VATICAN CITY - The Vatican's number 2 accused the media on Monday of
trying "to imitate Dan Brown" in their coverage of the VatiLeaks scandal
and said the Roman Catholic Church's latest travails were part of the
Devil's attempt to destabilize it.
I love the Vatican. It's an endless source of mirth. And of course
this brand of talk can come from only one source, the completely
deranged "Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who ranks second only to Pope
Benedict in the Vatican's hierarchy". Indeed. This guy is a major
rightwing control freak, spewing ugly rhetoric wherever he goes -- and
always with that Satan-lurking-in-the-shadows language. This guy lives
in an alternate reality where the church never does anything wrong. It's
Satan, don't you see?
"They (the journalists) continue to invent fairytales and repeat legends," he said.
Bertone branded as false the image of the Vatican as a place of intrigue
and power struggles, saying: "The truth is that there is an attempt to
sow division that comes from the Devil".
Even as he mouthed these complaints, a pesky secular reporter noted an inconvenient truth:
the devil had nothing to do with it:
[A]n Italian reporter contested Bertone's portrayal of the media, telling
him that the leaks scandal started with a letter in which an archbishop
complained to the pope about corruption in the Vatican.
That's quite a church they've got there.
