Joseph Grosso writes at Counterpunch:
If the recent report from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica is true than it turns out that the first Pope to resign his post in almost six hundred years did so, at least in part, due to the existence of a faction of gay Vatican officials being blackmailed by outsiders of a ‘worldly influence’. This sordid affair apparently emerged from an investigation by a three Cardinal team that Pope Benedict XVI set up to look into the leaking of documents by the Pope’s own butler, Paolo Gabriele, who saw leaking the Pope’s personal correspondence to an investigative journalist as a noble act meant to spur reform in an organization dominated by infighting and corruption.
Just last month tourists visiting the shops inside the Vatican were prevented from using credit cards to buy tickets and souvenirs after the Bank of Italy found that the Vatican Bank’s safeguards against money laundering do not meet international standards.
