slate | Pope Benedict XVI is a little more than two weeks away from beginning his retirement at the Castel Gandolfo,
but his final days as head of the Catholic church don't look like
they're going to be quiet ones. Unsourced reports coming out of Italy
suggest that the pope decided to call it quits not because of his old
age but instead to avoid the fallout that could come from a secret
300-page dossier compiled by three cardinals he tapped to look into last
year's leak of confidential papers stolen from his desk.
Those papers, widely known as the "VatiLeaks," raised questions
of financial impropriety and corruption at the Vatican. The
investigation that followed, however, may prove even more uncomfortable
for church officials.
The secret dossier allegedly details a wide range of infighting among
various factions in the Vatican's governing body, known as the Curia.
But the headline-ready takeaway from today's report from La Repubblica
concerns the existence of one faction in particular, a network of gay
church officials. Just in case that weren't enough to pique
international interest, the Italian newspaper also reports that some of
said officials had been blackmailed by outsiders. According to the
report, the pope got his first look at the dossier—"two folders
hard-bound in red" with the header "pontifical secret"—on Dec. 17, and
decided that same day to retire.
