Saint Paolo Gabriele

For the Roman Catholic Church, it has been a bad… well, I would say era (ever since the plebs started waking up in the mid-1500s), but for brevity’s sake let’s say century. The gargantuan religion-cum-nation has suffered some serious blows lately (largely because some of those blows were non-consensual affairs) and its worldwide integrity is at new lows. This is, of course, largely the fault of the outdated and unaccountable dictatorial regime that rules the Roman Catholic world. This ancient ecclesiastical body has found it hard to cope with the fact that they can no longer do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want, without international reprisal.

An excellent example of this is the Vatican’s unreasoning anger (evidenced by the recall of the papal nuncio from Ireland) when the Irish government had the temerity to release report after report about the rampant sexual abuse minors received at the hands of Catholic clergy. Of course sex abuse is only a facet of the Vatican’s problems in recent years. There are also the crony contract schemes and the rampant criminality going on out of the Vatican bank.

In all these scandals (which are too numerous to list here) the Church does the same thing. It closes ranks, denying anyone access to the truth. They will use religion to cover their tracks, and when that doesn’t work they fall back on the fact that they are a sovereign nation, the only true theocracy left in the world (even Iran pretends they elect their leaders).

So it came as a shock that the source of the latest spate of incriminating evidence against the Roman Catholic Church’s leadership did not come from a nosy reporter or special prosecutor. According to the Vatican, it came from the Pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele. He was quickly arrested, after being sniffed out by the Pope’s bulldog Cardinal Julián Herranz, an Opus Dei adherent. He was formally charged with illegal possession of secret documents and is being held in Vatican City pending his trial.