Oh, the Word from Rome is up again

John Allen, John Allen.....why can't I write like you?
Well, for starters he probably spell-checks :-) I have an excuse right now. My sister's Firefox blocks the pop-ups and I am not allowed to change that...
Anyway, his weekly Word From Rome column is available for your reading. As always, it is a very interesting peek into many of the workings of the Vatican. Among the good stuff, Allen follows up on his report earlier this week (which I blogged about here) about the Pope's London bombing telegram.

There was a mini-flap last week in the Vatican over the wording of Pope Benedict's July 8 telegram of condolence to Cardinal Cormac-Murphy O'Connor of Westminster in response to the London bombings. Signed by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Secretary of State, in the name of the pope, the telegram condemned the bombings as "barbaric acts against humanity."

An earlier draft of the telegram prepared by Sodano, however, also called the bombings "anti-Christian," seeming to raise the specter of a religious dimension to the violence. That version was leaked by Sodano's office to the Italian news agency ANSA, which ran it as the official version of the pope's comments. Even though the phrase was not in the official text released just moments later, many news outlets continued to repeat it throughout the day.

The NCR story on the episode can be found here: Pope's condolence telegram causes flap.

On one level, the story is a journalistic cautionary tale -- do not put words into sources' mouths, even when their own staffs leak a text. We all know that the communiqués of presidents and prime ministers go through several drafts before becoming official, and there's no reason the same thing shouldn't happen with popes.

On another level, it's a reminder to Vatican diplomats to pick their words carefully. In the over-heated atmosphere a terrorist strike always causes, many experts say, the last thing people need is a respected world leader ratcheting up the tension by suggesting an element of "holy war." That was not the intent, but it could have been the effect.

On July 10, after Sodano took possession of a new titular church following his election as dean of the College of Cardinals, he spoke to reporters about the telegram incident, explaining what he meant by "anti-Christian."

"Terrorism is always anti-Christian," Sodano said.

"It is a crime that offends the law of Christ, it is certainly anti-Christian. In the sense that it goes against the law of love that is the law of Christ. This has always been the line of the magisterium of the church, which indicates as anti-Christian murder, theft, every immorality, every violation of the dignity and the rights of the human person."

"I don't therefore see the reason for so much scandal and so many reservations about this term, at least if one enters into our way of confronting the problem."

"I understand that there was a question of whether this was opportune," Sodano said, "but I insist on saying that the pope and the bishops have always qualified as 'anti-Christian' the inhuman crime of terrorism, whoever the author of the crime and whoever the victim. They've called it [anti-Christian] in Ireland, in Spain, in Latin America, in the Middle East, and in various African countries starting with Rwanda. The magisterium can't do any less than affirm that every act of terrorism is anti-Christian, because it is against the law of God, which is the law of universal love."

"It would be interesting to re-read the speeches of the late John Paul II," Sodano said, "delivered during visits in various countries tormented by terrorist violence, from Drogheda in Ireland to Loyola in Spain, to Ayacucho in Peru. I believe that such research would illustrate well the affirmation that I made before, that every act of terrorism is anti-Christian."

Certainly, there can be nuance to the use of anti-Christian, but I think that anyone would read the Sodano draft as, well, most of us did. Telegrams are not a good place for nuance. Even the press doesn't get it, and will omit "qualifiers," in the great observations of Billy Flynn in the film version of Chicago, "because it would sell more papers." And I had another thought about the religious war thing, that this is an Islam versus Christianity thing. If that were the case, really, why are most of the major targets of al-Qaeda commercial in particular and military secondary? They targeted specifically the WORLD TRADE CENTER, not St. Patrick's Cathedral. London's PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. Why bother coming all the way from Leeds if this is a war against Christianity when there are plenty of Churches and old Abbeys that could be blown up?

And on a more humourous note, Pope Benedict XVI's boyhood home is up for sale.

I've been to the two-story house in Marktl-am-Inn, Bavaria, where Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927, but that was before he became pope. In those days, the house was marked by a small sign saying that Ratzinger, the prefect of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, was born there, and nobody paid much attention.

In the weeks since his election, however, the house has become a major media attraction and pilgrimage site, rendering the life of its current owner, a physiotherapist and single mother named Claudia Dandl, and her two girls, 8 and 10, well-nigh impossible.

As a result, Dandl has hired a real estate specialist in Munich to help her sell the property. Bidders have until Aug. 22 to make offers.

The mayor of Marktl-am-Inn, Hubert Gschwendtner, has said he wants the town to buy the property and convert it into a museum. In reports carried widely in German and Italian media, Gschwendtner has warned, however, that the town may not have the resources to compete against deep-pocket bidders, and has now raised the specter of a potential embarrassment: the Scientologists, Gschwendtner says, want to buy the pope's house.

Acting through an intermediary, the mayor said, the Church of Scientology is bidding to become the new owner, for purposes that remain obscure. It's not clear how the mayor knows this, nor why the Scientologists would pay top dollar for a facility in a small Bavarian town that seems unpromising territory for new recruits.

It's probable that Marktl-am-Inn will take its place alongside Wadowice, Poland, the hometown of John Paul II, as a modern Catholic pilgrimage destination. Who exactly will be there to welcome the pilgrims remains to be seen.

Who? Who? Tom Cruise, that's who. He already tried to take over the Catholic Church one good Catholic Girl at a time, but he can't marry and divorce them fast enough. But give him access to the pilgrims coming to the Pope's home, well, no one will be able to resist that laser-white smile.