Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (right) greets other cardinals as he arrives on St. Peter's Square ahead of Pope Benedict XVI's last weekly audience on Feb. 27.
Until a new Pope is chosen, the Vatican will be run by a crafty cardinal who has the place wired.
Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone has been tapping the phones of high-ranking members of the church hierarchy for more than a year to find the culprits who leaked embarrassing internal documents to reporters, a church official admitted Thursday.
“Some wiretaps or some checks” have been authorized, said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman.
The secret surveillance operation involved the wiretapping of “two or three” telephone lines, Lombardi said. He did not say whose lines.
Bertone has been portrayed in news reports — that were based on the “Vatileaks” he has been trying to stop — as a Machiavellian figure who undermined former Pope Benedict.
But now, Bertone, as acting head of the Vatican, has no Pope to check his power.
Bertone reportedly enlisted Domenico Giani, head of the Vatican police, to tap the phone calls and intercept the emails of several cardinals and bishops in the Curia, the governing body of the Catholic Church, the Italian magazine Panorama reported.
Now Bertone, 78, reportedly has the goods on some of the cardinals who will vote on a replacement for Benedict, according to the magazine.
Bertone was depicted as a major player in the Vatican intrigue in a book by an Italian journalist that was based on papal documents stolen by the Pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele.
After he was busted, Gabriele said he leaked the documents to protect the Pope and expose “evil and corruption” inside the Vatican.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/vatican-wired-cardinal-running-vatican-pope-chosen-article-1.1276106#ixzz2MIzVHGaf
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