Peggy Noonan on the Vatican Passion story

Yesterday I commented on the intrigue growing around whether the Pope did or did not say "It is as it was" about The Passion of the Christ. Some pretty serious charges were beginning to emerge. Now Peggy Noonan, who was one of the two first journalists to have reported the Pope's alleged comment, has set out the case from her perspective, in the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page (with thanks to Jim Davila for the link):

'Passion' and Intrigue
The story of the Vatican and Mel Gibson's film gets curiouser

If you've not been following it, the gist is this: the Vatican apparently reported the Pope as saying "It is as it was" and then a month or so later apparently denied it. Both Noonan (one of the journalists at the centre of this) and Steve McEveety (the producer of The Passion of the Christ) have emails from the pope's official spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, which seem to back up the quotation, unequivocally in the case of the McEveety one (sanctioning that the quotation is to be repeated "again and again and again"). Navarro-Valls apparently claims that the email to McEveety is not genuine but fabricated. Have a look at Noonan's full and patient examination of all this which concludes with a paragraph beginning, "Believe me, it is painful to be accused however implicitly of being the accessory to a lie" and with the promise of more to come.

One thing that is not yet clear to me is whether the emails to McEveety have been analyzed. The EWTN report yesterday said "Noonan and Dreher were able to establish that the email message to McEveety was sent from Navarro-Valls' email address, and relayed through a computer at the Vatican". Noonan's article, however, only confirms that the email to her was relayed through the Vatican and her email is nothing like as unequivocal as McEveety's.