Post-It notes from the papal kitchen
It focuses on the pope's alleged opinion of some soup he had for dinner one night, in a series of emails beginning with "The boss said the soup was good. Nice work" through "Still hearing from all sides about your famous bouillabaise. You should chisel the word "Good!" on the plinth above your stove" to "The claim that he would have intended the word "good" in a positive sense is preposterous prima facie and does not merit credibility. A memorandum indicating the contrary that purports to have been issued from my office is a transparent forgery" and so on. Well worth a read.
This parodies the debate of a week or so ago of whether the pope did or did not say "It is as it was" about The Passion of the Christ. That story and the surrounding issues still have not gone away. One of the latest and most thorough pieces is here in yesterday's National Catholic Reporter which brings us up to date on the controversy:
Pope on Gibson movie: Was it as it was?
Sifting through spin and Vatican speak
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
It explains the situation from the beginning to now in the best way I've seen yet and it has the following conclusion which resonates with British readers in the week of Hutton:
Where does all this leave us?
No one can have ironclad certainty about what the pope said. Based on Navarro’s Jan. 22 statement, it is possible that the pope said something like “It is as it was,” but intended this as a private reaction. My original source continues to insist this is the case. On the other hand, there is no clear confirmation of the remark.
No one comes out of this mess looking good.
The makers of the film have been widely accused of either lying about the pope’s comment, or abusing John Paul’s confidence by publicizing a private remark. If either of those charges is true it would be reprehensible, but if not, their reputation has been done a serious injustice.
Reporters, myself certainly included, look like naifs who have been spun every which way, or worse yet, like willing partners in someone’s dishonesty. If nothing else, it’s a wake-up call about the dangers of reliance on anonymous sources, a fact of reporting life in the Vatican. Officials here rarely speak on the record, so those of us who cover the Vatican are constantly dealing with unnamed sources. This incident undoubtedly has raised the bar on caution for all of us.
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