Conspiracies and Intrigues in the Vatican: Pope Francis' Battle for Reform

Conspiracies and plots in the shadow of the Dome have never been lacking, and even the reign of Francis is no exception. Indeed, he himself, from the beginning of his pontificate - perhaps sensing that there were pockets of strong resistance to his vision of a Church to be reformed - began to speak about it publicly, almost as if he wanted to denounce it. To date, there are dozens of episodes in which he has made it clear that the crows have never stopped fluttering over the Apostolic Palace and certainly to put obstacles in his way, making his planned path more complex. Immediately after the colon operation, for example, when he underwent a delicate five-hour surgery and had a long piece of intestine removed, he reported that during that delicate moment there were those who wanted him dead and had even started to maneuver imagining an imminent conclave. Fortunately, Francesco's fiber is good, he recovered quickly, but the idea of always having to deal with an environment where court maneuvers and conspiracies were, in his words, around the corner, has made the climate in the small pontifical state particularly heavy. One of the best-informed blogs, Messa in Latino, of a conservative stamp, has come to describe a general climate 'like North Korea'. Certainly excessive and paradoxical the example even if the situation, according to what is narrated, must have become over the years increasingly police-like. 'With employees frightened even just to talk to each other'. And again: there are more and more Vatican officials who now have 'a double cell phone and in the sacred palaces great care is taken with the use of emails, Whatsapp, Telegram, and the content of private phone conversations'. The narrative specifies that this kind of control would also be done at Santa Marta, the Vatican hotel where Pope Francis lives. Since news in the small Pontifical State circulates faster than elsewhere, no one missed a curious episode linked to the downsizing of a high office of the Vicariate. The prelate was moved because of certain confidences that his maid would have reported directly to Bergoglio during an audience. Naturally, in these years in the Vatican, investigations and administrative checks have been carried forward and new rules have been introduced, precisely to try to achieve a good degree of transparency. The gendarmes then seized various materials also using systems never seen before such as, for example, the search made by the gendarmes in the Apostolic Palace in front of the astonished Swiss Guards, since at that moment a centuries-old prohibition was about to be broken forever. The security of the palace, in fact, would not have been the responsibility of the gendarmerie but of the small Swiss army serving the Pope since the time of Julius II. In the meantime, cameras were also progressively placed in different environments inside the Vatican, even in areas that were previously unequipped, such as the Fabbrica di San Pietro. The progressive tendency towards internal control seems to be total and has been carried forward with papal approval already at the time of the former commander of the Gendarmerie, then removed by Pope Francis without too much ceremony in circumstances still unclear in 2019.