The Sismografo: A Voice of Independence and Truth in Vatican News

I read in astonishment that there would be an informational project that had detected the experience of the Sismografo. I deny ever having anything to do with this project linked to Opus Dei and I do not even understand why they should use my name. Luis Badilla, founder and creator of the Vatican news aggregator that closed its experience a few months ago, reacts with a note to the news that appeared on social media from communication managers of the Prelature. Some time ago, Javier Garcia, also a member of Opus, came to visit me to get information on the work done by the Sismografo. I spoke with him, as I always do, without making any agreement. I want to emphasize the absolute and total independence of the work that has been done by the Sismografo over the years and that has now been interrupted due to my fragile health, Badilla emphasizes. On X, an announcement appeared aimed at all Vaticanists announcing the birth of a new media project made by a series of volunteers from different professions of Spanish nationality. Last December, Luis Badilla, the director, signed the last editorial to close the most informed and attentive para-Vatican blog of the Church of Pope Bergoglio. The Sismografo has been the most free and out of the ecclesiastical mainstream voice there has ever been in recent times, light years away from the muddy and convenient readings. For more than ten years, the blog has been a reference point for the diplomatic, curial, and journalistic world, also consulted at the international level. A glance at the roll and from the news collected on the web coming from dioceses, media, cardinals, bishops was possible to have a frame of reference of what was boiling in the pot at that time in the global Church. The stop to the Sismografo was dictated by reasons related to the health of the founder. In his last postscript, Badilla wrote: The Sismografo stops here. We made this decision a few weeks ago but we wanted to wait until the moment of the first reliable news about the sentence of the trial involving Cardinal Angelo Becciu. This painful affair, which began well over two years ago, for us, for our readers, as well as for the whole Church, has been and is a watershed because it exposes a singular mode of the exercise of power by Pope Francis (...) To everyone I extend a gigantic thank you, sharing once again what has always united us: one loves the Church only with the truth and not with lies. At the end of this adventure, we can say we are proud of what we have done, especially because we have never succumbed to the pernicious habit - ecclesiastical and ecclesial - of justifying lies so as not to damage - it is said - the image of the Church. The sole history of pedophilia in the clergy proves the opposite. For Badilla, a very Catholic person, a Church increasingly identified with Christ is sustained only by the power of truth and every time it does so using the power of lies it will betray its Founder. For years, the Sismografo has offered to the surfers important elements to have a complex reading of the pontificate, without excluding those areas of shadow or ambiguity that sometimes emerged in various crucial areas: the fight against pedophilia, gaffes, mistaken appointments, diplomatic problems that have overlapped at different times, the protection provided to some bishop friends like Zanchetta or the former Jesuit, father Rupnik responsible for abuses, the head tails on different issues, the inexplicable fight against the scant minority of the worshippers of the Latin mass. The list is long. Not surprisingly, Badilla, in the last editorial, writes that the way, the style and the methods - as well as the narrative discourse - with which Pope Bergoglio has exercised his supreme ministry of universal Pastor, as Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, have shown that a man alone in command in the Church of Christ - moreover an absolute sovereign for life - is a form of government now seriously inadequate, lacking and risky. This is a story that has been dragging on for decades and that Cardinal Bergoglio underlined a lot in the pre-Conclave meetings of March 2013. Now, however, with Pope Francis this crisis has seriously worsened and the excesses and arbitrariness have reached intolerable limits that damage the credibility and authority of the Holy See. And again: until when, in the 21st century and even after, the government of the assembly of Catholic faithful composed of almost a billion and 400 million people can be entrusted to a single person without whose consent not a single leaf moves? Why is every decision, important and decisive, entrusted to the most hermetic secrecy possible without true transparency to the point of almost never having even crumbs of truth? To Pope Francis, Badilla gives all the credit for having rung the alarm bell for the future of the Church. Pope Francis in these almost eleven years of pontificate has made many mistakes, like all Popes, but his specific way of being has mired him in very serious mistakes such as the lack of transparency, the authoritarian opacity, and a casual relationship with the truth. The next Bishop of Rome should be, a man of law; a shepherd capable of reading the world and all humanity - and his time - with categories of religious and spiritual thought; a thinker capable of sifting through faith the realities and the socio-economic and political-geostrategic challenges and not the other way around. Badilla, 78 years old, defined a central character in the history of Vatican communication by the historian Lucetta Scaraffia who recently dedicated a biographical article published on Foglio to him, had in the past a political path in Allende's Chile, until landing as a political refugee in Italy and initially, in the times of Paul VI, finding work at Radio Vaticana as a collaborator for the Spanish section.