Shroud of Secrecy: The Story of Corruption Within the Vatican

James Noonan is an adjunct professor of English at Carleton University
and the author of Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and
Canadian History and Literature.

This book, written by a largely anonymous group of clerics in the
Vatican known as the “Millenari,” purports to document the
corruption that has existed there, particularly in the 20th century.
These charges are substantiated mainly through detailed anecdotal
evidence.

The main problem with the book is that this evidence is not
corroborated by sources other than the anonymous authors, all employees
or former employees of the Vatican who do not identify themselves for
fear of reprisal. We are thus asked to accept the charges of the
Millenari on their word alone. Besides this shroud of secrecy that
envelopes the book itself, no references for the quotations that abound
are given, whether from the scriptures, from Vatican documents, or from
elsewhere.

The English translation of the original book, Via col Vento in Vaticano
(“Gone with the Wind in the Vatican”) was done by Ian Martin, but no
information is given about him either.

The book does have some sensible recommendations on the need for reform
in the choice of bishops, the urgency of change in the rule of clerical
celibacy, and the justice of forming a union among clerical employees in
the Vatican. But these are like a few grains of wheat lost in a bushel
of chaff.

The one author who has been identified is Monsignor Luigi Marinelli.
And he was identified only in April 1999—two months after the book was
published in Italy—by Desmond O’Grady in the English-language
journal Inside the Vatican. Thereafter Marinelli was called to trial
three times by the Vatican court of the Roman Rota, but he never
appeared at any of the hearings prior to his death, in October 2000, at
the age of 73.