Friday, July 29, 2011

The 2005 Conclave Diary

A couple of days ago, Father Z posted about a story by the Italian Vatican watcher Andrea Tornielli at the Italian daily La Stampa.

Tornielli's story is about excerpts from a diary supposedly written during the 2005 conclave in which Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope, the excerpts published in the Italian journal Limes.

I am not going to recapitulate the details of Tornielli's story given Father Z has already done so. Reading Father Z's post, I was instantly reminded of something I had read a number of years ago about Limes publishing a diary recording the very same event, the 2005 conclave. Longtime readers of this blog will remember that I cited Limes' original story in the past in the sidebar in my list of papabili. I couldn't find anything in my archive, so I checked out Sandro Magister and found his original story on the subject from 2005, "The Vatican Codes: This Is How I Rewrite My Conclave". I'm not going to rehash what Magister wrote back then beyond his point that the diary had too many inaccuracies to have come from a true-blue cardinal.

So we have Tornielli's recent story of Limes publishing excerpts from a diary on the conclave and we have my remembrances and Magister's analysis of Limes publishing excerpts from a diary on the conclave. Comparing the details of what the diary said in Tornielli's story to those from Magister make it clear to me that the Limes diary cited by Tornielli is the same as the one from long ago.

Why is Andrea Tornielli bringing up an article from six years ago about a diary that one of the most eminent of his colleagues showed to be most likely fake, a clumsy attempt to undermine the new pope's support?

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