VATICAN CITY (AP) — There's something of a whodunit going on in the Vatican to discover who leaked Pope Francis' environment encyclical to an Italian newsweekly, deflating the release of the most anticipated and feared papal document in recent times. 
 
 Pope Francis delivers his message on the occasion of an audience with participants of Rome's diocese convention in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, June 14, 2015. Francis engaged in some self-promotion... (Associated Press) 
 
 L'Espresso magazine published the full 191 pages of "Laudato Si" (Be Praised) on its website Monday, three days before the official launch. The Vatican said it was just a draft, but most media ran with it, given that it covered many of the same points Francis and his advisers have been making in the run-up to the release. 
 
 On Tuesday, the Vatican indefinitely suspended the press credentials of L'Espresso's veteran Vatican correspondent, Sandro Magister, saying the publication had been "incorrect." 
 
 Magister told The Associated Press that his editor, not he, obtained the document and decided to publish it. 
 
 "I just wrote the introduction," Magister said in a text message, adding that he had promised the Vatican to keep quiet about the scoop. 
 
 In the draft of the encyclical, Francis says global warming is "mostly" due to human activity and the burning of fossil fuels. He calls for a radical change in behavior to save the planet for future generations and prevent the poor from suffering the worst effects of industry-induced environmental degradation. 
 
 Several Vatican commentators hypothesized that the leak was aimed at taking the punch out of Thursday's official launch of the encyclical, in which the Vatican has lined up a Catholic cardinal, an Orthodox theologian, an atheist scientist and an economist to discuss the contents. 
 
 They noted that conservatives — particularly in the U.S. — attacked the encyclical even before it was released, chiding the pope for talking science in a church document and insisting that global warming isn't a scientific reality. It would be in their interest, the argument goes, to fudge the pope's message. 
 
 Italian daily La Stampa suggested that the leak might have come from "conservatives" inside Vatican, noting that Francis' reform plans for the Vatican bureaucracy have been resisted by the more conservative old guard who would have an interest in sabotaging Francis' labor of love. 
 
 A leak, however, was to be expected, given that drafts of the document have been circulating for months and that the text had been translated into multiple languages before its official release. 
 
 Not to mention that the Vatican has had a long and storied history of leaked documents: The last big scandal in 2012 resulted in the pope's butler being put on trial for stealing his private papers and passing them off to an Italian journalist. He was convicted but was eventually pardoned by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI. 
 
 In the aftermath of the "Vatileaks" scandal, the Vatican City State updated its criminal code to include severe penalties for anyone who leaks a Vatican document or publishes news from it: Up to two years in prison and a 5,000 euro ($5,600) fine. 
 
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 Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield ||||| The Pope’s Prognosticator 
 
 From: “Foreign Policy”, January-February 2006, pp. 86-87, Section “Global News Stand – Essays, Arguments, and Opinions from around the World” 
 
 
 
 by Stacy Meichtry 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 10.1.2006 
 
 Dissent is by no means anathema to Catholic thinking. But influential prelates, unlike politicians, are shy when it comes to criticizing the powers that be. Because politics inside the Vatican is not practiced out in the open, the job of discerning (or guessing) what’s on the mind of Catholic officialdom has become a highly specialized field, limited to a select group of veteran reporters, academics, and analysts known as vaticanisti. These highly skilled navigators of the Roman Curia – one of the world’s most nebulous bureaucracies – do not merely know which department does what. They also boast an understanding of the Vatican’s inner life, keeping tabs on the major players and analyzing the intricacies of their relations with the same attention a die-hard baseball fan might show to batting statistics.Among the most reliable and revered vaticanisti is Sandro Magister, who covers the Vatican for L’espresso, an influential Italian newsweekly magazine with more than 600,000 readers. Magister is well regarded for both his acuity and his prolificacy. In addition to his print coverage, he writes a daily blog and a biweekly column for his Web site, www.chiesa.espressonline.it. Although L’espresso is generally regarded as an organ of Italy’s churchwary left (its rival is Panorama, a newsweekly owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire), Magister stands out because he typically leans more to the right in his editorial musings. His columns consistently advocate a muscular papacy that practices realpolitik abroad. He defends Catholicism’s identity from precisely the same cultural and political influences that define L’espresso: support for abortion rights, stem-cell research, religious pluralism, and a strict separation between church and state.What also sets Magister apart from the rest of the field is his ability to discern who, alongside the pope, is making his influence felt inside the Vatican. A professor of contemporary church history at the University of Urbino, Magister brings the dedication and expertise of a scholar to his beat, combing the Vatican for information the same way academics search for obscure texts. As with many Italian journalists, Magister generally leaves his sourcing to the reader’s imagination. But his scoops are both hard-hitting and accurate – a rare combination in a field that lends itself to rampant speculation. Such insight proved indispensable in the final years of John Paul ii’s papacy, when doubts flourished as to who exactly was guiding the Roman Catholic ship of state.Three years before John Paul died, Magister became one of the first to train his sights on the pope’s trusted theological advisor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. At the time, Ratzinger’s name had not yet surfaced on any lists of the papabili – or pope-hopeful. But Magister noted that Ratzinger was already making his voice heard on a number of issues that were beyond the scope of his office. If John Paul’s illness had created a power vacuum, his German aide was stepping forward to fill it. Among other moves, Ratzinger produced a sociological treatise on the role of women; he called Turkey unfit for membership in the European Union; he determined that Catholic politicians who support laws contrary to church doctrine, such as those protecting abortion rights, were unfit to receive communion. (Ratzinger expressed this decision in a confidential 2004 memo to the U.S. bishops’ conference that Magister made public, delivering a blow to Democratic Sen. John Kerry’s presidential prospects.) And, of course, Magister proved his prescience last spring when John Paul passed away and Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI.The Vatican usually goes to great lengths to reassure Catholics and the world at large that what seems like a shift in policy from one pope to the next is, in fact, a sign of deeper continuity. Challenging this premise is pretty much the bread and butter of any qualified vaticanista, and in this regard, Magister is no exception. In the first few months of Benedict’s reign, Magister predicted the pope would take a skeptical approach to Islam, highlighting his decision to decline an invitation from representatives of Germany’s Muslim community to visit a local mosque. Magister’s instincts were confirmed at last summer’s World Youth Day summit, when Benedict met with Muslim leaders on more neutral ground and bluntly challenged them to reject any interpretation of Islam that inspires terrorism. “Before this occasion in Cologne,” Magister wrote in the September 1 issue of L’espresso, “no pope had ever been so explicit and hard-hitting in facing the question of terrorism on a personal level with representatives of the Islamic community.”So far, the pope has not identified any specific Islamic groups or organizations who pose a threat to Christian Europe. Where Benedict stops short, Magister intervenes to finish the sentence. “His prudence is understandable,” Magister wrote online on August 18. “Cologne and Munich – where Joseph Ratzinger was archbishop from 1977 to 1981 – are the cities in which the Muslim Brotherhood, which has for decades been the main ideological and organizational source of radical Islam in the world, has gained control of most of the mosques and of active Islam in Germany and in Europe.” Benedict might be shackled by the limitations of diplomacy, but Magister is free to name names.Reading the mind of a pope is risky business. As Magister himself has demonstrated, even papal policy isn’t absolute. Benedict was once the consummate Vatican insider, wielding his influence in an opaque manner. Now that he has become the public face of Catholicism’s 1.2 billion faithful, any shift in his opinions will have more direct ramifications. Given his track record, Magister will be among the first to connect those dots.____________________
– The "heinous act" of leaking the draft of Pope Francis' long-awaited environment encyclical may have been designed to steal some thunder from Thursday's official launch, Vatican observers say—and some think it may have been masterminded by Vatican insiders, the AP reports. What the news agency is calling "something of a whodunit" is transpiring inside the Holy See after Italian mag L'Espresso published a 190-page-plus draft of the pontiff's "Laudato Si" ("Be Praised") letter on its website yesterday, confirmed by the Vatican to be a draft of the real deal. Today the Vatican called the posting of the draft "incorrect" and suspended the press credentials of Sandro Magister, the magazine's longtime Vatican reporter and "most reliable and revered vaticanisti," per his own Chiesa website. However, Magister claims he's not the one who obtained or leaked the document—his editor is, he tells the AP. "I just wrote the introduction," he texted, confirming that he had promised the Vatican his lips were sealed about the encyclical, which features Francis hitting global warming as being predominantly caused by humans and our insistence on burning fossil fuels. Who is under the microscope, according to some observers: Vatican conservatives who wanted the pope to keep his nose out of science and stick to church doctrine. The AP cites La Stampa, an Italian daily, as saying that those old-school conservatives don't appreciate the pope's attempts at reform. Some commentators say the leak may have been planned to devalue Thursday's launch, which will be assisted by decidedly non-church-affiliated professionals, including an atheist scientist and an economist, per the AP. (This isn't the first ugly Vatican leak.)