Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi Page A

tightening our security measures on the letters sent by our Commission, reminding the recipients of their utmost confidentiality.
    Your obedient servant, Zahra
    The most immediate countermeasure was the decision to establish a communication task force, taken at the meeting of October 12, 2013. The task force had three ambitious goals. 20 The first was to manage COSEA’s relations with the media—whose activity they hoped would remain dormant, given the delicacy of the subject matter. The second was to “analyze in depth how the Vatican communications system is currently structured,” in order to shake it up radically, given the ongoing leaks to the press and the more critical stance international media was taking to the Holy See in the wake of the Vatileaks scandal (the moniker given to the leaking of confidential documents by me, and the basis for my previous book, His Holiness ). Finally, the task force had “to be able to provide the Holy Father with the most appropriate recommendations to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of Vatican communications, internally and externally.”
    The media was one of the most delicate fronts to manage. The “enemies” were flocking in large numbers, at least according to the surprising revelations of another member of COSEA, the Frenchman Jean Videlain-Sevestre, disclosed in a grave email that he had sent to his colleagues and to the Pope’s confidants one month earlier:
    Our actions will highlight the financial and administrative shortcomings that the enemies of the Church obviously wish to see. I am speaking of some governments, some politicians and much of the media. For example, we must at all costs prevent the free masons from circumventing or even infiltrating our plans of action.
    As Sevestre so clearly indicated, the members of the Commission felt embattled. Not only did he fear internal resistance to the reforms of Francis, which were already emerging forcefully, he also feared the Freemasons. They always tracked the financial activities of the Vatican with close attention and sometimes open hostility: the “brotherhood of the masons” might even “infiltrate”—as the Frenchman put it—the Commission’s operative plans, in order to manipulate their execution and impede the achievement of their goals.
    Similar fears were emerging during the selection of advisors and experts to help the Commission in the conduct of its investigation. After Sevestre met with the renowned consultant Roland Berger in Paris on September 14, 2013, Berger advanced his own candidature, but added some concerns that were bothering him:
    We wish first of all to reconfirm our deep attachment to the Catholic Church … You can be certain of the utmost discretion of the signatories of this letter, of their Catholic faith, of their not belonging to organizations that are adverse to the Catholic Church, whether Masonic or of another nature.
    These were the first signs of resistance and acts of sabotage that would increasingly hinder the investigation by COSEA. The investigation into the saints’ factory would last for months, but the effect of Francis’s reform on that Congregation is still unclear today.

 
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    There is a black hole in the heart of the Church that took great efforts for Francis to uncover: a black hole created by mismanagement of the Vatican’s finances and compounded by swindling and accounting fraud. Through the Commission that he established in an unprecedented blitz, the pope was able to ascertain that the expenses of the Curia were paid for by money that was supposed to go to the poor. Offerings for charity that Catholics from throughout the world sent to the Vatican were being used to plug up deficits created by a handful of Church officials who maneuvered the bureaucratic levers of the Holy See.
    Jorge Mario Bergoglio had chosen