Vatican City - The return of the Holy Father to the Apostolic Palace, after 13 years and 14 days, is news that fills Catholic faithful with joy. Over these years the Pope has always continued to frequent the Apostolic Palace, but it had become more of an office than a residence. The Apartment, as it is called in the Vatican, remained empty for most of that time, because Francis chose to live at Santa Marta.
In recent hours, the Holy See Press Office sent an email to the jackals of the press who, for months, had been trying to wheedle out of one person or another - some from the court sacristan, others from the florist - where the Pope would live, what he would do and with whom he would live. The official communication stated that yesterday afternoon the Pope had “taken possession” of the apartment. At this rate, this flat has practically been turned into a diocese.
To say plainly that the Pope had simply moved house would, of course, have sounded far too blunt and prosaic; but keeping quiet - which would in fact have been the more sensible course - was clearly never one of the options considered by the harridans who circle like vultures around St Peter’s and Borgo Pio. They are not permitted to go any further, and that is why they lose their heads and hurl insults at those who do. The obsession these people have with gossip is pathological, even if, like seasoned psychiatric patients, they project onto others what they themselves most relish doing. And this morbid fixation is fed by the statements Matteo Bruni sends them. Bruni, however, has no intention of allowing scrutiny of the relationships he has “cultivated” inside the Holy See Press Office. These dynamics have produced favouritism and other corrosive patterns, rooted in relationships that continued beyond working hours, through dinners and meetings. All of it is documented.
A modus agendi that has helped create a dreadful climate in Via della Conciliazione, because within a workplace such dynamics are deadly, especially when the one who is “favoured” ends up feeling entitled to mistreat the other colleagues. So gossip about the lives of priests, popes and bishops would be permissible, in the name of the supposed need to go ferreting about and poking through other people’s lives. But when attention settles on their own lives, everything suddenly becomes beyond the pale. After all, the priest is left without protection; they, by contrast, are well shielded by their respective courts and by those who put them there, including the communities they come from. In short, the Pope has moved. And beyond the gossip that some tabloid hacks delight in peddling - not even sparing us the paid-for plug they must run for the company supplying the machines for the Pope’s gym - there is a far more serious fact: what the clergy and the faithful perceive. The Pope is there.
Whereas when the Pope was living at Santa Marta, or even when Leo was at the Holy Office in recent months, from St Peter’s Square it was not possible to see the light on in the window, now it is. And that sign is reassuring. It is especially reassuring for those who lived through the era of John Paul II’s pontificate and see in that window a sign. Beyond the gossip of the tabloid harridans, that window is also a sign of prayer. Indeed, already last night there were those who gathered in St Peter’s Square for the customary fraternal walk and prayed the Holy Rosary there, feeling inwardly closer to the Pope, because that window is a sign, yet it contains far more than it shows, as is the case with every authentic symbol.