The people of Rome have always liked to believe the worst of their bishop. When I was a correspondent in Rome more than 40 years ago, I was constantly assured by its citizens that the Pope not only had the evil eye but was known for a fact to be living secretly in the Vatican with a male ballet dancer. These were absurd rumours. Not only did Paul VI have rather dull eyes; he was also a cautious, unexciting fellow, a dry bureaucrat who had served for decades in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State before becoming archbishop of Milan and, after that, pope. I doubt if he had ever met a ballet dancer. Probably the juiciest scandal that occurred on his watch was the sudden death of the reputedly austere French Jesuit theologian, Cardinal Jean Daniélou, in the home of a Paris prostitute in 1974.
But now the Vatican is engulfed by real scandal.
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