Will the Vatileaks case be reopened?

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the former president of the Board of Superintendency of the Institute of Religious Works (IOR) or the Vatican Bank, was recently exonerated by the Italian Courts. Tedeschi had been appointed to the position of president of the Board of Superintendency in 2009 by Pope Benedict. At the time, a column in the Our Sunday Visitor reporting on the papal appointment stated that "Gotti Tedeschi's mandate was crystal clear: to ensure the bank operated according to the highest ethical principles, and could not be used for illicit purposes, including money laundering." In May 2012, Tedeschi was terminated, ousted, or forced to resign (depending upon which account one reads) following a no confidence vote by the four fellow members of the Board; this move subsequently received the sanction of the Commission of Cardinals. Tedeschi was accused of substantial malfeasance as well as illegal acts. The Italian authorities have now charged the banks' former director general (Paoli Capriani) and his deputy (Massino Tulli) will money laundering and other criminal acts. These two gentlemen allegedly opposed actions taken and proposed by Tedeschi to upgrade the bank's operations so that it would comply with international banking standards. They may have engineered Tedeschi's ouster and most certainly supported it. Capriani and Tulli resigned in July 2013 at the time that Pope Francis appointed a Commission of Inquiry to examine the bank's operations and to make recommendations with respect to its future. Coincidence?

In 2012, Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone also served as the head of the Commission of Cardinals which oversees the Board of Superintendency and all other bank governance and operations. Bertone was also alleged to be behind Tedeschi's ouster. At the time, Tedeschi was also accused of being the mole behind the Vatileaks scandal; the papal butler was convicted in a Vatican court and subsequently pardoned by the pope.

Some have postulated that it was the bank's ongoing and still unfolding financial scandals coupled with the sacking of his appointed reformer which proved to be the "last straw" leading to Pope Benedict's decision to resign the papacy. Two weeks before Pope Benedict resigned in February 2013, he appointed Ernst von Freyberg as president of the Board of Superintendency to succeed Tedeschi. Freyberg served both as president of the Board of Superintendency and director general from July 2013 through November 2013, when Rolando Marranci was appointed director general.

As of May 2012, the Board of Superintendency was comprised of : President Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, Vice President Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz, Secretary Carl Anderson, Manuel Soto Serrano, and Antonio Maria Marocco. Today the composition of this Board remains the same except that Ernst von Freyberg is now president having replaced Tedeschi. In November 2013, Pietro Parolin was appointed Vatican Secretary of State by Pope Francis following Bertone's resignation. The Secretary of State continues to serve as a member of the bank's Commission of Cardinals. With exception of the four holdover members of the Board of Superintendency (Schmitz, Anderson, Serrano, and Marocco), there appears to have been a complete personnel change within the upper levels of bank governance. These four individuals were the ones who effected the ouster of Tedeschi. Carl Anderson, presumably acting in his capacity as secretary, issued a scathing statement outlining the charges against Tedeschi and the basis for the Board's lack of confidence in both his leadership style and management skills. Now that Tedeschi has been exonerated and has stated his intent to pursue further legal action to not only clear his name but to uncover the unethical and illegal acts of those, who wrongly dismissed him, or those, who acted through those individuals, what is to become of those four holdovers members of the Board of Superintendency? At a minimum, these four individuals appear to have surrendered all personal credibility and integrity by their actions of May 2012.

Will the Vatileaks investigation be reopened now that the alleged "higher up" has been exonerated? Will another "butler" (read: low level functionary) be found to take the fall? Remember this go-a-round is being played out in the Italian civil courts. A papal pardon is not in play. The actors are international financiers and bankers. This is a very different case of characters and environment than the papal household, where employment security and pensions may hold sway. Will former members of the Commission of Cardinals be "outed" relative to this matter in upcoming months? Who will meet an untimely and mysterious death this time? Who will retire to some sunny Arizona? Will there be one or more convictions in a court of law over which a papal pardon is ineffectual?

Earlier today, I finished reading The Cave by Jose Saramago (1922-2010), a Portuguese writer, who spent the last 15 years of his life in a self-imposed exile in the Spanish Canary Islands. The conservative Portuguese government and the Catholic Church took offense at his writings. Despite the government's censorship of his works and opposition to earlier literary awards, Mr. Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

Two themes dominate this novel. One is a criticism of globalization with the obsolescence of the local means of production and commerce; the second is the personal obsolescence that comes with age within the context of a changing economic environment. What is the message for the individual in such an environment ? "It's ridiculous to throw away the present just because you're afraid there might not be a future." As one ages one must not forget that "...folly and illogicality may be a duty to the young, but the old have a perfectly respectable right to them too..."

A dog plays a supporting and an essential role in this novel. "Dogs are like that, they sometimes decide to do their owner's thinking for them."

After reading this novel, I don't think folks will ever look at shopping malls in the same way as they did previously.

Yesterday's post moreorless got away from me. I had some thoughts about how I would develop my comments on the event in question, but I went in a very different direction as the words came. Apparently, I reached back inadvertently to another thought that has been frequenting the passages within my mind of late. That is: It seems that one can spend his/her entire lifetime working on getting this living thing right, almost right, or, at least, a little bit better than yesterday, last week, last month, or last year.

In recent days, President Obama awarded 24 Congressional Medals of Honor to individuals who served during World War II, the Korean Conflict, and the Vietnam War. All but three were awarded posthumously. In his comments, the President spoke of "setting the record straight." One must ask what other records need to be set straight? In much the same way as it is for individuals, who find themselves devoting significant time and effort setting straight previous decisions, statements, and actions, societies need to attend to much the same business. Some memories deserve celebration in the present; others are in need of mending or amending. What took place in the White House earlier this week needs to take place in our neighborhoods and families.

In honor of and to fittingly celebrate PI Day (PI as in 3.14), I made a pie. The fixin's included a graham cracker crust made by Kleeber elves, bananas, banana cream pudding (the regular, not the instant kind), whipped topping (the creamy version), and a sprinkle of homemade raspberry granola to top off the whipped topping. Is it redundant to top topping? Or is it simply a foodie's exclamation point?

Someone has described PI Day as the ultimate Nerd Holiday. So here is my question for the math geeks. Will March 14, 2015 be PI's golden holiday (as in 3.1415)?

May the spheres be with you!

One hundred forty plus and still counting. Glenn Ford's release from a Louisiana prison on March 11th was the 140plus exoneration of a death row inmate in the United States since the 1970's. These are wrongful convictions where the individual was sentenced to death. It does not include the exoneration of those individuals, who were sentenced to any number of years up to life. This number does not give us any reliable indication as to the number of those persons, who have already been executed or remain on death row or continue to serve prison terms for crimes that they did not commit.

The press modestly notes these exonerations and frequently couches each case as an individual isolated miscarriage of justice. There is seldom, if ever, a suggestion that such cases might well be indicative of a flawed system. There is no serious discussion of systemic remedies to correct the miscarriages that are yet to be uncovered and to eliminate miscarriages that will continue to occur. A monetary settlement as directed by state law or awarded as the result of a separate court action is presented as the final resolution of the individual case. At times, actors in the criminal justice system will expound an argument of legal innocence versus factual innocence, that is, just because one can not legally prove, that you did do it, does not mean that you did not, in fact, do it. Is this to raise suspicion of the individual, who is exonerated, or to justify their own or their predecessor's prosecutorial behavior?

Why should we be concerned about such things? The facts of individual cases point out just how capricious the system can be. If it can happen to one of us, it may happen to anyone of us. Let us not forget. The system acts in our name: "The people rest their case..."

Some days one crosses a threshold for the first time: the step may not be planned; the opportunity simply presents itself; it may be the only door open at the time. The choices are to turn around and go back or to pass through that particular door even if for the first time. Is it the right thing to do? One doesn't know; that gets figured out once inside.

Fridays mornings at 7:00AM, I and Rick, a friend, get together for breakfast at a local restaurant. It is not every Friday; there are times one of us is out of town (in Rick's case, out of the country), has a conflicting commitment, or (during this winter) is snowed in. Needless to say, there usually is little competition for a table at the restaurant at this time of the day, day of the week, and season of the year.With rare exception, a particular table is available in a far corner of the dining room. This table has become "our table"--a distinction remembered by wait staff and acknowledged in good humor by local folks.

Typically, there are a half a dozen local folks, who also frequent the diner early on a Friday morning. (I suspect many of the same folks are there everyday and not just on Fridays.) These folks--males of the species--customarily arrive singly and, only rarely, in pairs. They occupy two or three tables off to one corner of the restaurant--a corner opposite to "our table." I guess you could call this area the "locals' table." Folks come and go at irregular intervals. The waitress buses the individual place setting as each is freed up either before or after the next person joins the group already at the table. Tips left on the table are often pushed into a pile at the center of the table and left to accumulate as the turnover in breakfasters continue for a two or three hour period each morning. The waitress picks them up apparently when she gets around to it. (I hope it is not when she determines it is of an amount worth bothering with.) As I approach thirty years residence in this community, I had not chosen to seat myself at the locals' table--until this morning, that is.

The restaurant was busy. When I arrived at 6:50AM, there wasn't a free table in the place. I suspect the popularity of the ice caves within the Apostles Islands National Lakeshore explains the busyness of the place at this particular time, on this particular day, during this particular season. A substantial number of visitors were getting fueled up before heading out on their iced lake shore adventures; a few local folks seated around two of the three local tables were doing much the same with very different adventures planned for their days. Rather impulsively--yet with considerable style I can assure you, I asked Bob if I could join him at one of the tables used by the morning regulars.  He was the only occupant at the moment at a table with seating for five. There was substantial evidence of prior occupancy: soiled napkins, crumbs and a smear of jam on the vinyl table cloth, used coffee cup, and budding pile of tip change. Since this encounter involved a one-on-one interaction, I felt confident that I could invite myself with minimal the risk of a rejection of my audacious self-invitation. A short time later, Harold and Gary joined Bob and me. Rick arrived 10 or 15 minutes thereafter. After Bob left, Bill slipped into the vacant chair. During some 90 minutes what ensued was a genuine local experience. We talked about kids, the effect of topography on ambient temperatures, the tolerance of freezing temperatures by perennial fruit crops, fishing, colony collapse disorder, unpredictable changes in ice conditions on Lake Superior, winter camping, snowshoeing, and timber cruising. All of these topics in one way or another, directly or indirectly, referenced the unspoken but clearly evident fact that the six of us, who sat around that table this Friday morning, were in the seventh or eighth decade of our lives.

All in all, it was a lot like making it to the grown-ups' table at the family holiday dinner. In that context, I suspect one has to be invited to move up to the "big table." A self-invitation does quite do it. One might be able to self-engineer such a move. One could volunteer to set the "big table" and in so doing set a place for himself in the hope that the grown-ups will just assume that someone has extended an invitation to the new guy at the table. My experience has been that the mother-in-charge will have counted and recounted the place settings at both the grown-ups' and the kids' tables along with visualizing the individual face that goes with each setting. It is therefore unlikely that one will be able to get away with this subversive act.

Then again, it doesn't hurt to ask.

I just finished reading two works by David Rhodes: Driftless and its sequel Jewelweed. I am glad that I stuck with Mr. Rhodes and took up the sequel after reading Driftless. Driftless left me feeling very discouraged and pessimistic about the contemporary state of rural America and its prospects for the future. Jewelweed ended on a much more positive and optimistic note. Rural communities can continue to thrive if folks make a conscious effort to nurture them and folks consider themselves to be social beings and act accordingly. The building and maintenance of local community may require an occasional violation of civil law and the setting aside of social convention; neither occurs without risk and potentially serious negative consequences. The moral requirement underlying such behavioral choices is the pursuit of a common good and not personal gain. We are social beings; we have social responsibilities. In the end, our behavioral choices are our own for which we are individually culpable. Being broken is no excuse to not participate in community; we are all broken in some way--being damaged goods is simply evidence of survival no more no less. There are always second and third chances to get it right or at least a little better this go-a-round.

The family farm (in 1950 terms) so threatened in Driftless does not survive in Jewelweed, not even the Amish version. The overreach of corporate America so powerful in Driftless is little more than a dark and ominous storm cloud in Jewelweed--a storm that can be outrun, endured, or that simply dissipates in the face of strength of character. Local integral communities--as in such catchphrases as "Think globally, Act locally," "All politics is local," and "Buy Local"--are able to thrive even when and if compromise and accommodation with the more powerful is the order of any given day. The challenge is to pick these venues--these battles--carefully and to maintain sufficient personal integrity and a broad based liberty so that one can step back from previously made or now considered compromise and accommodation.

Local communities do not act nor do they survive in isolation. They have the capacity to inspire and nurture one another. At times the lace that holds that boot on the foot is the over-the-road trucker, who has a passion for local produce and product and shares his finds with his local community. This boot has the ability to kick some corporate ass as local folks go about living their lives with self-confidence, independence, interdependence, and a sense of their own intrinsic value.

If anyone out there happens to run into Mr. Rhodes, would you please ask him what happened to Graham and Cora Shotwell and their two children, Seth and Grace? I missed them in the sequel.

In recent months I have had the opportunity to interact with state level public administrators (Bureaucrats, if you will--I hesitate to use the term due to its pejorative connotation.), legislative aides to my state senator and state representative, and staff of a statewide professional association. It has been an interesting experience. Sometimes I think I am back in college working on a group assignment drafting a statement of public policy. In those days, the work group consisted of equally youthful types with limited life experience and a brevity of both knowledge and expertise relative to the manner at hand. That is why we were in school; we were trying to address the latter so that we could proceed to accumulating the former. Forty years later, it feels a lot like doing more of the same thing under different circumstances. The objective is not to favorably impress a teacher, but to effect public policy where the implementation of said policy and professional practice impact upon the real life situation of our fellow citizens. I am okay with this feeling; it is just a feeling evoked by an earlier experience and a feeling where the real life consequences are not readily evident on an emotional level. That will come with implementation and feedback from those directly affected by the policy under consideration. Hopefully, that will be the future of these efforts.

There has been another dimension to this experience which is much more unsettling and for which I can not identify or rationalize a more satisfying outcome. This dimension arises out of the mutual disdain that I perceive to be present between state legislative folks (elected officials and their staff) and public administrators (civil servants). The terms "politician" and "bureaucrat" are used in a pejorative sense by these folks; the motivation of the "other" is viewed completely in self-serving terms. One is protecting the vote (that is, favor with their constituency); the other is protecting their job. This conceptualization of the "other" seems to eliminate any willingness or ability to perceive of the "other" in any alternative, and certainly any more favorably, terms. This absolutist thinking rules out any consideration of a range of possible strategies that might move a state level policy forward. The sole strategy seen as worthwhile and thereby employed by legislative folks is to garner numbers in favor of their position with little consideration of the value of those allies, where the primary requirement is the capacity is for loud speech. On the other hand, the strategy employed by public administrators is to parse language in such a way that its intent is to mislead the other party and to obfuscate the issue at hand, by rendering the matter either a moving target or a series of targets.

This was never more clear than when I asked during the course of a conference telephone call discussing strategy, "Can't we just appeal to folks to do the right thing?" The response was a resounding "No!" (Folks were apparently polite enough to not point out my naivete.) There was an acknowledgement that the position I and my allies advocated was consistent with (1)the intent of the Legislature, (2)the spirit, if not the, literal wording of State law, and (3)Federal policy. Yet such a claim to legitimacy was seen as tactically worthless. These two parties have apparently become so adept at their usual and customary battle strategies that these respective tactics have become the nuclear option for the respective camps. The nuclear option may have become the only strategy that each camp is willing to even consider, much less employ, in working with the other in they go about the people's work. These very limited arsenals concretize existing stereotypes, perpetuate errors in thinking, and inhibit creative problem solving. Maybe it is time for all of us to go back to school to learn the knowledge and expertise over which one is expected to have acquired a reasonable facility in order to be promoted from kindergarten to first grade.

This experience has given me a perspective from which to view Governor Christie's Bridgegate and Governor Walker's Campaign John Doe investigations. C and W's alleged illicit behaviors may not be substantively different from business as usual within these contexts. ("That is just how things are done around here.") The only differences are matters of degree, the size of the fiscal impact, or the numbers of the public impacted.

As the issue, which has currently engaged my passion, proceeds forward, I will refuse to collaborate with any party that resorts to a nuclear option in pursuit of its desired goal. A statement made by Grahm Shotwell (a character in the novel Driftless by David Rhodes) comes to mind: "...it was better to be wronged and do nothing about it than to do something wrong and regret it. A person could live with one but not the other." I am responsible only for my own sense of right and wrong, the comfort I take in the former, and the regret I bear with the latter.