VATICAN CITY -- In his first public comments on the latest scandal rocking the Vatican, Pope Francis told followers in St. Peter's Square on Sunday that the theft of documents describing financial malfeasance inside the Holy See was a crime but pledged to continue overhauling its administration.
The pope said that publishing the documents in two books released last week "was a deplorable act that doesn't help." The books, Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi and Avarice by Emiliano Fittipaldi, detail mismanagement and allege greed in the Vatican, and are seen as part of a bitter internal struggle between reformers and the old guard.
"This sad fact will certainly not divert me from the reform work that we are pursuing with my collaborators and with the support of all of you," the pope said to cheers from the crowd.
Among the disclosures in Merchants in the Temple, Nuzzi writes that the cost of sainthood can run up to half a million dollars and tells the tale of a monsignor who Nuzzi said broke down the wall of his neighbor, an ailing priest, to expand his apartment.
Fittipaldi, meanwhile, claimed that a children's hospital foundation had paid $215,000 toward the renovation of the apartment of the Vatican's No. 2 at the time, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and that nearly $430,000 donated by parishioners worldwide to help the poor was funneled to pay for Vatican administration.
The pope underlined that the leaked documents were the result of the reform course that he began and that measures had already been taken to address problems, "with some visible results."
Pope Francis has made it a top priority to overhaul the Vatican bureaucracy known as the Curia, a hive of intrigue and gossip. He appointed a commission of eight experts in 2013 to gather information and make recommendations after an earlier expose helped drive his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, to a historic resignation. Two former members of that commission have been arrested as part of an investigation into the stolen documents.
Last week, the Vatican described the books as "fruit of a grave betrayal of the trust given by the pope, and, as far as the authors go, of an operation to take advantage of a gravely illicit act of handing over confidential documentation." It added that the publication did not help "in any way to establish clarity and truth, but rather generate confusion and partial and tendentious conclusions."
Meanwhile, an estimated 1.4 million people are expected to attend a mass officiated by Pope Francis when he visits Kenya on his first trip to Africa, Catholic church officials and Kenyan authorities said Sunday.
During the pope's visit to Kenya on Nov. 25-27 -- the first stop in his three-state visit of Africa-- the pontiff will talk about strengthening families, inter-ethnic tolerance and inclusivity, presidential spokesman Manoah Esipisu said.
The pope will also discuss climate change when he meets with diplomats at the United Nations Environment Program headquarters in the Gigiri area of Nairobi, which will come a few days before the U.N. climate change conference in Paris, said Esipisu.
The Catholic church expects its 1,000 parishes in Kenya to each bring at least three buses of pilgrims for the mass on Nov. 26 at the grounds of the University of Nairobi, which will have 9,000 priests and clergymen, Bishop Alfred Rotich said.
Security arrangements will include 10,000 police officers, and an additional 10,000 members of the National Youth Service will be used for crowd control.
Kenya has faced a wave of attacks from neighboring Somalia's Islamic extremist rebels al-Shabab since it sent troops to Somalia to bolster the western-backed government against the militants' insurgency.
In nearly all of the attacks, non-Muslims have been targeted, and Christian churches have also been raided.
Pope Francis will also visit Uganda and the Central African Republic on Nov. 28-30.
A Section on 11/09/2015