Religion Digital publishes an almost thousand-word diatribe against this newspaper. The reason: a few paragraphs we devoted on Tuesday to Jordi Bertomeu within a report on pending appointments in Spain. Two hundred and forty words from us. The response came on Thursday, in the Opinion section, quadrupling the length and unsigned.
It needs no signature.
The text accuses us of reporting “irresponsibly,” of releasing a recording “in a biased and self-interested manner,” of silencing “in a self-interested manner.” Three times “in a manner.” In Spanish that is said “de modo”: “en modo” only exists on phones (airplane mode) and in Italian in modo irresponsabile, from which the calque comes. Whoever writes like this is not thinking in Tortosa; they are thinking in Romagna. Let us call it curialect.
It is, in a way, the shibboleth of Judges 12: Jephthah’s Gileadites seized the fords of the Jordan and asked every fugitive to pronounce the word; the Ephraimite said “sibbólet,” with its tell-tale sibilant, and that sibilant cost him his neck. Forty-two thousand fell for a single phoneme. Here no one beheads anyone: we merely note the prosody.
But the accent is the least of it. What the text knows is what matters. It knows that Bertomeu did not consent to the Nunciature recording; it knows which files have entered the register of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and which ones “never arrived,” such as Father Omar Sánchez—did it remain at the nunciature?; it knows what “apparent false promise” was made to Francis in a private audience… The author, whoever they may be, does not read newspapers: they read registers. How many people in the world could write that paragraph?
And, in its defensive zeal, it confirms. It confirms that the penal precept against Giuliana Caccia and Sebastián Blanco existed and threatened excommunication. It confirms that the Nunciature conversation existed and was recorded by lawyer Gonzalo Flores Santana. It confirms that collaboration with U.S. justice regarding alleged money laundering in offshores in Denver (Colorado) was discussed there, “awaiting the legal treatment such collaboration might merit.” The entire defense fits into a formula: everything happened, but it was signed by the Pope (the pontifical umbrella: an entire literary genre).
There is more. The text accuses us of not providing “a single detail about the content” of the meetings with the FBI and, two lines later, itself supplies that content, as a bonus: the laundering, the offshores, Denver. It is the old excusatio non petita with a Tiber postmark.
And then there is the main point, which is what it does not say. The headline speaks of a “presumed candidacy” of Bertomeu for the episcopate. The body talks about everything: VOX, an address on Calle Nicasio Gallego that is not this website’s, the mafia, the victims, the eight dicasteries… About the candidacy, not a single line. Denying it would have taken one sentence. Instead, nearly a thousand words were spent not writing it.
We published a rumor and called it a rumor. Across the way they have published a denial that does not deny, written by no one, with a Dicastery accent.
The anonymous has come out in signature mode.