The trial of a retired Vatican official accused of defamation for his alleged role in the publication of a book about the vices of top Church administrators opened yesterday before the Roman Rota.
Monsignor Luigi Marinelli, who has admitted to being one of the authors of Gone with the Wind in the Vatican - a catalogue of moral failings ranging from sexual depravation to careerism and corruption - did not attend the closed door session of the ecclesiastical court.
The trial has been adjourned until September.
The Vatican justice system swung into action after receiving a complaint from one of the individuals identified in the book, who claimed to be a victim of calumny.
The Rota, which normally deals with the annulment of Catholic marriages, ordered the former official of the Vatican's Congregation for the Eastern Churches to withdraw the book and refrain from having it translated into other languages. The result was to draw attention to a book that had passed almost unnoticed and the work has been selling like hot cakes ever since.
The author is identified as "I Millenari" (The Millenarians), an anagram of Marinelli. But the monsignor has insisted that he was not the sole author and enjoyed the collaboration of clerics still present in the Curia. "We were nine, perhaps 10 or a dozen. We never all met together. In the end, they decided that I should act as spokesman with the publisher", Monsignor Marinelli told an Italian newspaper.
Gone with the Wind in the Vatican claims homosexuality, professional ambition and freemasonry are all part of the Vatican scene. The book even claims that black masses have been celebrated behind the walls of Vatican City.
Observers say Monsignor Marinelli may have been induced to put pen to paper by his own disappointed ambitions. "In the Vatican not being promoted is like being accused", he said in an interview.
Monsignor Marinelli can at least take comfort from the fact that senior cardinals now agree there is too much careerism within the Church and have spoken out publicly against it in recent months.