The Catholic Church has endured a torrid year with the priest abuse scandals and cover ups causing massive public backlash. Every time it seemed that the furore had calmed down, something else came to light causing further consternation. This time it was the turn of the latest Wikileaks drama that last week released information gained from cables from the American embassy at the Vatican, which describe an increasingly out of touch and irrelevant Vatican leadership and its refusal to assist an Irish inquiry into priestly abuse.
One particular cable mentions that only one senior papal advisor uses a Blackberry, and then states that the "technophobia" in the hierarchy has prompted numerous gaffes and PR mishaps, followed by attempts to protect the pope from bad news.
The British ambassador to the Vatican was also reported as warning that the pope's welcoming into the Catholic church of disaffected Anglicans risked inciting a violent backlash against British Catholics.
The Vatican reacted to the Wikileak cable release in a short yet rather terse statement. It described the content of the cables describing its inner workings in an unflattering light as a matter of "extreme seriousness" and also potentially unreliable.
"Naturally these reports reflect the perceptions and opinions of the people who wrote them and cannot be considered as expressions of the Holy See itself, nor as exact quotations of the words of its officials," the Vatican said in a statement released over the weekend.
"Their reliability must, then, be evaluated carefully and with great prudence, bearing this circumstance in mind."
Before the publication of the cables, the US embassy to the Vatican underwent a preemptive damage control exercise by condemning "in the strongest terms" any leaking of documents, and promising that cooperation with the Holy See would not suffer.