Vatican official blames media -- and the devil

VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Vatican's No. 2 official on Monday blamed the media - and the devil - for fueling the scandal over leaked Vatican documents.

Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone told an Italian Catholic weekly that journalists reporting on the leaks scandal are "pretending to be Dan Brown ... inventing stories and replaying legends." The reference to Brown is particularly acute; Brown wrote "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons" the best-selling fictional accounts of power struggles and scandals inside the Catholic Church.

The attempt by the Vatican to blame the media for the leaks is to some degrees a repeat of 2010, when several Vatican officials blamed journalists for fueling the sex abuse scandal that had re-ignited that year. Thousands of people came forward, mostly in Europe, with reports that priests had raped and molested them when they were children.

Eventually, Benedict himself put the blame-game to rest when he admitted that the abuse was "born from the sins within the church," not from the media.

The leaks scandal broke in January when Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi revealed letters from a former top Vatican administrator who begged the pope not to transfer him for having exposed alleged corruption that cost the Holy See millions of euros (dollars) in higher contract prices. The prelate was transferred and is now the Vatican's U.S. ambassador.

The scandal widened over the following months with documents leaked to Italian journalists that laid bare power struggles and differences of opinion inside the Vatican over its efforts to show greater financial transparency and comply with international norms to fight money laundering.

The scandal reached a peak last month when Nuzzi published an entire book based on a trove of new documentation, including personal correspondence to and from the pope and his private secretary, much of which painted Bertone in a negative light.

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