Along with a full telling of the Boffo affair, His Holiness documents a furious power struggle over the management and finances of the Vatican City itself.

The Vati-leaks crisis in fact began last January, when an Italian TV program called The Untouchables revealed the contents of a set of letters written by a powerful Vatican official, Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò, denouncing corruption in the affairs of the Vatican itself. In 2009, Viganò took over the job of overseeing the expenses and income of the small Vatican state, known in Italian as the governatorato, with a budget of over $300 million a year, which involves everything from the considerable income of the Vatican Museums to maintaining the enormous physical plant of the Vatican palace and gardens to dealing with suppliers and contractors.

Viganò, who has a reputation as a rigorous manager, inherited a Vatican administration operating at a loss. By cutting costs and eliminating what he called "obvious situations of corruption," he produced a surplus within a year.

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- his successful cost-cutting measures, Viganò was called to a meeting with Bertone, who informed Viganò that he was being removed from his post and sent as papal envoy to Washington. Viganò then took the quite exceptional step of trying to go around the secretary of state and directly to the pope himself, trying to reverse the decision of his own order of transfer. "Holy Father, my transfer right now would provoke much disorientation and discouragement in those who have believed it was possible to clean up so many situations of corruption and abuse of power that have been rooted in the management of so many departments," Viganò wrote to the pope on March 27, 2011.

One of the things that set him off was a press campaign, again appearing in the Berlusconi family newspaper, Il Giornale, which preceded his defenestration. As resistance to his management grew inside the Vatican, a series of unsigned articles began to appear in the paper, clearly written, in Viganò's view, by someone with intimate knowledge of the Vatican. Viganò suspected that it was someone close to Bertone. Whatever the case, someone inside the Vatican was feeding stories to ll Giornale to grease Viganò's fall from power, just as they had in the Boffo affair.

What is common to these episodes is that Vatican leaking did not start or end with the Vati-leaks scandal. The furious letter-writing activity of both Boffo and Viganò was stimulated by what they perceived to be well-placed leaks from within the Vatican leadership itself. Leaking has become the weapon of choice in contemporary Vatican warfare.

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Anonymous letters, damaging dossiers, and poison penmanship are old staples of Vatican intrigue. The big difference is that all this material was once kept rigorously private -- its power derived from its mere existence and the potential threat of being made public. In the 1930s, for example, the Vatican was trying to restrict the activities of Padre Pio, a monk from Puglia who claimed to have received the stigmata and who was developing a cult following, all of which Church authorities viewed with extreme suspicion. After the Vatican ruled that Padre Pio could no longer perform mass in public and ordered that he be transferred to a distant mountain retreat, followers of the Pugliese monk cooked up a meaty dossier that contained the alleged sexual and moral peccadillos of the region's clergy. A member of Pio's inner circle printed up copies of the dossier and brought them to a meeting at the Vatican. The result of the encounter was the Vatican bought up all copies of the dossier and lightened the restrictions on the suspect friar with the stigmata, who is now one of the Church's leading saints.