VATICAN CITY - The Vatican is no stranger to drama, intrigue or scandal. But even by Vatican standards, this has been one hell of a month.
Ever since Pope Francis returned from his triumphant visit to the United States, nearly every day has brought surreal revelations of bishops behaving badly, cardinals resisting reform and ideological battles over everything from the theology of marriage to the Vatican's cigarette sales.
By Wednesday, the Vatican had had enough and issued a series of statements disputing reports left and right, only to end the day with confirmation that two Italian journalists were now under investigation by Vatican magistrates for their involvement in the latest scandal over leaked documents.
Francis' crazy month began with a monsignor from the Vatican's doctrine office outing himself as gay – with his boyfriend by his side – and denouncing the "hypocrisy'' of the church's doctrine on homosexuality the day before Francis opened his big bishop meeting on family life.
Then, 13 prominent cardinals penned a (leaked) missive to Francis warning that the Catholic Church risked collapse if he went ahead with his reformist agenda at the synod.
The soap opera continued with a report midway through the meeting that the pope had a brain tumor. It was denied.
To top it all off, a high-ranking Vatican monsignor from the conservative Catholic movement Opus Dei is now sitting in a Vatican jail cell, accused of leaking confidential information to the same Italian journalist whose 2012 expose of Vatican waste and wrongdoing helped bring down Pope Benedict XVI.
Hollywood couldn't make this stuff up – and yet Francis seems to be taking it all in stride.
On Tuesday, the pope sat with a few dozen people at a Florence soup kitchen, tucking into a bowl of Tuscan ribollita bean soup as if there were no place he'd rather be. That may well have been the case, given the intrigue swirling back home and the trip he has planned in two weeks to Kenya, Uganda and the conflict-torn Central African Republic.
As if the domestic drama weren't enough, even the trip now seems in doubt: French news reports say French soldiers working to keep the peace in the Central African Republic won't be providing any extra protection for the pope, and the U.N. said this week it was in talks with the Vatican about the pope's security amid a surge in violence that forced elections to be delayed and prompted Francis himself to recently say he still hopes he can go.
Despite the tumult, Francis has remained remarkably steady and determined, issuing an important mission statement this week outlining his vision of a church that shuns power, prestige and money in favor of solidarity with the poor and oppressed.
Perhaps he knew that Italian prosecutors were just about to announce that the former abbot of the famed Montecassino monastery was under investigation for allegedly pocketing some 500,000 euros ($500,000), some of it public money destined for charity, to fund five-star hotel stays and dinners of oysters and champagne.
"He's not even afraid because he knows what he is doing,'' Francis' close collaborator, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, said of the resistance in an interview in New York. "He's a man of prayer. He is a man of God. And so he's never disappointed by this kind of thing.''
Massimo Faggioli, an Italian church historian joining the Villanova University's theology department next year, said much of the headline-grabbing news of the past month can be chalked up to Francis' radical agenda, the opposition it has found in some conservative circles of the church and the politicized nature of Italian journalism.
"Italian media, especially television and newspapers, are an integral part of the political system,'' Faggioli said in a phone interview. "We know there is strong opposition to Pope Francis in some quarters, so what is happening, what has been published, is part of that resistance.''
Take, for example, the October 21 report that Francis was suffering from a small, benign brain tumor. A niche news outlet long associated with Italian conservatives reported that the 78-year-old pope, known for his progressive social justice bent, had been examined by a Japanese brain cancer specialist who determined that the small dark spot on Francis' brain was a tumor that could be treated without surgery.
The fantastical story, which claimed the doctor had travelled to Rome by helicopter for a top-secret exam, was denied not only by the Vatican but by the doctor himself, who, reached at his clinic in North Carolina, said he had never examined the pope and that the reports were “completely false.''