Opus Dei To Hunt Down Vatican Whistle-Blowers
First time accepted submitter Aguazul2 writes "In a familiar story relocated into the bizarre world of the Vatican, a whistle-blower who brought to light excessive overpayments on contracts to friendly suppliers was sent to the USA as punishment, and further sources of leaks are now being hunted down by a crack team headed by an 82-year old Opus Dei cardinal. It's just like Wikileaks, only with parchment and quills — probably."
I assure you its more up to date than pens-and-quills. He is one of their dozen astronomers and they have state-of-art observatories around the world .
You do realize that the Vatican is a sovereign state, right? The Vatican has the right to structure their reporting structure any way they want. It is not a democracy. In a democracy, the government is theoretically answerable to the people and therefore the people have a claim to being informed by whistleblowers as to inappropriate behavior on the part of government officials (and therefore whistleblower protections should exist to some degree in a democracy). The Vatican on the other hand is not in anyway a democracy. The various officials of the Vatican government are only theoretically answerable up the chain of command to the Pope, who is, theoretically, answerable to no power on earth. Someone in the Vatican government who reports inappropriate behavior to someone outside of the Vatican government hierarchy is not a "whistleblower", as, theoretically, there is no one outside of the Vatican government to blow the whistle to, they are, instead, a traitor (I am not sure if that is the correct word from the perspective of Vatican governance, but if it isn't, I am not sure what is). They have betrayed their commitments as a member of that organization (similar to someone who had reported such actions by a government official of the USSR to a western government).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison