Italian Newspaper Clears Pope Benedict Of Murdering Woman Found In Attic

Well at least we do not to have worry about that!!

The translation of the article from Sacri Palazzi is located on this page. The stuff in [ ###] is the bloggers comments who is translating.

That 'cardinal's button' found with a corpse in a church attic

Translated Oct. 28, 2010

Dear friends, for some days now, there have been surrealistic news reports on the case of Elisa Claps, a young woman from Potenza (capital of the Basilicata region in southern Italy] who was killed in 1993 and whose body was only discovered recently in the attic of a church. Indeed, attention has been called to a thick police report (600 pages) that has particularly dwelt on one of the objects reportedly found near the body: a red button.

The report claims that it appears to be from a cardinal's garment, especially since it would certainly not have come from the cassock of don Mimi Sabia, the parish priest of the Church of the Trinity who died in 2008. "Given the fact that the button appears to have come from a priest's garment, because of its particular shade of red", the report says, "and granted that the color of the cloth has not changed over time [apparently, it is a cloth-covered button], the button could well have come from a cardinal's habit". [As if red cloth-covered buttons could only come from a cardinal's habit!]

The Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, reading that it could be a cardinal's button, promptly reconstructed which cardinals had visited Potenza in recent years, and discovered that Cardinal Ratzinger had come to Potenza 20 days after the killing. The next cardinal's visit was two years later, with Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, and next, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray in 1997. The newspaper argued: "if the body had been there since September 12, 1993 [when the murder happened]... that button would have fallen off in the attic before the killing. But the last cardinal's visit before then foes back to 1981", when Cardinals Giovanni Benelli and Anastasio Ballestrero visited some communities truck by an earthquake.

And that is the way in which Cardinal Ratzinger's name has come up in these news reports which have the effect of associating him with the crime! Last night, in the program Chi l'ha visto [Who saw it] on Rai-3, they even showed a video of the cardinal, now Pope, when he received a literary prize in Potenza, which was the reason for his visit on October 3, 1993, 20 days after Claps had disappeared and was presumed killed.

"It is obvious", said the program host Federica Sciarelli, "that a cardinal would have no reason to go to the attic of a church, and we apologize that we have associated the Pope to this episode". Nonetheless, the association has been made. No one appears to have thought that the button could already have been there before the body was hidden in the attic.

Just as no one has seemed to consider that the button, even if it appears to be a 'cardinal-type' button, could have come from some other garment, such as a carnival version of a cardinal's habit!... But there it is! The big news was that Cardinal Ratzinger was in that church 20 days after the murder! Allow me to suggest other investigative trails which might shed light on some Italian crime mysteries....

The Aldo Moro case: a terrorist from the German gang Baader Meinhof observed that less than a year before the late Prime Minister was abducted [and subsequently killed by Brigata Rossa terrorists] Joseph Ratzinger was in Rome, the city from which the late Prime Minister was abducted...

The Bologna massacre: The terrorist bomb exploded in the waiting room of the city's train station. How many times has Cardinal Ratzinger passed through that same station?... The asassination attempt on John Paul II: Wasn't Cardinal Ratzinger at the scene of the crime, St. Peter's Square, four years earlier for the consistory at which he was created cardinal?... The homicide-suicide of a Swiss Guard officer*: That night, Ratzinger was in his home near the Vatican, a few hundred meters from the crime scene... We could go on infinitely... And who knows what someone like Dan Brown might contribute to these scenarios?