Quadragesimo Anno

By one of those blessed coincidences which serve to assure the faithful that the hand of God is afoot, the Vatican has decided to re-mark its own homework in the case of a vanished teenage girl, mere days before the personal secretary of the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak publishes a memoir in which he claims to address the very same case. The victim, whose father was a papal employee, disappeared in 1983, a few weeks after the disappearance of another girl of about the same age, prompting expectable quantities of unholy speculation. In a recent documentary, a friend of one of the girls said that she had been molested by "someone close to the pope" - at that time John Paul II, whose penchant for bestowing upon child abusers both Christian forgiveness and the chance to sin again apparently makes the claim a "startling" one for the laser-eyed liberal press.