What's going on in the Italian Church?

Argentinian daily La Nación summarizes the "Boffo affair" quite reasonably (the Italian dailies mostly ramble on and on...):

The Vatican, accused of an alleged conspiracy

An internal struggle divides the Church

Elisabetta Piqué

Correspondent in Italy

ROME - Intrigue, suspicion, betrayal, fratricidal war among prelates in the silent Roman palaces, in the best Borgia style. This is the climate these days surrounding the Vatican, accused by unnamed sources of being nothing less than the main source of the conspiracy that, last September, ended with the ousting of the once influential Dino Boffo from his position as editor of the newspaper Avvenire [the semi-official daily of the Italian Episcopal Conference].

The rumors, never denied by the Vatican, specifically accuse the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Pope's number two, and the director of L'Osservatore Romano, Giovanni Maria Vian, of hatching a Machiavellian plan to hit Boffo, in order to attack his mentor, powerful Cardinal Camillo Ruini, former president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, and his successor, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, considered too independent. Everything in a dark and serious plot now under the observation of Benedict XVI [Rorate note: a report on the matter has been prepared for the Pope by his personal secretary, Mons. Gänswein, according to this Sunday's edition of La Repubblica]. A conspiracy that reflects the harsh internal struggles within the Italian Church.

To understand the plot one needs to take a step backwards. The Boffo affair erupted in late August, when Vittorio Feltri, director of Il Giornale, the Berlusconi family newspaper, launched a fierce campaign against the director of Avvenire, the daily of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI). Feltri then released a bomb: the information - which proved false afterwards, as [Feltri] himself would admit - on Boffo's "well-known homosexuality", even though Boffo had reached a settlement to avoid prosecution for harassing the wife of a married man 10 years earlier.

The sex scandals and parties of Berlusconi were still fresh [in the memory of Italians at the time]. And it was thought, therefore, that this was a counterattack of the Cavaliere [i.e. Berlusconi] against the daily newspaper of the CEI, which had dared to echo the protests of some Catholics against the very promiscuous behavior of the premier.

Reliable

But the "Boffo affair", which many considered closed when he resigned, dragged down by the scandal, broke out again now. It happened when Feltri, in an interview with the newspaper Il Foglio, reconstructed how he came to publish the dossier on Boffo: "A personality of the Church, which must be trusted institutionally, contacted me and sent me a photocopy of the report," he said. Feltri refused to give a name, but insisted on one point: it was someone "institutionally reliable" and "it was not possible to doubt him".

The revelation gave rise to speculations and rumors of all kinds on the plot allegedly hatched by Cardinal Bertone and Vian, in order to place in difficulties the cardinalatial duo Ruini-Bagnasco.