Sinistro

In 1975, Andrea Riccardi, founder of the "Progressive" Community of Sant'Egidio, visited Archbishop Roberto Ronca, titular Archbishop of Lepanto, who had been an influential conservative voice in the Italian Church in the preceding decades, and asked him his opinion of Pope Paul VI:

"He sternly answered me: 'Montini, salva reverentia, - he was the Pope at that moment - has always been a sinister character [un personaggio sinistro].' Surprised with such a harsh judgment of a bishop regarding the Pope, I asked him in what sense he was sinister, and he answered me tersely: 'in the sense of sinistra [leftwing] and of sinistro [sinister]'."

This is just one  (p. 149, n. 170) of the hundreds of interesting footnotes in Roberto de Mattei's Il Concilio Vaticano II: Una storia mai scritta (Turin, Lindau, 2010), on the "never before written" history of the Council. Note: we have been authorized by Edizioni Lindau s.d.l, Turin, to make these and other excerpts of this book available to our readers in this blog.