“BY THEIR FRUITS YOU SHALL KNOW THEM”:
KEVIN SYMONDS’ SECOND INTERVIEW WITH FR. CHARLES MURR
ITV: Thank you, Fr. Murr, for sitting down again with Inside the Vatican. In our previous interview, you spoke of your association with Cardinal Edouard Gagnon and Msgr. Mario Marini. These two men worked closely with the Sostituto of the Secretariat of State, Cardinal Benelli. You yourself, however, did not enjoy the same association with Cardinal Benelli...
I was twenty-four years-old when I met and became friends with the newly appointed minutante in the Vatican Secretariat of State, Monsignor Mario Marini. Soon after, Marini introduced me to another extraordinary man who would play a major role in my life, his good friend, Archbishop Edouard Gagnon (1918–2007). Gagnon and Marini were respected friends and confidants of Archbishop Giovanni Benelli (Sostituto of the Secretary of State); I was not part of that inner circle. I knew Benelli, of course, and spoke with him many times, but I knew my place. Once, on Lago di Bracciano I was at table with him and Monsignors [Guillermo] Zanoni and Marini. I remember talking as little as possible. With Benelli, I knew my place and kept it.
Why did you think of your relationship with Benelli in this way?
To begin with, Giovanni Benelli was Giovanni Benelli! He was one of the most powerful men on earth; brilliant, a strategizer and deal-maker par excellence, the #1 Vatican diplomat, a man on familiar terms with popes and princes, patriarchs and presidents, world leaders of all sorts. I, on the other hand, was a greenhorn American student of philosophy; absolutely no one of consequence. Those special times that I was privileged to be in Benelli’s company were times I knew I was in the presence of greatness.
How did then Archbishop Gagnon become appointed by Pope Paul VI to be the Apostolic Visitator to the Roman Curia?
This was Archbishop Benelli’s call. Paul VI was convinced that “the smoke of Satan” had entered the Church (as he said publicly in June of 1972). In 1975, he called for an investigation of the entire Roman Curia. Benelli assured the pope that he had just the man for the job: Edouard Gagnon. And as soon as Gagnon accepted the awesome responsibility, he “hit the ground running,” as the expression goes. At the pope’s insistence, the in-depth investigation of the Roman Curia—no small assignment, let me assure you—was to be Gagnon’s full-time job, start to finish. (more...)
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