Vatican exec quits over doctored letter

VATICAN CITY — The head of the Vatican’s communications department resigned Wednesday over accusations he mischaracterized a private letter from retired Pope Benedict XVI, then had a photo of it digitally manipulated and sent to the media.

A week after The Associated Press exposed the doctored photo, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Monsignor Dario Vigano and named his deputy to run the department for now. But Francis kept Vigano on in the department in a lesser capacity, indicating that he doesn’t believe the problem was all that grave.

The scandal began last week when Vigano read aloud part of a private letter from Benedict at an event for a Vatican-published, 11-volume set of books about Francis’ theology.

Marking Francis’ fifth anniversary as pope, Vigano had held up Benedict’s letter as a sign of the continuity between the two popes, to blunt critics who complain that Francis’ mercy-over-morals papacy represents a theological break from Benedict’s doctrine-minded, theology-heavy papacy.

Vigano omitted the part where Benedict objected to one of the authors in the volume because he had been a longtime critic of Benedict and St. John Paul II. A news release sent out by Vigano’s office only contained Benedict’s words of praise for Francis and the book initiative, without mentioning that he hadn’t even read the books and had no plans to.

The AP reported that the photograph of the letter that accompanied the news release had digitally blurred out the lines where Benedict began to explain that he didn’t have time to read the books and wouldn’t comment on them, as requested by Vigano.