(Reuters)

Dino Boffo

It's difficult to make all this intelligible to the uninitiated, although the New York Times did have a (partially successful) go at it the other day*.The latest brouhaha between the Avvenire, the newspaper run by the CEI, the Italian Bishops' Conference, and Il Giornale and its muckraking editor, Vittorio Feltri, can be summed up briefly as follows: this summer, following the disclosure that prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had spent at least one night in his heavily-guarded Rome residence with a call girl, Avvenire, a generally sober Roman Catholic newspaper, joined others in criticizing the premier's flamboyant lifestyle.

Possibly because of other tensions between Berlusconi and the Church, possibly because a part of the center-right coalition is somewhat anti-clerical, partly because Feltri is a man with absolutely no journalistic scruples (he was my boss for a time in the early nineties), the activism by the Avvenire led Il Giornale to publish a people-in-glass-houses-shouldn't-throw-stones news item regarding a somewhat unsavoury (but still unclear) incident involving Avvenire's editor, Dino Boffo, who - il Giornale suggested - may be homosexual. Boffo, mind you, is not a priest.

After a week, Boffo resigned as the paper's editor but it is unclear to what extent this happened because he was asked to do so by the CEI's president, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, to what extent the Vatican itself put pressure on the CEI (insiders say the major change ot come out of all this will be a weakening of the world's national bishops' conferences), and to what extent it was because he himself felt so harried and embarrassed by the incident.

Personally, I was disappointed that he resigned since whatever he did pales in comparison to the antics of a sitting (ha ha) prime minister. But judicial experts say that by resigning, and by deciding not to sue Il Giornale for libel, much of the judicial dossier will remain private so that all that is known may remain only this, that in 2004 Boffo was fined  a modest amount for harassment, allegedly because of calls made from his cell phone to the girlfriend of a young man in whom he is said then to have been interested.

Talk about fiddling while Rome burns, the Boffo story has dominated the newspapers for over a week now; on Friday, Corriere della Sera, the country's most prestigious newspaper, had six (sic!) pages on various aspects of the matter. Total overkill, to my mind even if it has to be seen in the overall context of the raging debate over Berlusconi's lifestyle and the latter's reactions to the anti-him campaigns being waged by the foreign press and, in particular,by two leftwing newspapers here at home.

Berlusconi recently announced that he will be suing La Repubblica, Italy's second largest paper after Il Corriere (in reality, the country's most read paper is the Gazzetta dello Sport) and which has been attacking him on a daily basis since last April with its now famous "ten unanswered questions" and L'Unità, once the organ of the Italian communist party and which, I discovered only yesterday, has been running articles on whether or not Berlusconi has trouble getting an erection or (like a HUGE number of Italian men, hetero and not) prefers anal sex.

I mean, really, how low can you go! And is the hand-wringing fears about press freedom caused by these lawsuits justified (a demonstration is scheduled for later thismonth). Personally, I think not. Yes, Berlusconi does have an undue amount of influence over the Italian press because he, himself, directly owns three national TV networks (not to mention a publishing house and several other news organs) and because as Head of Government he has significant indirect influence over the three state TV channels and radio stations that technically are overseen by a parliamentary commission. But remember, there is nothing new here. The entire (and extremely legitimate) conflict of interest debate unfortunately was swept under the rug back in the 90's by the pusillanimous Italian Left and now, quite frankly, and for as long as Berlusconi is in power, little can be done about it. Furthermore, sad but true, the average Italian does not give a damn about this conflict of interest which makes you wonder just why foreign newspapers like The Times of London and the Economist go on as they do.

Once again, in the interests of full disclosure, I am hardly a fan of Berlusconi and hope the observers who say his departure from the political scene is  now only a couple of years off are right. But I also do not believe that he is the devil incarnate and I am getting pretty sick and tired of all the haranguing from elsewhere in Europe, which I believe masks a deep contempt for Italy. Some of this "disprezzo" may be warranted; Italy has long been a poorly governed country where special interests - criminal and "legitimate"  - have long prevailed over the common good, and Berlusconi's antics - in bed and out -- are surely only worsening the situation.But for those of you who are interested, I will be coming back to this topic again.

*With reference to the New York Times article mentioned above - and which gets it only partially right - here are my objections. Newspaper reporters should not adopt the political views of their sources. As anyone who has read the above story (and keep in mind I have been in Italy 30years longer than the current NYTimes correspondent) it is very misleading to write, re the Boffo affair, that it proves "no one can mess with Silvio Berlusconi".

Also, it is simply unfair to say the current Italian government is anti-immigration while the church is favourable. The Roman Catholic church urges fair, humane and charitable treatment for immgirants; it is not urging third world citizens to pour into Italy or other parts of Europe. As for the present government. it has been trying to satisfy part of its electorate by cracking down on illegal immigration (and what's wrong with that?). But only this month, it put into effect an amnesty for the hundreds of thousands of families who have been employing illegal immigrants as household help and now have an opportunity to legalize them - that is, if they are "Christian" enough to do so.