ROME – At one level, the question facing the three judges overseeing the Vatican’s long-running “trial of the century,” who are expected to deliver a verdict next month, is extremely straight-forward: Are the defendants innocent or guilty of the various forms of financial crime with which they’ve been charged?
Yet lurking beneath and beyond the surface is another question, one with much larger implications than the fate of these ten individuals, most of whom, presumably, will return to relative obscurity once the process is complete.
