Early on Friday morning, Roberto Formigoni, the former great white hope of Italian Catholics, arrived at the prison in Bollate to begin serving five years and more of a prison sentence. He took to prison with him, Italian media reported, two sackfuls of books... and a rosary.

His dogged fight against charges of corruption had failed at all levels of the court, up to and including the Court of Appeal.

The few media outlets in Malta who bothered to report this missed out on the charges, as did those few voices on the Left who remembered Formigni’s help to PN administrations. Formigoni was found guilty of having, as Governor of Lombardy, steered millions to the San Raffaele institution, and in return he was given villas, cars, and money.

I remember when we were invited to meet Minister John Dalli (just a few days before he stopped being Minister of Health) at Palazzo Ferreria and waiting for an audience with the minister, we found Fr Charles Vella. Somewhat facetiously, I told him about that day’s news, how San Raffaele, in free-fall, had run out of money preluding accusations of impropriety. Fr Charles’s response was vituperative: “You are so negative.”

Of course, Fr Charles was one conduit from Milan and its new money empires which persuaded Louis Galea and Eddie Fenech Adami to choose the San Raffaele template for what was to be the new hospital for Malta. We all know what came later – huge delays, cost overruns, changes in political direction. Ultimately, the San Raffaele template was set aside.

In the past week, this news has been eclipsed by the terrible upheaval taking place in the Vatican where Pope Francis has convened representatives of the bishops’ conferences to discuss paedophilia and associated crimes among the clergy.

To clarify the context, I could find nothing better than a long reportage by Jason Berry on the National Catholic Register. It is a reportage in three parts which chronicles how this problem was allowed to become so big because of inaction or worse by key figures, especially Pope John Paul II, now newly canonized.

The articles are too long to summarize but I will select a few cases.

In 1995, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër of Austria, whom the Pope had personally selected as a bishop (impressed by his piety at a Marian shrine), resigned as archbishop of Vienna after he accused of making advances to former Benedictine seminarians. Groër went unpunished.

In 1998, eight former Legionaries of Christ (including a Florida diocesan priest) filed abuse charges from their years as teenage seminarians against the founder, Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado. By then, Maciel had sent young Legionaries with money to grease the palms of curial officials. 

In November 2004, Sodano arranged for a dying John Paul, his speech slurred from the neurological disorder, to celebrate Maciel's 60th anniversary as a priest at a lavish Vatican ceremony. The Pope praised the long-accused paedophile for his "integral formation of the person." Ratzinger did not attend;

Ratzinger, a moralist, understood that with John Paul dying, whomever the cardinals chose as the next pope would inherit a disaster if the Maciel case were aborted.

Scicluna was taking testimony in New York when John Paul died in 2005. A few days later, Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. Months later, Scicluna delivered his fateful report – finding "more than 20 but less than 100 victims".

On 19 May, 2006 the Vatican ordered Maciel to "a life of prayer and penitence". The communiqué's language massaged by Sodano praised the Legionaries and did not acknowledge victims.

Maciel, 86, left Rome for his native Cotija, Mexico, and a reunion with one of his former paramours and their 23-year-old daughter, whose support in Spain he had covered from Legion coffers. The Vatican had known about Maciel's offspring as early as 2005, as the retired Cardinal Franc Rodé – successor of Cardinal Martinez Somalo who took a $90,000 gift from Maciel – told me in a 2012 interview. Rodé was shown a video of Maciel and his daughter by a Legionary, one of several starting to jump ship. Rodé said he told Scicluna, but did not confront Maciel because "I was not his confessor."