Com­ment: In the recently re-aired FTR #508, we exam­ined the ascen­sion of Pope Bene­dict, whose elec­tion came at a time when unfold­ing Vat­i­can scan­dals threat­ened to unravel, reveal­ing that institution’s darker side for the blood-soaked hor­ror show that it truly is. Avail­able evi­dence sug­gests that Ratzinger/Benedict is a prod­uct of the Vatican/fascist axis so exhaus­tively detailed in AFA #‘s 17–21.

We now see that the Vat­i­can has hired a legal adviser who had pre­vi­ously defended it against Holocaust-era law­suits. (The heroic John Lof­tus, inter­viewed most recently in FTR #‘s 704 and 706 was involved with those suits. They are touched on in both interviews.)

“AP Exclu­sive: How the Pope Got His US Lawyer” by Nicole Win­field [AP]; yahoo.com; 4/17/2010.

The Vat­i­can has long let car­di­nals or its offi­cial spokes­men do its talk­ing when scan­dal hits.

But as the Vat­i­can reels from a swirling cler­i­cal sex abuse cri­sis, the Holy See has turned to an unusual advo­cate: a tennis-loving, Saab-driving solo prac­ti­tioner from Berke­ley, Calif., whose obscure inter­est in sov­er­eign immu­nity law and flu­ency in Ital­ian landed him the job of the pope’s U.S. lawyer.

Jef­frey Lena’s stud­ied yet cre­ative approach to defend­ing the Vat­i­can in U.S. abuse law­suits has influ­enced the Vatican’s new pub­lic mes­sage as he is increas­ingly called on to act as Rome’s unof­fi­cial U.S. spokesman and strategist. .  .  .

. . . Still, the 51-year-old for­mer his­tory pro­fes­sor avoids the lime­light. He declined to be pho­tographed for this pro­file, cit­ing secu­rity and pri­vacy con­cerns for his wife and son. He says he has received threats because of his advo­cacy for the Holy See and has moved his three-person law office to an undis­closed loca­tion in Berkeley.

The threats stem from the con­tro­ver­sial nature of the cases brought against the Vat­i­can in the U.S. over the past 10 years: before the cler­i­cal abuse law­suits tar­get­ing the Holy See, Lena defended cases in which the Vat­i­can bank was accused of stash­ing Nazi loot.

Lena recalls that when look­ing for co-counsel to rep­re­sent the Vat­i­can bank, sev­eral large firms declined because they didn’t want to defend a Holo­caust claims suit. . . .

. . . Lena was teach­ing con­tracts at the Uni­ver­sity of Turin in 2000 when he was asked to sub­mit his advice on a clam­orous law­suit that had just been filed near his home­town in San Francisco.

Holo­caust sur­vivors from Croa­tia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia had filed suit against the Vat­i­can bank, alleg­ing that it accepted mil­lions of dol­lars of their valu­ables stolen by Nazi sympathizers.

Just who asked Lena to take on the case? All roads point to Franzo Grande Stevens, one of Italy’s best-known and respected attor­neys, dubbed “l’avvocato del’Avvocato” — the attor­ney of the late Fiat chair­man Gianni Agnelli.

Grande Stevens was also the lawyer for the Vat­i­can bank, for­mally known as the Insti­tute of Reli­gious Works, and the lawyer for the Vat­i­can City state.

Grande Stevens didn’t respond to e-mail requests for com­ment and Lena declined to say if Stevens made the request.

But in a let­ter to La Stampa news­pa­per last week, Grande Stevens chan­neled vir­tu­ally all of Lena’s key defense strate­gies in the U.S. sex abuse cases to com­plain about a pro­file the paper had run on Lena’s main U.S. adver­sary, Jeff Anderson.

The Holo­caust claims suit against the Vat­i­can bank was dis­missed in Decem­ber after an appeals court upheld the bank’s immu­nity under the for­eign sov­er­eign immu­ni­ties act, one of at least 12 pub­lished fed­eral deci­sions Lena has won in the area of sov­er­eign immunity. . . .