President Michel Suleiman called on Friday for a bigger role for women in public life in Lebanon and hoped they would increase …

Rome, Italy, Mar 8, 2013 / 04:22 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The media silence of the cardinals resulted in an anonymous interview to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in which a source claimed there is “a lobby” of leakers. That group is composed of people “coming from the State Secretariat, the Vatican City State administration, the APSA (a sort of Vatican Central Bank) and the Italian Bishops’ Conference,” the unnamed source said. “The problem is not the kind of news, but that such confidential news broke out,” said a Vatican Secretariat of State official who spoke to CNA under the condition of anonymity.

So the question that lingers on the minds of many is: Why have the leaks resumed? While press attention has focused on the American cardinals’ daily briefings being canceled, they were not the real problem, as the bishops’ conference spokesman explained.  

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In their general congregation meetings, in liturgical processions and in the Sistine Chapel, every cardinal has a place and each cardinal knows his place. The Vatican calls it "precedence," and it has little to do with the importance of the cardinal's day job, the size of his diocese or his age. But it has everything to do with timing. Cardinals are divided into a three-tier internal hierarchy: cardinal bishops, cardinal priests and cardinal deacons. It's the seating order for the general congregations in the Vatican synod hall. It will be the order they line up in for the procession at the Mass for the election of a new pope.The four patriarchs of Eastern Catholic churches who are cardinals are inserted in the ranking between the cardinal bishops and cardinal priests.