Leak of Pope’s Encyclical on Climate Change Hints at Tensions in Vatican

ROME — The unexpected leak of Pope Francis’ much-anticipated environmental encyclical has meant the return of something that not long ago was fairly common around the Vatican but had become often dormant during the two-plus years of Francis’ mostly charmed papacy: intrigue.

Who leaked it and why? Was this the work of frustrated conservatives in the Vatican, as some experts have speculated? Does it portend big fights at a pivotal October meeting in which church officials are expected to grapple with homosexuality and divorce? Or is it just a tempest in a teapot?

“Somebody inside the Vatican leaked the document with the obvious intention of embarrassing the pope,” said Robert Mickens, a longtime Vatican expert and editor of Global Pulse, an online Catholic magazine.

The Vatican press office was tense on Tuesday. Hours after a draft of the encyclical was published Monday on the website of L’Espresso, an Italian magazine, the Vatican indefinitely revoked the credentials of Sandro Magister, the journalist who wrote a short introduction that accompanied the magazine’s publication of the draft. Vatican officials say the leaked draft is not the final version of the encyclical, which has been barred from release until Thursday.

Leaks are hardly uncommon in journalism — some would consider them sustenance — and Vatican journalism has been no exception. Most recently, Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy was undermined when his butler leaked documents, in an episode known as VatiLeaks, that exposed infighting and discord in the Vatican. The scandal is considered one of the reasons that Benedict resigned, leading to the March 2013 election of Francis.

With global interest in the Francis encyclical — titled “Laudato Sii,” or “Be Praised” — the Vatican had prepared a major media rollout, with a news conference on Thursday morning and the release of the final document. That has now lost some of its steam. Tempers flared inside the Vatican press office on Tuesday, both among staff members and among a handful of reporters, who criticized others for breaking what they saw as an inviolable promise not to publish before Thursday.

The immediate focus of attention was Mr. Magister, who writes a widely read blog about the Vatican on the L’Espresso website and is known as one of Francis’ toughest critics. Mr. Magister said he was simply following orders: He wrote a short introduction to the draft after his boss, Luigi Vicinanza, L’Espresso’s editor, got a copy and decided to go public.