The National Security Agency took the unusual step Thursday of denying a report that it eavesdropped on Vatican phone calls — and that it even may have tapped in on Pope Francis before he was elected.
Calls to and from the Vatican guesthouse where the College of Cardinals stayed before the papal conclave were among 46 million conversations monitored by the spy agency, the weekly magazine Panorama said.
The NSA, which rarely issues public statements, denied it had “targeted the Vatican” but stopped short of saying whether Holy See communications were swept up in a massive eavesdropping effort.
According to Panorama, one of Italy’s two largest weekly magazines, the NSA monitoring began on Dec. 10, 2012.
“It is feared,” the magazine reported, that phone calls were listened to up until the beginning of the conclave that elected Francis, the former Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina, on March 13.
The monitored calls included those to the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse, where the soon-to-be pope and the rest of the College of Cardinals stayed during the conclave.
Panorama, which did not give a source for its information, said the recorded Vatican phone calls were catalogued by the NSA in four categories: leadership intentions, threats to the financial system, foreign-policy objectives and human rights.
The Vatican shrugged off the report.
“We are not aware of anything on this issue,” spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said, “and, in any case, we have no concerns about it.”