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Archbishop Carlo Maria ViganòDiane Montagna / LifeSiteNews

ROME, August 30, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The Italian journalist who helped a Vatican whistleblower edit his testimony has reported that Archbishop Carlo Viganò was in tears after the work was done.

Marco Tosatti, an Italian journalist and Vatican insider, reported that the retired papal nuncio phoned him a few weeks ago and told him the story that would form the basis of his testimony against the disgraced Archbishop McCarrick, Pope Francis, and other prelates. Tosatti expected to interview Viganò, but instead the older man arrived with a draft of his testimony. The two men looked at the archbishop’s draft for three hours, the journalist helping the author whittle it down to only those claims that could be substantiated.

Tosatti told Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press (AP), “He had prepared some kind of a draft of a document and he sat here by my side I told him that we had to work on it really because it was not in a journalistic style.”

The journalist said also that Viganò was “deadly serious” while they worked, and that “both emerged physically and emotionally exhausted.”

As the archbishop was leaving, Tosatti insisted on kissing his ring.

“He tried to say ‘No,’” the journalist told AP. “I told him, ’It’s not for you, it’s for the role that you (play) that I do it,’” Tosatti said. “He didn’t say anything. He went away, but he was crying.”

Tosatti denies that he was the archbishop’s ghostwriter or that he urged the retired nuncio to publish the testimony, as has been reported in the Italian press.

“…I did not “persuade” [him] to make the document public,” the journalist wrote on his blog. “And my contribution was that of a professional editing; that is, we worked on the draft, whose material was entirely by the Nuncio, to make sure it was fluent and journalistically usable.”

The journalist is disgusted that people are using the fact that he helped Viganò edit his testimony as a kind of “gotcha,” supposed evidence that Viganò is part of a conservative cabal using the McCarrick scandal as an excuse to attack Pope Francis.

“It’s extraordinary that even this circumstance – the fact that the person who wanted to do an interview contributed to the editing of the testimony – has been used by someone… seeking to discredit this deed of clarity and courage carried out by Monsignor Viganò,” Tosatti wrote.

“I will say that it could be interpreted as a sign of desperation of those seeking to distract from a silence and refusal to give answers which is becoming hard for many Catholics to bear.”