VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Laura Sgrò’s home office in Rome’s elegant Barberini neighborhood is stacked with files and books and decorated with vases from her native Sicily. “This is the wolves’ den,” she said, indicating a large painting hanging behind the desk of a pack of wolves in a snowstorm.
“The wolf is my favorite animal,” said Sgrò, “because it’s organized and has a pack mentality, a sense of responsibility, rules, and it knows how to be fierce but can also takes care of others.”
It’s an apt descripton of Sgrò herself, a canon, or church jurisprudence, lawyer, who has become known at the Vatican for taking on some of the most controversial and complex legal cases and scandals facing the Catholic hierarchy. She is representing the family of Emanuela Orlandi, a teenager who disappeared in 1983 in mysterious circumstances, as well as five women who have accused the artist and ex-Jesuit priest Marko Rupnik of sexual or psychological abuse.
Her fellow canon lawyers refused to talk on the record about Sgrò, answering a request for comment with a brusque, “Non si fa” — “It’s not done.” But a few praised her talent anonymously, while …