A clarfication from Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., over at CWNews:

A week ago, we Jesuits of the Pontifical Biblical Institute were informed in the course of a regular community meeting that our main lecture hall would be in use on March 20 at the request of a former faculty member (Salesian Father Frank Moloney) for the public launch of a novel he had co-authored with Jeffrey Archer. The Rector apologized in advance for any inconvenience caused by the event itself and for any ructions caused by attendant publicity.

That publicity — both before and after the event — gave rise to lurid headlines ("Pope Gives Blessing to Gospel of Jeffrey Archer") and to nonsense of other kinds as well. Here’s the lede from the Times of London:

Jesus never turned water into wine, He did not walk on the water and He never calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee, according to a new ‘Gospel’ published today with Vatican approval and co-authored by Jeffrey Archer.

The following points are offered in correction of errors of fact, emphasis, or interpretation given in the English–speaking media:

• The Pope did not "bless" the Archer-Moloney novel.
• The Pontifical Biblical Institute provided the bottled water at the speaker’s rostrum for the Archer-Moloney press conference. Its scholars had nothing whatever to do with the book’s content.
• The Archer-Moloney novel was not "published with Vatican approval."
• No biblical scholar, including my former colleague Fr. Frank Moloney, believes Fr. Frank Moloney to be "the world’s greatest living biblical scholar."
• Fr. Moloney is not "one of the Pope’s top theological advisers."
• The International Theological Commission, of which Fr. Moloney was a member, has the same level of teaching authority as the Philatelic Office of the Holy See — that’s to say: zero.
• The teaching of the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum §11 has not been abrogated.

In crudely commercial terms, the authors’ choice of Rome as a launch-site and their promiscuous use of the terms "Vatican" and "Pontifical" in their promotional efforts was a shrewd move. Hype apart, though, the notion that biblical scholarship or Church teaching has been advanced by the novel is unwarranted.

All well and good, but the questions still goes begging: Why did the Pontifical Biblical Institute accede to Moloney’s request?