“The simpler it is, the more testing it takes,” said Stefania Fochi, in charge of consumer testing for market leader Barilla, which organized the taste test.

Pasta sales worldwide have grown steadily over the past three years, to €22.3 billion ($28 billion) last year, according to Euromonitor research. In Italy, however, sales have fallen steadily over that same timeframe as the economy suffers and stores are forced to offer discounts. National pasta sales dropped to €2.7 billion ($3.4 billion) last year from €3.1 billion ($3.9 billion) in 2009 — meaning spaghetti makers in these days of austerity need to try harder to keep their customers loyal.

Granted, in Italy, it’s not a huge challenge given that most Italians eat a plate of pasta — be it spaghetti alla carbonara, penne al ragu or orecchiette with broccoli — at least once a day. But they are terribly discerning customers: A noodle is not just a noodle.

“Some were sticky, some were good, al dente and cooked the right amount of time,” said Stefania De Rossi, a 46-year-old mother of three who was selected for the taste test because of her family’s daily pasta habit. “I liked the last one (identified only by its code name: V36). It wasn’t super smooth, it was a bit rough but seemed better.”

Her pickiness stems in part from Italians’ particular obsession with food: Eating in Italy is taken very seriously on both a family and cultural level. The Slow Food movement was born here and you can smell, see and taste this way of life at this time of year in outdoor markets, exploding with bundles of fresh asparagus now that the green and purple hills of artichokes have begun to wane.

And what better way to enjoy those asparagus tips than to sautee them in olive oil with bits of speck, a smoky cut of prosciutto, and toss the whole thing with a small mound of linguine?

“Pasta is truly the symbol, the emblem not just of Italian food … but the principal plate of the Mediterranean diet,” said Amelia Germoleo, vice director of the National Pasta Museum in Rome. “It’s profoundly rooted in the culture, the lifestyle, the ‘being’ of Italy.”

The museum, which is currently closed for renovations, seeks to enlighten visitors about pasta’s past, including the very Italian origins of dried pasta, the stuff that comes in packages and can be preserved, as opposed to egg-based fresh pasta that must be eaten quickly.

It turns out Marco Polo didn’t bring spaghetti to the West from China. Rather, Germoleo said, the earliest known origins of dried pasta date from 12th century Sicily. The Norman king of Sicily, King Ruggero II, instructed a geographer to write a book about all that was known of the world.

In 1138, the geographer, Idrisi, reported back that the settlement of Trabia, west of Palermo, was making a type of vermicelli that was “sufficient to provide not only for Calabria but also the Muslim and Christian territories, where numerous cargoes are sent by sea,” according a citation of the book in a museum publication, “Time for Pasta.”

“This debunks the myth that Marco Polo brought it from China,” Germoleo said. “Dried pasta is absolutely Italian.”

Agostino Macri, a food security expert at the National Consumer’s Union, said that pasta was in the “genome of Italians.”

“A good dish of pasta puts you in a good mood,” he said. But he cautioned against going overboard in consuming it, particularly with specialties like spaghetti all’amatriciana, a heavy dish using tomatoes and bacon-like pancetta that is common on Roman trattoria menus.

“It has a lot of calories,” he warned.

The pasta that was served to the blind tasters had none of that: simply spaghetti tossed with a dash of olive oil. Each of the five brands tested — Barilla, De Cecco, Gragnano and supermarket brands Coop and Conad — was cooked in 1 liter of water salted with 7 grams of sea salt for every 100 grams of pasta.

While each sample cooked, women in white lab coats and latex gloves handed out small packets of noodles as they appear in the package, giving the whole affair a sterile, clinical feel when most Italians would tuck into a plate of pasta around the dinner table.

The testers ran their fingers slowly over the slender sticks, caressed them, noted the flecks of brown on the golden strands of semolina and the slight roughness of the grain in their hands. And then they answered an 11-page questionnaire asking them how the color, thickness, smell, taste and texture appealed to them. The results aren’t for public consumption, Barilla said.

“For us the pasta is very important, especially for me,” Gabriella Brescia said after sampling her five dishes as she packed up and headed home. “I could give up everything except pasta.”

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The Vatican said in a statement Thursday that the vote was taken because of Gotti Tedeschi’s failure to fulfill the “primary functions of his office.” He himself has told prosecutors that he barely paid attention to the bank’s works, showing up only two days a week while tending to his primary position as head of Spain’s Banco Santander’s Italian unit in Milan.

In addition, Gotti Tedeschi was found to have leaked confidential documents to serve his personal and political interests, according to a person familiar with the Vatican’s investigation. The person requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter.

The Vatican is in the midst of a scandal over leaked documents and has begun a criminal investigation into the source of the leaks, as well as appointed a commission of cardinals to get to the bottom of it.

In the statement, the Vatican said the board had grown increasingly concerned about the governance of the bank and that the situation had deteriorated recently.

During a regularly scheduled board meeting Thursday, the five superintendents, who include the former No. 2 at Deutsche Bank, Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz, and Carl Anderson, head of the Knights of Columbus, a major U.S. Catholic fundraising organization, unanimously adopted a no-confidence motion and recommended that Gotti Tedeschi’s mandate be terminated.

His fate isn’t final. On Friday the cardinals who sit on the IOR’s governing council are to meet to consider the board’s decision. While it wasn’t clear if they could ignore the no-confidence vote, the Vatican made clear the search was already on for a replacement.

“The council is now looking forward to search for a new and excellent president who will help the institute rebuild relationships between the institute and the financial community based on mutual respect based on internationally accepted banking standards,” the IOR said.

The no-confidence vote comes at a critical time for the Holy See in its efforts to shed the IOR’s image as a secretive tax haven battered by years of scandal.

The Holy See is heading into a July meeting of Moneyval, a Council of Europe committee that will determine whether it has complied with international norms to fight money laundering and terror financing. Transparency of the IOR’s finances has been one of several criteria that the Moneyval evaluators have investigated.

It wasn’t clear if the timing of Gotti Tedeschi’s ouster was aimed at sending a message to the Moneyval investigators, but just last week the Holy See met with them to discuss the preliminary findings of their report.

Gotti Tedeschi has long painted himself as the symbol of Vatican financial transparency, but the vote Thursday indicated that his primary collaborators on the board had found him to be anything but. He was faulted for not keeping the board of superintendents apprised of the work of the bank, among other failings.

Recently, he raised eyebrows when he made a joke about Hitler, war and economics.

Gotti Tedeschi was a frequent contributor to the Vatican newspaper and went on a very public speaking tour extolling the benefits of a morality-based financial system and citing frequently from the pope’s encyclical on the subject, “Charity in Truth.”

Italian authorities placed Gotti Tedeschi and the IOR’s top manager under investigation in September 2010 and seized €23 ($30 million) from a Vatican bank account at the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano Spa, after the bank informed the Bank of Italy about possible violations of anti-money laundering norms.

Gotti Tedeschi and the Vatican have denied any wrongdoing, calling the investigation a misunderstanding. No charges have been filed, and the money was subsequently released after the Vatican passed a series of measures to combat money laundering and create a financial watchdog authority — key requirements for the Moneyval process.

The Vatican bank was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII to manage assets destined for religious or charitable works. Located in a tower just inside the gates of Vatican City, it also manages the pension system for the Vatican’s thousands of employees.

The bank is not open to the public. Depositors are usually limited to Vatican employees, religious orders and people who transfer money for the pope’s charities.

The Vatican bank’s finances have long been shrouded in secrecy. Most famously, it was implicated in a scandal over the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano in the 1980s in one of Italy’s largest fraud cases. Roberto Calvi, the head of Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 in circumstances that remain mysterious.

Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had made to several dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.

While denying any wrongdoing, the Vatican bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors.

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The publication Saturday of “His Holiness,” by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, added fuel to the fire, reproducing confidential letters and memos to and from Benedict and his personal secretary which, according to the Vatican, violated the pope’s right to privacy.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement Saturday the book was an “objectively defamatory” work that “clearly assumes characters of a criminal act.” He said the Holy See would get to the bottom of who “stole” the documents, who received them and who published them. He warned the Holy See would seek international cooperation in its quest for justice, presumably with Italian magistrates.

The Vatican had already warned of legal action against Nuzzi after he broadcast letters in January from the former No. 2 Vatican administrator to the pope in which he begged not to be transferred for having exposed alleged corruption that cost the Holy See millions of euros in higher contract prices. The prelate, Monsignor Carlo Maria Vigano, is now the Vatican’s U.S. ambassador.

Nuzzi, author of “Vatican SpA,” a 2009 volume laying out shady dealings of the Vatican bank based on leaked documents, said he was approached by sources inside the Vatican with the trove of new documents, most of them of fairly recent vintage and many of them painting the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in a negative light.

Much of the documentation is fairly Italy-centric: about a 2009 scandal over the ex-editor of the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, a never-before-known dinner between Benedict and Italy’s president, and even a 2011 letter from Italy’s pre-eminent talk show host Bruno Vespa to the pope enclosing a check for €10,000 for his charity work — and asking for a private audience in exchange.

But there are international leaks as well, including diplomatic cables from Vatican embassies from Jerusalem to Cameroon. Some concern the conclusions of the pope’s delegate the disgraced Legion of Christ religious order in a memo to the pope last fall. (He warned that the financial situation of the order, beset by a scandal over its pedophile founder, “while not grave, is serious and pressing.”)

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the head of the Institute for Religious Works, otherwise known as the Vatican’s bank, gets significant ink, with reproduced private memos to the pope with his take on the Vatican’s response to the global financial crisis and how to handle the church’s tax exempt status amid Italian government efforts to crack down on tax evasion.

The bank has been trying for some two years to remedy its reputation as a shady tax haven beset by scandals, which include the collapse of Italy’s Banco Ambrosiano and the death of its head, Roberto Calvi, who also helped manage Vatican investments and was found hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982.

In a bid to show it has mended its ways, the Institute for Religious Works this week invited ambassadors from 35 countries in for a tour and a chat with its managing director as part of a new transparency campaign. The tour came on the same day Holy See representatives were in Strasbourg discussing the first draft of a report from a Council of Europe committee on the Vatican’s compliance with international norms to fight money laundering and terror financing.

British Ambassador Nigel Baker, who went on the Institute for Religious Works tour, later blogged that the Vatican’s reputation depends on showing that its institutions are transparent. “Plenty still needs to be done. But the Holy See needs to stick to its guns. It is in their interest, and ours,” he wrote.

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On the contrary, he told The Associated Press, the revelations showed that the Legion under papal delegate Cardinal Velasio De Paolis is doing the right thing by taking action once the revelations became known.

“Even the recent public communications about the Legion seem to be new and a positive sign of transparency,” he said. “There is no reason then not to have confidence in the way Cardinal De Paolis is guiding this complex path of renewal.”

The Rev. Thomas Williams, an American moral theologian who was the public face of the Legion for years, admitted Tuesday he had had a relationship with a woman and had fathered a child “a number of years ago.” He didn’t identify the woman. The Legion said the child is being cared for.

The Legion subsequently admitted that Williams’ superiors knew about the child but didn’t remove him immediately from his prominent role as a professor of moral theology at the Legion’s university in Rome and a popular television commentator, author and spokesman. The order has refused to say precisely when Williams’ superiors knew, but former Legion priests say they suspect at least some of the Legion’s leadership knew years ago.

Williams was only removed from his teaching position in February after a Spanish victims’ group confronted the Legion with a letter outlining the allegations against Williams and other Legion priests accused of abusing children. The matter became public after The Associated Press obtained a copy of the letter and last week requested comment from the Legion.

The revelations and apparent cover-up of the initial knowledge of Williams’ child have raised questions about whether it’s really possible to rehabilitate the Legion, which has been in disarray since admitting in 2009 that its founder had raped and molested seminarians and fathered three children with two women. The order, founded in 1941, became one of the fastest growing and most influential because of its ability to attract money and seminarians to the priesthood. Pope John Paul II held its leader, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, up as a model for the faithful.

The facade, however, began to crumble in 1997, with revelations of Maciel’s abuse, but the Mexican prelate continued to enjoy Vatican support and protection. It wasn’t until 2006 that the Vatican sanctioned him to a lifetime of prayer and penance for his crimes. He died in 2008.

Benedict took a big risk when he assumed control of the Legion in May 2010 after a Vatican investigation determined that Maciel was a fraud who had created an order bent on silence and obedience to cater to his double life. The Vatican concluded that his order was beset by such problems it could only survive if it were thoroughly “purified.”

Benedict could have shut the order down, and some critics of the cult-like movement say that remains the only possible solution.

American canon lawyer Edward Peters, the Vatican’s expert witness in U.S. sex abuse lawsuits and an adviser to the Vatican’s highest court, has concluded the Legion “needs to disappear.”

But Benedict chose instead to name De Paolis to oversee a process of reform that includes rewriting the order’s constitutions, correcting the abuses of power and defining the charism, or the essential spirit of the order that makes it unique. The aim is to preserve whatever good that the order may still provide the church with its 800 priests and zealous lay members.

Two years in, the logistical process of rewriting the constitutions is going ahead. And just this week — on the same day the Williams revelations made headlines — De Paolis announced that he had named new leaders for the Legion’s female branch to help shepherd it through a process of reform as well.

But in yet another indication that the process is anything but linear, none of the members selected by De Paolis are considered reformers, with most, if not all, of them strongly linked to the old guard leadership and with little experience in the field.

Former members of the so-called consecrated branch of the Legion say De Paolis’ choices don’t reflect the results of the voting undertaken by current members to choose their own leaders. They predicted a new exodus of members frustrated that their efforts to reform had again been rebuffed.

“I believe this will generate numerous and significant desertions,” said Nelly Ramirez, a former consecrated woman who left in 2009 and has written a book about her experiences.

Since the revelations about Maciel were first disclosed in 2009, some 350 women out of more than 900, have abandoned the Legion’s consecrated branch, where women live like nuns, fundraising, recruiting members and working in schools and youth programs. A group of 35 who have left formed their own group in February that has been canonically approved by the Vatican.

De Paolis has warned current members not to mix with the members of Totus Tuus lay association, lest they be poached away.

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On the Web:

Legion of Christ is at www.legionariesofchrist.org

Totus Tuus lay association of ex-consecrated women is at https://www.facebook.com/ComunidadTotusTuus

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The revelation immediately raised questions about when Williams’ superiors knew of the existence of the child, given that the birth occurred several years ago and that Williams, a former superior of the order’s Rome headquarters, has never stopped speaking out on issues of moral conscience. A Legion spokesman said the order had decided not to disclose when it learned about his child.

Williams’ admission was issued after The Associated Press last week presented the Legion with the allegation against Williams, which was lodged by a Spanish association of Legion victims. The association’s accusations, sent to the Legion and Vatican several weeks ago, also named other Legion priests accused of sexually abusing minors.

Williams, who was not accused of abuse, said that “a number of years ago” he had a relationship with a woman and fathered her child. He didn’t identify the mother and didn’t say whether the relationship was over. He also did not identify the gender or say if he was helping to support the child.

The Legion has been beset by scandal following revelations that its late founder, the Rev. Marciel Maciel, fathered three children with two women and sexually abused his seminarians. Maciel died in 2008, and in 2009 the Legion admitted to his crimes. The Maciel scandal has been particularly sensational given that the Mexican-born priest was held up by Pope John Paul II as a model for the faithful, with his priests admired for their orthodoxy and ability to bring in money and attract new seminarians.

The facade, however, began to crumble in 1997 with revelations of his abuse, though it wasn’t until 2006 that the Vatican sanctioned Maciel to a lifetime of prayer and penance for his crimes. Just last week, the Legion admitted that seven of its priests were under investigation by the Vatican for allegedly sexually abusing minors — suggesting that the same culture of secrecy and silence that Maciel used to cover his crimes enabled other priests to abuse children.

Williams, the most prominent priest in the 800-strong order, spoke about Maciel’s double life in a February 2009 interview with the Catholic ETWN program, saying the revelations were a “very, very hard blow to all of us.”

Williams, the author of such books as 2008′s “Knowing Right From Wrong: A Christian Guide to Conscience,” was the superior of the Legion’s general directorate in Rome in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More recently, he taught theology, promoted his books and lectured widely.

His personal website, which lists his numerous books, speaking engagements, articles and appearances as a CBS commentator, was taken down on Tuesday. Emails to Williams, who is said by friends to be suffering from cancer, have not been returned.

The Vatican in 2010 took over the Legion after conducting an investigation into the order and the double life of Maciel, who founded the order in 1941 in Mexico and oversaw its growth into a large and prominent congregation. It is now being run by a papal delegate, Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, who is spearheading a process of reform after the Vatican found serious problems with the cult-like group.

Genevieve Kineke, who runs a blog about the Legion aimed at helping those who leave, welcomed Williams’ revelations but questioned who knew what and when given that the child is several years old and that at least some in the Legion are believed to have known for years of Maciel’s double life yet covered it up to avoid scandal.

“I’m gratified that this has become known, for it couldn’t remain hidden without its own toxic effect,” Kineke said in an e-mail. “With due respect for his privacy and that of his family, details about the timeline are still important — if only to ascertain if more corporate duplicity led to this point.”

She noted that Williams has been a vocal advocate for the Legion “evidently while harboring his own ‘double life.’ Either his superiors knew this, and still allowed him to speak, or he abused his freedom knowingly and engaged in grave hypocrisy.”

Legion spokesman Jim Fair said he didn’t know when Williams’ superiors learned about the existence of the child. “The decision was taken not to provide additional detail on this,” Fair said in an email.

The accusation against Williams was first lodged by the Association for Help for Those Affected by the LC, a Spanish association for victims of the Legion. Member Patricio Cerda told The Associated Press that the fact that Williams only admitted to the accusation when the Legion was confronted by the AP shows that the culture of cover up in the Legion remains.

“This shows that there is no real process of reform,” but just a process to rewrite the Legion’s constitutions, he said. He said that the cases of abusive priests referred to the Vatican were known to Legion superiors more than five years ago, and a year ago to De Paolis. Most of the allegations concern alleged abuse from decades ago and some of the cases were well-known among Legion watchers.

“What is surprising is how long it took them to recognize the paternity of a child of one of their priests and how much they tried to protect those who abused children,” he said.

In his statement, Williams said he and his superiors had decided he should to take a year off of active ministry to reflect on his commitments as a priest. “I am truly sorry to everyone who is hurt by this revelation and I ask for your prayers as I seek guidance on how to make up for my errors,” he wrote.

In an email sent to all Legion priests that accompanied Williams’ announcement, Fr. Luis Garza, who heads the Legion in the U.S., said he was relaying the news with great sadness given the Legion’s recent turmoil.

“The last thing I would wish is to add a fresh wound when older wounds may not have healed fully,” wrote Garza, who was long the Legion’s No. 2 in Rome.

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