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In recent days, often speculative reports — some even alleging gay sex scandals in the Vatican, others focusing on particular cardinals stung by the child sex abuse crisis — have dominated headlines in the Italian news media, suggesting fierce internal struggles as prelates scramble to consolidate power and attack enemies in the dying days of a troubled papacy.

The drumbeat of scandal has reached such a fever pitch that on Saturday, the Vatican Secretariat of State issued a rare pointed rebuke, calling it "deplorable" that ahead of the conclave, "when the Cardinal electors will be held in conscience and before God, to freely indicate their choice, that there be a widespread distribution of often unverified, unverifiable or completely false news stories, that cause serious damage to persons and institutions."

The Vatican compared the news reports to attempts in the past by foreign states to exert pressure on the papal election. "Today there is an attempt to do this through public opinion that is often based on judgments that do not typically capture the spiritual aspect of the moment that the Church is living," the statement said.

The news reports come as Benedict attempts to put his house in order in his final days as pope. In the past week, he named a new head of the scandal-plagued Vatican Bank and also reassigned a powerful Vatican diplomatic official to a posting outside Rome.

On Feb. 11, Benedict made history by announcing that he would step down on Feb. 28. He said he was worn down by age and was resigning "in full liberty and for the good of the Church." The volley of newsreports since hint at some of the possible problems facing the Vatican when the pope decided that only someone younger and stronger could govern the church.

Last week, largely unsourced articles in the center-left daily La Repubblica and the center-right weekly Panorama reported that three cardinals whom Benedict had asked last summer to investigate the leaking of confidential documents, known as the "Vatileaks" scandal, had found evidence of Vatican officials who had been put in compromising positions.

The newspapers reported that, after interviewing dozens of people inside and outside the Vatican, the cardinals produced a hefty dossier. "The report is explicit. Some high prelates are subject to 'external influence' — we would call it blackmail — by nonchurch men to whom they are bound by 'worldly' ties," La Repubblica wrote.

Last October, a Vatican court sentenced Paolo Gabriele, the pope's butler, to 18 months in prison on charges of aggravated theft, after he pleaded guilty to stealing confidential documents. Later Benedict, just days after he received the cardinals' report, pardoned Mr. Gabriele.

Vatican experts speculated that prelates eager to undermine opponents during the conclave were behind the most recent leaks to the news media.

"The conclave is a mechanism that serves to create a dynasty in a monarchy without children, so it's a complicated operation," said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Center in Bologna and author of a book on conclaves.

The voting rules for the conclave require a candidate securing an uncontested majority, so any effort to undermine rivals is "part of the great game of the conclave, whose tools include political attacks and efforts to condition consensus," Mr. Melloni added.

While the battle lines inside the Vatican hierarchy and the College of Cardinals are difficult to discern, in Mr. Melloni's view, the news reports calling attention to Vatican scandals could shore up the more conservative cardinals who would lean toward electing "a sheriff, not a pope," a figure who would focus on discipline more than the pastoral aspects of the role.

Analysts said Benedict's personnel decisions, meanwhile, appeared to reflect his own attempts to shift the power in the Vatican.

On Feb. 15, he appoint Ernst von Freyberg, a German industrialist and aristocrat, as the new director of the Vatican Bank, a move that experts said was aimed at weakening the Italian influence at the institution.

And on Friday, he named Ettore Balestrero, 46, the Vatican's undersecretary of state, as papal nuncio in Colombia, also making him a bishop. Technically a promotion, the move was also seen by many Vatican experts as a way to move the prelate, who played a key role in overseeing the Vatican Bank and in the Holy See's dealings with China and Israel, away from the power center in Rome.

The scandals involving leaked documents have flourished in the fertile ground of power vacuums both at the Vatican as well as in Italy, which will hold national elections on Sunday and Monday. The end of Benedict's papacy also dovetails with the end of the era dominated by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose media culture was marked by mudslinging and blackmail techniques.