"Yes, I passed documents. I did it spontaneously, probably not fully lucid," said Monsignor Angelo Lucio Vallejo Balda during a Vatican City trial on Monday.

"I was convinced I was in a situation without exit," said Balda, former secretary of the Prefecture for Economic Affairs.

Balda is one of five people, including two journalists, who face up to eight years in jail, for breaking a Vatican law created by Pope Francis in 2013 criminalizing the leaking of documents.

The priest admitted passing material to journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi who both wrote books revealing widespread financial mismanagement in the Vatican.

Balda said he was under pressure from fellow defendant and member of the commission, Francesca Chaouqui, a 34-year-old PR expert.

He explained that he felt under pressure from Chaouqui who at one time he had been close to.

The priest said he believed Chaouqui mingled in a "dangerous world" of Italian power brokers.

Sources

The Guardian
AFP/Yahoo News
Catholic News Agency
The Tablet
Image: Getty Images/The Guardian

In a 35-page report, Judge Piero Bonnet said Paolo Gabriele — who has been charged with "aggravated theft" — felt sure Pope Benedict was not aware of what was going on.

"I was certain that a shock, even in the media, could be healthy in putting the Church back on the right track," Gabriele was quoted as saying.

Gabriele also claimed he felt "infiltrated" by the Holy Spirit and had discussed with a spiritual director his concerns about the Church and his thoughts on taking the documents.

In fact, the judge said, the priest (identified only by the letter B) affirmed that Gabriele had given him a box full of documents, which the priest told Vatican investigators he burned because he knew "they were the fruit of an act that was not legitimate" and because he feared they would be stolen from his residence which had been burgled a few months earlier.

Many of the documents were the same as those featured in a television programme by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi and later published in a book by him. Most dealt with allegations of corruption, abuse of power and a lack of financial transparency at the Vatican.

Gabriele — who will turn 46 on August 19 — told investigators how he met Nuzzi in an apartment near the Vatican and described in detail the measures he and Nuzzi took to avoid detection.

Along with Gabriele, a computer technician at the Vatican Secretariat of State, Claudio Sciarpelleti, has been charged with the lesser offence of "aiding and abetting" him.

The formal indictment of the two Vatican employees is "not the last word" in the ongoing investigation into the Vatileaks scandal, according to Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi.

Sources:

Catholic News Agency

Catholic News Service

Image: Welt Online