Paolo Gabriele, the Pope's personal valet, was convicted of stealing secret papers from the Holy See on Saturday and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

But there was growing suspicion that he had been subjected to little more than a show trial and that the Vatican had successfully prevented the true extent of the "Vatileaks" scandal from emerging.

During the trial it was revealed that some of the documents taken by the butler were so confidential that they had been marked "to be destroyed", in German, by the Pope himself. But neither the prosecution nor defence inquired as to what they referred to and their contents remain a secret.

"This was a political trial and a political sentence - it was in the interests of the Vatican to conclude it as quickly as possible," Marco Politi, a veteran Vatican journalist and the author of a respected recent book on the papacy of Benedict XVI, told The Sunday Telegraph. Continue reading

Gabriele began serving his prison sentence by order of a Vatican court, said Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman.

"The order will be carried out before the end of the day," he said on Thursday.

He will be detained in one of the recently refurbished prison cells inside the Vatican police barracks.

Lombardi said Gabriele will not be able to seek any employment in the Vatican in the future. He added that Gabriele's violation of the trust of the pope and the privacy of so many people underlines his "incompatibility" with employment at the Vatican.

The Vatican will proceed "with humanity and attention," Lombardi told the Catholic News Service. The spokesman said the Vatican will take into consideration the fact that the 46-year-old Italian was supporting a family with three children in an apartment on Vatican property.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, said Gabriele's crime caused great damage to the pope and to the universal church.

By stealing private correspondence to and from the pope, and other sensitive documents, and by leaking them to an Italian journalist, Gabriele committed "a personal offence against the Holy Father," the cardinal was quoted in a CNS report.

His actions also "violated the right to privacy of many people; created prejudice against the Holy See and its different institutions; created an obstacle between the communications of the world's bishops and the Holy See; and caused scandal to the community of the faithful," Bertone said.

After a Vatican-led investigation, which started in May, and four days of courtroom proceedings attended by a pool of Vatican journalists, Gabriele was found guilty of aggravated theft and sentenced on Oct. 6.

Cardinal Bertone said the whole process was carried out with "transparency, equanimity, and in full respect of the rights" of the accused.

Sources

• Catholic News Service
• Agence France Presse
• BBC
• Image: Reuters/BBC

Several European newspapers published an op-ed piece by Gianluigi Nuzzi, the book's author, defending the actions of Gabriele, the Associated Press reported.

Gabriele has been convicted on Saturday of aggravated theft for stealing the pope's private correspondence and passing it onto Nuzzi.

Gabriele confessed to photocopying some of the pope's private letters and giving them to Nuzzi, saying he wanted to shed light on the "evil and corruption" he saw around him in the Vatican that he believed was being kept from the pope.

Nuzzi said he wanted to further explain Gabriele's motives, which he said he ascertained over the course of several encounters that formed the basis of the book "His Holiness: Pope Benedict XVI's Secret Papers," which was published in May.

He said Gabriele was at the receiving end of disgruntled Vatican cardinals, bishops and managers who came to him "day after day" with their secrets and concerns "hoping he would bring them to the pope."

"Surely enjoying a privileged point of view — for six years he was one of the people closest to the Holy Father in the pontifical apartment — Gabriele strongly doubted that Benedict XVI was always aware or received truthful information," Nuzzi wrote.

"He spoke to me about this profound perplexity, his discomfort as evidenced by a filial love for the pope, a veneration for his simplicity, recounting stories of a man in the middle of the wolves."

Many of the issues Gabriele brought to light haven't yet been explained, "but certainly they explain the frustration of a man who, when confronting these intrigues, perceived the fragility of his pastor in a battle between good and evil," Nuzzi wrote.

The three-judge Vatican tribunal reduced Gabriele's three-year sentence in half, in part because he admitted he had betrayed the pope and thought "albeit erroneously" that he was doing the right thing.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said a papal pardon is "likely" although there's no knowing when it might come.

Nuzzi appealed for a pardon, noting that Gabriele's leaks didn't reveal state or military secrets but merely shed light on events that were damaging the church.

Nuzzi was neither charged in the case nor called to testify. The Vatican didn't investigate him for receiving stolen goods because the handoff of documents occurred on Italian soil, out of the Vatican's jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, the swift conviction of Gabriele leaves lingering suspicions that he was a pawn in a much larger Vatican intrigue, Reuters reported.

The report said that despite the Vatican's desire to quickly turn the page on one of the worst scandals in its recent history, the trial of Gabriele has left many questions unanswered, leading some to call it a whitewash.

Sources

• AP/The Washington Post
• Reuters
• Yahoo
• Image: Reuters

Gabriele claimed that his cell was so small he could not extend his arms, and the light was kept on permanently.

The judges have ordered an inquiry into his allegations.

The Vatican police said conditions inside the police security room respected international standards and Gabriele's rights were never violated.

Authorities accused Gabriele of stealing highly sensitive papers the pontiff had marked "to be destroyed" and compromised Vatican security through his actions.

On Tuesday, Gabriele pleaded not guilty to theft, but admitted abusing the pope's trust and photocopying documents.

He said he leaked the papers, which revealed alleged corruption at the Vatican, because he thought the pope was being manipulated.

The Vatican police on Wednesday, however, told the tribunal they found thousands of documents hidden inside the home of Gabriele.

Prosecutors have said Gabriele confessed to leaking copies of the documents to journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi because he wanted to expose the "evil and corruption" in the church to help put it back on the right path.

The final four witnesses in the trial were heard Wednesday and closing arguments are set for Saturday, when a verdict by the three-judge Vatican panel is expected.

During the hearing, Gabriele recounted his daily life in the shadow of the pope on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace, the BBC reported.

The report said the Vatican tribunal wants to wrap up the trial by the weekend, before the arrival in Rome next week of 200 Catholic bishops from around the world due to discuss the New Evangelisation at a three-week Synod.
This month also marks the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council.

The BBC said the butler's trial has eclipsed all other Vatican news this week in the world's media.

Sources

• BBC
• Reuters/The Globe and Mail
• AP/Huffington Post
• Image: Getty Images/BBC

During Saturday's start of the trial, the Vatican tribunal said Gabriele's trial will be separate from that of Claudio Sciarpelletti who was charged for allegedly aiding and abetting Gabriele in the so-called Vatileaks scandal.

Giuseppe Dalla Torre, the presiding judge, said four more sessions "next week should be sufficient" for completing Gabriele's trial.

Although under Vatican law a defendant is not obliged to appear in person, Gabriele was present in the courtroom on Saturday.

Sciarpelletti, a computer technician in the Vatican Secretariat of State, was represented by his lawyer.

The trial's first session lasted two and a half hours, which included an 80-minute break during which the judges went behind closed doors to consider the motions and objections made by the defense lawyers.

Eight witnesses will be called to testify in Gabriele's trial and five are set to be called for Sciarpelletti's case.

The Gabriele witness list includes six Vatican police officers, as well as Msgr. Ganswein and Cristina Cernetti, one of the consecrated laywomen who work in the papal household. Neither of them was present in the courtroom.

Gabriele has already admitted his guilt, acknowledging that he passed documents to Gianluigi Nuzzi, author of the book His Holiness: the Secret Papers of Benedict XVI. Published last May, the book portrays a Holy See driven by internecine rivalry, political manoeuvres and occasional corruption.

Gabriele has always said he acted for the good of the Catholic Church, inspired by the Holy Spirit and with a mission to expose "evil and corruption". Many observers wonder if he acted alone or on behalf of some senior Holy See figure, however.

Presiding judge Giuseppe della Torre suggested on Saturday that the trial might be concluded this week, after four more hearings. If found guilty, Gabriele faces up to four years in prison. Many believe, however, that he will eventually be pardoned by the pope.

Source

• Irish Times
• The Christian Science Monitor
• Catholic News Service
• Image: Losservatore Romano via Irish Times

Gabriele has been charged with aggravated theft and faces up to four years in prison if convicted by the three-judge Vatican tribunal.

Gabriele earlier told investigators that he was acting as an agent for the Holy Spirit to rid the Catholic Church of "evil and corruption".

The former butler will stand trial with Claudio Sciarpelletti, who according to court papers played a secondary messenger role in an unprecedented scandal that has threatened to expose major rifts at the heart of the Catholic Church.

He has already confessed and asked to be pardoned by the pope.

Reports said Gabriele's case is the most "high-profile" since the Vatican tribunal was created in 1929 with the birth of the Vatican city state.

Giovanni Giacobbe, the Vatican's appeals court prosecutor, said that despite the pope's authority, Vatican judges are wholly independent.

"The judges have never received pressure to decide in one direction or another," he told reporters at a Vatican briefing Thursday. "The pope can't tell the tribunal what to do."

Gabriele was arrested May 24 after Vatican police found what prosecutors called an "enormous" stash of documents from the pope's desk in his Vatican City apartment.

Many of those documents appeared in the book "His Holiness: Pope Benedict XVI's secret papers," by Gianluigi Nuzzi, an Italian journalist whose earlier book on the Vatican bank caused a sensation.

Sources

• AP/Houston Chronicle
• Fox News
• The Telegraph
• Image: EPA/Telegraph

By the end of the day, Pope Benedict's butler would be branded a traitor and some, including an Italian cardinal, would compare him to the most famous betrayer in history - Judas Iscariot, the man who turned Jesus over to the Romans.

Dark haired and handsome, Gabriele, 46, left his simple home on the third floor of a 1930s Vatican apartment block named after the 7th century monk Saint Egidio.

With the St Ann's Gate entrance, guarded by Swiss Guard in blue berets, to his back, he passed the Holy See's central post office on Via Del Belvedere, turned left to climb a stone stairway named after Pope Pius X, and walked up a flight of covered steps to enter the small Renaissance-era Courtyard of Sixtus V.

Here he used a key held by fewer than 10 people to enter an elevator that leads directly to the pope's private apartment on the third and top floor of the Apostolic Palace in the world's smallest state. Even cardinals can't use it.

Gabriele, said by those who know him to be a timid, reserved and shy man, is now at the centre of the worst crisis in Pope Benedict's pontificate.

His face has appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the world, accused of being the source of leaked documents alleging serious Vatican corruption and cronyism in a scandal that has shaken the very centre of the Church.

To some - even if he is found guilty - he is an idealist who wanted to root out corruption in the Vatican and was helped by outside accomplices. To others, he is merely a pawn in a much bigger power struggle among cardinals inside the Vatican walls.

"I know Paolo and I don't think he is capable of doing something like this by himself," a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity told Reuters. Continue reading

Sources

• Reuters
• Image: Stanze Vaticane