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

The three 'detective-Cardinals', Julian Herranz, Jozef Tomko and Salvatore De Giorgi presented the Pontiff with a hefty dossier containing mostly transcriptions of hearings in question and answer form.

The content, which is being kept top-secret, is said to give an accurate picture of how the Pope's personal secretariat handled documents and of correspondence addressed to and sent from the Vatican Secretariat of State.

The goal of the three cardinals was to reconstruct the working methods of the Curia recreating the document trail between the Secretariat of State and the Pope's personal secretariat.

The Pope's personal secretariat also underwent an in-depth investigation to show clearly how correspondence to the Pope was managed and the ways of accessing the Pope.

Vatican Insider reports the bulky document contains statements from over a hundred thoroughly conducted interviews and is said to be a meticulous piece of work.

Vatican Insider reports the cardinals are in favour of the document being published and said publication would not cause them any difficulties. However the Holy Father, who has the final say, is inclined to delay releasing the results of the parallel investigation, at least until his former butler, Paolo Gabriele's trial is over.

Sources

• Vatican Insider
• Image: Syracuse