The Pope's Butler on Trial. but the Investigation Is Proceeding "in Various Directions"
By Sandro Magister
The judicial process has been set for Paolo Gabriele, the unfaithful butler of Benedict XVI. Next autumn, he will be tried for the aggravated theft of confidential documents, copies of which he took from the pontifical apartment. On the last working day before the summer closure of the Vatican tribunals, investigating judge Piero Antonio Bonnet granted the request of the prosecutor, Nicola Picardi, and ordered that a trial be held. It will also involve a second defendant, Claudio Sciarpelletti, a computer technician at the secretariat of state, but he will face a lesser charge of aiding and abetting, in practice for obstructing the investigation into his relationship with the main defendant. The complete texts of the complaint and the indictment, each of them fifteen pages long, have been released by the Vatican press office: > Procedimento penale presso il tribunale... In the two documents, the names of the witnesses questioned in the course of the investigations have been protected under privacy and replaced with letters of the alphabet, with the exception of Monsignor Georg Ganswein, Benedict XVI's personal secretary, whose name is cited in full each time. But it is easy to guess, for example, that the witnesses H, M, N, and O correspond to the four Memores Domini sisters who assist the pope. Both the complaint and the indictment have passages of significant interest, on both the unfolding of the affair and its future results. CULPRIT IN THE HOUSE The discovery of the culprit turns out to be particularly dramatic. The book with the leaked documents had been on sale in Italy for two days when, on May 21, there was a meeting of the entire "pontifical family": Msgr. Ganswein; the pope's second secretary, Alfred Xuereb; the four Memores Domini sisters; the pope's other assistant, Birgit Wansing; and the butler, Paolo. Each of those present denied having given any papers to the author of the book. Msgr. Ganswein confronted the butler, showing him documents that had gone into the book and had passed through none other than his hands. But he continued to deny it. But in the meantime, the investigators of the Vatican secret service had accumulated hard evidence against Gabriele. On May 23, the "pontifical family" met again, and Msgr. Ganswein told Gabriele that he had been suspended from his position pending the outcome of the investigation. Gabriele proclaimed his innocence once again. He even accused those present of unjustly wanting to turn him into a "scapegoat." He said that he had the comfort of his spiritual director. That same day, however, his residence within the Vatican walls was searched, and a large number of leaked documents were found, some of which were the the same as had been published in the book. On the evening of May 23, Gabriele was arrested. "INFILTRATED" BY THE HOLY SPIRIT In the judgment of Msgr. Ganswein and of the Memores Domini sisters, Gabriele was a very devout person. Each morning he attended the Mass celebrated by the pope. But he did not excel at his job: "He always needed to be directed and guided." But he was believed to be honest and loyal, and precisely for this reason he was allowed to "follow the flow of documents" that passed "across the desk of Msgr. Ganswein or were lying on the shelf in front of it." And from there – he later admitted during questioning – he took documents, photocopied them, and brought home the copies, which he finally delivered to the author of the book. For what reasons? "I saw evil and corruption everywhere in the Church. . . I believed that even the supreme pontiff was not correctly informed. . . I thought that a shock, including one in the media, could be helpful in putting the Church back on the right track. . . I thought that in the Church, this role was precisely that of the Holy Spirit, by whom I felt myself in a certain manner infiltrated." DIRECTOR OUT OF CONTROL Gabriele's spiritual director, indicated as witness B, is another of the disconcerting characters of the affair. Gabriele also delivered to him a series of documents, collected in a box with the pontifical seal. Questioned by the judges, the spiritual director said that he had received them, knew of their dishonest provenance, and therefore burned them without reading them. But Gabriele also said – during an interrogation on July 21 – that it had been his spiritual director himself who had advised him to deny any blame, in the dramatic face-to-face with Msgr. Ganswein on May 21: "My spiritual father told me not to acknowledge my responsibility in this, unless I were asked by the Holy Father himself." A CHECK, A GOLDEN NUGGET, AND THE AENEID Another disconcerting element that has emerged from the investigation are these three "objects" found in Gabriele's residence: - a check for 100,000 euro made out to "Santidad Papa Benedicto XVI," dated March 26, 2012, made out by the Universidad Catolica San Antonio di Guadalupe; - a nugget, presumably of gold, offered to the Holy Father by the director of the ARU in Lima, Guido del Castillo; - an incunabulum of Virgil's Aeneid translated by Annibal Caro, printed in Venice in 1581, given to the pope by the "Famiglie di Pomezia." It is well known that the pope receives countless gifts. But that any of them should end up in the home of his butler is dumbfounding. The justifications given by Gabriele during questioning leave many important matters unsettled. BUT THE BUTLER IS NOT THE ONLY CULPRIT But what is even more obscure is the fact, acknowledged by the investigating judge, that among the papers found in Gabriele's possession are documents "that could reasonably have a provenance different from that of the personal secretariat of the supreme pontiff." In effect, other confidential documents have continued to come out of the Vatican even after the arrest of the pope's butler, evidently from other offices and by the agency of other persons. Four of these documents, which became public at the end of May, concern the case of the Institute for Works of Religion, IOR, the Vatican "bank:" > Gotti Tedeschi, la mina che fa tremare il Vaticano > IOR, la mail segreta di Gotti Tedeschi But before these four documents, on May 24, a few hours after the arrest of Gabriele, an even more explosive one came out. It did not end up in the newspapers because it had been stolen, but because it was proudly exhibited by its own signatory, the American Carl Anderson, president of the Knights of Columbus and a member of the board of the IOR, which on that same May 24 had removed Ettore Gotti Tedeschi from the presidency of the IOR. It was the document, by its nature highly confidential, that put the proceedings of the meeting in black and white and listed the accusations hurled against Gotti Tedeschi: > Notice and Memorandum Its publication enjoyed the evident consent of the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. In the indictment issued against Gabriele and the other defendant, Judge Bonnet writes that this closes only one part of an investigation that has a larger scope and extends "in various directions," which is already underway and will continue, for other crimes and against other eventual culprits. The three cardinals – Julian Herranz, Joseph Tomko, and Salvatore De Giorgi – whom Benedict XVI has charged with conducting the investigation into the continued leaking of confidential information from the Vatican have also drawn conclusions, secret for now, that go far beyond the betrayal of the butler alone. But the fact that a document should have come out of the Vatican like the one that on May 24 publicly pilloried the former president of the IOR is an act that contradicts the intention to reconstruct a pact of loyalty within the Vatican walls, in which the trial against Gabriele is an important and significant step. __________ English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A. __________ The latest three articles from www.chiesa: 11.8.2012 > Vatican Diary / The two unknowns of the book on the Child Jesus Who will be its main publisher? And will Ingrid Stampa, Ratzinger's former manager, again oversee the Italian edition? The strange imbroglio of those who accuse her of having betrayed the pope's trust 9.8.2012 > To Obama and Romney, Catholics Prefer the Pope In the United States, the approval rating of Benedict XVI is rising. And also of the bishops, because of their battle on behalf of freedom. Six former ambassadors to the Vatican endorse the Mormon candidate. A survey by the Pew Forum 3.8.2012 > Vatican and Money. The Moneyval Earthquake Isn't Over A new president for the IOR. The future of Cardinal Nicora. More tremors are on the way. But in the meantime, the operation of transparency set in motion by Benedict XVI has knocked down all the alibis. It is an example binding for all Catholic institutions __________ For more news and commentary, see the blog that Sandro Magister maintains, available only in Italian:
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