VATICAN CITY
The Guardian (United Kingdom)
Catherine Pepinster
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 August 2012
It has all the makings of a Hollywood adaptation of a Dan Brown novel. Secrets of the Vatican exposed, documents stolen from the pope’s desk, rows and rivalries between cardinals, vast sums of money, the involvement of the cultish organisation Opus Dei. And then the so-called Vatileaks scandal, which has had Rome agog for months, went a bit Da Vinci Code meets Cluedo: the butler allegedly did it.
Paolo Gabriele, who has worked for Pope Benedict XVI as one of his most personal aides for six years, has now been charged and sent to trial by a Vatican judge for leaking papal documents, including papers containing allegations of corruption and other financial problems.
The Vatileaks scandal has been a deeply embarrassing saga for the most senior echelons of the Catholic church, and it is surprising that it has attracted so little attention in Britain. The plight of 46-year-old Gabriele himself, for instance, has shocked Catholic observers. After his arrest he was incarcerated for 50 days, initially in solitary confinement in a cell deep inside the Vatican; then under house arrest in his apartment within the Vatican City State. Despite the Catholic church still using Latin as an official language, it didn’t appear to understand habeas corpus. Yet human rights experts barely reacted to what was happening: when my publication, the Tablet, contacted Amnesty International about the butler’s situation, it had nothing to say.
Only the LSE’s Prof Conor Gearty, writing in the Tablet, pointed out the scandal of it, particularly given how vocal Rome usually is about human rights. But Vatileaks is a much more disturbing episode than just the treatment of one individual. First a television programme, then leaks in the press and eventually a book by the investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuuzi exposed thwarted efforts to deal with corruption within the Vatican City State, which the Catholic church runs.
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