ROME
The Guardian
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Friday 1 January 2016
When Francesca Chaouqui was summoned two months ago to a meeting with Vatican police, the public relations expert – who had served on a prominent Vatican commission examining financial reforms – willingly went along. She assumed it would be an hour-long affair.
Instead, the 33-year-old was arrested, interrogated and held for 72 hours within the Vatican walls – apart from a short stint in hospital after falling ill – and says she was denied access to a lawyer. “I was wearing very light clothing because I had been at home, and I stayed in those clothes for three days,” she told the Guardian in a recent interview.
Since then, having been charged by Vatican prosecutors with leaking confidential documents to two journalists, a crime under Vatican law punishable by up to eight years in prison, Chaouqui has emerged as an unlikely protagonist in the biggest scandal to rock the Vatican under Pope Francis.
At the centre of the case are allegations that Chaouqui and two others stole documents they had gathered in the course of work on the Vatican commission and leaked them to journalists who used them to write explosive books about alleged financial mismanagement of church funds. The pope himself has suggested Chaouqui was lashing out at the church because she had not been offered a permanent position after the commission she served on was disbanded.
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