Court finds ex-Papal butler guilty, gets 18-month jail term
Reuters – 10/6/12
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – A Vatican court on Saturday found Pope Benedict’s former butler guilty of stealing sensitive documents and sentenced him to a year and a half in prison.
The court delivered its verdict after a two-hour deliberation on the last day of the trial.
The prosecution had asked for a three-year sentence.
The defense asked the court to reduce the charges from “aggravated theft” to “misappropriation” and for him to be freed.
Paolo Gabriele had earlier told the court in his last appeal that he had acted exclusively out of deep, “visceral” love for the Roman Catholic Church and the pope.
The head of the three-judge panel, speaking “In the name of Holiness,” said Gabriele had abused the pontiff’s trust in him.
The judge said he had given Gabriele a lighter sentence than the three years sought by the prosecution because he had no previous criminal record.
Gabriele’s lawyer told reporters he would be returned to house arrest in the Vatican for the time being. She said she would decide after she hears the court’s formal explanation of its verdict whether to file an appeal.
Butler Gabriele sentence unlikely to end Pope scandal
By David Willey
BBC News, Vatican City
10/6/12
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19858225
Paolo Gabriele’s trial has hijacked the Vatican’s autumn religious news agenda
The 18-month prison sentence handed down by the Vatican City criminal court on Pope Benedict’s former butler, Paolo Gabriele, may mark not the end but the beginning of a complex story of betrayal and discontent at the very heart of the Catholic Church.
Some of the hundreds of sensitive documents stolen from the Pope’s desk over an extended period found their way into the Italian mainstream media and into a bestselling book earlier this year.
Pope Benedict wanted closure on the Gabriele case and he got it, only hours before the start of the most important Vatican event of the year, which begins on Sunday.
He has called a three-week long Synod of Bishops from around the world to advise him on how to spearhead what the Vatican is optimistically calling “The New Evangelisation”.
This is code for a high-octane effort by the Catholic Church to counter the insidious spread of secularism within countries – particularly in Europe – that once confidently proclaimed themselves Catholic, but where Sunday mass attendance is now falling yearly to ever-lower levels.
The butler trial has hijacked the Vatican’s planned autumn religious news agenda and has concentrated world attention on yet another episode contributing to the credibility crisis affecting the Holy See.
Lucrative offers
Sunday’s edition of the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, predictably put a brief report on the butler trial at the bottom of its back page.
In theory, under a treaty signed between the Vatican and Italy in 1929, people convicted of crimes carried out in Vatican territory serve their sentences in Italian jails, as there are no suitable long-term detention facilities within Vatican City State.
The former butler is not expected to appeal against his sentence
But if Gabriele, a Vatican citizen, were to be transferred to a jail in Italy he might be tempted by lucrative offers to reveal other details about what he learned while in the Pope’s service.
His lawyer has indicated that the former butler does not intend to appeal and is ready to serve his sentence by remaining under house arrest in his “grace and favour” apartment situated inside the walls of Vatican City.
However, a second embarrassing trial looms.
In about a month, the Vatican court is due to hear the case against Claudio Sciarpelletti, a computer technician who worked in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State – the equivalent of the papal Cabinet Office.
He was originally charged with aiding and abetting Mr Gabriele in his theft of documents, but the Vatican judges decided to hold his trial separately.
Mr Sciarpelletti has called as one of his witnesses the first upper-level cleric – other than the Pope’s personal secretary – to give evidence in the Vatileaks scandal. He’s an Italian monsignor in charge of documentation in the Secretariat of State.
The Vatican prosecutor is also considering further possible, and more serious, charges against both Paolo Gabriele and Claudio Sciarpelletti – including violation of state secrets and attacking state security. These would involve heavier punishments than for aggravated theft.
The newly-appointed Vatican communications strategist, Greg Burke, formerly a Fox News TV correspondent, admits that the Pope has personally been very upset about the Vatileaks scandal.
He told the BBC: “There are four or five people in the world who have the chance every day to talk to the Pope and get five minutes of him with no distractions. Paolo Gabriele could have done it that way. Instead, he went off and caused the scandal that it became.”
Reflections on the ‘butler did it’ verdict
Sun, 10/07/2012
by John L. Allen Jr.
NCR Today
ncronline.prod.acquia-sites.com/blogs/ncr-today/reflections-%E2%80%98butler-did-it%E2%80%99-verdict
After a Vatican court on Saturday sentenced former papal butler Paolo Gabriele to 18 months of detention for being the mole at the heart of the Vatican leaks scandal, my friend and colleague Marco Ansaldo of La Repubblica asked me for some brief reactions which appeared in the Sunday edition of the paper.
The following is the English version of the four points I gave Andsaldo, which ran under the headline “The Battle for Transparency Stands Halfway.”
* * *
First, the Gabriele trial and the whole Vatileaks scandal is not comparable to the sexual abuse crisis or the Holocaust-denying bishop case in terms of public opinion, at least outside Italy. Frankly, most Americans have no idea what the scandal is about, they haven’t read Nuzzi’s book or followed the leaks closely, and they find the idea of the pope’s butler being under arrest more comical than alarming.
This is a unique scandal in that the damage is greater internally. Inside the Vatican itself, it created a crisis of trust that has not really been resolved by the trial or the verdict. Personnel are now more reluctant to share confidences, and bishops around the world are hesitant to put anything on paper or to discuss their problems with Vatican officials for fear that it might be leaked or misused. In other words, this is a scandal that strikes more at the inner workings of the Church than its public image.
Second, it seems clear that the trial has not answered all the questions surrounding the case. Those questions include not only whether others were involved in the leaks, but what exactly Gabriele meant by saying there is a climate of “widespread unease” inside the Vatican – what are people uneasy about, which people share those feelings, is the pope aware, and what does he plan to do about it? The core issue of whether the current regime around Benedict XVI is truly up to the challenge of administering a universal church in the 21st century have not been, and really could not be, resolved by the trial.
Third, it’s ironic that the verdict comes just one day before opening of the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization, because the images sometimes projected by the Vatican – power struggles, palace intrigue, corruption and cover-ups – are arguably among the most serious obstacles to evangelization faced by the contemporary Church.
Benedict XVI has repeatedly called the church to a new path of transparency, but it’s not clear that the outcome of the trial will strike most reasonable people as truly transparent. No one doubts that “the butler did it,” but it does not seem that the trial provided much latitude for pursuing other important questions. For instance, Gabriele claimed that he acted because the pope seemed not to be aware of some important matters, suggesting that things were being concealed or at least kept away from Benedict XVI. Is that true? We still don’t know, and I suspect many people would like to know.
Fourth, one fascinating question now is: What becomes of Paolo Gabriele? Once he’s finished serving eighteen months of house arrest, or after a pardon from the pope (whichever comes first), will he be free to talk about his experiences publicly? Will he get a book deal and make the rounds of TV talk shows, like other minor celebrities of all stripes these days? Will he talk openly about the things he saw, heard and experienced during his years at the pope’s side, sharing his most intimate moments?
In other words, will he become the creature that all power structures fear most – the rogue insider? In any event, it’s probably a mistake to believe that with this sentence, the world has heard the last of Paolo Gabriele.
Allen at his usual. Anti-Willaimson hackery at its most predictable.
Who cares, beside his mother and his rabbi, what Allen says anyway?
Speculative tittletattle posing as “journalism” is such a bore.
Bishops should not have butlers.