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In the end it was the butler, and only the butler, who did it – or so the Vatican would have the world believe.
Paolo Gabriele, the Pope’s personal valet, was convicted of stealing secret papers from the Holy See on Saturday and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
But there was growing suspicion that he had been subjected to little more than a show trial and that the Vatican had successfully prevented the true extent of the “Vatileaks” scandal from emerging.
During the trial it was revealed that some of the documents taken by the butler were so confidential that they had been marked “to be destroyed”, in German, by the Pope himself. But neither the prosecution nor defence inquired as to what they referred to and their contents remain a secret.
“This was a political trial and a political sentence – it was in the interests of the Vatican to conclude it as quickly as possible,” Marco Politi, a veteran Vatican journalist and the author of a respected recent book on the papacy of Benedict XVI, told The Sunday Telegraph. Continue reading
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