A saddened Pope Benedict marked a difficult Pentecost Sunday as the Vatican braced for a possible widening of the scandal that has seen his butler arrested on charges of stealing private documents in the “Vatileaks” affair.
On Saturday his personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, 46, was formally charged with stealing confidential papal documents. The Pope made no reference during his two public appearances on Sunday to the scandal or the arrest.
But Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the former Archbishop of Milan and himself once a candidate for the papacy, seemed to speak for many when he said the scandal should prompt the Church “to urgently win back the trust of the faithful”. The atmosphere in the walled city-state was glum as Vatican sources said they could not rule out more arrests, particularly if Gabriele named any accomplices.
Gabriele is suspected of leaking highly sensitive documents, some of which allege cronyism and corruption in Vatican contracts with Italian companies. Few believed that Gabriele could have acted on his own and some said he may have been an unwitting pawn in a Vatican power struggle. “Either he lost his mind or this is a trap,” a friend of Gabriele’s in the Vatican told the newspaper La Stampa. The Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has ignored the story. Some say this may be because the paper itself has been an instrument in a power struggle involving reciprocal mud-slinging between allies and enemies of the Vatican’s “prime minister”, secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
“This is a strategy of tension, an orgy of vendettas and pre-emptive vendettas that has now spun out of the control of those who thought they could orchestrate it,” Church historian Alberto Melloni wrote in the Corriere della Sera newspaper. —Reuters