Vatican Arrests 2 in Connection With Leaked Documents, by Elisabetta Povoledo, New York Times (November 2, 2015)

ROME — The Vatican announced on Monday that two members of a commission set up by Pope Francis to study financial overhauls at the Holy See had been arrested on suspicion of leaking confidential documents to journalists.

The arrests come just days before the publication of two books — “Avarizia,” or “Avarice,” by Emiliano Fittipaldi, and “Merchants in the Temple” by Gianluigi Nuzzi — purporting to raise the lid on old and new scandals at the Vatican.

They also immediately added to the intrigue and infighting that appear to be intensifying around Francis, whose push for a more open Roman Catholic Church has met with stiffening resistance from traditionalists within the Vatican and beyond.

The two people arrested — Msgr. Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda and Francesca Chaouqui, a laywoman — were taken into custody by the Vatican police over the weekend, the Vatican said in a statement. Ms. Chaouqui was released on Monday after she agreed to cooperate with the investigation, the Vatican said.

The two were members of a commission the pope set up shortly after his election to examine the Vatican’s financial holdings and economic structures. The commission was dissolved last year after it had carried out its mandate.

Monsignor Vallejo Balda holds one of the top posts at the Vatican’s prefecture for economic affairs. Ms. Chaouqui is a public relations specialist.

Divulging confidential documents has been considered a crime in the Vatican since July 2013, after the leak of a cache of Vatican documents, including personal papers belonging to Pope Benedict XVI, which Mr. Nuzzi published in a best seller, “Sua Santità,” or “His Holiness.”

After the publication of that book, the pope’s personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested on charges of leaking the documents to Mr. Nuzzi. Mr. Gabriele was tried and was sentenced in October 2012 to 18 months in prison. He was pardoned two months later by Benedict.

The revelations of widespread infighting and power struggles at the Vatican are considered to have helped precipitate the resignation of Benedict in 2013 — the first pope to step down in nearly 600 years.

Echoes of that scandal, called Vatileaks by the news media, reverberated last month at the Vatican, when an Italian newspaper announced that Pope Francis had a treatable brain tumor, a report that the Vatican denied.

The Vatican said on Monday that the coming books were “the fruit of a grave betrayal of the pope’s trust.” The authors of the books have been warned that the Vatican’s legal offices are considering legal action.

“Publications of this kind do not contribute in any way to the establishment of clarity and truth, but rather to the creation of confusion and partial and tendentious interpretations,” the Vatican said in the statement. “We must absolutely avoid the mistake of thinking that this is a way to help the mission of the pope.”

Mr. Nuzzi’s book will be published in several countries on Thursday. The book purports to “tell from the inside” the struggles that Francis and his closest advisers are undertaking to overhaul the church, based on “unpublished documents and tape recordings,” according to a news release for the book.

“Never before had a journalist been able to listen to the tape recordings of several private meetings between high ranking Vatican officials and the pope,” the news release read.

The book suggests that the Vatican’s finances were in such chaos that Benedict had no choice but to resign. The book also promises to reveal the “poisons of those who would sabotage the pope’s vigorous revolution.”