Vatileaks ‘seductress’ claims gay priest hid lover as butler

By Tom Kington
Times (UK)
February 6, 2017

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/vatileaks-seductress-claims-gay-priest-hid-lover-as-butler-vprkct5ps

Francesca Chaouqui claims that Father Balda told her he lived with a man

A Spanish priest jailed by the Vatican for leaking details of corruption in the priesthood was known to be gay and accredited his lover as his “butler” at the city state, a book has alleged.

Father Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, 55, was jailed for 18 months last July for giving journalists details of his work on a Vatican commission set up by Pope Francis to stamp out sleaze, in what became known as the Vatileaks scandal.

In court he claimed that he was seduced and pushed into leaking documents by Francesca Chaouqui, 35, another member of the commission, who received a ten-month suspended sentence.

Mrs Chaouqui has settled scores in her book, In the Name of Peter, in which she claims that on the night of the alleged seduction, Father Balda instead told her that he was gay.

“He told me about his lover, the reason he had been sent away from his diocese in Spain,” she wrote. “The Vatican, as always, calls back its lost sheep, which is why he was ‘promoted’ to the Vatican job.” Father Balda, his mother, and his lover moved into an apartment opposite an entrance to the Vatican, she said. “He successfully requested accreditation to enter the Vatican for his ‘butler’, even though this is usually given to relatives, but all the staff at the Vatican knew what was going on,” she added. His “young and impatient” partner soon left because he could “not tolerate the presence of the mother,” she wrote.