VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider
Paolo Gabriele, who stated: “I don’t feel like a thief”, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. The Pope will pardon him but now investigations are aiming to reconstruct the poison pen letter writer’s network of accomplices
VATICAN INSIDER STAFF
Vatican City
The “poison pen letter writer” has been given a mild sentence – he will only serve a jail term of one year and six months and will be pardoned – but investigations into potential accomplices continue. So Vatileaks is not over today: there are too many grey areas in an affair that has exposed a deep governance crisis in a Curia weakened by conflicts between opposing parties who are fighting to for power. Influential figures in the Curia still oppose the Pope, who is trying to enforce a strict line of purification, to the detriment of a deeply ingrained conspiracy of silence among sections of the Church hierarchy who are mixed up in the Vatican’s financial scandals.
Meanwhile, the former butler’s confidants, Curia representatives such as papal vicar Angelo Comastri, are ending up in the Vatileaks meat grinder when they actually have nothing to do with the whole affair. “I was dragged into the affair big time, even though I had nothing to do it,” Cardinal Comastri complained at the end of the Gendarmerie’s celebrations for the feast day of St. Francis on Friday. During the celebrations, Salvatore DeGiorgi, one of the cardinals who prepared the report on the Vatican document leak for the Pope, expressed regret about the sensationalist climate surrounding the search for the truth.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.