VATICAN CITY
Crux
By Inés San Martín
Vatican correspondent November 4, 2015
ROME — An Italian journalist who allegedly received confidential documents from two members of a now-expired papal study commission on Vatican finances has described the arrest of those figures by Vatican gendarmes as “abnormal,” claiming it’s an effort to obscure the content of his revelations.
It was “an attempt [from the Vatican] to divert attention from the actual issues covered on my book, that are based on documents,” Gianluigi Nuzzi, author of a new book revealing financial abuses in the Vatican, said Wednesday in a Rome news conference.
On Monday, the Vatican announced that Spanish Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda and Italian lay woman Francesca Chaouqui had been interrogated and then placed under arrest on suspicion of having leaked secret material to Nuzzi, author of Via Crucis (in English, “Merchants in the Temple.”)
Both Vallejo and Chaouqui were members of a commission, known by its Italian acronym COSEA, established in the summer of 2013 by Pope Francis to lay the groundwork for his efforts at financial reform in the Vatican.
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