VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast
Barbie Latza Nadeau
A steamy babe who once posed topless now at the center of the latest Vatican intrigue has many telling the pope, ‘I told you so.’
VATICAN CITY — For many inside the Vatican, Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui was trouble from the start. The willowy 32-year-old brunette raised eyebrows almost immediately in 2013 when, at 30, she was handpicked by Pope Francis as the only laywoman on an eight-member advisory panel called the Commission for Reference on the Organization of the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See.
On Monday, the Vatican confirmed that Chaouqui, along with a Spanish monsignor named Lucio Vallejo Balda, who was the secretary of COSEA, had been arrested for leaking documents to journalists.
Sound familiar? It should. In 2012, Pope Benedict’s butler Paolo Gabriele was arrested for just the same crime, and the butler was charged with leaking to just the same journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who has a new book coming out this week.
His previous book, His Holiness, is widely believed to be the last straw that led to the eventual resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. God (and likely Chaouqui) only knows what his new book, called Via Crucis in Italian and Merchants in the Temple in English, will reveal when it hits bookstores Thursday. Nuzzi tells The Daily Beast that Chaouqui did not collaborate on this, or any, of his books. But he told us the same thing about the butler, too.
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