UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody
Posted on July 17, 2016 by Betty Clermont
The new pope enacted a law criminalizing leaks of detrimental information to the press. Nevertheless, two books were going to be published exposing pervasive corruption during Pope Francis’ pontificate. The pope had two of his employees arrested and then put on trial along with a third employee and the authors of the two books.
The result was months of free publicity for the books. Additionally, the public came to learn that no crime – not sodomizing children or fraud – is considered as grave as exposing the pope’s secrets. No physical evidence was produced proving the defendants’ guilt during the trial. Nevertheless, the prosecution recommended that the only woman among the five defendants receive the harshest penalty for “instigating” and “conspiring.”
Pope Francis enacted a law on July 13, 2013, criminalizing leaks of Vatican information, “an obvious response” to the 2012 scandal known as “Vatileaks.” Pilfered documents had exposed “petty turf wars, bureaucratic dysfunction and allegations of corruption and homosexual liaisons.” The crime of revealing damaging information had never existed before in the Vatican.
On October 31, 2015, Msgr. Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda (54), secretary for the Prefecture of Economic Affairs, and Francesca Chaouqui (33) were summoned to the Vatican for questioning and then arrested with Pope Francis’ “personal approval” regarding “the unauthorized removal and sharing of confidential documents.”
The Spaniard, Vallejo Balda, had been secretary of a temporary commission, already dissolved, established by the pope to recommend changes to the Vatican’s financial administration. Chaouqui, an Italian laywoman formerly employed in the Rome office of Ernst & Young, had been a member of the same commission. Chaouqui was released after a couple of days because “there were no evident reasons to keep her in custody, and also in view of her cooperation with the investigation.” Vallejo Balda was imprisoned in a Vatican jail cell.
Chaouqui’s attorney, Giulia Bongiorno, later pointed out the Vatican’s “alleged violations of Chaouqui’s due process rights by interrogating her without an attorney.”
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