VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast
Barbie Latza Nadeau
After a messy, ill-thought-out trial, the Vatican reaches a compromise and convicts one of its own.
ROME — In what must surely be a relief to Pope Francis, a Vatican tribunal ruled on Thursday that the press is free, that secretaries aren’t to blame, that new mothers shouldn’t go to jail, and that one of their own is the only one who truly deserves to pay the price for the Vatican crime of leaking documents to the press.
The so-called Vatileaks II trial began eight months ago over allegations that Spanish Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda and a Calabrian public relations consultant named Francesca Chaouqui, aided by Balda’s assistant Nicola Maio, knowingly leaked secret documents to journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipladi.
Balda and Chaouqui were both on a special commission designed to reform the Vatican’s finances, during which they allegedly stole the documents with the help of Maio and fed them to the journalists who published them in books last year.
The audacity of putting two journalists on trial for practicing journalism garnered harsh criticism from around the world, including a New York Times editorial that outlined why the Vatican was on the wrong side of press freedom and a call by the Committee to Protect Journalists to drop the charges.
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