VATICAN CITY
AFP
By by Dario Thuburn (AFP)
VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI’s former butler Paolo Gabriele, sentenced on Saturday to 18 months in jail for leaking secret memos, said he was a loyal servant disgusted by “evil and corruption” in the Vatican.
A married father-of-three who lives inside the Vatican as one of the tiny state’s 594 citizens, Gabriele was born in Rome and started out as a cleaner in the Secretariat of State — the main administration of the Catholic Church.
Gabriele then worked as part of the domestic staff of late pope John Paul II before being promoted in 2006 to the prestigious post of butler to the pope — a position that gave him unique access for a layman to the pontiff himself. …
The butler expressed frustration with a culture of secrecy in the Vatican — from the mysterious disappearance of the daughter of a Vatican employee in 1983 to a quickly hushed-up double murder and suicide by a Swiss guard in 1998.
“There is a kind of omerta against the truth, not so much because of a power struggle but because of fear, because of caution,” Gabriele said in the interview, using the term for the code of silence of the Sicilian Mafia.
He told Nuzzi he was acting with “around 20 other people” in the Vatican, though he later denied others had been actively involved in helping him.
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