VATICAN CITY
BBC News
By David Willey
BBC News, Vatican City
The 18-month prison sentence handed down by the Vatican City criminal court on Pope Benedict’s former butler, Paolo Gabriele, may mark not the end but the beginning of a complex story of betrayal and discontent at the very heart of the Catholic Church.
Some of the hundreds of sensitive documents stolen from the Pope’s desk over an extended period found their way into the Italian mainstream media and into a bestselling book earlier this year.
Pope Benedict wanted closure on the Gabriele case and he got it, only hours before the start of the most important Vatican event of the year, which begins on Sunday.
He has called a three-week long Synod of Bishops from around the world to advise him on how to spearhead what the Vatican is optimistically calling “The New Evangelisation”.
This is code for a high-octane effort by the Catholic Church to counter the insidious spread of secularism within countries – particularly in Europe – that once confidently proclaimed themselves Catholic, but where Sunday mass attendance is now falling yearly to ever-lower levels.
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