VATICAN CITY
Daily Beast
Barbie Latza Nadeau
How the Vatican’s ill-advised plan to prosecute two journalists is backfiring badly.
VATICAN CITY — Be careful what you wish for.
If the Vatican had hoped to teach reporters a lesson in restraint by putting two journalists on trial for printing leaked documents, it was sorely mistaken. In fact, the global outrage at the Holy See’s attempt to stifle the free press may in fact be just what’s fueling a frenzy of steamy secrets and a no-holds-barred attitude that has been making the Vatican look more like a hotbed of ill repute than a holy place of prayer and moral guidance.
What started as a fairly banal Vatileaks II trial—in which a monsignor, a public-relations specialist, an administrative assistant, and two journalists faced charges for leaking and printing classified financial documents that, frankly, weren’t all that surprising nor all that secret—has turned into a tale of illicit sex, spies, extortion, and computer hacking.
Spanish Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda and PR specialist Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui were both on a committee set up by Pope Francis to offer guidance to help straighten out the Holy See’s muddled finances. According to prosecutors, they, with the help of Balda’s administrative cleric, allegedly fed journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi documents from the committee that showed the depth of corruption and questionable financial practices that were the norm in the Vatican for decades.
The journalists’ books sought to outline gross financial malpractice through balance sheets and petty gossip about overspending. But what has emerged on the sidelines of the case is, frankly, far more titillating.
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