Vatican arrests priest, laywoman suspected of leaking confidential documents

The arrest followed Italian media reports at the weekend that Vatican police were investigating the attempted theft of a laptop belonging to Libero Milone, the head of the city state’s new finance office.

The revelations emerged a day after the Vatican announced it had arrested Lucio ngel Vallejo Balda, a 54-year-old senior Vatican bureaucrat, and Francesca Chaouqui, a 33-year-old Italian public relations maven known in a few circles as “the pope’s lobbyist”, on suspicion of disseminating internal documents. Chaouqui was allowed to go free because she cooperated in the probe, the Vatican said.

Two former members of a Vatican commission have been arrested on charges of stealing and leaking information.

In the meeting, the book says, Francis showed alarm at a letter from the Vatican auditors citing the nearly total absence of transparency in the budget, both of the Holy See and the office of Vatican governance.

The study commission COSEA was established in July 2013 by Pope Francis as part of his plan to reform the Vatican’s finances. The arrests were made following months of investigations relating to the dissipation of confidential information to writers of books that are yet to be released. The investigation was managed by the Vatican’s gendarmerie corps, which controls most security, law enforcement and firefighting coordination in the city-state apart from direct papal protection, which is handled by the famed Swiss Guard.

The release of confidential Vatican documents raises unhappy memories of the “Vatileaks” scandal that broke during the final months of the pontificate of Benedict XVI.

The Vatican stressed the publication of illegally obtained confidential information constitutes a “serious betrayal of trust” that the Pope has placed on certain individuals.

Its author Gianluigi Nuzzi previously wrote His Holiness in 2012, which contained several private documents that had been stolen from Pope Benedict XVI’s desk by his butler in a situation quickly dubbed the “Vatileaks scandal”.

According to the publishers, Nuzzi’s new book, “Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis’s Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican”, promises to reveal “heretofore untold, unbelievable stories of scandal and corruption at the highest levels”.

Francis was tasked by his cardinal electors to stamp his authority on the bickering Curia, the Church’s governing body, and clean up the Vatican bank – but the fresh leaks looked set to fuel criticisms of his reform programme.

Publications of this kind do not contribute in any way to the establishment of clarity and truth, but rather to the creation of confusion and partial and tendentious interpretations.

“Avarice”, also due out Thursday, claims a foundation set up to support a children’s hospital paid 200,000 euros toward the renovation of the apartment of the Vatican’s No. 2 at the time, Tarciso Bertone. “We must absolutely avoid the mistake of thinking that this is a way to help the mission of the Pope”.

Without specifying if the latest arrests were linked to those books, the Vatican said Holy See prosecutors are weighing “further measures, involving, if it is the case, worldwide cooperation”.