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Trial of Pope Benedict's former butler to start on Saturday
Paolo Gabriele (bottom L) arrives with Pope Benedict XVI (R) at St. Peter's Square in Vatican, in this file photo taken May 23, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Alessandro Bianchi/Files
VATICAN CITY |
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict's former butler, Paolo Gabriele, goes on trial on Saturday in one of the most embarrassing episodes in recent Vatican history.
The trial of the 46-year-old man who served the pope his meals and helped him dress is due to start at 9:30 a.m. (4.30 p.m. EDT) in the Vatican's little-used tribunal, a small room with rich paneled wood and a papal emblem on its ceiling.
His arrest on May 23 caused an international furor after police found confidential documents in his apartment inside the Vatican, a dramatic twist that threw the global media spotlight on an institution battling to defend its reputation from allegations of graft.
A three-judge panel will decide the fate of Gabriele, whom the pope used to call "Paoletto" (little Paul) and who is now described in Vatican documents as "the defendant".
Gabriele stands accused of stealing the pontiff's personal papers and leaking them to the media in what he says was an attempt to clean up corruption at the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church.
According to an indictment last August, Gabriele told investigators he had acted because he saw "evil and corruption everywhere in the Church" and wanted to help root it out "because the pope was not sufficiently informed".
The documents pointed to a power struggle at the Church's highest levels.
Gabriele, who said he saw himself as a whistle-blowing "agent of the Holy Spirit", is widely expected to be convicted on charges of aggravated theft because he has confessed.
The trial procedures will be based on a 19th century Italian penal code and could result in a prison sentence of up to four years for Gabriele and one year for Claudio Sciarpelletti, a computer expert charged with aiding and abetting him.
CORRUPTION ALLEGATIONS
It is not clear how long the trial might last.
Gabriele, a father of three who lived a simple but comfortable life in the city-state, told investigators after his arrest in May that he believed a shock "could be a healthy thing to bring the Church back on the right track".
His arrest capped nearly five months of intrigue and suspense after a string of documents and private letters found their way into the Italian media.
The most notorious of the letters were written to the pope by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, currently the Vatican's ambassador to Washington, who was deputy governor of Vatican City at the time.
In one, Vigano complains that when he took office in 2009, he discovered corruption, nepotism and cronyism linked to the awarding of contracts to outside companies at inflated prices.
Vigano later wrote to the pope about a smear campaign against him by other Vatican officials who were upset that he had taken drastic steps to clean up the purchasing procedures.
Despite begging not to be moved away from the Vatican, Vigano was later transferred to Washington by Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
Since the papal state has no prison, Gabriele would serve time in an Italian jail, though the pope is widely expected to pardon him.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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Why would Communists worry about releasing what to them would be a silly superstition? The fact that the “silly superstition” mentioned the infiltration of the Catholic Church by what the document called “Satanic” forces would have been enough to keep the “inconvenient” document sealed. There was no way such a document was going to see the light of day, since its release would compel a closer examination of the Vatican by independent observers, possibly compromising Moscow’s recent usurpation of the Holy See.
However, thanks to the recent Vatican “power struggle” breaking into the open, Communists within the Holy See were forced to reveal their presence by the incredulous appointment of the Marxist-oriented, liberation theologist Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller to head up the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the purpose for the appointment to plug the damaging leaks from the Vatican. This is the man that the supposedly “conservative” Pope Benedict knows he can trust 100% to prevent any more embarrassing leaks from the Vatican…a Marxist-oriented, liberation theology enthusiast. Does this make sense to you?
Those of you not familiar with the true events taking place within the “former” USSR these past 21 years will naturally ask, “Wouldn’t the Moscow network within the Vatican have fallen apart as soon as the collapse of the USSR took place in late 1991?”
For the answer to that question, first Google: “Bulgaria protestant communist agents” and “Bulgaria orthodox communist agents”.
Bulgaria is the only nation to have created (belatedly) a Files Commission looking into Communist-era agents still in power there. Guess what they found? Communist-era agents still in control of the government, media, Churches and other institutions (and the Files Commission is only chartered to investigate from 2003 onwards).
If Files Commissions had been created in all not-so-former East Bloc nations/USSR republics, then we’d get the same results as Bulgaria: That Communist agents are still in control there too.
What this means is that the “collapse” of the USSR in late 1991 was a strategic ruse, as predicted by KGB defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn (Golitsyn actually correctly predicted that East Bloc nations/USSR would first “liberalize” before they “collapsed”) , the only Soviet-era defector to still be under protective custody in the West, proving (1) the collapses of the USSR/East Bloc were strategic ruses; and (2) that all other Soviet-era defectors who followed Golitsyn were still loyal to their respective Communist intelligence agencies, since all of them provided incorrect intelligence on the future of the USSR/East Bloc.
Beginning to get the wider picture now?
Now you know why the Russian electorate in 1992 failed to create a de-Communization program in order to ferret out Communist agents still in power? If the “collapse” of the USSR had been real, such a de-Communization program would have been immediately implemented.
The above also explains why the Russian electorate are only electing Soviet-era Communist Party members for President/Prime Minister. If the “collapse” of the USSR had been real, the Russian electorate would never have elected such Quislings back into power.
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Forty years later in 2000, the Vatican released a four-page forgery, not the one-page, approximately 25-lined document that had been read by a select few before 2000.
This explains the Vatican’s inexplicable, and relatively new policy (fifty years old or so), of passing onto other parishes priests that sexually abuse children, ensuring (1) that the number of such sex crimes would increase geometrically; and (2) encourage pedophiles to join the seminaries. Now, such a policy could not be kept under wraps for long (as the Vatican well knew), since the massive number of crimes would have eventually reached a critical mass, exploding into the news headlines as they did. Only an INTENTIONAL Vatican policy of encouraging child sex crimes by priests explains the Vatican’s behavior these last fifty years. Believers in Christ wouldn’t subject children to sexual abuse, but Communists would in order to weaken the Catholic Church.
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