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Pope's former butler will not appeal sentence
VATICAN CITY |
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Paolo Gabriele, Pope Benedict's former butler who leaked sensitive Vatican documents, believes his sentence of 18 months under house arrest is fair and will not appeal it, his lawyer said on Thursday.
Cristiana Arru told Reuters that Gabriele wanted the sentence, handed down last Saturday when he was convicted of aggravated theft, to stand because he thought it was reasonable.
"Paolo had decided from the start decided that he wanted to pay the consequences for his actions. If we appealed, it would mean the opposite," she said.
The prosecution had asked for a three-year sentence but the court gave him half that because he had no previous criminal record.
Gabriele will be serving the sentence under house arrest in the apartment in the Vatican where he lives with his family.
The pope, who reigns as a sovereign monarch in Vatican City, is widely expected to pardon Gabriele, meaning he will be released from detention. He is expected to continue working in the Vatican but in a lower-level job.
Gabriele said during the trial that he did not consider himself a thief but leaked documents that alleged corruption in the Vatican out of what he called a "visceral" love for the Church and the pope.
However, Gabriele's swift conviction by the court after only four sessions left lingering suspicions that he may have been a pawn in a much larger Vatican intrigue involving infighting in the papal court.
The documents he leaked constituted one of the biggest crises of Benedict's papacy, embarrassing the Vatican as it struggled to overcome a string of child sex abuse scandals involving clerics and mismanagement at its bank.
Gabriele told investigators he had acted because he saw "evil and corruption everywhere in the Church" and that information was being hidden from the pope.
In pre-trial testimony Gabriele acknowledged he had come under the influence of several Vatican officials, including a confessor to whom he gave copies of sensitive documents. The confessor later destroyed them.
But he said those who influenced him could not be considered "accomplices" and the panel of three judges did not pursue other lines of questioning regarding possible help he may have received.
Many commentators believe that Gabriele, who served the pope his meals and helped him dress, could not have acted alone.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Michael Roddy)
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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?
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.
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.
Unless you’ve read Golitsyn’s 1984 book, “New Lies for Old” (available at Internet Archive), and become familiar with the Communists’ “Long-Range Policy” (which all Communist nations signed onto in 1960 as their “new” and more subtle strategy to neutralize the West), you are ignorant of all matters concerning foreign policy.
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.
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