Five charged in Vatileaks scandal

AFP

The Vatican has charged five people over a damning leaks scandal at the heart of the Catholic Church, with a preliminary hearing set for November 24, 2015, Italian media reported Saturday.

Vatican deputy spokesman Ciro Benedettini confirmed to AFP that “summons are being served”, adding that an official statement would be made later.

“Vatican magistrates have charged five people at the end of an investigation into the stealing and publishing of confidential Holy See documents,” the Repubblica daily said.

Spanish priest Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda and Italian PR expert Francesca Chaouqui were arrested early this month on suspicion of stealing and leaking classified documents to the media.

Journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi were questioned after they published books containing leaked information.

Vallejo Balda and Chaouqui were both members of a special commission set up by Pope Francis to advise him on economic reform within the Vatican. The fifth person, Nicola Maio, also worked with the now defunct commission.

Fittipaldi told Italy’s ANSA news agency he was stunned by the Vatican’s move.

“Maybe I’m naive but I believed they would investigate those I denounced for criminal activity, not the person that revealed the crimes,” he said.

The journalist said that under a law introduced in 2013 on the pope’s bidding, he and the others risk up to eight years in jail.

Chaouqui was released shortly after her arrest, pledging to cooperate with the authorities, but Vallejo Balda is still in a Vatican jail.

The scandal, which has revealed uncontrolled spending by the Vatican as well as accusations of corruption and theft, has awoken painful memories of the last time employees aired the centuries-old institution’s dirty laundry.

In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI’s butler engineered a series of leaks that revealed fierce infighting in the highest echelons of the Catholic Church and allegations of serious fraud in the running of the city state.

He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, before being pardoned by the pope but banished from the Vatican forever.

Five charged in Vatileaks scandal

Vatican backs force to stop IS ‘genocide’

The Vatican’s ambassador to the United Nations has endorsed military action against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria — an unusual move because the Vatican traditionally has opposed force in the region.

In an interview with the US Catholic website Crux, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi said IS fighters were committing atrocities on a huge scale and the world needed to intervene.

“We have to stop this kind of genocide,” the Italian archbishop told Crux. “Otherwise we’ll be crying out in the future about why we didn’t do something, why we allowed such a terrible tragedy to happen.”

Tomasi said a coordinated and “well-thought-out coalition” was needed to do everything possible to achieve a political settlement without violence.

“But if that’s not possible, then the use of force will be necessary,” he added.

Pope Francis has denounced the “intolerable brutality” being inflicted on Christians and other minorities in Iraq and Syria by IS group militants.

Last month, IS kidnapped 220 Assyrians in the Tal Tamr area of Syria where the extremist Islamist group has seized control of 10 Christian villages, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

And the pope expressed his dismay after the group’s Libyan branch released a video showing the gruesome beheading of 21 mostly Egyptian Coptic Christians.

 

Vatican backs force to stop IS ‘genocide’