The butler did it! That was the tabloid take on the unprecedented breach of security that shook the Vatican last year, when a trove of secrets plucked from one of the most impenetrable places on earth—the pope's private quarters—was leaked to the media. But why did he do it? And did he act alone? Sean Flynn digs around the Vatican's strange, cloistered world and unravels a cloak-and-dagger scandal that's a lot more layered than the Church would have you believe—and that may be just the beginning.
BY SEAN FLYNN ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN RITTER
February 2013
The whole thing began, as many cryptic scandals do, with an apparently innocuous phone call. In the spring of 2011, a friend that Gianluigi Nuzzi hadn't heard from in quite some time asked to meet for coffee in Milan. Nuzzi's friend didn't work in journalism, which is Nuzzi's business, and he didn't mention that he might have the seeds of a story.
At the café they exchanged pleasantries, caught up. But then Nuzzi's friend announced his true intention: He had another friend—he wouldn't say who, exactly—who wanted to share some secrets from inside the notoriously leakproof walls of the Vatican. Nuzzi didn't find this particularly surprising. People often want to tell him things: He's on television, the host of an investigative news show called The Untouchables. But he didn't find it particularly interesting, either. Though he'd written a well-received book in 2009 about the Vatican bank's history of shady dealings, Nuzzi had no desire to become a specialist in the inner workings of the world's smallest sovereign nation. And who knew what an anonymous source might be offering.
Still, his friend was insistent. Nuzzi told him to pass along Nuzzi's cell-phone number.
Sometime later, Nuzzi got another call, this time from a man he did not know. He doesn't know his real name, so he refers to him as The Contact. The Contact told Nuzzi that, if he was interested, he should take a train from Milan, where he lives and broadcasts his show, to Rome and then go to a bar near Piazza Mazzini. Nuzzi still didn't know if he was interested, but this was the sort of thing—shadowy encounters with strangers—that Nuzzi enjoys. He has been a journalist for almost twenty years, mostly in print before moving to television a few years ago, and prefers working with confidential sources and documents. He likens himself to a submarine, prowling beneath the waves and surfacing only when he has something to report. Think of how many fish have yet to be discovered, he says, how many trenches still are unexplored!
Two men, both Italians in their forties dressed in conservative suits, met Nuzzi at the bar. They asked him many questions— about his professional interests, his tactics, how he keeps anonymous sources anonymous. They were affable and polite, but Nuzzi guessed they weren't clerics. "They let slip a few words," he later wrote, "that recalled the barracks more than the sacristy." They offered no secrets. Rather, Nuzzi realized, they were assessing him, gauging whether he could be trusted.
Apparently he could be. A second meeting was arranged—another bar, the same two men. After some small talk, one of them pulled from his pocket a folded sheet of paper. He handed it to Nuzzi, who smoothed it out, read quickly. On it was a list of grievances involving two well known monsignors inside Vatican City. But the complaints were anonymous, which reduced them to gossip. These were the dark secrets—nameless trifles?
Nuzzi handed back the paper. "No, thank you," he told the men.
Both men smiled and said nothing.
Nuzzi was confused. But the men seemed satisfied, and then he understood: The tip had been a bluff, a test to see if he'd grab any silly slander or if he was a serious journalist interested in a serious story.
"Let's go for a walk," one of the men said. Nuzzi followed them outside, where a van was parked. They drove for almost an hour, but in circles, looping through the streets, making sure they weren't followed. Then they stopped in front of an apartment building not far from where they'd started. The men had a key to a vacant unit. They led Nuzzi inside, down a hallway, and into a room empty except for a single plastic chair.
A man was sitting in the chair. He told Nuzzi he had worked inside the Vatican for about twenty years. He professed to be a devout and pious Catholic, which Nuzzi would come to believe because the man quoted Gospel passages and His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI from memory. The man was uncomfortable meeting with a journalist, but he said his conscience left him no alternative. There are scandals in the Holy See, he told Nuzzi, hypocrisies and frauds practiced upon the Church, and even upon Benedict himself, that he could no longer abide.
The man said he had documents that would prove the truth. He had collected memos and letters for years, and he would give them to Nuzzi. But their meetings could never become known. They could never speak on the phone or communicate by e-mail. They would meet only in person, on a prearranged schedule. Also, the man wanted a code name.
"Maria," the man suggested.
Nuzzi smiled. He liked it. Maria, he thought. The messenger above suspicion.
···
The man in the plastic chair would appear to have been Paolo Gabriele, who until his highly publicized arrest last spring was the pope's butler. Nuzzi will neither confirm nor deny this, but there are obvious similarities. Gabriele, like "Maria," had worked in the Vatican for about twenty years, and he is a devout and pious Catholic who often quotes Gospel and the pope. He told Vatican police and the Vatican court and Nuzzi, in his one public interview, that he for years had collected private papal documents that did not reconcile with Church teachings, at least as he understood them. "Hypocrisy reigns unchecked in the Vatican," the man in the plastic chair told Nuzzi. "Hypocrisy, well, there's a lot of that," Gabriele later told Nuzzi. "We could say that it is the realm of hypocrisy."
However, Gabriele was not the only source. "Maria," Nuzzi tells me, "is a collective." He says there were about twenty moles in all. There were the sources who preferred to meet in the bright aisles of La Feltrinelli bookstore on the north side of the Area Sacra ruins; others he met in the dining room in a hotel with a view of St. Peter's and in a restaurant that serves small portions of expensive food on Via Luigi Settembrini. "When I told you about walking in the park and it was snowing, that was with one person," Nuzzi says. "When I told you about another meeting, that was another person."
From those sources, Nuzzi collected hundreds of documents that became the foundation of what is now called, rather cheaply, VatiLeaks. Nuzzi put some of those documents on television, and other reporters printed some in newspapers, and, last spring, he published far more in a best-selling book called His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI. This was all considered an epic scandal. In the first half of the year, the international press had the Vatican variously "rocked" or "reeling" or just generally "in chaos."
Nuzzi's first installment aired on the January 25, 2012, broadcast of The Untouchables, and it explored charges of systematic corruption in the Vatican, centering on the efforts of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who had instituted a number of successful financial reforms as secretary-general of Vatican City. Yet almost three years before his term was to expire, Viganò was reassigned to be the Vatican's ambassador to Washington. "Holy Father," he wrote in a pleading March 27, 2011, letter to pope Benedict, "my transfer right now would provoke profound confusion and dismay for those who believed it was possible to clean up the many cases of corruption and abuses of power that have been rooted in the management of so many departments.
That letter and several others written by Viganò were the spine of Nuzzi's broadcast. It was a straightforward story, the apparent reformer seemingly punished by more powerful people with no interest in being reformed. Yet it was only the beginning.
Two days later, the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano published additional leaked information about Viganò. More documents found their way to more reporters. In February, a confidential memo surfaced that recounted an Italian cardinal apparently reporting to the Vatican that he'd learned of an alleged assassination plot that would leave the pope dead within the year. Officials in the Vatican bank, according to other leaks, were pushing back against reforms designed to make it as transparent as Europe's other financial institutions. In March, Nuzzi aired parts of an interview with a Vatican leaker—face obscured and voice muddled—who is now known to be Gabriele.
In all of this, though, the true scandal wasn't the particulars of the leaks but rather the fact of them. The documents slipped to Nuzzi and others in 2011 were an unprecedented breach of the Vatican's secrecy. Moreover, most of the papers were letters and memos smuggled out of the Apostolic Palace—that is, from the pope's own offce and apartment, one of the most intensely private suites on the planet. "Even during the toughest years of the Cold War, when the CIA and the KGB had agents inside the Vatican, nobody got close to the papal family," says Marco Politi, an Italian journalist who's written about the Vatican for more than twenty years. "This is the first time that, on purpose, someone within the Vatican was sending material to the outside world with the goal that the political struggle would be played out in the media."
Paolo Gabriele rides shotgun with His Holiness in the popemobile in October 2011···
In the narrative of the Vatican leaks, Gabriele has been cast as the punch-line villain (the butler did it!), a possibly delusional simpleton who betrayed the Church and the Holy Father, albeit out of misguided altruism. Yet he is also an unlikely villain.
Gabriele grew up in a middle-class neighborhood three metro stops west of Vatican City, but his eventual employment there was a matter of either happenstance or divinity, depending on the degree of one's faith. He was raised Catholic, of course, but he never aspired to a religious vocation, never heard the call to the priesthood or even served as an altar boy. Still, he was devout.
"If you really want to put a label on it, he was more like an evangelical," says a friend who's known Gabriele since their days in a parish youth group. "He believed in the Gospel, that Jesus taught that you will be known by the love you show for others. And in his mind, the Church was always supposed to be a family." (In that one TV interview of Gabriele's, Nuzzi asked him what he thought was the most beautiful verse in the Gospels. Gabriele paraphrased John 13: 34-35. "Love one another as I have loved you. From this they will know you are my disciples.")
Mostly, though, Gabriele was an artist. He studied at the fine-arts high school in Rome—where he met his wife, Manuela—and made a little money selling his paintings. Later he found work assisting a priest at a Polish church. Part of his job was scrubbing toilets, which he did conscientiously and apparently with great vigor. "A Vatican bishop comes in one day," the childhood friend says, telling the story the way Gabriele told him, "and he says, 'Who cleaned this bathroom, and cleaned it so well? I want to meet him.' "
Gabriele was hired soon after to work in the Secretariat of State, the department that governs the city-state. He was well liked, dutiful, and his performance reviews were exemplary. In the late '90s, when one of the assistants in the papal apartments retired, Gabriele's patron, the bishop impressed by his toilet scrubbing, encouraged him to apply for the job. A position in the Apostolic Palace, the regal tan building on the edge of St. Peter's Square from which the pope waves out his window to the faithful below, is one of the most coveted in the Vatican, especially for a layperson like Gabriele. There are more than a billion Catholics in the world, but only 450 of them live in Vatican City, and perhaps ten spend their working life in intimate proximity to the man the faithful believe is Christ's vicar on earth. Gabriele was truly awed, two friends say, by his blessed fortune. (There were advantages for the bishop, too, since the pope is both the spiritual leader of the Church and the absolute monarch of his own wealthy little nation: Having an inside man is shrewd for any ambitious cleric.)
John Paul II was pope at the time. He liked Gabriele—he called him Paulus, an endearment Gabriele so appreciated that he used it for his e-mail address—and Gabriele adored the Holy Father. Hours before the pontiff died in the spring of 2005, according to the friend, Gabriele stood at his bedside, softly singing a Polish hymn about the Virgin Mary.
When John Paul II died, his butler retired and Gabriele was promoted to serve the new pope, Joseph Ratzinger. Until last spring, Gabriele, who was 45 when he was arrested, lived with his wife and three children inside the Vatican. For seven years, he made the short commute from his apartment to the Apostolic Palace, where Gabriele readied the quarters for the day. Over the years, one of the friends says, his duties involved an increasing amount of secretarial work, vetting correspondence and such, but primarily he was a butler, with the basic butler mandate of tending to His Holiness. He helped Benedict with his robes, and he often prayed with him at the pope's private morning Mass. He held his umbrella in the rain, and he rode in the front right of the popemobile when Benedict was on tour. Gabriele stayed most days until lunch was prepared (four laywomen cook and clean for the pope), took the afternoons for himself, then returned before dinner.
Gabriele respected Ratzinger, whom he considered a fair and just man. A native of Bavaria who'd been ordained in 1951, Ratzinger had been in Rome for almost twenty-five years as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which made him essentially the Catholic Church's chief theological enforcer. He is a very different pope from his gregarious, globe-trotting predecessor. He is in poor health—rumors of his impending demise were perpetually whispered even before he announced his retirement on February 11—and extensive travel is uncomfortable.
Unlike John Paul II, who dined with guests most evenings, Benedict XVI usually has dinner either alone or with a select few intimates. He lives, in some ways, an almost monastic life, preferring to study and write, which he does prolifically. (He caused a minor, Grinchy stir last fall when he suggested in his third scholarly volume about Christ's life that livestock were not, in fact, mooing and bleating around the manger.)
Journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi was specifically sought out by Gabriele.He, too, apparently was quite fond of Gabriele, calling him by the affectionate diminutive Paoletto. Gabriele liked it, as if it deepened his personal bond with the Holy Father. "If I could have picked the pope," Gabriele once said, "I would have chosen Ratzinger." And over the years, Gabriele came to love Benedict XVI.
Unfortunately, he most recently professed that love in a Vatican courtroom, where he also was confessing to having sneaked private papers into the hands of a journalist. "I feel guilty for having betrayed the trust that the Holy Father gave me," he told the court last fall, "whom I love as a son would."
Gabriele began copying documents a few months after the white smoke from the conclave that elected Ratzinger in April 2005 had dissipated over the Tiber. He did so only sporadically at first, and his motive appeared to be simple curiosity. Though he'd worked in the Vatican for more than a decade by then, Gabriele's new position would have given him a more intimate view of the machinations of running the place, both in terms of bureaucracy and palace intrigue. Presumably he knew his copying was overstepping his bounds, but he took no elaborate measures to conceal what he was doing: He just ran documents through the photocopier in the offce he shared with the pope's two secretaries. He never passed those early documents to anyone, and he eventually destroyed them all; if anything, he seemed to be assigning himself papal homework.
There was a considerable amount to learn about the way Vatican City was run. The tourists are confined to the museums and St. Peter's, but behind the walls is a bustling little city-state of 109 acres. There is a railway station and a post offce, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a bank. The Swiss Guards protect the pope, both in their ornate uniforms and in plainclothes, like the Secret Service shields the president. There is also a small police force, the Vatican gendarmerie, and a courtroom and even small holding cells. There are landscapers and maintenance workers and men to haul away the garbage and keep the streets clean, and there are contractors to be hired, managed, and paid. It's not the most complicated operation, but there are a lot of moving parts, and those parts are moved by men who, almost by definition, are ambitious and driven. Plus, there are far-flung personnel issues to deal with, which are inherently political—which priests will become bishops, which bishops will become archbishops—and a steady supply of scandals to contain and clean up, notably but certainly not exclusively the Church's decades-long scourge of pedophile clergy.
Gabriele stopped copying documents after a few years, his curiosity apparently satisfied. But he began again in 2010, after Archbishop Viganò instituted those financial reforms and upset the status quo. Viganò put in place tighter accountability controls and he purged what he considered waste and, at times, corruption. Under Viganò, the Vatican stopped paying favored contractors twice the going rate for the same jobs outside the walls. Not surprisingly, this annoyed some of the people accustomed to the way things were. Gabriele saw Viganò as the victim of a smear campaign.
Worse, he later testified, Benedict would often ask him questions about particular issues in which Gabriele believed His Holiness should have been well versed. He came to suspect the pope was being misinformed by his underlings, that malfeasance and misfeasance were being kept from him. "I became convinced," Gabriele said in court, "that it's easy to manipulate someone with such enormous decision-making power."
Yet he didn't believe it was his place to speak of such things directly with the pontiff. So he started copying documents again—still in the office, but now two copies, one to leak and one for his files. "Seeing evil and corruption everywhere in the Church," he told Vatican investigators, "I was sure that a shock, even in the media, might be just the thing to bring the Church back on the right track." He believed the Holy Spirit was at work within him, that he'd been called to save the Church from itself.
"The situation has worsened," a source told Nuzzi. "The scandals multiply."
Still, he didn't intend to slip a sheaf of secret papers to just any journalist, though there undoubtedly would have been many willing takers. He chose Nuzzi, whom he had never met, because he had been impressed with Vaticano S.p.A., Nuzzi's 2009 book about the Institute for Works of Religion, more commonly known as the Vatican bank and less commonly known for its alleged history as a tax-shelter-and-money-laundering operation for unsavory characters. That work had been based on confidential sources and documents—two suitcases full of them that Nuzzi flew back from Geneva in a private plane—but it was also sober and evenhanded. Indeed, Gabriele had been so taken by Vaticano S.p.A. that he bought copies to give as gifts. "Nuzzi gave me confidence," Gabriele told investigators, "because he seemed concerned with providing information without mud-slinging and slandering people."
Such praise pleases Nuzzi. He seems custom-built for broadcast journalism, particularly for an investigative program with a noir title like The Untouchables. He speaks in a bourbon-smooth baritone, and he's solidly built with a big shaved head and a scar scrambling down his right cheek. The Untouchables produces serious journalism, but Nuzzi's proudest of what he's published. "I always like it better when people say, 'I read your book,' instead of, 'I saw you on television,' " he says.
Contacting Nuzzi, however, apparently took several months. Gabriele's version is that after his initial meeting with Nuzzi—presumably the one orchestrated in the empty apartment—they met once a week for a while, then every two weeks into January 2012. On each occasion, Gabriele would wait outside the door of Nuzzi's offce on Via Sabotino, and the two of them would walk a few blocks to a flat Nuzzi kept on Viale Angelico for when he was working in Rome. Once there, Gabriele would give Nuzzi documents he'd smuggled past the guard at St. Anne's Gate, the narrow opening that lets pedestrians and vehicles through Vatican City's towering walls.
···
Winter settled over Rome, and Nuzzi's pile of documents grew. Archbishop Viganò's letters were an obvious set piece, broad allegations of ongoing corruption and cronyism. But Nuzzi also had papers involving the Vatican bank's struggles with transparency and a score of complaints about heavy-handed management in the city-state. There were obsequious letters from rich people offering fat checks and ostentatious gifts (a 100,000-euro truffle!) and asking for an audience with Benedict. There was darker material, too: the disappearance, in 1983, of Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican worker, for instance, or the purported sex-slaying of a missionary in Ecuador.
Nuzzi realized the story was bigger than he'd expected. He began outlining a book, sorting the documents into chapters. He also began to worry. He remembered that the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal described the Vatican as the best and most effective intelligence apparatus in the world. He was not physically afraid, but he assumed his cell phone was being monitored, and he worried his Rome apartment might be burglarized. A farmhand at Nuzzi's grandfather's place in Trentino, where he spent summers as a boy, used to scatter crumbs on the stable floor so he'd know if any of the locals were messing with the livestock in the night. Nuzzi started scattering crumbs on his floor, slipped a toothpick between the door and the jamb, checked to see if either had been disturbed. He saved his manuscript to a USB drive that he wore around his neck.
Despite his daily proximity to the pope, Gabriele felt he could not bother Benedict with the scandals.Nuzzi imagined it was worse for Gabriele, behaving like a spy, maintaining a loyal facade in the daylight, sneaking out after dark. But he was sure no one suspected any of his sources and especially not the pope's butler. In February, Nuzzi recorded that interview with Gabriele, his face blurred and his voice altered. It aired in March, and there were no repercussions. Gabriele appeared to be safe.
His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI was published on May 19, and it was immediately and immensely popular. (An English-language e-book will be released this spring.) Nuzzi did not write it as an attack on the Church, nor does it read as one. In fact, it's quite sympathetic to Benedict. "I'm not hiding the fact that I have sympathy for the pope," he says. "The more they were describing him, the more I was feeling for him."
The Vatican, of course, was not pleased. "The latest publication of documents of the Holy See and private documents of the Holy Father," the Vatican's spokesman announced, "can no longer be considered a debatable—and objectively defamatory—journalistic initiative, but clearly assumes the character of a criminal act."
···
On May 21, the papal household, with the exception of the pope himself, convened a meeting to discuss Nuzzi's book. Eight were in attendance, including the four housekeepers, one of the pope's secretaries, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, and Paolo Gabriele.
Gänswein asked if any of them had delivered documents to Nuzzi. Everyone said no. Then he spoke directly to Gabriele. The monsignor told him he knew Gabriele had been asked to prepare responses to two of the letters in the book and that those letters were no longer in the papal offce. Again Gabriele denied leaking anything. He seemed taken aback, according to Vatican investigators, and asked Gänswein "with great surprise" how he could suspect the Holy Father's loyal butler.
Gabriele realized that was not an effective tactic. Three days later, with the investigation intensifying, he turned himself in. "The first step was spiritual," he later testified. "I went to a confessor and explained what I had done." Then he surrendered. Four Vatican investigators searched his apartment the same day. They found about a thousand papal documents—some marked "to be destroyed" in German—among reams and reams of research Gabriele had accumulated on past Vatican scandals and religion and Freemasonry and other topics. "See how much I like to read and study?" one of the investigators quoted Gabriele as saying.
Nuzzi's phone rang at about the same time, a source telling him about the arrest. "The first reaction was almost like pain," he says. "I never thought they'd make such a radical choice."
But Nuzzi couldn't react, not noticeably. For one, he was in a meeting from which he couldn't excuse himself. And what if it was a bluff, a lie to gauge his response, to feel out his relationship with Gabriele? Maybe it wasn't true. Then his phone rang again, and again, and again—reporters calling for comment. It was a strange sensation, being on the receiving end of a press frenzy. "I could not consider myself prey," he says. "I had to respect other people's work."
From there began what Nuzzi and many others consider a campaign by the Vatican to discredit Gabriele, to cast him as a mental simpleton, an emotional adolescent, and, possibly, a degenerate kleptomaniac.
The Vatican's brief against Gabriele is laid out in the lengthy indictment that was handed down on August 13. It is very thorough, recounting the investigation and Gabriele's confession and his contention that he felt compelled to expose the "evil and corruption" in the Vatican for the good of the Church. There is also a lengthy exposition about why, in the Vatican's legal system, a confession isn't enough evidence to convict. (The Church, as is duly noted in the indictment, had some unfortunate experiences with confessions during the Inquisition.) Layered throughout, however, are several elements that tend to make Gabriele look like a loon.
One is a list of three items—other than the trove of documents—found in his apartment. The first was a check, payable to the pope, for 100,000 euros from a Catholic university. The second was "a nugget presumed to be gold" that had been a gift to the pontiff from a Peruvian mining magnate. And the third was a 1581 translation of The Aeneid, also a gift to the pope. Gabriele explained that his oldest son had been studying the poem, and he'd asked to borrow it to show his teacher (access to 400-year-old manuscripts being a perk of working in the Vatican). Of course, he could have pilfered all three. But the indictment quotes Gabriele saying the items were in his apartment because of "the state of my mess," and he often took care of gifts to the pontiff. In court, however, he denied knowing anything about the check and nugget.
The indictment also included summaries of two psychological examinations, by the prosecution and the defense. Neither concluded that Gabriele suffered from a major psychological disorder. That said, the prosecution expert characterized Gabriele as a man "of simple intelligence in a fragile personality with paranoid tendencies to cover a deep personal insecurity." The report from the defense psychologist was even less flattering. He determined that Gabriele's sense of identity was "incomplete and unstable" and that he suffered "suggestibility, feelings of grandiosity...as well as a pervasive need to be valued and appreciated," all of which made him "grossly inadequate to perform the duties of his job." All that mental fragility supposedly absolved him of responsibility for the leaks, a sort of incompetence defense.
Left unexplained, of course, was why such an untrustworthy and unstable head case was allowed anywhere near Christ's vicar on earth, let alone two in succession.
A man who knows Gabriele well shakes his head at the portrait painted of his friend in court. He does not recognize the person in the Vatican indictment. He's not sure how the Vatican can recognize that person. Twice Gabriele has taken his friend on tours through Vatican City. "To walk a half mile, you have to make twenty stops," he says. Everyone knew Paolo, everyone was Paolo's friend. "If you have a chance to know him," the friend says, "you can't help but like him."
That man has been Gabriele's friend since they were teenagers in the same Roman parish. They don't see each other as often as they used to—the friend lives in Milan now—but they still share "a deep friendship." He particularly objects to the passing reference, just a fragment of a sentence from another suspect,* to "the painful childhood of Paolo Gabriele." No details are provided, and the passage immediately moves on to other matters. But considering what came before—the psych evaluations, the gold nugget, and the uncashable check—the phrase seems a potential clue to understanding all the Vatican has alleged. "No," Gabriele's friend says. "No, it's not true."
As he remembers it, there were two incidents in Gabriele's life that, while certainly traumatic, do not add up to a childhood that can in total be considered painful. His mother died when he was 3, leaving his father to raise Gabriele and his older sister alone until he remarried a few years later. And as a teenager, he didn't get along with his father, a strict man who hated the way his artsy son grew his hair long. The arguments and the tension got bad enough that Gabriele moved in with a friend's family for a while—a few weeks or a few months—but they have long since reconciled. Gabriele named his third child, a son, for his father.
The friend says Gabriele had no real vices, no smoking or drinking, no sex before marriage. He was honest and funny and tried to live the Gospel, and there is nothing really more complicated to say than that. "He is a simple man," the friend says. "Not simple-minded, but just a simple man."
He also believes that Gabriele's motive in leaking documents was just as he explained it. "He had a very high level of expectation for the Church," the friend says. And when he saw the mortal side of the Vatican, the fallible human elements, he was terribly disillusioned, and he wanted the world to know so the Church could right itself.
"He knows so much," the friend says. "But now the moment he decides to talk, he's just a gold-nugget stealer."
···
After some preliminary hearings, Gabriele's trial commenced on October 2, and the panel of three Vatican judges kept it a brief and straightforward affair. Straightforward because, though he tried to explain himself several times, "to speak some truths," as Nuzzi puts it, neither his motives nor his perception of the Vatican's sins were on trial. And brief because he didn't dispute that he'd done exactly what he'd been accused of doing, which was stealing documents. As a legal proceeding, it was open and transparent and very effcient. He was convicted on October 6 and sentenced to eighteen months in custody, to be served in a secure and modest room in the offce of the Vatican gendarmes.
After he was arrested, according to the childhood friend, Gabriele's wife asked what he thought would happen now that he'd been accused of betraying the Holy See. "I started out scrubbing toilets," he told her, "and I'll probably go back to scrubbing toilets." He told Nuzzi, "My conscience is clear."
So he went to Vatican jail to do his time. His wife came to see him once a week, and he was allowed out for Mass in a small chapel on Sundays. He passed his days by painting, and he joked to Manuela that maybe he'd hold an exhibition of his canvases when he was released. "But they're all so dark," she told him, "like Munch."
The narrow legal machinations might have been eminently fair, but in a broader sense Gabriele's motives do matter. Rightly or wrongly, he believed he was exposing misbehavior in his beloved Church, willingly risking his cherished career and his family's security. "So who's the bad guy?" Nuzzi asks. "Is it the butler? Or is it the guys in all these documents?"
He feels terrible for Gabriele. Nuzzi told him there were risks, but he never expected his source would be arrested, would be sent to Vatican jail. "He can't spend Christmas in there," he told me in early December.
In the end, though, Gabriele will be a footnote to his own story, because it's not about him anymore. In fact, on the first Sunday in June, the Italian paper La Repubblica published leaked Vatican documents it reported had been delivered after Gabriele had been arrested—along with a note that claimed the butler was merely a scapegoat.
"It's a story now," Nuzzi says, "of, for the first time, this wall of silence that's always been protected and has now been pierced. And that sets a precedent."
···
Though Pope Benedict's retirement was startling—he was, after all, the first pope to retire in six centuries—it almost certainly was not because of the leak scandal. He is old and ill and never really enjoyed the public pomp of being pope anyway; retiring, rather than lingering and deteriorating, was not unreasonable.
But the Vatican is more than the pope, and for the greater institution the leaks were never primarily about the betrayal of Benedict. The scandal was always about a breach in the cloistered secrecy of a tiny sovereign nation. The palace gossip and the allegations of corruption that seeped out were merely evidence of a larger, more fundamental problem, much like rivulets of water trickling from the face of a dam about to burst. No matter who is elected pope this spring—a reformer from the Southern Hemisphere, an Italian traditionalist, a Filipino!—the institutional Vatican will surely spackle the cracks. The Vatican's business is not to be shared.
It's a curious perspective. In early December, when one of his sources was doing time in Vatican jail, Nuzzi tried to explain it. He told me a story, in the same way that he'd been told, about an elderly monsignor who lived in the Vatican not so many years ago.
One warm night, when the monsignor had guests for dinner and the window open to catch the breeze, the cats that prowl the tiled roofs were making a racket, howling and mewling in the twilight. The monsignor despised those cats. So he got up from the table, retrieved an antique carbine, and fired a few shots out the window. Then he sat back down as if nothing unusual had occurred.
The next morning, two nuns climbed to the roofs with buckets, into which they deposited a few dead cats. And nothing more was ever said about the incident.
The point, Nuzzi said, the key to understanding everything else, was what never happened: No one suggested taking away the monsignor's rifle. The real problem was what was left littering the rooftops. And so it was enough, it was proper, to simply cart away the bodies.
"Gabriele told me that story," he said. "I think Gabriele told me." He shrugged. "You can say Gabriele told me. It was one of them."
The pope pardoned Gabriele three days before Christmas and expelled him from the Vatican for eternity.
* On May 25, Vatican police also arrested Claudio Sciarpelletti, a 48-year-old computer technician in the Secretariat of State, after they found a sealed envelope in his desk drawer with "P. Gabriele" written on it. The documents inside—mostly letters and e-mails—weren't of any interest. Sciarpelletti initially gave investigators three different explanations as to how the envelope got into his desk. At his trial in November, Sciarpelletti testified he simply couldn't remember how he'd gotten it or why. He was convicted of obstruction of justice, though his role apparently was so minor he received only a two-month suspended sentence.
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