Note: The arrestee is a whistleblower, not the original (alleged) corruption perps, and the cops making the bust are Vatican, not Italian, police. Of course.
The Guardian:
The pope's butler has been arrested by Vatican police on suspicion of leaking a large number of confidential letters addressed to Benedict XVI which have lifted the lid on alleged corruption and nepotism at the Holy See. ...There's more; this is Ratzinger's Vatican. The list of allegations in the article is stunning.
The arrest comes a month after the Vatican gave an investigative team led by Cardinal Julian Herranz, a member of Opus dei, a full "pontifical mandate" to join Vatican police in rooting out the perpetrators of what has been dubbed Vatileaks. ...
Among the most serious leaks published this year are in a letter from Carlo Maria Viganò, the deputy governor of Vatican City, denouncing inflated contracts with friendly companies, false invoicing and missing cash.
Further revelations were published this week in a book by a journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who described how an unnamed whistleblower sent emissaries to sound him out before they held secret meetings in an unfurnished, rented flat near the Vatican. "I wore a USB round my neck for six months with the leaked documents on it," Nuzzi told the Guardian. "It was like something out of a film." In the book, the source says he was coming clean because "hypocrisy within the Vatican goes unchallenged and scandals multiply". ...
Inflated contracts? Missing cash? Gay smears? And for good measure, this:
Letters depict collusion between the Berlusconi government and the Vatican over how to avoid EU pressure to make the Catholic church pay tax on its properties.How ... secular.
UPDATE: Howie Klein adds this, "What Is It With Child Rape And Organized Religion?" at Down With Tyranny. It isn't just Catholics who cover crimes to protect "their own."
GP
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