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Europe

The pope’s ex-butler, still a mystery

By Jason Horowitz,February 15, 2013

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Even before Gabriele was discovered as the source of many of the VatiLeaks documents, he had gained a reputation as something of an over-sharer. He was not shy, insiders said, about offering his concerns about the Vatican to some of its top cardinals. Among fellow laymen, he spoke as though he were in the know. Gabriele lived with his wife and children upstairs from a woman whose daughter had been kidnapped decades earlier in an infamous Vatican scandal. The butler would sometimes bump into the girl’s brother, Pietro Orlandi, who said Gabriele would claim that everyone in the Vatican knew what had happened to his long-lost sister but that no one had the courage to tell the truth.

During his trial, Gabriele boasted to Vatican investigators that the four-minute walk home sometimes took an hour and a half because “I am continuously stopped” by people asking for help. Vaticanisti, the reporters who obsessively document Holy See machinations, often turned to him, too.

One reporter who met frequently with Gabriele said that the butler often waited for the pope’s secretary to leave the room so that he could slip public appeals into the pope’s personal inbox. That reputation as an accessible back channel of information both into and out of the pope’s office, combined with his initial statement, later recanted in court, that others “suggested” the leaking plot to him, created wide suspicion within the Vatican that a sophisticated conspiracy of cardinals exploited the butler’s loose lips.

Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, dismissed that theory and depicted “Paolo” as a lone and troubled leaker.

“It’s very strange that a person had so much trust for so long in this office has done such a clamorous act,” he said, suggesting that a court-appointed psychological analysis of Gabriele revealed he was not a rational person. “His personal interest in the world of intelligence and freemasonry help you understand a little a mentality that searches for classified documents and relationships in the institutions.”

After his arrest, the Vatican effectively silenced Gabriele. During his trial, the judge cut him off as he began to expound upon his conversations with cardinals. Fusco, his old friend, signed on as his attorney but was fired after talking to the press. His other lawyer, Christiana Arru, laughed when asked about the prospect of seeing her client in jail.

“I exclude that he would want to talk to any journalist,” she said, suggesting that his being burned once would suffice.

Asked again a few days later, she grew angry. “For starters you all know nothing about Catholicism, which is a single body, but we absolutely do not want to make any statements that are different from those made by the Holy See,” she said. “This is not a case against the Holy See. The Holy See has been sufficiently damaged in this period. So I wish you good luck but you won’t get anything from me or from the family.”

Gabriele’s wife repeatedly declined to comment, repeating “this is a very delicate moment” in several brief conversations.

Before Christmas, the pope, wearing white robes, personally pardoned his former butler, dressed in his usual gray suit and striped tie, during a 15-minute jailhouse meeting. The pontiff also banished Gabriele from the city state, providing him with a new job and residence — a “paternal gesture,” according to the Vatican. The Italian press has reported that the former butler’s apartment will soon be occupied by his successor, Sandro Mariotti (nicknamed “Sandrone”), who has since taken Gabriele’s seat in the popemobile.

A few weeks ago, Pietro Orlandi, the brother of the kidnapped girl, went to visit his mother and bumped into Gabriele outside the apartment building.

“He was serene,” Orlandi said.

Gabriele now performs clerical duties at a Vatican children’s hospital attached to the basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. Gabriele may have some familiar company there. His former supervisor, Cardinal James Michael Harvey, was recently moved out of the Vatican and appointed the basilica’s titular priest.

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