Pope's butler outed as "mystery man" in TV interview

An Italian commercial broadcaster has outed the former papal chamberlain Paolo Gabriele as informant for the investigative programme on the Vatican. On Monday night, the station "La7" showed from the program "Gli Intoccabili" (The Untouchables) the full interview with Gabriele of 22 February in the original. At that time, the voice of the informant and the face had been distorted using pixelation.

As a motive for the theft Gabriele cites in the interview "anger" over a "wall of silence" in the Vatican that suppresses the truth. He admitted to working with 20 people. He was not concerned about money but about a more just church, as the Pope also wanted.

Gabriele was arrested on 23 May after a large amounts of Papal documents had been found in his home. A few days before the book "Sua Santita" by the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi was published containingh confidential documents from the Vatican. Gabriele must after the completion of the judicial inquiry in the autumn stand trial for grand larceny before the Vatican court..

The butler went on to explain that the Vatican had not informed the Pope about the murder of the Swiss Guard commander Alois Estermann and his wife in 1998. "We are in a country where you go and cause a bloodbath and leave undisturbed again. And after 24 hours, no one can speak up about what happened," said Gabriele. As another example, he cited the case of abduction of the then 15-year-old Vatican citizen Emanuela Orlandi in 1983, which has not been solved.

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