The trial of Pope Benedict XVI's butler, which
ends on Saturday after just four hearings, has split experts between
some who say it is Vatican transparency in action and others who detect a
whitewash.
The world's tiniest state has for
the first time opened its doors for the biggest trial of its modern
history to a small group of journalists, who have then relayed the
content of the courtroom drama to their colleagues.
Cameras have however mostly been
kept out, the courtroom tucked away behind the Vatican walls is off
limits to the general public and the brief trial of Paolo Gabriele for
aggravated theft has been relatively limited in scope.
Vatican expert Marco Politi
defined the trial as “nebulous” and said that the charge of aggravated
theft against Gabriele for leaking confidential Vatican papers to an
Italian journalist covered up for harsher truths.
“The core of this story is the
betrayal and the unprecedented leak of documents that reveal conflicts
within the Curia, instances of corruption that have not been clarified,
battles over the Vatican bank,” Politi said.
“The court is closing its eyes and not going deeper,” he said.
For all the brevity of the trial,
Gabriele's defence has been stronger than many experts had predicted and
he has accused Vatican gendarmes of mistreatment during his detention -
a charge quickly denied by the papal police.
Some Catholic publications have
sprung to the Vatican's defence, with the weekly Famiglia Cristiana
accusing certain media outlets of having turned Gabriele into a “martyr”
and of believing his every word “like molten gold”.
Judge Giuseppe Dalla Torre has
appeared keen to keep the trial limited to the charges and not allowing
broader discussions that could help understand Gabriele's motivations or
explore his network of contacts and sources.
Dalla Torre at the first hearing
threw out a request from the defence to include in the documents of the
trial a secret report into the “Vatileaks” scandal compiled for the pope
by a group of cardinals in a parallel inquiry.
The judge said that report had “no relevance” to the case at hand.
He also
separated Gabriele's case from that of Claudio Sciarpelletti, a Vatican
computer technician accused of abetting the crime and a case that could
shed more light on how Gabriele came to obtain the documents he passed
on.
Gianluigi Nuzzi, the journalist
Gabriele is accused of leaking documents to has hardly been mentioned at
the trial and there are no charges against him.
As the trial concludes, it is not
clear how Gabriele could have obtained such a vast number of documents
including originals spanning several years.
The inquiry is ongoing, however,
and prosecutors have left open the possibility of probing more serious
charges like the leaking of state secrets.
When Gabriele took the stand on
Tuesday, Dalla Torre cut him off repeatedly as he tried to speak about
the reasons for his actions and in particular his desire to better
inform the pope, who he felt was being “manipulated”.
Asked by his lawyer to explain
what exactly he thought the pope was badly informed about, Gabriele
began by saying “Certainly...” but the judge quickly intervened saying:
“This is irrelevant. Let's discuss the case at hand.”
The
system the judge is operating in is also highly unusual as the Vatican's
criminal laws date back to the late 19th century and the pope holds
sweeping powers including the right to dismiss a case before it comes to
trial.
Some commentators say the simple
fact that the pope allowed the case to go to trial despite the obvious
embarrassment of airing an affair that concerns him so personally in
public shows a will to discuss the issues at hand.
The inclusion as a witness of the
pope's personal secretary Georg Gaenswein, a hugely influential figure
in the Vatican who generally keeps a low public profile, has also been
seen as revolutionary by observers of Vatican affairs.
The pope “wants to know and wants
others to know what happened,” Marco Tosatti, a Vatican expert who
writes for La Stampa daily, told AFP.
Lucetta Scaraffia, a columnist for L'Osservatore Romano, also said that she believed the pope himself was “allowing issues to be aired.”