At a certain point he couldn't take it any more," says his lawyer Cristiana Arru, clutching her rosary beads, in only her second ever public interview. He says he saw lies being told. He thought that the Pope was being kept in the dark regarding key events.
Gabriele was found guilty of "aggravated theft" and spent three months in custody before being pardoned by the Pope. But that was not the end of it. The Church's leader set up an inquiry into the whole affair. Three Cardinals produced a page report. It was meant to be kept under lock and key, but a leading Italian daily claimed it had been briefed on its contents. The result? More embarrassing leaks, this time with claims of a network of gay priests exerting "inappropriate influence" inside the Vatican.
The headaches continued to mount for the German Pope. In many journalistic endeavours, "follow the money" is good advice for getting to grips with what is really going on, and it applies to the Vatican too. One of the most eyebrow-raising stories we encountered involved an annual Nativity scene in St Peter's Square.
For years, deals were struck in which the Vatican paid several times the market rate. When a whistleblower tried to reform the system, officials in the papal court persuaded a hapless Pope Benedict to promote him to a role 4, miles from Rome.
Similar antics occurred at the Vatican Bank, for years a source of unwelcome headlines for the Catholic Church. It was set up to help religious orders and foundations transfer much-needed money to far-flung parts of the world. But when a sizeable proportion of the transactions are in cash and are being sent to politically unstable parts of the planet, it does not take a genius to see what might go wrong.
It appears that bank officials took key decisions without always informing the Pope. When the board ousted its reforming president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi conveniently, on the day that the news of the Gabriele's arrest was getting saturation news coverage , the Pope did not find out until it was too late. He was "very surprised" in the later words of his private secretary.
Gotti Tedeschi was an Opus Dei member and thought to be close to the Pope, but in the end this did not protect him. Did all this prove too much for the ageing Pope Benedict? Examine the precise words of the papal press spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi: "The Church needed someone with more physical and spiritual energy who would be able to overcome the problems and challenges of governing the church in this ever-changing modern world. This is a church that now has a huge opportunity to move on and face up to the challenges of the 21st Century.
Often seen as remote, its leadership is now canvassing the views of ordinary Catholics on hot-button issues such as contraception and gay marriage. Another issue that proved problematic for the pope was the financial entanglements of the Vatican Bank.
Again, this was something that predated Benedict's papacy, as the Vatican Bank had long permitted the use of secretive accounts that invited scrutiny for potential money laundering. Benedict sought to update the Church's archaic practices by establishing the independent Financial Intelligence Authority as a watchdog, but the entrenched bureaucracy limited the potential of effective change, and in May , the Vatican Bank's president was fired for negligence.
The lack of transparency led to another embarrassing turn of events just before Benedict's exit, with the Vatican briefly relegated to a cash-only operation in early after Italian banks ceased doing business with the Holy See. The straw that broke the camel's back may well have been the disclosure of the pope's personal documents in the "Vatileaks" scandal of That year, in an investigative TV series and best-selling book His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI , Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi revealed to the world a Church management divided by cliques and infighting, the withholding of important financial information from the pope, and the machinations behind the transfer of an archbishop who tried to enforce Benedict's reforms and rat out the uncooperative members of the flock.
Nuzzi's source was soon discovered to be the pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele, who admitted to exposing the private correspondence out of fear that corruption was overtaking the Church. Sentenced to 18 months in prison by a Vatican court, Gabriele was pardoned by the end of by Benedict, though the damage was already done.
In the weeks that followed Benedict's retreat into private life, theories abounded as to why one of the world's most powerful spiritual leaders undertook the legacy-altering move. One conspiracy theory held that he was forced into resignation, but his ongoing use of his papal name and garments were signaling that he still considered himself the rightful head of the Church. But Benedict has stuck to his original explanation, with a documentary, Benedict XVI: in Honor of Truth , providing supporting evidence that the pope emeritus felt he could no longer publicly lead the 1.
Meanwhile, he lives out his days writing and praying in the solitude of the Vatican's Mater Ecclesiae monastery, the full extent of the circumstances and struggles that drove him from the apex of his calling likely shared only with his Savior. As Benedict's successor, Francis' liberal and minimalistic beliefs are a stark contrast from Benedict's more traditional practices.
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