Vatileaks: Holy See will put reporters who revealed shameful corruption on trial

As if all the sleaze seeping out of the Vatican in the past weeks wasn’t enough to deal with, the Holy See will begin the high-risk gambit of trying the reporters whose new books revealed the juiciest details.

Three Vatican insiders, Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda, his associate Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui and Mgr Balda’s former personal secretary, Nicola Maio, will also stand trial. The Vatican prosecutor has charged the officials with forming a criminal group that leaked confidential information that revealed widespread mismanagement, back-stabbing and venality in the Holy City.

But it is the indictment of the journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi which has been met with a mixture of amusement, disbelief and no doubt barely contained delight by the publishers of two books that were already selling briskly.

One Vatican expert and papal biographer, Marco Politi, described as “nonsensical” the decision to indict the pair for “exerting pressure to obtain confidential information”. He said: “The work of journalists is to obtain and publish secret documents. These two were simply doing their jobs. It’s ridiculous to try to prosecute them.”

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In theory, all five defendants could be sentenced to up to eight years in prison. But by putting the two journalists on trial, the Holy See appears to be in breach of its obligations as a signatory to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, article 19, which allows journalists to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.

Fittipaldi’s book, Avarice, revealed how €200,000 (£160,000) was diverted from a charity for sick children to fund the refurbishment of a luxury apartment for the senior cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. Cardinal Bertone has said he paid the bill himself and then discovered the foundation had also settled it, without him asking it to.

Merchants in the Temple, by Nuzzi, alleges that a Vatican official took advantage of his sick neighbour’s time in hospital to knock down the wall between their apartments and steal an extra room.

The two journalists said they would attend the trial. Nuzzi told The Independent: “I’m going to be there. I don’t know exactly how long it’s going to take, but I think they want it over quickly. I’m not afraid, I’ve simply done my job. The Vatican reacted to the books because their contents were embarrassing for them, but it won’t work. Europeans by now expect freedom of information and a free press.”

One Vatican insider said it was possible that the two journalists would escape with a fine if found guilty. Even if they were given prison sentences, the Vatican doesn’t have facilities to jail five people for long periods. In all likelihood, it would pay for convicts to be housed in Italian prison.

Francis is said to regard with great seriousness the accusation that his officials secretly taped his conversations and possibly passed these recordings to the journalists.

It has been suggested that the documents, which mostly came from Francis’s internal review of how the Vatican was governed, were leaked to undermine his reforms. These reforms have seen the Australian Cardinal George Pell brought in to sort out financial mismanagement.

It’s believed Francis has done little to disguise his dislike for Ms Chaouqui, who has been described as “interfering”.

All the accused deny any wrongdoing.