Pope’s former butler to take stand in trial

VATICAN CITY—Pope Benedict XVI has returned to the Vatican after three months of vacation to find his former butler on trial in one of the most damaging scandals of his pontificate: the leaks of stolen papal correspondence detailing power struggles, defamation campaigns and allegations of corruption at the highest level of the Catholic Church.

Paolo Gabriele is to be questioned on the stand on Tuesday by the president of the Vatican tribunal, the first time the public will hear from the butler himself about the events that landed him in a Vatican detention facility on May 23, accused of stealing the documents and giving them to a journalist.

Vatican police arrested Gabriele after they found a stash of papal papers in his Vatican City home. In all, police carted off 82 boxes of papers, though not all of them were papal correspondence.

Prosecutors have said Gabriele confessed to leaking copies of the documents because he wanted to expose the “evil and corruption” in the Church. They quoted him as saying that even though he knew taking the documents was wrong, he felt inspired by the Holy Spirit “to bring the Church back on the right track.”

“I believed that the Holy Father wasn’t being correctly informed about certain things,” they quoted him as saying. “In this sense, I was compelled also by my profound faith and desire that there should be light shed on everything in the Church.”

The trial opened over the weekend inside the intimate ground-floor tribunal in the Vatican’s courthouse tucked behind St. Peter’s Basilica.