ROME — The Italian journalist who was put on trial by the Vatican for publishing confidential documents has written a new book alleging a host of Catholic sins, including gay sex in the Vatican’s youth seminary.
Gianluigi Nuzzi’s Original Sin went on sale Thursday. At a news conference, Nuzzi said his lawyers had hand-delivered a copy to the Vatican’s criminal prosecutor, saying at least one of the seminarians was a minor at the time of the alleged escapades.
The Vatican didn’t immediately comment.
The book reproduces documents from the Vatican’s scandal-marred bank, showing multi-million-dollar accounts in the names of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II and their private secretaries. And it alleges that hidden powers in the Vatican were blocking the reforms of Pope Francis and his predecessor, Benedict XVI.
Nuzzi also claims that Mother Teresa’s account at the bank – officially known as the Institute for the Works of Religion – was so large that the institution would have collapsed if she withdrew her funds.
The journalist said her trust in certain bank officials ensured they stayed in place, even if they were “more acquainted with the jet set of the world of film” than “the poor of Mother Teresa.”
The book delves into the case of one of the Vatican’s biggest mysteries, the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee.
The author claims that in 2011, the Vatican began a “secret dialogue” with Italian prosecutors to share information in the case, because of the embarrassment caused by the constant gossip and speculation about the disappearance in the media.
And it gathers together years of exposes into the gay subculture of the Vatican. The new claims concern the Vatican’s St. Pius X pre-seminary for middle and high schoolers who are considering a possible vocation to the priesthood.
Nuzzi reproduces a letter and testimony from a gay ex-seminarian who recounted how an adult, now a priest, used to come into his dorm room and have oral sex with his roommate. The book reproduces a 2014 letter from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the ex-seminarian, saying it had determined that no sexual abuse of a minor had occurred but that it was referring the case to the Vatican’s office for clergy.
Nuzzi told reporters Thursday that the roommate was indeed younger than 18 when the encounters began. Neither the roommate nor the priest were identified.
Nuzzi and fellow journalist Emmanuele Fittipaldi were put on trial in a Vatican court in 2015 after both published books based on leaked documents that exposed greed, mismanagement and corruption at the highest levels of the Catholic Church. In July 2016, after an eight-month trial, the Vatican’s criminal court declared that it had no jurisdiction to prosecute them.
The court did, however, convict two other people for conspiring to leak the documents, and absolved a third.
Crux staff contributed to this report.
