An 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 on Thursday.
At a news conference, Nuzzi said his lawyers 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 did not immediately comment.
The book reproduces documents from the Vatican’s bank, showing multimillion-dollar accounts in the names of popes Paul VI and John Paul II, and their private secretaries.
It also alleges that hidden powers in the Vatican were blocking the reforms of Pope Francis and his predecessor, Benedict XVI.
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, 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-school students, who are considering a possible vocation in the priesthood.
Nuzzi reproduces a letter and testimony from a gay former seminarian who recounted how an adult, now a priest, used to come into his dormitory 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 former 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 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 last year, after an eight-month trial, the Vatican’s criminal court declared that it had no jurisdiction to prosecute them.
However, the court did convict two other people for conspiring to leak the documents, while absolving a third.
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