Two Italian journalists and a laywoman will Tuesday go on trial at the Vatican over the theft of confidential documents used to write two new tell-all books that lay bare past corruption and mismanagement at the Holy See.
"Freedom of information is on trial," one of the two journalists, Gianluigi Nuzzi, said Monday on Twitter, announcing that he would attend the first trial hearing on Tuesday.
The second journalist, Emiliano Fittipaldi, said in a letter to left-leaning Italian daily La Repubblica said he too would be present at the hearing.
Francesca Chaouqui, a PR consultant and former member of a Vatican reform commission ordered to stand trial, also said on Monday she would attend Tuesday's hearing.
"I will fight like a lion so that the truth comes out," said a Facebook post by Chaouqui, who denies any wrongdoing over the stolen documents.
Nuzzi, author of the recently published book Mercants in the Temple, and Emiliano Fittipaldi, whose book Avarice also came out this month and Chaouqui were among five people charged at the weekend.
Nuzzi, Fittipaldi, Chaouqui, high-ranking Vatican cleric Monsignor Lucio Angelo Vallejo Balda and his former assistant Nicola Maio were charged with “illegally procuring and successively revealing information and documents concerning the fundamental interests of the Holy See and the state,” the Vatican said in a statement issued on Saturday.
Balda and Chaouqui, a laywoman, who were members of a commission set up by Francis to study Vatican financial reforms, were also charged with criminal conspiracy, as was Maio.
Nuzzi and Fittipaldi are accused of "demanding and exercising pressure, above all on Vallejo Balda, to obtain confidential documents and information, that in part they used to draft two books,” the statement said.
Italy's Order of Journalists on Monday appeared to back Nuzzi and Fittipaldi stating that their professional code called for journalists to "adhere to the substantial truth of the facts and to give news, not to keep secrets."
The case mark a new phase in the so-called 'Vatileaks' scandal. It began in 2012 when Pope Benedict XVI's butler was convicted on charges he supplied Nuzzi with stolen documents for his earlier Vatican expose, the best-selling His Holiness.
The stolen private letters between Benedict and his private secretary disclosed venomous infighting at the top of the Catholic Church and serious graft allegations in the Vatican government.
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