The Daily Beast reports:
VATICAN CITY — For many inside the Vatican, Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui was trouble from the start. The willowy 32-year-old brunette raised eyebrows almost immediately in 2013 when, at 30, she was handpicked by Pope Francis as the only laywoman on an eight-memberadvisory panel called the Commission for Reference on the Organization of the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See.
On Monday, the Vatican confirmed that Chaouqui, along with a Spanish monsignor named Lucio Vallejo Balda, who was the secretary of COSEA, had been arrested for leaking documents to journalists.
Sound familiar? It should. In 2012, Pope Benedict’s butler Paolo Gabriele was arrested for just the same crime, and the butler was charged with leaking to just the same journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who has a new book coming out this week.
His previous book, His Holiness, is widely believed to be the last straw that led to the eventual resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. God (and likely Chaouqui) only knows what his new book, called Via Crucis in Italian and Merchants in the Temple in English, will reveal when it hits bookstores Thursday. Nuzzi tells The Daily Beast that Chaouqui did not collaborate on this, or any, of his books. But he told us the same thing about the butler, too.
Though Chaouqui’s résumé is impressive at face value, with stints at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe and Ernst & Young, she didn’t quite fit the Vatican mold. She was a devout Catholic, sure, but she had tweeted a number of questionable missives that didn’t sit well with the ruling Vatican elite at the time, including how she thought that the Holy See’s then-secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone was “corrupt,” and how Italy’s finance minister Giulio Tremonti was “un gay,” and who she implied was quite well known among the Vatican’s gay lobby and for which Tremonti later sued her for slander (the case is pending).
She had also perpetuated a rumor that Pope Benedict XVI had leukemia, not so different from the recent rumor about Francis and a non-existent brain tumor. But perhaps the biggest question mark in her suitability for such a high-profile Vatican job is the series of semi-nude photos she posted of herself with an equally unclothed man, which earned her an accolade from the website Go Topless, which congratulated her as “the only female aide appointed by the Vatican for freely showing her nude torso.”
Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, assistant to the Pope
“I am the only woman on this type of commission and of course everyone wants to find a way to disgrace me,” she said at the time. No one pushed the matter further and the COSEA finished their assigned recommendations and eventually dismantled. Her Twitter account, in which she shared what now seem like cryptic tweets with Nuzzi, has also disappeared, though lives on in eternity through retweets and her digital footprint.