Vatican: Pope Benedict XVI unafraid of leaks probe widening with butler Paolo Gabriele's cooperation

Updated at 1:35 p.m. ET

(AP) VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI isn't afraid about what might emerge in the widening investigation into leaked documents and is encouraging prosecutors and a fact-finding commission to get to the truth over one of the most serious Holy See scandals in recent history, the Vatican spokesman said Tuesday.

Spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said Benedict was pained by the leaks and that he, Lombardi, felt "personally violated," even though none of the spokesman's correspondence had filtered out to Italian media or into a recent book of leaked documents that have laid bare the infighting, intrigue and petty squabbles that have plagued the highest echelons of the Catholic Church's governance.

The so-called "Vatileaks" scandal has tormented the Vatican for months and represents one of the greatest breaches of trust and security for the pope in recent memory. Benedict's personal butler has been arrested, accused of theft, after documents he had no business having were found in his Vatican City apartment. Few think the butler acted alone, and the investigation is continuing on three separate tracks.

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The butler, Paolo Gabriele, is due to be formally questioned in the coming days by Vatican prosecutors following his May 23 arrest, Lombardi said. His lawyers reported that had pledged to fully cooperate with the investigation to get to the truth, raising the specter that higher ranking prelates may soon be implicated.

Lombardi said the scandal was certainly grave, and pointed to the fact that Benedict had established a commission of high-ranking cardinals to investigate alongside the criminal investigation and an internal administrative probe. The cardinals' commission is headed by a heavyweight: Cardinal Julian Herranz, an Opus Dei prelate who headed the Vatican's legal office as well as the disciplinary commission of the Vatican bureaucracy before retiring.

In addition, the pope's personal bodyguard, Domenico Giani, a former Italian secret service agent, has been on something of a crusade tracking down the origin of the leaks in recent months, Vatican insiders report.

"We aren't afraid of the problems, the difficulties and also the errors and guilt that might come out," Lombardi told reporters. "We are trying to do the right thing, following a difficult path of truth and taking the necessary measures to reestablish the trust and good functioning of the governance of the church and its institutions."

He said it certainly was a "difficult test" for the pope and his aides but that he hoped that the problems would be identified so that the Vatican can "enjoy the trust of the people God, which the pope certainly merits and we his collaborators must try to support."

The Vatileaks scandal broke in January when Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi broadcast letters from the former No. 2 Vatican administrator to the pope in which he begged not to be transferred for having exposed alleged corruption that cost the Holy See millions of dollars in higher contract prices. The prelate, Monsignor Carlo Maria Vigano, is now the Vatican's U.S. ambassador.

The scandal widened over the following months with documents leaked to Italian journalists that laid bare power struggles inside the Vatican over its efforts to show greater financial transparency and comply with international norms to fight money laundering. There was even a leak of a memo claiming that Benedict would die this year.

The scandal reached a peak last weekend, when Nuzzi published an entire book based on a trove of new documentation, including personal correspondence to and from the pope and his private secretary, much of which paints Benedict's No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in a negative light.

Vito Mancuso, an Italian theologian, told reporters at a press launch of the book "His Holiness" that the documents, many of which point to Bertone's involvement in scandals that have afflicted the papacy, all appeared aimed at providing evidence for why he should resign.

"Looking at the documents in succession, it seems like you're seeing a series of bullets aimed at hitting Bertone," Mancuso said.

Bertone, 77, was Benedict's loyal No. 2 at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith before being named secretary of state. With no diplomatic or broad administrative experience coming into the job, he has earned not a few critics inside the Vatican bureaucracy.

The Vatican probe into the leaks is actually working on several tracks: Vatican magistrates are pursuing the criminal investigation, and Gabriele was arrested as part of that. The Vatican secretariat of state is pursuing an administrative probe. And the three cardinals appointed by Benedict are acting in a sort of supervisory role, looking beyond the narrow criminal scope of the leaks to interview broadly across the Vatican bureaucracy, Lombardi said.

They report directly to the pope and can both share information with Vatican prosecutors and receive information from them, Lombardi said.

Gabriele's arrest occurred almost simultaneously with another stunning development inside the secretive walls of the Vatican: the ouster of Benedict's hand-picked president of the Vatican bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, himself close to Opus Dei. The bank's board took a vote of no-confidence last week to oust him for failing to do his job.Bank board member Carl Anderson told The Associated Press that the ouster had no political undertones and that the board wasn't taking cues from Bertone. He said it was purely a business decision since Gotti Tedeschi had become an obstacle to the bank's efforts to be more transparent in its financial dealings. Gotti Tedeschi hasn't responded to the accusations.

The chaos of the scandal came amid new developments in one of the Vatican's most enduring mysteries, the case of Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee who disappeared in 1983 while on her way to a music lesson in Rome.

On Sunday, Orlandi's brother led a march to the Vatican in hope that Benedict would offer them a prayer following the unearthing of the tomb of a mobster alleged to have kidnapped her. The crypt, inside an Opus Dei church in Rome, yielded hundreds of old bone fragments that are being examined for a trace of the girl.