A new scandal over leaked confidential Vatican documents deepened on Tuesday as extracts of two books pointed to waste and mismanagement holding up Pope Francis's economic reforms.
ANSA sources said Francis is already "very saddened" by the renewed scandal, which led to the arrest at the weekend of two advisers who served on his financial reform commission.
High-ranking Spanish clergyman Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda and Public Relations expert Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui were detained and interrogated following a months-long investigation into the misappropriation and disclosure of classified information.
Vallejo Balda remains in custody. Chaouqui, who was released after agreeing to collaborate with investors, said on Tuesday that she was innocent.
"I did not betray the pope," Chaouqui wrote on Facebook, denying that she was the source of the leaks. "I never gave papers to anyone," she said, adding that she was confident the investigations would establish her innocence.
Advance previews of two books on the Vatican due out later this week and based on confidential documents emerged in the media on Tuesday, drawing further attention to the scandal.
Extracts of 'Avarice: Documents Revealing Wealth, Scandals and Secrets of Francis' Church, by Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi, said that officials in the Vatican's Secretariat for the Economy spent hundreds of thousands of euros on business class flights, clothes made to measure, and expensive furniture.
Fittipaldi wrote that a list of the secretariat's expenses was sent to Pope Francis in January 2015, less than a year after he established the dicastery to manage the Vatican's economic activities.
The list included "crazy expenses that reached more than half a million euros after just six months of operations", according to Fittipaldi.
The other book, "Merchants in the Temple," by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, paints a picture of financial mismanagement, greed, secrecy and waste in the Vatican's bureaucracy, according to extracts released to the media on Tuesday.
The Vatican has said it may take legal action against the books. It has condemned them as the "fruit of a serious betrayal of the trust given by the pope and, as regards the authors, of an operation to gain advantage from the gravely illegal act of obtaining confidential documentation".
The papacy of Francis's predecessor, Benedict XVI, was hit by the first so-called Vatileaks scandal over the leaking of embarrassing confidential Church papers.
Benedict's butler was convicted over the leaks but was subsequently released from a Vatican cell thanks to a papal pardon.
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