Officials 'rented out buildings cheap as favours for powerful colleagues' Vatican-owned properties are being used by priests as brothels and massage parlours, according to the latest claims to emerge from the Vatileaks scandal.
The properties implicated in a report, leaked by a Vatican mole, include premises close to the Italian Parliament and a solarium near Piazza Barberini.
A Vatican department, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, owns hundreds of exclusive properties in central Rome, was also singled out in the document.
It claimed that Vatican officials were allowing buildings to be leased out at peppercorn rents as favours to powerful colleagues.
The document also alleged that they would allow dodgy property deals that would see addresses being used as brothels and illicit saunas, it was reported by The Independent.
The claims come two years after the Church was embarrassed by revelations that several priests shared an apartment block with Europe's largest homosexual sauna.
Its website ironically touts one of its 'bear nights' with a video of a hairy man stripping down and changing into a priest's outfit.
It says Bruno is 'free to the music of his clergyman, remaining in a thong, because he wants to expose body and soul'.
The purchase was apparently the brainchild of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Pope Benedict's much-disliked right-hand man who held the Vatican's purse strings during the last pontificate.
The latest Vatileaks claims emerged as Pope Francis insisted the Church shun all temptations of power, prestige and money as he pressed his reform agenda amid a new scandal at the Vatican.
Francis outlined his vision of the church in a lengthy speech to Italian bishops gathered in Florence, leaving behind a Vatican reeling from revelations of internal resistance to his reform agenda.
The Argentine Jesuit told the bishops he wanted a church that was humble and poor and not obsessed with preaching doctrine or acquiring power.
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