Pope's ex-butler sentenced to 18 months

VATICAN CITY, Oct. 6 (UPI) -- Pope Benedict's former butler, Paolo Gabriele, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after being found guilty of leaking thousands of Vatican documents.

The papers taken from the pope's desk were used in a book that revealed claims of corruption within the church hierarchy, CNN reported.

A three-judge panel deliberated a little over an hour before announcing the sentence following a week-long trial.

Gabriele had confessed to stealing church documents when questioned in June, police said. He had pleaded not guilty, but stood by his confession during the trial, the BBC reported.

In a statement to the court, he said his actions had a moral objective, saying he acted out of "overwhelming love" for the Church.

The prosecutor had sought a three-year sentence for Gabriele. However, his attorney asked the jury to reduce the theft charge to a lesser offense because, she said, he was motivated by "the evil he saw" within the Catholic Church.

Testimony during the trial revealed that police found more than 1,000 important documents among hundreds of thousands of papers in Gabriele's apartments in Vatican City and Castel Gondolfo.

Many of those documents were the sources of claims of corruption within the Catholic Church made in the book "His Holiness" by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi.

The pope is widely expected to pardon Gabriele.