VATICAN CITY: Pope Benedict XVI pardoned his former butler Paolo Gabriele, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing secret papal memos, but banished the once loyal servant from the Vatican forever.

“This morning the Holy Father Benedict XVI visited Paolo Gabriele in prison in order to confirm his forgiveness and to inform him personally of his acceptance of Mr. Gabriele’s request for pardon,” the Vatican said in a statement.

The pardon for Gabriele, who was convicted and sentenced in October by a Vatican court for leaking secret papal documents to the press, was a “paternal gesture” for a man “with whom the pope shared a relationship of daily familiarity for many years.”

However, the ex-butler “cannot resume his previous occupation or continue to live in Vatican City,” it added.

After a 15-minute meeting with Benedict, Gabriele returned home to his wife and three children, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said. He had spent a total of three and a half months in detention.

The tone was intimate, Lombardi said. He likened the meeting between the pontiff and his betrayer to a prison encounter in 1983 between Pope John Paul II and the Turk Mehmet Ali Agca who had attempted to assassinate him two years earlier.

A former trusted aide who had passed hours of every day in the pontiff’s company, the 46-year-old Gabriele will now have to move out of his home within the Vatican’s walls.

“The Holy See, trusting in his sincere repentance, wishes to offer him the possibility of returning to a serene family life,” the Vatican said.

Gabriele, one of the few lay members of the “pontifical family”, leaked the sensitive memos to the press as part of a whistle-blowing campaign against what he called “evil and corruption” in the Vatican.

Many religious observers had thought it unlikely that the Vatican would expel Gabriele because of the risk that he would be free to reveal further secrets. But many hope that Gabriele’s freedom may allow him to reveal whether the leaks were orchestrated by higher powers.

The butler told Italian investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, who published the leaks, that there were “around 20” like-minded people in the Vatican, sparking rumors that disgruntled cardinals may have been behind the leaks.

There was much talk of a power struggle between the Vatican’s powerful number two, Tarcisio Bertone, and his opponents. The documents, secretly copied and leaked, also included allegations by a former governor of the city state of massive fraud within its walls.

During the trial, Vatican police said they had found more than 1,000 secret documents, some photocopies but others originals, in Gabriele’s home, that had been stolen from the papal palace. These included letters from cardinals and politicians and papers the pontiff himself had marked “To Be Destroyed.”

Gabriele had said that he wanted to “help” the Pope who, he claimed, had been kept in ignorance of scandals inside the Vatican.

While the disgraced butler was initially given a three-year jail term, the presiding judge reduced the sentence on the grounds of his past service to the Catholic Church and his apology to the Pope for betraying him.

The butler’s accomplice, a computer programmer who was convicted in November of helping Gabriele engineer the leaks, will also be pardoned, Lombardi said.

Claudio Sciarpelletti, who was given a two-month suspended sentence and a five-year probation in November, has already resumed working at the Vatican.