An Italian journalist under criminal investigation by the Vatican was summoned to Vatican City this week, the Associated Press reports. The journalist, who published a book, based on leaked documents, about scandals at the Vatican, said Tuesday that he refused to answer a prosecutor’s questions.

A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told the New York Times last week that Emiliano Fittipaldi, the author of Avarice, and Gianluigi Nuzzi, the author of Merchants in the Temple, were both under investigation for “possible participation in the dissemination of reserved information and confidential documents,” which is “a crime under the Vatican City criminal code.”

Vatican City, which Italy recognized as an independent state in 1929, has its own laws that, especially regarding transparency, are far stricter than Italy’s.

Fittipaldi and Nuzzi said they had not been officially informed of the investigation, but Fittipaldi said he went to the Vatican on Monday to find out what he was being accused of. However, according to the AP, Fittipaldi said he refused to answer any questions, invoking Italy’s constitutional freedom of the press. “I’d rather go to jail than reveal one of Avarice’s sources,” he said.

Earlier this month, two members of a commission appointed by Pope Francis to review the Vatican’s financial holdings—Msgr. Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda and Francesca Chaouqui, a laywoman—were arrested on suspicion of leaking the documents to journalists.

The two had access to the documents cited in both Fittipaldi and Nuzzi’s books, the AP reports.

“I’m really shocked,” Fittipaldi said. “Reading my book, I would have thought that once the news was out there would have been investigations about other things inside the Vatican—not the publication of the news.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.