A fired Vatican auditor and his deputy are suing the Holy See for $9.25 million, “alleging they were sacked after discovering financial irregularities,” according to an account by Reuters this week. The auditor, Libero Milone, says that Pope Francis signed off on his firing in 2017 after he exposed graft-ridden Vatican officials.
Pope Francis appointed Milone to his position in 2015, ostensibly for the purpose of purifying the Vatican’s notoriously crooked finances and improving its financial practices. But, as usual, Pope Francis was more interested in talking a good game about “reform” than playing one. By 2017, he let the openly corrupt Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who is now on trial at the Vatican for graft, fire Milone. Becciu claimed that Milone “went against all the rules and was spying on the private lives of his superiors and staff, including me.”
It is obvious that a corrupt Vatican punished Milone for simply blowing the whistle on thieving prelates like Becciu. This isn’t even a close call. Becciu, as the Vatican’s own half-hearted trial against him is bringing out, was up to his eyeballs in graft. He fired Milone not for any real improprieties but for uncovering Vatican rackets.
Milone’s lawsuit will serve as yet another illustration of this pontificate’s bogus reform agenda. We were told at the beginning of it that Pope Francis would fumigate the foul odors of corrupt finance that have long wafted over the Vatican. (The recent Netflix documentary Vatican Girl revolves in large part around this longstanding culture of malfeasance at the Holy See.) All we have since then is business as usual, as Milone’s lawsuit punctuates.
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