“I need to speak to the Pope,” says Libero Milone, the former Vatican auditor general, who was forced to resign in 2017—because, he says, he had exposed widespread financial corruption.
In a July 30 session with journalists, Milone said that efforts to restore integrity and accountability in the Vatican’s financial affairs, led by the late Cardinal George Pell, were thwarted by a powerful bloc of officials of the Roman Curia, who ultimately arranged his removal.
Last week a Vatican appeals court dismissed Milone’s wrongful-termination lawsuit, confirming a lower court’s verdict. The former auditor now plans to take his appeal to the Court of Cassation, the Vatican’s top court. But more importantly, he hopes to arrange a private meeting with Pope Leo XIV, in which he could inform the new Pontiff about the situation that he uncovered. As Milone put it, “at the end of the day, the best thing is for two people to sit down in front of each other and talk this through.”
Milone paints a dramatic picture of the bureaucratic maneuvering for power within the Roman Curia, comparing the situation to Animal Farm. “Little did George Orwell know when he wrote it in 1944 that he was writing about the Vatican in the year 2000,” he says. Orwell wrote his novel after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and abdication of Czar Nicholas. “You know, we had a Pope who advocated as well,” Milone observes. “Because of a pressure group—a pressure group that insisted on doing certain things, and Pope Benedict didn’t think he was up to managing that situation, and he retired.”
The former auditor sees Cardinal Pell as the primary victim of a Vatican cabal determined to resist economic reforms. Pell, he says, “was imprisoned unjustly, because it was all a big frame-up, in my opinion. And he died in mysterious circumstances.”
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