Cardinal Angelo Becciu said Sunday that he has been invited to attend an upcoming consistory for the College of Cardinals, claiming that Pope Francis told him his rights and privileges as a cardinal will be reinstated. If this is true, the pope’s decision is a dramatic reversal of fortune for Becciu, who is currently on … Read more
Cardinal Angelo Becciu said Wednesday that he is blameless in the forced resignation of a Vatican auditor, because it came at Pope Francis’ request. Cardinal Becciu was said to be responsible for the sudden firing in 2017 of the Vatican’s first auditor general, Libero Milone, as well as the cancelation of an internal audit. But … Read more
In a story that has more red-herrings than a Poirot novel, the drawn-out saga of Cardinal Becciu’s alleged financial improprieties and their possible influence on the case against Cardinal George Pell recently took another turn. On April 9th, an Italian news outlet stated that new evidence explains the real reason for secret transfers of over … Read more
The technology company to which Cardinal Angelo Becciu authorized millions of dollars of payments in Australia has been named in an emerging U.S. political scandal, raising new questions about the Vatican’s business with the firm. Neustar, a technology and security company, has been named in pretrial motions filed by John Durham, the special counsel investigating … Read more
Vatican prosecutors issued new indictments Tuesday (Jan. 25) against four individuals involved in a financial scandal over the Roman Catholic Church’s money-losing investment in a London real estate deal, further expanding the number of defendants in what is already being referred to as the Vatican “megatrial.” All of the newly indicted are familiar figures in … Read more
Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the disgraced former sostituto of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, has written to Cardinal George Pell, the former prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, declining to explain why he sent millions of euros of Vatican funds to Australia during the run up to Pell’s 2017 criminal trial. In an open letter … Read more
Francis not only had been kept informed of every step of the London deal, actually approving it, but personally intervened in at least one crucial moment of the affair. While at the Vatican the trial of Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu and the other defendants is approaching its fifth hearing without ever really getting started, the … Read more
Defense lawyers in the Vatican’s fraud and extortion trial accused prosecutors on Wednesday of defying a court order by withholding pieces of evidence — including an alleged interrogation of Pope Francis — as the pontiff’s own role in a flawed London property investment again came before the court. The president of the Vatican City State … Read more
Cardinal Angelo Becciu’s eight-year tenure in the Vatican Secretariat of State has left a trail of scandal and moral wreckage that makes for sensational headlines. But that may be obscuring the more significant and under-reported aspect of Holy See’s corruption problem, and that is the apparent involvement of Pope Francis himself, as well as numerous … Read more
Cardinal Angelo Becciu’s fall from grace in the Francis papacy is unparalleled in recent Vatican history, and the Vatican’s public relations apparatus is portraying his case as an example of the pope’s commitment to cleaning up corruption within the Holy See. However, Becciu’s misbehavior was on public display for many years while he held the … Read more