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
Somewhere out in the ocean right now, a small buoy is measuring wave direction and speed, along with barometric pressure and water temperature, feeding that data back to observatories. Even small upticks or downticks may signal the first stirrings of what could become a devastating storm. You don’t need special equipment, however, to detect warning … Read more
The reform-minded Francis hopes the upcoming trial of one of his top Cardinals will show he’s serious about cleaning up the Vatican’s finances. New information indicates that the troubles may boomerang back onto the pontiff himself. he biggest financial criminal trial in the history of the Catholic Church, scheduled to restart October 5 in a … Read more
While Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu is the most high-profile defendant among those indicted by Vatican prosecutors over a disputed London real estate deal, a group of four Italian laymen, both inside the Vatican and out, loom as the real architects of the scheme, forming the heart of what one senior Vatican official described as a … Read more
Cardinal Angelo Becciu authorized “classified” payments from the Vatican to a company in Australia during 2017 and 2018. The cardinal told The Pillar this week they are unrelated to the trial of Cardinal George Pell, which was underway at the time. Four international wire transfers, from 2016 to 2017, which total more than AU$2 million, … Read more