The saga of the Cardinal George Pell trial had a startling new twist yesterday. It has long been argued that powerful forces conspired to bring down Pell – Victoria Police admitted to establishing a “Get Pell” squad specifically to fish for allegations before any had been made – but the new revelations seem to hint at enemies in high places in the cardinal’s own church.
Before he returned to Australia in 2017 to face a Victorian court, Pell was appointed finance minister at the Vatican, with a mission to clean up alleged widespread corruption in Church finances.
That mission seems to have made some powerful enemies with a long and devastating reach.
A senior Catholic cardinal has been accused of using €700,000 ($1.14m) of Vatican funds to bribe witnesses to secure a sex abuse conviction against a rival.
Italian media have reported that Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, 72, is suspected of wiring the cash to recipients in Australia who helped to ensure hostile testimony in the abuse trial of Cardinal George Pell, who was accused of molesting choir boys in Melbourne in the 1990s.
According to Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, none other than Becciu’s former right-hand-man, Monsignor Albert Perlasca, has stated that the transfer was made from the Vatican to a bank in Australia. Perlasca claims the transfer was made at the same time the case against Pell in Australia was developing. It’s not been stated exactly whom the transfer was made to.
The enmity between Pell and Becciu runs deep.
Quoting leaked documents, the Italian newspapers La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera reported at the weekend that Vatican investigators suspect that Cardinal Becciu hoped to use the money to definitively derail Cardinal Pell’s transparency program, which threatened to expose Cardinal Becciu’s allegedly corrupt management of Vatican cash[…]
Cardinal Becciu held an influential role in distributing and investing millions of euros of Catholic donations as the deputy secretary of state between 2011 and 2018 before Francis put him in charge of running the Holy See’s department responsible for making saints.
He was sacked from that job and stripped of the right to elect popes by Pope Francis last month, as Vatican investigators sifted through his spending record at the secretariat of state.
Their suspicions are focused on a multimillion investment he oversaw in a luxury property in Chelsea, London, which allegedly lost the Vatican money while making millions for consultants.
He is also allegedly suspected of funnelling Vatican cash to charities and businesses run by his three brothers. He has denied all wrongdoing.
Cardinal Becciu’s clash with Cardinal Pell came to a head in 2016 when the Australian ordered an audit of Vatican finances by an external accountancy firm. Soon after it was launched Cardinal Becciu overruled Cardinal Pell and blocked the audit.
A year later, he was behind the ousting of the Vatican’s auditor-general, Libero Milone, who was accused of spying on officials.
“Milone was Pell’s right-hand man and the enmity between Pell and Becciu was huge,” Massimo Franco, the author of The Enigma of Bergoglio, a new book about Francis, said.
Meanwhile, the Pontiff of Piffle remains preoccupied with his social justice agenda.
The scandal cast a shadow yesterday over the publication of a key Vatican document calling for a more caring and sharing society and denouncing the evils of war[…]the Pope stated that war was never warranted, rejecting the Catholic Church’s traditional concept of a “just war”.
He also accused populist leaders of “appealing to the basest and most selfish inclinations of certain sectors of the population”, while criticising “trickle-down” free-market neo-liberalism for failing to stamp out poverty.
Questioning whether the right to private property was “absolute or inviolable”, he quoted early Christian thinkers who claimed, “if one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it”.
Francis said the coronavirus pandemic had confirmed his belief that present political and economic institutions must be reformed to address the legitimate needs of the people most harmed by the coronavirus.
It might be advisable to put his own, corrupt house in order before finger-wagging everyone else.
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