Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the former papal chief of staff convicted of financial crimes, has said that the exercise of papal power needs to change, calling for the pope to lose his governing authority in the Vatican City State.
Becciu, who was convicted of embezzlement, fraud, and abuse of office by a Vatican City tribunal last year, is currently appealing a sentence of five-and-half-years in prison, which was imposed after a trial which itself lasted more than two-and-a-half years.
The cardinal gave an extensive series of interviews, filmed over the course of several years and broadcast last week on Belgian TV network VRT as part of the program “Het Vaticaan: de staat van de kerk.”
In the broadcast, the cardinal, whom Francis ordered to resign from office in 2020 pending his indictment and trial, discussed a range of controversial topics, including his views on Pope Francis, as well as his dealings with former Vatican financial authorities.
While the cardinal continued to insist on his innocence throughout the interview sessions, his narrative of events appeared often at odds with his admissions in court and with other publicly known events.
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During the program, broadcast on October 24, Cardinal Becciu recalled the day in September 2020 on which Pope Francis demanded his resignation, after the pope was presented with the results of a Vatican criminal investigation into the cardinal.
“You transferred money from Peter’s Pence to your diocese, but this money went into your brother’s pockets,” Becciu recalled the pope telling him, in reference to the cardinal’s admitted financial support for the Spes Cooperative charity run by his brother Antonio Becciu in their native Sardinia.
In the program, interview sessions with Becciu were interspersed with footage of the cardinal inspecting the charity’s work in Sardinia, including a bakery.
“If I sent 25,000 euros to the diocese, those 25,000 euros were needed to finish the restoration of an oven… I wanted to help in the diocese, a cooperative in the diocese, a Caritas cooperative of which my brother is the president. But I am proud to have helped this cooperative… I mean this money was charity wasn’t it?” Becciu said.
The cardinal was convicted of funneling tens of thousands of euros of Church funds into his brother’s personal bank account, something he admitted doing in court, while insisting such transfers were ordinary Vatican practice when supporting charitable works.
Despite his defense, Becciu was found guilty by Vatican City judges of violating financial laws which prohibit Church property or money from being sold or given to relatives “without a special permission given in writing by the competent authority.”
Both Vatican and Italian prosecutors have also questioned how “charitable” the Becciu brothers’ purposes were.
During Becciu’s trial, Vatican prosecutors told the court that their Italian counterparts had found the forged receipts among nearly 1,000 pages of paperwork they examined.
When the paperwork for the supposed deliveries was produced, no one could recognize the signatures on the documents, prosecutors said.
Italian financial police concluded that invoices were created just weeks before police searches, and were fabricated to cover supposed deliveries dating back to 2018, for which no other records exist.
Despite the evidence presented against him in court, Becciu claimed in the program that “the pope was misled” about the cardinal’s crimes.
“I guess someone took revenge on me. Because maybe I was too friendly with the pope? Were they jealous?” Becciu speculated during his recent interviews.
Throughout his trial and following his conviction, lawyers for Becciu have argued that Pope Francis interfered in criminal case in Vatican City and violated the cardinal’s right to due process by “changing the law” to favor prosecutors — even though the only law changed by Francis was to allow cardinals to stand trial in ordinary court.
Despite Becciu’s repeated insistence that he remains loyal to Pope Francis, during an interview segment filmed in Sardinia, the cardinal called for a radical overhaul of the Petrine office after Francis’ reign.
“It will be necessary to clarify the exercise of papal authority,” Becciu said. The cardinal went on to insist that the pope should be removed from the temporal governance of Vatican City all together:
“That is, he should no longer be a head of state.”
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During his interview sessions, Becciu also addressed his conflicts with Cardinal George Pell, who until 2017 was prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy, and Libero Milone, who served as the first auditor general of the Vatican, before being forced from his position by Becciu.
“With Cardinal Pell, we did have a period of contrast, but my contrast stemmed not from wanting to oppose the reforms, but because Cardinal Pell wanted to impose rules that were not rules yet,” Becciu claimed in the interview.
“He wanted to audit the accounts of the Secretariat of State. But to audit the Secretariat of State’s accounts, you need authorization from the pope, which never happened,” said Becciu.
However, as previously reported by The Pillar, both Pell and Milone have said Becciu initially cooperated with their efforts to audit the Secretariat of State, but became confrontational after they discovered a series of loans and investments obscured from departmental ledgers using accounting practices prohibited under Vatican financial law.
Becciu has routinely stated in court that the Secretariat of State was outside the oversight of both the Secretariat for the Economy and the Office of the Auditor General, despite no such exemption being present in either department’s remit.
In legal submissions obtained by The Pillar, submitted in writing and reiterated during the lawsuit hearing on Oct. 18, lawyers for the Secretariat of State defined the relationship between Milone former department and the secretariat as “the relationship between the ‘entity that provides to the audit of the financial statements’ (the Auditor) and the ‘entity subject to audit’ (the Secretariat of State).”
Becciu has previously taken credit for forcing Milone’s ouster from office in 2017, saying that he was forced to resign under threat of criminal prosecution for “spying” on the private finances of senior officials, including Becciu. However, in the interview broadcast last week, Becciu attempted to shift all blame for Milone’s firing onto Pope Francis.
“Dr. Libero Milone accuses me of having plotted his defenestration from the Secretariat of State. False, false, false. I only carried out orders,” Becciu said. “The pope called me one morning and told me, ‘Look, I charge you with a burdensome task and I am sorry that I always have to give you unpleasant assignments. You must call Dr. Milone and tell him that he no longer has my trust. Therefore it is best for him to resign.’ I did this, he did not believe me.”
“What it was,” said Milone, “is that I discovered that there were cardinals putting money in their pockets, they were doing strange things, and my reporting line was to the pope, so I reported everything to the pope.”
Milone said his work uncovered the misappropriation of hundreds of thousands of euros by individual cardinals and prelates, fictitious building projects, and the use of a Church institution to allegedly launder money to Italian political parties.
“Evidently, Becciu and his friends must have come across these reports because he was the pope’s chief of staff at the time, and got worried because ‘this guy’ was putting these cardinals in difficulty,” he previously told The Pillar. “These are the reasons for which I was apparently accused of spying.”
Becciu also used the television interview to address accusations previously made in the Italian press that he had played a role in orchestrating false accusations of child sexual abuse against Cardinal Pell.
Those accusations resulted in Pell’s departure from office at the same time as Milone’s sacking, with the cardinal returning to Australia to stand trial before eventually being exonerated by the country’s High Court.
“It’s true [the Italian newspaper] Corriere della Sera launched the accusation [in 2020], but it was manipulated news,” Becciu said. “It’s crazy, crazy stuff.”
The newspaper suggested that hundreds of thousands of euros sent from the Vatican to Australia could have been to bribe Pell’s accusers, noting that the transfers coincided exactly with Pell’s first demands for an investigation into the Secretariat of State’s finances.
The amount and purpose of that money has been the subject of numerous press reports, including by The Pillar, and with Australian financial watchdogs initially flagged some AU$2 billion as having been transferred from the Vatican between 2014-2020.
“We have the records, given to me by Cardinal Parolin just the day before my interrogation, from which it is manifest that money was sent to Australia, 2.3 million Australian dollars,” Becciu said in the interview broadcast last week. “This payment had been requested from us by the Pontifical Council of Social communications at the time, because the ‘.Catholic’ domain was to be guaranteed. But only that, the authorization was given by Cardinal Pell.”
Previous reporting by The Pillar has established that large sums were sent by Becciu from the Vatican to Australia at that time, though Becciu insisted the money was for a “confidential” purpose.
Subsequent reporting by The Pillar also established that money was sent by Becciu to a tech company in Australia and could be linked to the ‘.Catholic’ domain.
However, Becciu’s claim in the interview that the sending of the funds had been approved personally by Cardinal Pell runs directly contrary to repeated public statements from Pell prior to his death in January 2023.
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Although the majority of the interview footage broadcast last week was filmed prior to Cardinal Becciu’s conviction in December last year, the final segment shows the cardinal discussing the prospects for his appeal and the enormous financial liabilities assessed against him by the court for the embezzlement and abuse of millions of euros of Vatican funds.
“So now there is the appeal,” Becciu said in the interview. “We don’t know when it will be. But I don’t have any assets, I don’t own any houses, any apartments, any seaside villas,” the cardinal said. “All I own is a little car down there.”
However, despite claiming to have extremely limited personal means, Vatican police testified during the cardinal’s trial that when he was questioned about his employment of a “private spy,” to whom he wired hundreds of thousands of euros in Church funds, the cardinal offered to repay more than half a million euros out of his personal bank account to resolve the issue.
According to the police investigator, Becciu offered to repay the funds from his personal account at the IOR, a Vatican bank, and asked them to keep the matter confidential because it would cause “serious harm” to the cardinal and his family.
