Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu of Italy is seen during a consistory ceremony in 2018
Even by the byzantine standards of the Vatican, it has been an extraordinary past week.
Fallout from a scandal involving a disgraced cardinal, a London property deal gone sour and allegations of embezzlement and unbridled nepotism has shaken the Holy See.
The characters in this tangled and oblique affair range from a Sardinian woman claiming to be an intelligence expert with links to the secret services, to a lawyer for the cardinal who had to resign after posting social media images of himself posing on a beach in skimpy Speedos.
It has exposed ineptitude in how the Vatican handles its huge wealth, which was recently revealed to amount to €4 billion, as well as the extent of the resistance that Pope Francis faces in cleaning out the Augean stables of the Catholic Church’s finances.
“If all this Vatican intrigue had been in a novel, I would have said it was too far-fetched to be believable,” said Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.
It has been a turbulent time in the Vatican — seen here from a bridge across the Tiber
Credit: Getty
The scandal revolves around Angelo Becciu, a cardinal who was effectively the Vatican’s deputy interior minister and managed millions of euros in Church funds, some of it donations from ordinary Catholics.
He was forced to resign by Pope Francis two weeks ago in a surprise fall from grace that was described as an “earthquake” by Vatican experts, since when a dizzying list of allegations have emerged about whom he channeled Vatican funds to.
The recipients of his largesse allegedly include his three brothers, who ran various companies and charitable foundations around the world, as well as Cecilia Marogna, a 39-year-old Italian intelligence operative who claims she runs a system of “parallel diplomacy” protecting Vatican embassies in Africa and the Middle East from terrorist attacks.
At the heart of the scandal is the cardinal’s involvement in a controversial €324 million property deal — the Vatican’s purchase of a former Harrods car showroom in Sloane Avenue, London, which it intended to convert into luxury apartments.
Pope Francis is said to be angry at the fact that millions of euros were paid to middlemen who brokered the deal and has ordered a thorough investigation.
The property was sold by Raffaele Mincione, a millionaire financier who was once engaged to the model Heather Mills before she married and then divorced Sir Paul McCartney.
London-based Mr Mincione has denied any wrongdoing, saying the Vatican knew exactly what it was getting into because the sale was drawn up transparently and was signed off by auditors.
Cardinal Becciu was one of the most powerful figures in the Vatican
Credit: AFP
“As with all such deals, the fees were all pre-arranged. The Vatican was aware of the costs of doing the transaction,” a source close to the businessman told The Telegraph.
“We didn’t swindle the Vatican, we didn’t hide anything, and for them to be complaining about the deal now seems like sour grapes.”
Mr Mincione feels he is “an innocent party ensnared in a much bigger power struggle within the Vatican.”
Questions are now emerging about whether the Pope’s sacking of Becciu – and the very rare decision to strip him of his rights as a cardinal — was an over-reaction to his alleged misdemeanours.
There are claims that a dirty tricks campaign is being conducted against the cardinal by his enemies within the Vatican.
Cardinal Becciu – he has kept his title but not the rights that go with it — oversaw the purchase of 60 Sloane Avenue when he was deputy of the Secretariat of State between 2011 and 2018.
Middlemen reportedly made millions of euros in the deal, prompting a Vatican investigation into how it apparently paid more than it should have done for the prime property.
“He seems to have made some bad investments. That’s not a crime. It may be stupidity or ineptitude or naivety, but it’s not criminal,” said Robert Mickens, a Vatican expert based in Rome and the editor of La Croix International, a Catholic news website.
“The Sloane Avenue deal does not seem to be at the level of high crimes and misdemeanours. There’s no suggestion he was lining his own pockets.”
The cardinal has also been accused of funneling hundreds of thousands of euros, as well as contracts, to his three brothers.
One of them runs a charity in Sardinia while another has a construction business that was allegedly paid to carry out restoration work on churches in Angola and Cuba – two places where Cardinal Becciu served as the Vatican’s nuncio or ambassador.
“Giving contracts to his brothers may be unethical, but again it’s not illegal. For him to be stripped of all his rights as a cardinal seems to be disproportionate. There are cardinals who have covered up sex abuse and they did not have their red hats taken away,” Mr Mickens told The Telegraph.
Cardinal Becciu has protested his innocence ever since he was forced to step down, and reiterated that position in a statement on Thursday.
He had committed “no illicit activities whatsoever” and said he was “serenely awaiting” the outcome of any investigation by Vatican prosecutors.
He said his contacts with Ms Marogna, the Sardinian intelligence consultant, “strictly pertained to institutional affairs.”
All last week there was a steady drip feed of stories in the Italian press that were deeply unfavourable to the cardinal.
Cardinal George Pell recently returned to Rome after having his conviction for sexual abuse overturned
Credit: Getty
They included allegations – which he “categorically” denied – that he paid €700,000 to witnesses to try to influence the evidence they gave in the Australian trial against Cardinal George Pell, who was accused of molesting choirboys in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne while he was archbishop in the 1990s. Cardinal Pell was acquitted of those charges and recently returned to Rome.
The question is, who is leaking the Vatican documents on which all these allegations are based?
It is known that Cardinal Becciu was at odds with Cardinal Pell when the latter, as economy minister, started to scrutinise the Vatican’s murky finances.
“I would not dismiss the possibility that Pell’s people facilitated some of this reporting,” claimed Mr Mickens.
Father Reese, who is a senior analyst for Religion News Service, a Catholic agency, said: “It’s clear that Becciu and Pell clashed when Pell was the economy minister because he wanted to have the entire Vatican audited. Becciu did not want the Secretariat of State audited, and perhaps now we know why.
“Is there some sort of dirty tricks going on against Becciu or was he doing dirty tricks against Pell? Only a full, international investigation will get to the truth. As they said during Watergate, ‘follow the money’.”
Ms Marogna admits she received €500,000 of Vatican money over four years through a company she set up in Slovenia, saying she used it for “humanitarian operations”.
Cecilia Marogna says she was engaged in 'parallel diplomacy' to protect Vatican embassies in Africa and the Middle East
She thinks her links to the cardinal were leaked in order to discredit him. There were even suggestions in the Italian press that she was his lover, which she strongly denies.
She believes she was used “to divert attention from the London scandal,” she told Corriere della Sera newspaper.
“The payments made to me are small beer in the context of a much wider battle for power which has already claimed many scalps. It is only just getting going, this clash between the factions that oppose Pope Francis.”
As the mud flies, Pope Francis ploughs on with trying to clean up the Holy See’s finances. On Thursday, he met representatives of Moneyval, the European Council’s anti-money laundering experts, telling them that the Vatican was committed to “clean finance” and invoking the Biblical story of the merchants being cast out of the temple.
He received the team at a private audience in his library in the Apostolic Palace – an indication of the importance he accords the issue.
The Vatican submitted to evaluation by Moneyval a decade ago, in a bid to shake off its shady financial reputation.
The claims and counter-claims now swirling around Rome are all part of a titanic struggle within the Vatican between those who support Pope Francis’s reforms and those who are trying to sabotage them, according to Bartolomeo Sorge, a theologian and Jesuit priest.
“Francis is the first modern Pope since the Vatican Council (in the early 1960s) to directly tackle the internal reform of the Church and that has created great difficulties for him,” said Father Sorge, the former director of La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit publication.
“Scandals are emerging from this reform, such as pedophilia and the poor management of Vatican finances. But these are signs that he is doing something serious.”
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