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VATICAN CITY — Within the high walls of the Holy See, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu — former head of the Office of “Miracles” that coined saints — was considered a papabile, a possible next pope.
Then his career collided with the church's prosecutors, who accused the 75-year-old Italian and nine other officials of corruption, setting up the Vatican's trial of the century.
On Saturday, Becciu – the first cardinal to be tried in the Vatican's little-known criminal court – was found guilty of multiple counts of embezzlement. Becciu was read out in a converted area of the museum that houses the Sistine Chapel and sentenced to five years and six months in prison.
Becciu's lawyers said the decision will be appealed, but it brings the cardinal closer to one of Vatican City's few prison cells – an outcome that is both a sign of accountability and a challenge for an institution that has long struggled to stamp out corruption represents embarrassment. He was also banned from holding office in the Vatican.
The case, a marathon of 86 trials that included a hodgepodge of different charges, exposed the murky world of Vatican finances as well as the pope's crusade for accountability, even, critics argued, at the expense of the rule of law. The star defendant was always Becciu, once a papal confidant who resigned from his senior post after a surprise meeting in 2020 in which Pope Francis dramatically confronted him about the allegations against him. Francis stripped him of his privileges as a cardinal before he was found guilty. Later, some of these rights were unofficially reinstated.
Meanwhile, the Vatican is doing worse as new questions are raised about the effectiveness and fairness of its legal system. Although the case was presented as an exercise in transparency under a crusading pope, it nevertheless appeared to backfire in crucial ways, opening an unwelcome window into the intrigue, infighting and incompetence that underlies the world's smallest sovereign state.
“In the end, the pope kicked a hornet’s nest,” said Giovanni Maria Vian, a former editor of the Vatican newspaper.
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A bad investment by the Vatican in a swank London property that ultimately led to massive losses sparked the extensive investigation, which included unprecedented raids on Vatican offices. When prosecutors investigated, they claimed Becciu wrongfully funneled 125,000 Euros to a Sardinian charity run by his brother and another 575,000 euros to Cecilia Marogna, a Sardinian woman with a humanitarian organization in Slovenia that, Becciu said, was supposed to help free a kidnapped nun. Other senior Vatican officials who signed the London deal were never charged, and the pope had been previously informed of the transaction.
Before the trial began, Francis appeared to use his power in a way that his supporters saw as a push for transparency, but critics called it excessive from a man serving as the absolute monarch of Vatican City. He approved a series of secret orders aimed at giving prosecutors more power, including an order that allowed investigators to conduct wiretaps.
As prosecutors tried to prove their case, They have been plagued by setbacks, including questions about the credibility of their star witness and revelations that he had been trained by a Becciu enemy. .
The trial came as a pope was elected with a mandate to reform the Roman Curia – the opaque bureaucracy that runs Vatican City. It was considered to have made progress, although not yet sufficient, in improving financial transparency. The Vatican Bank – long plagued by secret accounting and money laundering scandals – has undergone a purge over the past decade, a process that began under Pope Benedict XVI. begun and accelerated under Francis.
Francis has also banned gifts to Vatican employees worth more than $50 and forced Holy See officials to sign a declaration that they have no assets in tax havens.
The Becciu case “says a lot about the pope's theatrical and spectacular desire to come clean,” said Emiliano Fittipaldi, an Italian journalist and prominent Vatican observer. He added: “Becciu became a kind of symbol or scapegoat of a system that finally had to be dealt with, even if he had committed no crime.”
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Prosecutor Alessandro Diddi demanded prison sentences of between four and 13 years for the defendants and compensation of almost 500 million euros. Becciu maintained his “absolute innocence” and claimed he had not stolen “a single euro”. During the trial, Becciu appeared to suspect that the pope had turned against him, even as he was forced to deny reports that he had funded an international smear campaign against one of Francis' harshest conservative critics.
Some observers questioned why the Vatican even tried to prosecute the complicated case, which stretched from Britain to Slovenia to Italy, rather than handing it over to better-resourced Italian authorities.
After Francis became pope, Becciu, who previously served as de facto chief of staff in the Vatican's Secretariat of State – its diplomatic arm – traveled frequently with him and was considered one of the few men within the Holy See who could freely contact the pope's door .
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During his tenure, the Secretariat invested in a luxury building on London's fashionable Sloane Avenue through the Italian financier Raffaele Mincione. The property once served as a warehouse for Harrods department store. With upgrades the Vatican should make a mint.
Instead, it turned out that the property was radically overvalued. It was sold last year at a loss of $175 million. But before that, attempts by the secretariat to refinance a loan through the Vatican Bank set off alarm bells that reached the pope and triggered the broader investigation.
On the witness stand, Becciu lamented his transformation from a pious clergyman to a “monster.” Behind the scenes, he set about proving his innocence. In 2021, before the trial began, he wrote a series of letters to Francis asking the pope to confirm that he was aware of the London deal and even supported it.
Becciu also asked Francis to admit that he was previously aware of the agreement with Marogna, the wife of the charity in Slovenia, who was paid an exorbitant fee for unclear services. Becciu said he believed the money would support the freeing of Sister Gloria Cecilia Narváez, a Colombian nun who was kidnapped in Mali in 2017.
In a subsequent call to Francis, which came a day after the pope was discharged from a Rome hospital for intestinal surgery, Becciu secretly recorded the pontiff, who appeared to be sympathetic to his plight. But a follow-up letter to the pope seeking his written support against the allegations ended with a frosty letter written in legalese in which Francis expressed “surprise” at Becciu's request and said he could not help him.
“I regret to inform you that I cannot comply with your request,” the pope wrote.
Prosecutors' case relied in part on testimony from Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, the Vatican official who signed contracts related to a London property in 2018. Originally the target of the investigation, he changed his statement and became a witness for the prosecution against Becciu. Former Vatican diplomat Francesca Chaouqui, who was implicated in the Vatileaks scandal that allegedly led to the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. was sentenced to 10 months in prison, later testified that she had tried to influence Perlasca after accusing Becciu of being involved in her downfall.