VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis will bid Cardinal George Pell a final farewell during a funeral mass on Saturday, the Vatican said, as revelations surface about the Australian prelate’s growing concerns over what he saw as a “catastrophe” and “catastrophe” of the papacy under Francis.
The Vatican said Thursday the dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, will celebrate Pell’s funeral mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. As is customary at cardinal funerals, Francis will deliver a final commendation and greeting.
Pell, who served as Francis’ first finance minister for three years before returning to Australia to face child sex abuse charges, died Tuesday in a Rome hospital of heart complications following hip surgery. He was 81.
He had split his time between Rome and Sydney after being cleared of allegations in 2020 that he molested two choirboys when he was Archbishop of Melbourne. The Australian Supreme Court overturned a previous court conviction and Pell was released after 404 days of solitary confinement.
Pell had repeatedly clashed with the Vatican’s Italian bureaucracy during his 2014-2017 tenure as prefect of the Holy See’s Economic Secretariat, which Francis created to deal with the Vatican’s opaque finances. In his telegram of condolence, Francis credited Pell with laying the groundwork for ongoing reforms, which included introducing international standards for budgeting and accounting by Vatican offices.
But Pell, a staunch conservative, became increasingly disillusioned with the direction of the papacy from Francis, including his emphasis on including and promoting the laity about the future of the church.
He authored a remarkable memorandum setting out his concerns and recommendations for the next pope in a future conclave, which circulated last spring and was published under the pseudonym “Demos” on the Vatican blog Settimo Cielo.
Blogger Sandro Magister revealed Wednesday that Pell was in fact the author of the memo, which is an extraordinary indictment of the current pontificate of a once-close associate of Francis.
Divided into two parts — “The Vatican Today” and “The Next Conclave” — the memo lists a number of items covering everything from Francis’ “weakened” preaching of the gospel to the Holy See’s precarious financial position and the city-state’s “lack of respect for the law,” including the ongoing financial corruption process that Pell himself advocated.
“Commentators from every school, though for different reasons … agree that this pontificate is a disaster in many or most respects; a disaster,” Pell wrote.
Also on Wednesday, conservative magazine The Spectator published an allegedly autographed article that Pell had written in the days before his death. In the article, Pell described as a “toxic nightmare” the two-year survey of lay Catholics on issues such as church teaching on sexuality and the role of women, which is expected to culminate at a bishops’ meeting in October. .
Referring to the summary of the Vatican’s publicity campaigns, Pell lamented a “deepening confusion, the attack on traditional morality, and the insertion of neo-Marxist jargon into dialogue about exclusion, alienation, identity, marginalization, the voiceless, LGBTQ, and the crowding out of Christian ideas of… Forgiveness, sin, sacrifice, healing, redemption.”
However, Pell’s anonymous memo is even tougher, targeting Francis himself in particular. While other conservatives have criticized Francis’ crackdown on traditionalists and clemency-over-morality priorities, Pell went further and dedicated an entire section to the pope’s involvement in a major financial fraud investigation that led to the prosecution of 10 people, including Pell’s one-time nemesis , Cardinal Angelo Becciu.
Pell initially welcomed the indictment resulting from the Vatican’s €350 million investment in a London real estate deal, as it confirmed his years of efforts to expose financial mismanagement and corruption in the Holy See. But as the trial progressed, uncomfortable questions were raised about the rights of the defense in a legal system where Francis has, and has exercised, absolute power.
Pell noted that in the course of the investigation, Francis issued four secret decrees “to assist the prosecution” without those concerned having the right to appeal. The defense has argued that the decrees violated the suspects’ human rights.
Pell also came to the defense of Becciu, whom Francis removed in September 2020 before he was even investigated. “He has not received due process. Everyone has the right to due process,” wrote Pell, who has a personal interest in the issue.
“The Vatican’s disregard for the law threatens to become an international scandal,” Pell wrote.