Vatican intrigue surprises Pell
The Pope’s former treasurer, Australian Cardinal George Pell, says he feels a dismayed sense of vindication as the financial mismanagement he tried to uncover in the Holy See is now being exposed in a spiralling Vatican corruption investigation.
Pell made the comments to the Associated Press in his first interview since returning to Rome after his conviction-turnedacquittal on sexual abuse charges. Pell told the AP that he knew in 2014 when he took the treasury job that the Holy See’s finances were ‘‘a bit of a mess’’.
‘‘I never, never thought it would be as technicolor as it proved,’’ Pell said from his living room armchair in his apartment just outside St Peter’s Square. ‘‘I didn’t know that there was so much criminality involved.’’
Pell spoke to the AP before the December 15 release of the first volume of his jailhouse memoir, Prison Journal, chronicling the first five months of the 404 days he spent in solitary confinement in a Melbourne lockup.
Pell left his job as prefect of the Vatican’s economy ministry in 2017 to face charges that he sexually molested two 13-year-old choir boys in the sacristy of the Melbourne cathedral in 1996. After a first jury deadlocked, a second unanimously convicted him and he was sentenced to six years in prison. The conviction was upheld on appeal only to be thrown out by Australia’s High Court, which in April found there was reasonable doubt in the testimony of his lone accuser.
In the prison diary, Pell reflects on the nature of suffering, Pope Francis’ papacy and the humiliations of solitary confinement as he battled to clear his name for a crime he insists he never committed.
Pell and his supporters believe he was scapegoated for all the crimes of the Australian Catholic Church’s botched response to clergy sexual abuse. Victims and critics say he epitomises everything wrong with how the church has dealt with the problem.
In the book, Pell makes repeated reference to his three years at the Vatican trying to impose international accounting, budgeting and transparency standards on the Holy See’s notoriously siloed bureaucracy, where prefects guard their money, turf and power as fiefdoms. That secretive culture has come under a microscope as Vatican prosecutors investigate the Vatican secretariat of state’s 350 million (NZ$595m) investment in a London real estate venture and the tens of millions of euros in donations from the faithful that it paid to Italian middlemen to manage the deal.
After more than a year of investigation, no one has been indicted, though a handful of Vatican officials and Italian businessmen are under investigation. Pell said he is watching the developments as they unfold.
‘‘It just might be staggering incompetence,’’ he said of the scandal, adding that he hoped eventual trials would ascertain the truth.
‘‘It would be better for the church if these things hadn’t happened, if I wasn’t vindicated in this way,’’ he said. ‘‘But given that they have happened, it’s quite clear . . . what we were trying to do explicitly: Trying to do, and to some extent substantially achieved.’’
Pell, with his rather brusque, no-nonsense Australian sensibilities, clashed frequently with the Vatican’s Italian old guard as he sought to get a handle on the Vatican’s assets and spending. His most well-known nemesis was the then-No. 3 in the Vatican’s secretariat of state, Cardinal Angelo Becciu.
Pell famously boasted in 2014 that he had ‘‘discovered’’ hundreds of millions of dollars that were ‘‘tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on the balance sheet’’ – a reference to the secretary of state’s in-house asset portfolio that Becciu controlled that never appeared on the Vatican’s consolidated financial statements.
Becciu hasn’t been charged in the corruption investigation, but it came as little surprise that Pell issued a blistering statement after Francis on September 24 fired Becciu, over apparently unrelated allegations of embezzlement, which Becciu denies.