Edward Pentin keeps us up to date on the ongoing Vatican financial scandals:
Cardinal Pell’s remarks were conspicuously well-timed, coming in the wake of the arrest last month of Italian financier Gianluigi Torzi on charges of “extortion, embezzlement, aggravated fraud and money laundering,” relating to a London property deal carried out by Vatican Secretariat of State officials that went sour.
The continuing controversy over the flawed transaction has focused attention on Vatican management practices that have allowed senior officials to duck their own responsibility and act with impunity, fostering both corruption and poor morale among some Vatican officials, according to a range of sources who spoke with the Register.
The cardinal’s video message also came just one day after companies owned by Italian businessman Raffaele Mincione, who was also connected with the London investment, filed lawsuits against the Secretariat of State and the holding company that owns the property.
The Vatican apprehended Torzi on June 5 and then granted him bail ten days later. Senior Vatican officials, meanwhile, claimed to have no knowledge of Torzi’s alleged crimes or preferred not to comment.
A two-year investigative report by the Financial Times, however, found evidence that the deal was “signed off by some of the most senior officials in the Catholic Church.”
The documented evidence, the article added, “cast doubt on the Vatican’s official narrative” that the speculative London property deal that has burdened the Vatican with enormous financial losses “was the work of Torzi and a handful of junior administrators who have been suspended during the investigation.”
A former Vatican official told the Register it was “inconceivable” that senior curial officials knew nothing about the deal. “How does one single layman force the most powerful dicastery in the Roman Curia to do something like that?” the ex-official asked.
Go here to read the rest. Two things the current Vatican will never run short of: scandals and scapegoats.
Is there any credibility left in the Vatican? Financial corruption, sexual perversion and religious hypocrisy provides a perfect devilish bomb to blow up the Church.
All true.
Really, is anyone in charge?
Francis is quickly becoming irrelevant noise.
One of the more bleakly-amusing things about this particular pontificate is how cash-obsessed it is. Seizing the assets of the FFI, grabbing hold of the Knights of Malta, renting out the Sistine Chapel to Porsche, squeezing $25 million out of the Papal Foundation for a corrupt hospital, Tarcisio Bertone and Reinhard Marx getting sweet renovations on their pads and now this thing in London.
Bergoglio said at the outset that he wanted “a poor church for the poor.”
He’s certainly managed that–if you throw a rude adjective with a hyphen in front of the first “poor.”