PopeWatch: It All Comes Down to Money

From Sandro Magister:

On what remains of the legendary, omnipotent secretariat of state, the coup de grace fell between Christmas and New Year, with the “motu proprio” of Pope Francis that carried away the strongbox with everything it contained, meaning a good part of that billion and 400 million euros that Cardinal George Pell – during the few months at the beginning of the pontificate when he was able to act with the pope’s full mandate to clean house – had uncovered outside the official Vatican budgets.

From now on, therefore, what was the great power center of the Vatican curia will no longer wield funds or properties, all of these moving over to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, APSA, and under the control of the secretariat for the economy. Of the administrative office of the secretariat of state only the emblem and a couple of desks will survive, on which to keep the few house accounts with money to be requested each time from whoever is responsible. Even the discretionary fund that is available to the pope will no longer be kept by the secretariat of state, but by the APSA.

Compared with what it was at the apogee of its history, therefore, the secretariat of state is now touching the lowest point of its orbit. But it’s not over, because in the coming months its reputation and power could fall even lower.

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It was Paul VI, during the 1960’s, who conferred the greatest powers on the secretariat of state, from which he himself had come and which in point of fact he continued to govern.

And it was John Paul II, in 1979, who appointed as secretary of state a cardinal of the first magnitude, Agostino Casaroli, architect of the Ostpolitik beyond the iron curtain but also the man who in 1984 managed to save the Holy See and the Institute for Works of Religion, IOR, from the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, with a “voluntary” outlay of 250 million dollars to the creditor banks.

Casaroli was succeeded in 1991 by Cardinal Angelo Sodano and in 2006 by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. With whom the authority of the secretariat of state embarked on a descending parabola so marked that at the conclave of 2013 Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected with the request for its drastic downsizing, within the framework of an overall reform of the curia.

The new pope, in fact, began by calling around him as his advisers in reforming the curia and in governing the universal Church eight cardinals from the five continents, from among whom the secretary of state was deliberately excluded. And he created a brand-new secretariat for the economy, endowed with full powers and with Cardinal Pell as prefect, which already by its name heralded the removal of financial activities from the secretariat of state.

But this “incipit” was quickly contradicted by the facts. To the eight cardinal councilors Pope Francis soon went back to add Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state since August 31 2013. And the housecleaning work of Cardinal Pell and auditor Libero Milone met with a very violent counter-offensive, especially from the second-in-command of the secretariat of state at the time, substitute Giovanni Angelo Becciu, and the cardinal president of the APSA, Domenico Calcagno, both – at that stage – in the good graces of the pope, who unexpectedly switched over to their side.

The result was that in 2016 Francis took away from Pell the powers he had initially given him and would no longer receive Milone in audience. The following year the cardinal had to give up all his duties in order to return to Australia, hounded by accusations of sexual abuse ultimately recognized as baseless – but after 404 days in prison – while Milone was forced to resign on the basis of the accusation – in reality not even subjected to a judicial investigation – of having wished to violate, in his analyses of the accounts, “the private lives of officials of the Holy See.”

After the attack had been repelled and it was shielded from any supervision the secretariat of state was thus able to continue its wheeling and dealing, in some cases – as with the purchase of the Dermopathic Institute of the Immaculate, a hospital in Rome owned by a religious order and ultimately a prey to bankruptcy – with financial support from the APSA and the US-based Papal Foundation, still backed at the time by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

The business was conducted by the administrative office headed by Monsignor Alberto Perlasca. Always, however, under the supervision of Cardinal Parolin and under the command of substitute Becciu, who in turn met with Pope Francis daily and kept him informed of everything.

Francis knew and approved. In the summer of 2019, however, the pope suddenly switched to the side of those who opposed the biggest of the financial operations underway at the secretariat of state – where in the meantime the role of substitute had been taken over by the Venezuelan Edgar Peña Parra, succeeding Becciu, who had been promoted to cardinal – the purchase of a large building in a prestigious district of London, at no. 60 Sloane Avenue.

The operation, badly conducted through unreliable outside agents, was a disastrous loss, and in remedy the secretariat of state had asked the IOR for help. Where Pope Francis had and has in crucial roles two men appointed by and strictly obedient to him: director general Gian Franco Mammì, previously the manager of the Vatican bank’s clients in Latin America and from that time forward close to Bergoglio, and the “prelate” Battista Ricca, a former career diplomat recalled to Rome because of his homosexual intemperance, but publicly acquitted by Pope Francis at the beginning of his pontificate with the famous phrase: “Who am I to judge?”

The fact is that the IOR not only refused to help the secretariat of state with a loan, but it judged the entire London operation as wrongful and filed a complaint with the Vatican tribunal, also charging with failure of oversight the Financial Intelligence Authority, AIF, headed at the time by the Swiss financier René Brüelhart and directed by Tommaso Di Ruzza, son-in-law of former Bank of Italy governor Antonio Fazio.

Today, more than a year later, the Vatican judicial investigations still seem to be up in the air and the trial is yet to come. But in the meantime Pope Francis has already let loose a flurry of convictions, at his sole discretion.

On October 1 2019 he had the offices of the AIF searched by the papal gendarmerie and suspended its director, Di Ruzza, along with four officials of the secretariat of state, including Becciu’s former secretary, Monsignor Mauro Carlino.

A few days later he fired gendarmerie commander Domenico Giani, only to confess on November 26, on the return flight of his trip to Thailand and Japan, that he, the pope, had ordered the search.

On November 18, he showed Brüelhart the door and secured the resignations of two other members of the AIF’s board of directors, Switzerland’s Marc Odendall and the American Juan Carlos Zarate, regardless of the fact that after the searches on October 1 the Egmont Group – the “intelligence” network of 164 states of which the Holy See is a member – had excluded the AIF from this group on account of the violation of confidential information.

On January 20 he definitively fired, after having suspended him, former AIF director Di Ruzza.

In February of 2020 he removed Monsignor Perlasca as director of the administrative office of the secretariat of state, temporarily switching him over to adjunct promoter of justice of the supreme tribunal of the apostolic signatura.

On April 30, he also removed Perlasca from it, sending him back to his diocese of origin, Como, and definitively fired three more of those suspended on October 2: Monsignor Carlino and the two laymen Vincenzo Mauriello and Fabrizio Tirabassi, the latter already Perlasca’s right hand man.

Finally, on September 24, he removed Becciu as prefect of the congregation for the causes of saints and stripped him of all his “rights” as a cardinal, including participation in a conclave.

It goes without saying that this flurry of convictions issued by Pope Francis not only before any trial but without even formulating any specific accusation or ensuring the minimum right to defense was accompanied, at the secretariat of state and among those affected by these measures, by a war of all against all, in particular of Perlasca against Becciu.

And Cardinal Parolin? Also at daggers drawn with Becciu, has not yet been brought under accusation personally, but it is clear that his authority has gone to pieces, given the disaster in the Vatican offices under him.

That Francis has already taken note of this loss of Parolin’s authority is proven by at least one recent indication: the removal of the secretary of state, for the first time, from the commission of cardinals that oversees the IOR, renewed by the pope last September 21.

But in addition to this conspicuous expulsion, the “new entries” into the aforementioned commission also speak volumes, in particular those of three cardinals devoid of any financial expertise: the Polish Konrad Krajewski, apostolic almoner, the Italian Giuseppe Petrocchi, archbishop of L’Aquila, the Filipino Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle, prefect of “Propaganda Fide.”

Their call to be part of the commission is simply linked to their being cosy with Francis.

Go here to read the rest.  Mammon, always at the center of events in the Vatican.