Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu attends the Consistory for the creation of new Cardinals at the St. Peter’s Basilica on Aug. 27, 2022, at the Vatican. / Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images
Rome Newsroom, Nov 30, 2022 / 11:00 am (CNA).
As the Vatican trial against Cardinal Angelo Becciu and nine others rounds the corner in its 16th month, recent court hearings have introduced a few revelations about the case as well as possible new accusations against the Secretariat of State’s former No. 2.
Here are some of the latest twists and turns in the trial to prosecute people in and around the Vatican for financial crimes.
A secret papal recording
During a Nov. 24 hearing, a Vatican prosecutor played a recording of a phone call between Pope Francis and Cardinal Becciu — secretly recorded on the cellphone of Becciu’s niece.
Though media and observers had to leave the courtroom while the recording, which had not yet been admitted into evidence, was played, Italian news agency Adnkronos later published a full transcript.
The recording revealed, Vatican prosecutor Alessandro Diddi said in court, that Becciu had called Pope Francis on July 24, 2021 — 10 days after the pope had surgery on his colon and three days before the start of the trial — to ask him to confirm that he had authorized payments to free a kidnapped nun in Mali.
During the phone call, Becciu lamented that a letter from the pope repeated the same accusations of prosecutors. “I almost should not go to trial anymore because, I’m sorry, but the letter you sent me is a condemnation,” he said, according to the transcript published by Adnkronos.
The cardinal also reportedly said he would not be able to call Pope Francis as a witness in the trial, which is why he was calling him to have his statement that he had authorized the financial operations.
Francis said he wanted to stay above the fray of the trial and asked Becciu to put his questions to him in writing.
Possible criminal conspiracy
In the same hearing, Diddi said he also was investigating a new possible charge against Becciu and others: criminal conspiracy.
The accusation concerns the charge that Becciu misused Vatican funds to support the cooperative SPES — which works with the local Caritas in Becciu’s home Diocese of Ozieri in Sardinia. SPES is mostly managed by the cardinal’s family members.
Diddi said financial police in Sardinia have found falsified documents apparently used to justify a transfer of money from Caritas to SPES in 2018.
Police found that 927 transport documents for bread had actually been created in the summer of 2021, a few weeks before the start of the Vatican trial, and back-dated to 2018.
Becciu sues — and loses
An Italian court last week rejected a defamation lawsuit filed by Cardinal Becciu against three journalists at the Italian newspaper L’Espresso.
Becciu was ordered to pay 40,000 euros in court costs to the GEDI Publishing Group, which owned L’Espresso when the complaint was filed.
The cardinal’s lawyer had argued that L’Espresso’s reporting in 2020 had cost Becciu the chance to be pope. His lawsuit asked judges to award him 10 million euros in compensation.
This was Becciu’s second lost lawsuit this month. Earlier in November, a judge in northern Italy ordered the cardinal to pay over 20,000 euros each in court costs to his former collaborator Monsignor Alberto Perlasca and Perlasca’s friend after suing them for “persecutory acts.”
In his sentence, the judge called Becciu’s lawsuit an “abuse of the procedural instrument” and also directed the cardinal to pay 9,000 euros in damages to Perlasca.
Becciu could choose to appeal the decisions.
Perlasca’s day in court
Monsignor Perlasca, the former head of administration at the Secretariat of State, testified two days last week, his first time taking the stand during the Vatican’s finance trial. His questioning continued on Nov. 30.
Perlasca was once considered a suspect in the finance investigations, but he was never charged after volunteering information to investigators during extensive questioning in 2020 and 2021. He is now the prosecution’s star witness.
Perlasca had sought to have most of his pretrial interrogations excluded from evidence at trial. He argued that due process was not followed since he did not have a lawyer with him while questioned.
But the president of the Vatican court, Giuseppe Pignatone, denied the plea on the eve of Perlasca’s testimony, only excluding a part of one interrogation from Aug. 31, 2020.
Perlasca, who contradicted his prior statements throughout questioning Nov. 24 and 25, was warned by Pignatone to be careful of his answers — or risk being charged with perjury.
When asked about the Secretariat of State’s decisions around the purchase of the London building, the investment at the heart of the trial, Perlasca claimed to have so little power that he could not even sign his name to anything.
But the prosecutor pointed out that Perlasca’s name was signed to the “framework agreement” that transferred the management of the London property from Raffaele Mincione to Gianluigi Torzi, both defendants in the trial.
Perlasca said the “current sostituto,” or No. 2, at the Secretariat of State, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, told him to sign it.
The former right-hand man of Becciu said he did not know much about financial affairs, unlike his predecessor in the position, and distanced himself from all responsibility, despite having been the head of administration.
He said Becciu is guilty of all the charges against him and insinuated the cardinal put pressure on him, while he himself is “neither accomplice, nor conniver, nor abettor.”
Perlasca also downplayed threats of suicide he made to Becciu over messages, calling them “provocations” now being exaggerated for dramatic effect.
According to Perlasca, Becciu suggested multiple times he should visit his brother, Mario Becciu, a psychologist and licensed therapist in Rome.
A statement from Becciu’s lawyers welcomed the opportunity to examine Perlasca’s claims in court and said the priest’s testimony did not correspond to the accusations against their client.
Earlier this year, Perlasca entered the Vatican trial as a civil plaintiff, joining the Secretariat of State; the Vatican’s two financial bodies, APSA and the IOR; and internal financial watchdog authority ASIF in requesting damages.
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Peter Seewald has developed an intimacy with Benedict apparent in his interviews, and book. His judgment should be trusted. If our blessed loved Benedict XVI departs he’ll remain an advocate. Of course his final testament will be interesting. A true and faithful witness I’m confident he will be rewarded with beatific knowledge of his beloved Jesus of Nazareth. It will end the moot controversy of who is pope. The contrast with Francis is remarkable. Nowhere do we find in Benedict since his spiritual maturity any ambiguity, any preposterous suggestion, any abrogation as pontiff in witnessing to and defending the faith as revealed. Unlike our present experience. I refuse to judge Pope Francis because I am not equipped to do so. God is the judge of his conscience. No one is equipped to accompany and discern the truth of a person’s soul. Nonetheless I can and must pass judgment on a person’s works. There I address with full confidence that there are deceptive features, said in passive tense not active as one intending to deceive. For example Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia 303 quotes Saint Thomas Aquinas in ST 1a2ae 94 4, Although there is necessity in the general principles, the more we descend to matters of detail, the more frequently we encounter defects. Aquinas addresses Justice in this passage to emphasize the need to deliberate the conditions on the ground so to speak in determining what is just. He’s posing a hypothetical to demonstrate a point, not that we can never determine what is just – if for example we take it literally that we will always find exceptions. Instead Francis proposes that we will always find exceptions to an intrinsically evil act like Adultery [or abortion, homosexuality, cohabitation] which demolishes the reality of intrinsic evil. Aquinas holds there is no virtuous mean between excess and defect for such an evil. Murder, abortion, homosexuality are always evil. Consequently Francis underscores a doctrine of mitigation that affects all morality leaving culpability indeterminate and subject to discernment and resolution. He references in 302 the Catechism that mitigation may reduce to a minimum moral culpability (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2352). Mitigation cannot become a theological category that eliminates mortal sin as warned by John Paul II. Especially if we remain in a continuous state of repeated intrinsically evil acts, as if the serial fornicator, adulterer, sexual deviant diminishes culpability, is even freed from mortal sin. Insofar as abortion the overwhelming majority are convenience decisions, rarely under extreme conditions of duress. Mitigation as employed by the Pope Francis places personal conscience as the determinant of what is a moral good or evil. Indeterminate moral standards due to exceptions, mitigation, and conscience are the three levers that overturn traditional Apostolic morality, a first in Church history and a deceptive doctrine he commends to all clergy to employ by accompaniment and discernment. Thereby placing the onus on the priest to grant the benefit of the doubt. As in Malta tacitly approved by this Vatican that anyone may now approach the sacraments at will regardless of manifest sin, with the proviso they follow the guidelines, the three levers of deliberation and dissolution of culpability provided in Amoris Laetitia. I submit this commentary in conscience as priest and my obligatory witness to the truth.
Does possibly mitigated subjective culpability ever elevate conscience as the determinant of what is moral good or evil, or eliminate objective morality? Pope Benedict wrote directly and unambiguously to this point, and to the widespread deadening of conscience in the West:
“I have been absolutely certain that there is something wrong with the theory of the justifying force of the subjective conscience . . . Hitler may have had none (guilt feelings); nor may Himmler or Stalin. Mafia bosses may have none, but it is more likely that they have merely suppressed their awareness of the skeletons in their closets. And the aborted guilt feelings . . . Everyone needs guilt feelings. The loss of the ability to see one’s guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas, is a more dangerous illness of the soul than guilt that is recognized as guilt (see Psalm 19:12). [‘But who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults.’]
“To identify conscience with a superficial state of conviction is to equate it with a certainty that merely seems rational, a certainty woven from self-righteousness, conformism, and intellectual laziness. Conscience is degraded to a mechanism that produces excuses for one’s conduct, although in reality conscience is meant to make the subject transparent to the divine, thereby revealing man’s authentic dignity and greatness” (Values in a Time of Upheaval, 2006).