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Vatican City, Oct 30, 2019 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Angelo Becciu has denied any impropriety in a real estate investment made with Vatican funds and insisted that he only acted in the best interests of the Holy See.

In an interview with Italian media published Tuesday, the former deputy at the Holy See’s Secretariat of State rejected any wrongdoing in the authorization of a $200 million property deal to develop a building in London. 

Responding to what he called “slanderous charges” that he had “played with and tampered with the money of the poor” in the 2014 transaction, the cardinal defended the investment, saying it was “accepted practice.”

Speaking to ANSA, the cardinal said “My conscience is clear and I know I have always acted in the interest of the Holy See and never in my personal one. Those who know me well can attest to that.”

Becciu served as “sostituto,” or second-ranking official at the Secretariat of State from 2011-2018, when Pope Francis named him a cardinal and moved him to the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints.

The interview came in response to media coverage of an ongoing investigation by Vatican criminal and financial authorities into a 2014 $200 million investment made through Athena Capital, a Luxembourg investment fund, which financed a stake in the development of a luxury apartment project in London.

Details of the investment were first reported by the Financial Times earlier this month. The money was taken from Swiss bank accounts under the control of the Secretariat of State and kept separately from other curial accounts held at the Vatican.

The London investment, along with a nearly $50 million 2018 investment in the same property, has raised questions about the internal control of Vatican money held in international banks and investment vehicles, especially after repeated efforts to bring financial practices into line with international practices and standards.

On Tuesday, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin said the investment was a one-off, and the fund in question appeared to be “well managed.” He said that he was working to clear up questions about the project.

“We are working to clear up everything. This deal was rather opaque and now we are trying to clear it up,” Reuters quoted Parolin as saying.

Becciu told ANSA that there is a difference between Vatican funds intended for the benefit of the poor and the proceeds of the annual Peter’s Pence collection taken up in every parish in the world and sent to Rome.

“It is accepted practice for the Holy See to invest in property, it has always done so: in Rome, in Paris, in Switzerland and also in London,” Becciu said, insisting that the deal was “regular and registered according to law.”

“In the Secretariat of the State we had a fund entitled ‘money of the poor’. And it was destined for the poor. If, on the other hand, for money of the poor they want to refer to Peter’s Pence, we have to clarify,” Becciu said.

“The Pence is not only for the pope’s almsgiving but also the funding for his Pastoral ministry,” Becciu said, suggesting that the Secretariat’s two investments in the luxury apartment development were an appropriate use of donated funds.

Becciu did not address his reported involvement in other complicated Vatican transactions during the interview.

On Oct. 29, CNA reported that Becciu was involved in a complicated series of events and financial transactions around the purchase of the Istituto Dermopatico dell’Immacolata (IDI), an Italian hospital that collapsed in 2013 under 800 million euros of debt through theft and fraud. 

As sostituto, sources told CNA, Becciu was the “driving force” behind requests for a $25 million grant from the U.S. based Papal Foundation, ostensibly to supply short-term liquidity to the hospital, but actually intended to help remove a 50 million euro bad loan from the books at the Vatican’s central bank, APSA.

While the balance of the grant was cancelled after pushback from Papal Foundation board members, $13 million dollars was initially sent to the Secretariat of State, though how the money was used has not been reported.

Becciu told CNA that although he had been involved in the purchase of the IDI by a partnership created by the Secretariat of State, “Cardinal Parolin assumed the office of Secretary of State [in 2013] and I no longer concerned myself with IDI.” 

In early 2019, Cardinal Parolin, wrote to the Papal Foundation saying the $13 million would be reclassified as a loan, rather than a grant, and would be repaid. 

Two sources within the Papal Foundation told CNA that the Vatican has proposed the loan be repaid through “discounts” applied each year to the list of grants requested of the Papal Foundation by Vatican offices and Catholic apostolates.

“The poor will end up paying the debt,” a source close to the Papal Foundation told CNA.

Becciu’s role in authorizing the $200 million investment, and the potential focus on his time at the Secretariat of State by Vatican investigators have placed his tenure there under renewed scrutiny. While there, he was responsible for the cancellation of an external audit of all curial finances, intended to centralize information and details of Vatican assets and funds held away from the Vatican and unavailable for scrutiny.

On October 1, Vatican prosecutors raided the Secretariat of State’s offices. Documents and devices were seized. Although the Vatican did not indicate what exactly had prompted the investigation, subsequent reporting has indicated the London property investment and Cardinal Becciu were being looked into.

The next day, a confidential memo was leaked announcing the suspension of five Vatican employees, including two officials: Msgr. Mauro Carlino, who oversees documentation at the Secretariat of State, along with layman Tomasso Di Ruzza, director of the Vatican’s Financial Intelligence Authority (AIF). Di Ruzza was subsequently cleared to return to work following and internal AIF investigation.

Becciu’s interview came two days after the same paper reported that Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte had been hired to consult on the deal in May, 2018, just weeks before taking office.

Conte has since distanced himself from the Vatican-backed deal and ensuing investigation.

On Monday, his office released a statement in response to the FT’s story saying “it should be noted that Mr. Conte only gave a legal opinion and was not aware of, and was not required to know, the fact that some investors were connected to an investment fund supported by the Vatican and now at the center of an investigation.”

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Vatican City, May 4, 2017 / 06:14 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis told the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications, which is holding their first plenary assembly this week, that given a growing digital culture throughout the world, new media must become a primary platform for spreading the Gospel.

“Studying new ways and means to communicate the Gospel of mercy to all people, in the heart of different cultures, through the media that the new digital cultural context makes available to our contemporaries” is something that is “very much in my heart,” Pope Francis said May 4.

He spoke to members of his Secretariat for Communications, which was formed in June 2015 as part of his ongoing reform of the Roman Curia, during their first plenary assembly.

The assembly is taking place May 3-5 at the Vatican and gathers members of the secretariat, which is headed by Msgr. Dario Edoardo Vigano.

In his audience with the plenary participants, Francis said the word “reform” is something we shouldn’t be afraid of. To reform, he said, isn’t just “repainting” things, but is rather “giving another form to things, organizing them in a different way.”

“And it must be done with intelligence, meekness, but also…also, allow me the word, with a bit of ‘violence,’” he said, but stressed that its a “good violence to reform things.”

More than just merging the Vatican’s various communications entities, the secretariat has the task of building “a truly new institution” that has arisen from the need for a “so-called ‘digital convergence,’” he said.

Whereas in the past each form of expression had its own medium in either newspapers, books, photographs, television, radio and CDs, now all of these forms of communications, are transmitted “with a single code that exploits the binary system.”

In this context, he pointed to the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which will officially join the secretariat next year, saying it “will have to find a new and different way to reach a number of readers greater to what it can achieve in paper format.”

As of now the paper operates primarily in daily and weekly print format, with a limited online presence in its various languages.

Pope Francis also turned to Vatican Radio, which broadcasts papal and Vatican news several languages throughout the world, saying the entity will need to be revisited “according to new models and adapted to the modern technologies and needs of our contemporaries.”

He made a point to emphasize the attention Vatican Radio has given to broadcasting in countries will little access to technology, such as certain countries in Africa, noting that services to these places “have never been abandoned.”

In addition to L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican Publishing House and the Vatican Typography office will also be merged into the greater working community of the secretariat, which is something the Pope said will require “availability to harmonize” with their “new productive and distributive design.”

“The work is great, the challenge is great, but it can be done. It must be done,” he said, stressing the need to for a willingness to work together as all of the changes and merges take place.

As the study commissions within the secretariat move forward in identifying new paths and proposals, the Pope told them to be “courageous” in the criteria they choose, asking that the guiding criteria be an “apostolic and missionary one, with special attention to situations of discomfort, poverty, difficulty.”

“In this way, it becomes possible to bring the Gospel to everyone, to optimize human resources, without replacing the communication of the local Churches and, at the same time, supporting the ecclesial communities most in need.”

He concluded his speech stressing the need to “not let ourselves be overcome by the temptation of attachment to a glorious past,” and encouraged members instead to make “a great effort of teamwork to better respond to the new communicative challenges that the culture of today asks of us, without fear and without imagining apocalyptic scenarios.”

Pope Francis established the Secretariat for Communications on June 27, 2015, with the promulgation of the motu proprio, “The current communication context.”

One of its primary responsibilities is the restructuring and consolidation of the Holy See’s various communications outlets, which were previously ran as individual offices.

The dicastery will eventually oversee Vatican Radio, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican Television Center, the Holy See Press Office, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Vatican Internet Service, the Vatican Typography, the Photograph Service, and the Vatican publishing house.

Msgr. Dario Edoardo Viganò, previously head of Vatican Television, is prefect of the department. On April 12, 2017, the Pope named a group of 13 new consultors, including EWTN’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael P. Warsaw

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CNA Staff, Feb 28, 2024 / 17:05 pm (CNA).
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