Rome Newsroom, Jun 9, 2020 / 10:00 am (CNA).- After an outbreak in the Little Missionary Sisters of Charity motherhouse in northern Italy led half of its sisters to test positive for COVID-19 and nine sisters to die, the last hospitalized sister has be… […]
Vatican City, Jun 9, 2020 / 09:30 am (CNA).- As Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis has started a fund with 1 million euros ($1.1 million) to help those in the Diocese of Rome who are facing economic difficulty because of the coronavirus.
In a June 8 letter … […]
CNA Staff, Jun 9, 2020 / 08:30 am (CNA).- The Catholic Church in England and Wales has received a 1 million pound ($1.3 million) donation to fight poverty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
The money was donated by the Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation, founded by the late billionaire businessman Albert Gubay, who made a pact with God in his youth that if he became rich he would give half his money to the Church.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, president of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said June 9: “All of this remarkable gift will be spent on the immediate relief of hardship, and, I stress, its effects will be felt across the whole of England and Wales.”
Gubay, who died in 2016, amassed his fortune through Kwik Save, a British convenience store chain, Total Fitness, a chain of gyms, and property investments. Upon his death, his charitable foundation, which is based in the Isle of Man, was worth about 700 million pounds ($890 million).
Nichols said the foundation had contacted him May 20 with the “startling news” that it would make an “immediate outright donation of £1 million” to the Church for poverty relief.
“I was taken aback by the sheer generosity of this single payment and agreed to cooperate in the distribution of this grant to Catholic charities,” he said.
After consulting with the other metropolitan archbishops of England and Wales, the cardinal invited charities to apply for emergency funding by May 31, which should be spent on the poor by the end of September.
Thirty-eight applicants applied for grants totalling more than £2 million.
The $1.3 million donation will be split into three parts with more than $508,000 going to local food banks and the direct provision of food, $317,000 to expand food voucher programs and more than $425,000 for immediate financial support for the needy.
Charities receiving money will compile reports on the impact of the funds by the end of October.
Food banks have reported unprecedented levels of demand since the government imposed a lockdown in the U.K. in order to stem the spread of the coronavirus. The Trussell Trust, a leading food bank network, said that in the week after after the lockdown was introduced in March, it distributed 50,000 food parcels, almost twice as many as usual.
Albert Gubay was born in 1928 in the Welsh seaside resort of Rhyl to an Iraqi Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother.
In a 2011 interview with the BBC, he said that he turned to God while struggling to make ends meet as a young businessman.
“One Saturday, I didn’t know where the next penny was coming from and I lay on my bed and I had this conversation with God,” he recalled.
“I said: ‘God, help me and whatever I make over the years of my life, when I die, half will go to the Church.’”
In 2011, Nichols presented Gubay with a papal knighthood, conferred by Pope Benedict XVI, for his charitable work.
In his June 9 statement, Nichols said: “I wish to express heartfelt thanks to the Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation for this exceptional and magnificent donation to such important work. In particular, I thank the Gubay family for their leadership in this remarkable gift which is in addition to the regular charitable giving of the foundation.”
“I do so, not only on behalf of every bishop in England and Wales for the confidence it shows in the effectiveness of the charitable work of our Catholic charities, but much more importantly, on behalf of all those whose hardship will be alleviated by this outstanding generosity.”
Vatican City, Jun 9, 2020 / 07:30 am (CNA).- With the Vatican’s interim deal with the Chinese government due to expire in September, an archbishop who helped to negotiate the agreement said this week that he believes it should be renewed for one … […]
Vatican City, Jun 9, 2020 / 06:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis appointed Msgr. David L. Toups as the next Bishop of Beaumont, Texas, Tuesday.
The Holy See press office announced June 9 that Toups would succeed Bishop Curtis J. Guillory, 76, who has led the… […]
CNA Staff, Jun 9, 2020 / 03:00 am (CNA).- Cardinal Angelo Becciu has said that the arrest of a businessman at the center of a Vatican property deal will have no wider repercussions and that business in the Vatican “will continue as before.”
Commenting on the June 5 arrest of Gianluigi Torzi, the former sostituto at the Secretariat of State said that he did not know the Italian businessman charged by Vatican prosecutors with fraud, extortion, money laundering and other crimes. Becciu also defended the investment of hundreds of millions of euros in the London property at 60 Sloane Avenue, and said it still represented good value for money.
“I don’t know Torzi, I was no longer sostituto when the facts that are attributed [Torzi] happened,” Becciu told Adnkronos after the announcement of Torzi’s arrest.
Before he was made a cardinal in June, 2018, Becciu was the second-ranking official at the Vatican Secretariat of State, which invested hundreds of millions of euros in the London property between 2014-2018. Torzi acted as a broker, a commission-earning middleman, for the Secretariat of State as it finalized the purchase in 2018 and 2019.
The Adnkronos report offers Becciu’s account of his role at the Vatican. Becciu insists that Torzi’s involvement in the project came after the cardinal had become head of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints in the summer of 2018, but that the original investment in the building was a sound decision.
“Are you sure that that building was a waste? But there has been no doubt that if sold now it would make double what it cost – 148 million euros when I was there, if there were other [additional expenses] then ask who made them, I was no longer there.”
On Saturday, the cardinal dismissed the idea that Torzi’s arrest would cause a broader “earthquake” in the curia, calling it “a journalistic fantasy.”
Becciu’s interview concluded with his declaration that “[Torzi] will have to answer for a specific crime for which he alone is responsible. And the Vatican will continue as before.”
CNA has reported that between 2014 and 2018, the Secretariat of State paid around $300 million for the building, bought from Italian businessman Raffaele Mincione. Mincione arranged the secretariat’s initial investment through an investment fund through which he managed hundreds of millions of euros for the Secretariat of State.
Completion of the sale was conducted through Gutt SA, a Luxembourg-registered holding company owned by Torzi.
According to a press statement from the Holy See, Torzi was arrested Friday in connection with “well-known events connected with the sale of the London property on Sloane Avenue, which involved a network of companies in which some officials of the Secretariat of State were present.”
In May, CNA reported that in November 2018, a lay official at the Secretariat of State was made a director of Gutt, for a period of one month. That official, Fabrizio Tirabassi, was suspended from his position in October, 2019, following a raid by Vatican investigators.
In his statements to Adnkronos over the weekend, Becciu repeated previous denials that the investment used funds from Peter’s Pence, a fund of donations sent to the Holy See by Catholics and dioceses around the world to support the ministry of the pope.
On Saturday, Vatican News reported that the investments made by the secretariat in Mincione’s Athena Global Opportunities Fund amounted to 200 million euros. It reports Mincione invested this money in the building, which he owned, and other ventures of Mincione’s, which it described to be a “conflict of interest.”
On Nov. 4, 2019, CNA reported that in 2015 Cardinal Becciu seems to have attempted to obscure on Vatican balance sheets nearly 200 million in loans connected to the transaction by cancelling them out against the value of the property in London, an accounting maneuver prohibited by financial policies approved by Pope Francis in 2014.
That apparent attempt to obscure the loans was detected by the Prefecture for the Economy, then led by Cardinal George Pell. Senior officials at the Prefecture for the Economy told CNA in 2019 that Becciu told Pell the cardinal was “interfering in sovereign business” by looking into the secretariat’s dealings with Swiss bank BSI.
BSI was closed by Swiss banking authorities in 2017, following an investigation which found systematic violations of anti-money laundering protections.
On Saturday, Becciu said that Torzi’s involvement in the London property deal came only after he had left the secretariat.
In May, CNA reported that Swiss authorities had frozen tens of millions of euros in several bank accounts as part of the Vatican’s investigation into the deal.
On June 6, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that among the funds frozen were several million under the control of Msgr. Alberto Perlasca.
Perlasca served under Becciu for nearly a decade as head of the administrative office of the secretariat’s First Section until July 2019, when he was transferred to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the Holy See’s supreme court. Perlasca worked as a prosecutor at the court, until his office and home were raided by investigators in February.
In an interview with the newspaper Il Giornale on Monday, Perlasca denied that he had any Swiss bank accounts and is “ready to sue anyone who claims otherwise.”
Perlasca said that “there was considerable confusion, I hope not knowingly, between personal accounts and accounts of the Secretariat of State, on which, however, I had no signature power since only the superiors had it. I only had the power to sign in conjunction with another superior. I don’t remember ever having to use it, because there never was a need. In other words: I couldn’t move a single cent.”
Perlasca said he personally lodged a complaint against Torzi in 2018, alleging fraud by the businessman.
Corriere also reported that accounts belonging to Mincione have been seized by Swiss authorities as part of the investigation, as well as those under the control of Enrico Crasso, who has also managed Holy See investments through the Centurion Global Fund.
Crasso told Corriere that the accounts relevant to him were only under his management and not personal accounts. Previously, CNA reported on Centurion’s connections to several institutions subject to allegations of money laundering.
On Saturday, Mincione denied any relationship to Torzi beyond working with him as the secretariat’s chosen intermediary for the completion of the property purchase.
In an interview with Adnkronos, Mincione said that apart from knowing Torzi slightly as a social acquaintance, his contact with him was limited to Torzi’s mandate to act on behalf of the secretariat, given by Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, who replaced Becciu as sostituto in 2018.
Mincione insisted in the interview that his dealings with the secretariat were all legitimate, and that the Holy See could still realize a profit on the London property.
Mincione also appeared to imply that responsibility for Torzi’s involvement could ultimately lay with Pope Francis, saying “there is a picture of Torzi with the pope, which I have. [Torzi] was given this job by Peña Parra, [who was himself] appointed by the pope.” It is unclear why or how Mincione would have a photo of Torzi with the pope, especially if the two businessmen were not close.
CNA has previously reported that Torzi, along with his family, were received in a private audience with Pope Francis on December 26, 2018. Repeated requests, over several months, to the Holy See asking how the meeting was arranged have gone unanswered.
On the same day as Mincione’s interview with Adnkronos, a picture apparently showing Torzi and his wife with Pope Francis began circulating online.
Perlasca told Il Giornale that “It seems very bad to call the Holy Father directly into this matter.”
“I know that, at the end of December 2018, there was a meeting with him, to which however no representative of the Administrative Office was invited,” Perlasca said.
CNA Staff, Jun 9, 2020 / 12:10 am (CNA).- June 5 marks three years since the Diocese of Cúcuta, Colombia opened its Divine Providence House of Transit in response to the thousands of Venezuelan migrants streaming into Colombia.
In those three y… […]
Denver Newsroom, Jun 8, 2020 / 08:01 pm (CNA).- The Texas Supreme Court will hear the Diocese of Lubbock’s appeal of a legal decision allowing a former deacon to sue the diocese for defamation for including his name on a list of clergy credibly a… […]
Mexico City, Mexico, Jun 8, 2020 / 06:42 pm (CNA).- With reports of domestic violence on the rise during the coronavirus lockdown in Mexico, one pro-life platform is offering women help, shelter and legal advice.
Linda Rebolledo, the coordinator and s… […]
Denver Newsroom, Jun 8, 2020 / 06:01 pm (CNA).- A community of Dominican nuns in Hawaii is shaken but hopeful after a burglar broke into their convent last week and stole a minivan that the nuns use for their ministry.
“It was still a good running car, even if it was 13 years old,” Sister Bernarda Sindol told CNA.
Donations have poured in from far and wide to help the nuns replace the stolen vehicle.
“It’s a blessing in disguise, because now we’re going to buy a new car,” she laughed.
The sisters awoke May 30 to find their convent had been broken into during the night.
No one was hurt in the robbery; the nuns live on the upper floor, and for their safety have a heavy gate on the door leading upstairs.
In addition to stealing most of the nuns’ food from the kitchen, the assailant took the keys to their minivan— which were hanging on a bulletin board downstairs— and made off with the vehicle.
Six Dominican Sisters of the Rosary live at the convent, which is located behind St. Elizabeth Catholic Church and School in Aiea, about 10 miles northwest of Honolulu on Oahu.
The police are still investigating and have not yet located the stolen vehicle.
The minivan was important for the nuns’ ministry, Sister Bernarda said, because many of them teach at the school adjacent to the convent— which the order has managed since the 1960s— and also at other schools around town.
Having the car made it easier for the nuns to get around, for their ministry and also for things like shopping and errands, without them having to rely on public transportation.
Sister Bernarda said the robber must have known which windows and areas of the convent were not alarmed, and broke in with relative ease.
The thief removed a painting of the Last Supper hanging in the nuns’ dining room, apparently hoping to find a wall safe.
The town lies on Pearl Harbor in a relatively safe area, Sister Bernarda said, so they never really expected a break-in like this.
“Some people just don’t have any respect for the Church. And those are the people we have to pray for,” she said.
As of Monday, a GoFundMe page set up by St. Elizabeth’s pastor had collected more than $31,000 toward a new vehicle for the nuns.
Sister Bernarda said donations have poured in from all over— the last one she saw was from a trucker in Nebraska, who donated $20.
“Twenty dollars is twenty dollars. It’s from people’s hearts, and we appreciate it. People are just so generous,” she said.
Sister Bernarda asked for prayers for an end to the pandemic, as she suspects the thief likely broke into their convent out of desperation.
“People are frustrated, they’ve lost their jobs, they have to feed their families. So we just pray that this coronavirus will go away so that people can live more normally,” she said.
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