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Cardinal Pell to return to Rome this week

September 27, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

Rome Newsroom, Sep 27, 2020 / 09:10 am (CNA).- Cardinal George Pell is set to return to Rome on Tuesday, his first time back in the Vatican since 2017, when he took a leave of absence from his role as prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy to travel to Australia. 

The cardinal is set to fly on Sept. 29, sources close to Pell confirmed to CNA on Sunday, following an initial report by Australian journalist Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun newspaper.

Pell has been living in his former Archdiocese of Sydney since his acquittal by Australia’s High Court in April on charges of sexual abuse. 

In 2014, the cardinal was appointed by Pope Francis to take charge of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy and to lead efforts at reforming Vatican financial affairs. After charges of sexual abuse were brought by Victoria police, Pell took temporary leave of his role in 2017 in order to return to Australia and prove his innocence. 

Pell faced allegations from a single accuser related to his time as Bishop of Melbourne. He spent 13 months in solitary confinement after he was initially convicted and given a six-year prison sentence, before being vindicated on appeal to the High Court.

Pell’s term of office as head of the Vatican’s financial secretariat expired during his time in prison, with Pope Francis naming Fr. Juan Antonio Guerrero Alves, SJ, to succeed him in 2019.

The news of Pell’s return to Rome comes just days after the dramatic resignation of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, whom Pope Francis asked to resign as prefect of the Congregation of the Causes of Saints and from the rights extended to members of the College of Cardinals on Sept. 24 after he was linked to an ongoing investigation of financial misconduct at the Vatican.

Becciu had worked previously as the number two-ranking official in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, where, CNA has previously reported, he repeatedly clashed with Pell over the reform of Vatican finances.

Pell, who had not spoken publicly about his former Vatican role since his exoneration, responded to the news of Becciu’s resignation with gratitude.

“The Holy Father was elected to clean up Vatican finances. He plays a long game and is to be thanked and congratulated on recent developments,” Pell wrote in a statement sent to CNA Sept. 25.

“I hope the cleaning of the stables continues in both the Vatican and Victoria,” Pell said.

CNA has reported that in 2015 Becciu seemed to have made an attempt to disguise the loans on Vatican balance sheets by canceling them out against the value of the property purchased in the London neighborhood of Chelsea, an accounting maneuver prohibited by new financial policies approved by Pope Francis in 2014.

The alleged attempt to hide the loans off-books was detected by the Prefecture for the Economy, then led by Pell. Senior officials at the Prefecture for the Economy told CNA that when Pell began to demand details of the loans, especially those involving the Swiss bank BSI, then-Archbishop Becciu called the cardinal in to the Secretariat of State for a “reprimand.”

In 2016, Becciu was instrumental in bringing to a halt reforms initiated by Pell. Although Pope Francis had given the newly created Prefecture for the Economy autonomous oversight authority over Vatican finances, Becciu interfered when Pell’s financial secretariat planned an external audit of all Vatican departments, to be conducted by the firm PriceWaterhouseCooper.

Unilaterally, and without permission of Pope Francis, Becciu canceled the audit and announced in a letter to all Vatican departments that it would not take place.

When Pell challenged internally the audit’s cancellation, Becciu persuaded Pope Francis to give his decision ex post facto approval, sources inside the prefecture told CNA. The audit never took place.

Becciu held a press conference in Rome Sept. 25 at which he protested his innocence of financial wrongdoing.


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Pope Francis: The path to holiness requires spiritual combat

September 27, 2020 CNA Daily News 2

Vatican City, Sep 27, 2020 / 06:30 am (CNA).- Pope Francis said Sunday that the Christian life requires concrete commitments and spiritual combat in order to grow in holiness.

“There is no path to holiness without some renunciation and without spiritual combat,” Pope Francis said in his Angelus address Sept. 27.

This battle for personal sanctity requires grace “to fight for the good, to fight not to fall into temptation, to do what we can on our part, to come to live in the peace and joy of the Beatitudes,” the pope added.

In the Catholic tradition, spiritual combat involves an internal “battle of prayer” in which a Christian must fight temptation, distraction, discouragement, or dryness. Spiritual combat also entails cultivating virtues to make better life choices and exercise charity towards one’s neighbor.

The pope acknowledged that conversion can be a painful process because it is a process of moral purification, which he likened to removing encrustations from one’s heart.

“Conversion is a grace for which we must always ask for: ‘Lord, give me the grace to improve. Give me the grace to be a good Christian,’” Pope Francis said from the window of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.

Reflecting on Sunday’s Gospel, the pope said that “living a Christian life is not made up of dreams or beautiful aspirations, but of concrete commitments, in order to open ourselves ever more to God’s will and to love for our brothers and sisters.”

“Faith in God asks us to renew every day the choice of good over evil, the choice of the truth rather than lies, the choice of love for our neighbor over selfishness,” Pope Francis said.

The pope pointed to one of Jesus’ parables in chapter 21 in the Gospel of Matthew in which a father asks two sons to go and work in his vineyard.

“To the father’s invitation to go and work in the vineyard, the first son impulsively responds ‘no, no I will not go,’ but then he repents and goes; instead the second son, who immediately replies ‘yes, yes father,’ does not actually do so,” he said.

“Obedience does not consist of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but of acting, of cultivating the vineyard, of bringing about the Kingdom of God, in doing good.”

Pope Francis explained that Jesus used this parable to call people to an understanding that religion should affect one’s life and attitudes.

“With His preaching on the Kingdom of God, Jesus opposes a religiosity that does not involve human life, that does not question the conscience and its responsibility in the face of good and evil,” he said. “Jesus wants to go beyond a religion understood only as external and habitual practice, which does not affect people’s lives and attitudes.”

While acknowledging that the Christian life demands conversion, Pope Francis emphasized that “God is patient with each one of us.”

“He [God] does not tire, He does not desist after our ‘no’; He leaves us free even to distance ourselves from Him and to make mistakes … But He anxiously awaits our ‘yes’, so as to welcome us anew in His fatherly arms and to fill us with His boundless mercy,” the pope said.

After praying the Angelus with the pilgrims gathered under umbrellas in a rainy St. Peter’s Square, the pope asked people to pray for peace in the Caucasus region, where Russia staged joint military exercises with China, Belarus, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Armenia last week.

“I ask the parties to the conflict to make concrete gestures of goodwill and brotherhood, which can lead to solving problems not with the use of force and arms, but through dialogue and negotiation,” Pope Francis said.

Pope Francis also greeted the migrants and refugees present at the Angelus as the Church celebrates the World Day of Migrants and Refugees and said that he was praying for small businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

“May Mary Most Holy help us to be docile to the action of the Holy Spirit. He is the One who melts the hardness of hearts and disposes them to repentance, so we may obtain the life and salvation promised by Jesus,” the pope said.


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Cardinal Becciu defends actions, welcomes chance to ‘explain’

September 25, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

Vatican City, Sep 25, 2020 / 10:45 am (CNA).- The day after he was forced to resign from his Vatican job and to give up his rights as a cardinal, Angelo Becciu defended his actions and said he “is ready” to explain if called on by Vatican judicial authorities.

“I didn’t commit any crimes,” Becciu told journalists Sept. 25. “I received no communication on the part of the [Vatican] magistrates. I’m ready. If they want me to explain [my actions], I’ll explain.” 

“I’m maintaining my serenity,” he said. “I renew my trust in the Holy Father.”

Becciu spoke to journalists at an invite-only press conference near the Vatican Sept. 25. CNA obtained an audio recording of the press conference after it took place.

The cardinal responded to questions about actions he took while serving as “sostituto,” or the second-ranking official at the Secretariat of State, from 2011 to 2018.

New reports revealed that Becciu used millions of euros of Vatican charity funds in speculative and risky investments, and that he directed Vatican and Italian bishops’ money to go toward “loans” for projects owned and operated by his brothers. 

The speculative investments were made by financier Enrico Crasso, who, CNA has previously reported, was given by Becciu control over millions of euros in Vatican investment funds.

Becciu said Friday that he did not follow the actions of Crasso “step by step,” and that they met only once a year. According to Becciu, Crasso would inform him of what investments he was making, “but it’s not that he was telling me the ramifications of all these investments.” 

“I don’t know” what Crasso was doing, Becciu said.

According to the cardinal, investing Vatican funds was in his job description at the Secretariat of State. “Sure, we made investments,” he said. “We made them with the desire to make them in the interests of the Holy See, not my personal interests.”

Crasso manages Centurion Global Fund, an investment fund used by the Secretariat of State, with links to two Swiss banks investigated or implicated in bribery and money laundering scandals. As CNA reported, this is the same fund in which the Vatican Secretariat of State invested millions of euros, including with money donated to Peter’s Pence, an annual collection undertaken by the Holy See.

Reports show that the fund’s investments lost money while its managers, who include Crasso, recouped millions in fees.

Crasso also reportedly introduced Becciu to Lorenzo Vangelisti, CEO of Valeur Group, an asset management, advisory, trading, and real estate company.

Vangelisti was involved in the Vatican’s purchase of the Sloane Avenue property in London, together with the director of Valeur capital, Alessando Noceti, who worked previously for Suisse Credit in London.

Becciu denied that he knew either Vangelisti or Noceti. “I don’t know who they are,” he said. “I have never met them.”

The cardinal said that he and Pope Francis did not discuss the London property during their roughly 20-minute meeting Thursday. He also denied that any money from Peter’s Pence was used to purchase the property at 60 Sloane Avenue.

The cardinal described the meeting with the pope and his subsequent resignation as “surreal,” because “yesterday, until 6:02 p.m., I felt I was a friend of the pope, a faithful agent of the pope … and then there, speaking, he tells me that he no longer trusts me.”

“That he no longer trusts me because he had seen reports from the [Vatican] magistrates that I had embezzled,” he said.

After the cardinal resigned as prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, a position he had been in since September 2018, the pope asked him to also resign the “privileges” of cardinals, Becciu noted.  

The embezzlement reports, Becciu said, claimed that when he was sostituto he had misappropriated 100,000 euros to give to a cooperative owned by his brother, and which was part of the charity of his former diocese.

Becciu said he tried to explain the action to Pope Francis, saying that it was true he had gifted 100,000 euros, but it was sent to the Ozieri diocesan Caritas from Vatican funds intended for “various” charitable works, and thus was legitimate.

He said the accusation that the money had gone instead to his brother’s cooperative connected to Caritas “seemed strange” to him, and that when he called his brother and the bishop to ask about the money, they confirmed to him that it was in the Caritas accounts, yet untouched.

Asked if he thought that matter constituted a conflict of interest, since his brother works for the diocesan Caritas, the cardinal said, “a conflict of interest? I don’t know if it really was a conflict of interest. I wanted to help the diocese, not my brother, the diocese.”

A press release from the Bishop of Ozieri and president of the diocesan Caritas, Corrado Melis, Sept. 24 said the diocese “has never been the beneficiary” of undue or illegitimate favors.

Becciu is also reported to have used his connections to help two other brothers, from the time when he was apostolic nuncio in Cuba and Angola.

He quibbled with details of the L’Espresso report, which said that his brother’s carpentry company was given ecclesiastical projects in the two countries. According to Becciu, in Angola his brother only helped to repair “two doors” at the nunciature, and in Cuba, his brother did the renovations at the nunciature because “it was difficult to find” materials in Cuba, so they imported them from Italy.

To his third brother, who owns a food and beverage distributor, called Angel’s, Becciu said “he never gave money, not mine nor that of the institution” of the Church.

He also indicated proof should be given or he “will sue for defamation.”

Becciu’s family released their own statement Sept. 25, calling the reports “unfounded and maliciously false…” as well as “slanderous, offensive and disparaging.” 

They said Francesco Becciu had carried out “some carpentry work on behalf of ecclesial entities” but they are “not attributable to Cardinal Becciu.”


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