Just when you think that the Vatican’s “trial of the century” against a cardinal and nine other defendants for various alleged financial crimes can’t get any more surreal, two developments pop out of the woodwork to prove you wrong.
A hearing Thursday produced both a previously unknown, and unauthorised, recording of a phone call with Pope Francis, as well as testimony from the prosecution’s star witness, who essentially blamed everyone in the system – both above him and below him, but not himself – for what went wrong.
Let’s begin with the phone call.
The recording apparently was made by a relative of Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, one of the defendants in the trial, who’s facing charges related to transfers of Vatican money to a Catholic charity in his native Sardinia and also his financial dealings with a self-described lay security consultant named Cecilia Marogna.
Although reporters and other members of the public were escorted out of the hearing room Thursday before the recording of the conversation was played, the news agency AdnKronos provided a transcript.
The recording occurred in late July 2021, just three days before the trial opened and not long after the pope’s colon surgery, and the recording was apparently preserved on a cell phone belonging to one of Becciu’s nephews.
In the call, Becciu clearly wanted Pope Francis to acknowledge that he had authorised payments through Marogna to a British firm to secure the release of a Colombian nun who had been kidnapped by Islamic militants in Mali in 2017.
The firm was paid roughly $350,000 for its expenses, and then $500,000 was paid in ransom.
We have the star witness
implying that basically everyone else
in the situation
bears responsibility for what went wrong,
but not him.
The nun, Sister Gloria Cecilia Narvaez, was eventually released and met Pope Francis in the Vatican afterwards.
Asked if he remembered being briefed on the transactions, Francis appeared to confirm that he had been: “I remember that, vaguely, but I remember, yes, I had it [the information], yes.”
Becciu then says he can’t call the pope as a witness but asks him for a written statement that he had authorised the expenses. Francis suggests that Becciu put something on paper and send it to him, promising to look it over.
Prosecutors in the Vatican trial introduced the recording after having obtained it from Italian financial police, who are conducting their own investigation of a charity in Sardinia linked to Becciu.
Clearly, the prosecution hoped it would put Becciu in a bad light for having taped the pontiff surreptitiously, though defence attorneys pounced on it to argue that it illustrates why the pope needs to be questioned to establish what he knew and what he approved.
From the beginning, defence lawyers have argued that the people charged in the trial didn’t do anything that wasn’t fully approved by their superiors – including the “substitute,” meaning the number two official in the Secretariate of State, at the beginning Becciu and now Venezuelan Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra; the Secretary of State, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin; and Pope Francis himself.
Prosecutors don’t dispute that authorisation occurred but insist it was granted under false pretences because, they claim, the defendants misrepresented the nature of the transactions involved.
As for the star witness… continue reading