Cardinal Pell, aged 81, died in January 2023 in Rome after a cardiac arrest following a routine hip replacement operation. His funeral was held four days later at St Peter's Basilica.

The funeral was notable for the absence of a traditional open casket, which reportedly surprised Vatican officials.

Recent reports in The Australian suggest that Pell's body was left in disarray after an autopsy, with his clothes haphazardly placed in the coffin, his body not properly dressed and without shoes.

Final insult

Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, citing a conversation with Pell's brother, revealed that the cardinal's nose was broken upon the body's return to Australia, describing it as a "final insult".

Bolt speculated that the mistreatment might have stemmed from either incompetence or lingering animosity within the Vatican.

"Pell once told me he did not feel safe in the Vatican as he chased the crooks" Bolt stated. "What was done to his body makes me suspect he was right."

Pell a 'ticking time bomb'

However Pell's brother David told The Australian that the family has no issue with George Pell's medical treatment in Rome.

David Pell said George Pell had several serious heart conditions that dated back to the 1990s. He described the cardinal as a "ticking time bomb".

David Pell explained the condition of George Pell's body, saying that he was vested but in an incorrect sequence.

He suggested the Cardinal's nose could have been broken by the lid of his tight fitting coffin which was lined with zinc or, as one medico suggested, that the Cardinal's nose could have been damaged by hospital tubes while nursing staff were trying to revive him.

David Pell said that there was no room for the Cardinal's size 14 shoes to be put on him, but that they were in the coffin.

He said the family decided the coffin not be open at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney because the embalming "was not up to scratch" and by the time of the Sydney funeral his brother would have been dead for three weeks.

David Pell told the Australian that, while a number of his brother's friends urged him to return to Australia for his hip replacement, the family had no say.

"The big boy made up his mind" he said,

Sources

Daily Mail

The Australian

Herald Sun

The Australian

CathNews New Zealand

Milone claims his resignation from the role of auditor general was extorted under threat of arrest in 2017, as was a similarly forced resignation of one of his two deputies, Ferruccio Panicco, on the following day. Mr Panicco died from cancer in 2023.

Mr Milone believes he was framed and forced to resign seven years ago to avoid being arrested and sent to jail in the Vatican. He believes that those who wanted to remove him as auditor general deceived Pope Francis regarding his activities to get the Pope to agree to his removal.

Mr Milone, 75, and his lawyers told this to a small group of journalists, including America's Vatican correspondent, at a press briefing in his lawyers' office in Rome on June 19.

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The Vatican's first auditor-general, Libero Milone, said "At his funeral, at his casket, I promised him that we would seek out the truth".

Milone added that Pell's success in overturning his convictions demonstrated that "some judicial systems are efficient and effective".

Cardinal Pell, a key figure in Pope Francis's financial reform efforts, died on 10 January 2023 at the Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome.

Pell's unexpected death hours after surgery has raised questions among Vatican observers and close associates.

Several unusual circumstances have fuelled speculation surrounding Cardinal Pell's death:

• The cardinal's casket was closed during the funeral, preventing mourners from participating in the traditional farewell touch or kiss
• Reports have emerged suggesting that internal CCTV cameras at the hospital were not functioning on the day of Pell's death, raising questions about the monitoring of his care
• Additionally, claims have surfaced that no medical doctor was on duty the evening the cardinal died, potentially compromising the level of medical attention he received

Adding to the intrigue, at least two cardinals, close friends of Pell, had urged him to return to Australia for his surgery, expressing concerns about his safety in Rome. However, Pell insisted on staying, determined to address his fellow cardinals in pre-conclave meetings despite being too old to vote.

Sudden and mysterious

Milone shared his concerns as he prepared for an appeal hearing regarding his controversial dismissal in 2017.

Libero Milone is the last surviving member of the high-powered trio that initiated Pope Francis's financial reforms.

Milone and his deputy, Ferruccio Panicco, were abruptly fired in June 2017, just days before Cardinal Pell had to return to Australia to face child sexual abuse charges.

The circumstances surrounding the pair's dismissal were mysterious. Vatican police raided Milone's office and confiscated electronic equipment.

The former auditor-general and Panicco sued the Vatican for wrongful dismissal in 2022, seeking over €9m in compensation. However the Vatican court rejected the claim in January 2024, leading to the current appeal.

Panicco passed away in 2023.

Sources

The Australian

Katholisch

CathNews New Zealand

But do prosecutors really have a case against Becciu?

In his argument July 26, Alessandro Diddi spent the day focused on Becciu, the former sostituto of the secretariat, whose defense Diddi described as "masterpieces of falsification and mystification of reality."

The cardinal, in turn, has declared his "absolute innocence" and himself to be "a faithful servant of the Church" who has "suffered in silence" throughout a process he's called a witch hunt and media smear campaign.

Away from the courtroom hyperbole, though, there is perhaps one thing on which Becciu and Diddi would agree: The case is complicated.

According to the official charge sheet, he is accused of embezzlement and abuse of office, conspiracy, as well as the subornation of witnesses. But how does this break down, and does the evidence add up?

All roads lead through London

According to most media coverage of the trial, the primary focus of the evidence and the charges — including against Cardinal Becciu — is the Secretariat of State's now-infamous purchase of a London building at 60 Sloane Avenue.

But that story, however popular, isn't quite right.

The London deal may be at the center of the trial, but the charges, accusations, and evidence extend back years before the deal was concluded, and well into the months after.

The 2018 acquisition of the building by the secretariat was a messy affair, to put it mildly.

And it was the building's purchase which started the investigation which led to the current trial.

And it was the complicated structuring of the purchase which led to charges of extortion and other crimes for defendants, most notably the businessman Gianluigi Torzi.

But Cardinal Becciu has insisted that he had nothing to do with the purchase of the London building, and that the deal was done after he had left the Secretariat of State in June of 2018 and it was managed by his successor as sostituto, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra.

In that, Becciu has a point. He did not, so far as the available evidence shows, have anything to do with the decision to buy the building outright, or with approving the details which left the Vatican wide open to (alleged) fraud and extortion.

Still, that is only part of the story.

The purchase of the building — which lost the Vatican more than 100 million euros — was part of a hasty settlement as the secretariat severed ties with the financier Raffaele Mincione, with whom it had invested some 200 million euros in 2014.

That initial investment was approved by Becciu, as was its financing, and the unusual way it was recorded on Vatican balance sheets.

And those actions are part of the prosecution case — though the cardinal has insisted he cannot remember much of what he approved, or explain his reasons, even when presented with documents bearing his signature.

And as has been reported since before the trial began, when the newly created Secretariat for the Economy and Office of the Auditor General tried to look through the Secretariat of State's books for a curia-wide audit in 2015-16, it was Becciu who led the resistance to scrutiny.

According to reporting at the time — and later confirmed both by Cardinal George Pell, the first prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, and Libero Milone, the first auditor general — the secretariat under Becciu's leadership used forbidden accounting practices to effectively hide the whole 200 million euro investment with Mincione from auditors, along with the bank loans used to finance the investment.

Becciu has made several evolving claims in his own defense since.

He has said, at different times, that he never refused to cooperate with Pell and Milone; that Pell and Milone's departments never had the authority to audit the Secretariat of State anyway; and that he did act to shield the specific investments from scrutiny because they were some kind of secret discretionary papal fund outside of Vatican financial laws.

In addition to Pell (who died earlier this year) and Milone's insistence that none of these defenses are true, the plain text of the statutes of both their former departments — issued by Pope Francis — seems clearly to give them total access to and oversight of all Vatican departments and funds, with no exceptions. Read more

• Ed Condon is a co-founder and editor of The Pillar.
• First published in The Pillar.

They are demanding the Catholic Church pay for damages to their reputations caused by their unceremonious sacking in 2017.

Milone (pictured with the Pope) was the Vatican's first auditor general. Panicco was his deputy.

Pope Francis appointed Milone to the auditor general's role. Milone's brief was to clean up Vatican finances and raise accounting procedures to international standards of accountability and transparency.

He and his deputy were sacked two years later by Cardinal Archbishop Angelo Becciu.

Milone says at first he had good relations with Francis, telling him "everything I found" and meeting him regularly.

But that changed in 2016. That was about the same time he requested more information from Becciu on the purchase of a London building. He suspected Francis did not receive his letters after that.

Soon after, both auditors were sacked.

Milone blames this on Becciu, who until Francis fired him in 2020 was the third-highest-ranking official at the Vatican.

Becciu masterminded "operation eject-Milone", the ousted auditor says.

When Becciu sacked Milone in 2017, he told reporters Milone "went against all the rules and was spying on the private lives of his superiors and staff, including me".

Milone denies this.

"We did the right thing, we never spied, we have been honest, we did what we had to do, but unfortunately what we had to do was very embarrassing," he says.

Meanwhile, in 2020 Pope Francis fired Becciu. He is currently one of 10 defendants at a trial in the Vatican on charges including corruption and embezzlement related to the purchase of a building in London. All of them deny any wrongdoing.

So far the Vatican has made no comment on the lawsuit, which Milone and Panicco's lawyers filed last week with the Vatican prosecutor's office.

He sees his firing as a battle between "the Middle Ages and modernity". He is calling out "the small mafia at the Vatican" that was offended by his findings of lapses in the Catholic institution's finances, including "many cases of rule violations, improper predisposition of accounting records, and incorrect registrations."

Becciu says he has nothing new to say about the Milone case, that it was the pope who ordered Milone's ousting and that he merely carried it out.

His lawyers say Milone has given "a completely unfounded reconstruction" of events in the legal filing.

Milone and Panicco's 53-page legal filing alleges that "a filter" was put up which made it difficult for Milone to reach the pope, who was the target of a "disinformation operation" by some in the Vatican.

Milone says he has proof that several Vatican offices concealed transactions or obstructed auditors' attempts to see real estate and investment portfolios. He also pointed to significant anomalies in the management of funds at the Catholic pediatric hospital Bambino Gesù.

Source

• Religion News Service
• Reuters

Libero Milone says he was accused of spying after opponents of Pope Francis' financial reforms mounted a campaign against him.

The Vatican press office says Milone was "going outside his competencies and illegally hired an external company to undertake investigative activities about the private lives of representatives of the Holy See."

"This, besides being a crime, irremediably strained the trust placed in Dr. Milone," the statement said. It added that the Vatican's internal investigation of his actions was conducted with care and respect.

Milone was appointed to the new auditor general role in 2015 during sweeping financial reforms led by Cardinal George Pell.

His five-year contract gave him authority to audit the books of any department in the Vatican.

Milone maintained an initial silence after his resignation, but later said he was forced out when his investigations uncovered irregularities, an allegation which the Vatican contests.

On the day he resigned, Milone says he met with one of the Vatican's most senior officials who told him he was being dismissed. This followed a seven-month investigation by Vatican police.

Domenico Giani, the Vatican's police chief, told Reuters news agency there had been "overwhelming evidence" against Milone. He offered no further details.

Milone says the evidence presented to him was "fake, fabricated" and that he was effectively being pushed out.

Milone has not provided any evidence of the irregularities he found in the Vatican finances.

The Vatican says Milone's actions were not just criminal but had also "irredeemably damaged" the working relationship between the Vatican and Milone.

It also says it is surprised Milone has discussed his resignation as he had agreed not to do so.

Milone says, suspecting his office computer had been tampered with, he arranged for an external company to check for surveillance devices. The company discovered his computer had been the target of unauthorised access, and his secretary's computer had been infected with spyware that copied files.

Source

• The Tablet
• National Catholic Register
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Malay Mail Online

He has not given any reasons for his unexpected departure from the post, which he has held for just two years.

His role was to help ensure transparency in the Vatican's finances.

In a statement, the Vatican said:

"It is noted that Doctor Libero Milone yesterday presented his resignation to the Holy Father from the position of Auditor General.

"The Holy Father accepted it. Thus concludes, by common agreement, the relationship of collaboration with the Holy See.

"While it wishes Doctor Milone every good for his future activity, the Holy See informs that, as soon as possible, a process will be activated to nominate a new director for the Office of Auditor General."

Although neither Milone nor the Vatican has given any reason for Milone's resignation, unnamed sources claiming to have knowledge of the situation say there had been a "clash of operational styles" between Milone and the departments his office audited.

The Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA) has been particularly affected, the sources say.

APSA is the office of the Roman Curia that deals with the "provisions owned by the Holy See in order to provide the funds necessary for the Roman Curia to function".

It manages the Vatican's real estate holdings, pays Vatican employees' salaries, acts as a purchasing office and human resources department, and manages the Vatican's financial and stock portfolio.

Source

• National Catholic Register
• Catholic Herald
• Reuters
• Image: Catholic Herald

Under statutes approved by the Pope earlier this year, the auditor general will have the power to audit the books of any Vatican office.

He will report directly to the Pope.

Having an independent auditor helps ensure the "separation of powers" needed for reforming the Vatican's economic activity.

Among Mr Milone's previous work was three years as a member of the audit committee of the United Nations' World Food Programme.

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