A senior Catholic cardinal has been accused of using €700,000 of Vatican funds to bribe witnesses to secure a sex abuse conviction against a rival.
Italian media have reported that Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, 72, is suspected of wiring the cash to recipients in Australia who helped to ensure hostile testimony in the abuse trial of Cardinal George Pell, who was accused of molesting choir boys in Melbourne in the 1990s.
Whut?
Before he returned to Australia in 2017 where he was tried, jailed and acquitted on appeal, Cardinal Pell, 79, served as finance minister at the Vatican, where his attempts to clean up opaque accounting were opposed by Cardinal Becciu.
Quoting leaked documents, the Italian newspapers La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera reported at the weekend that Vatican investigators suspect that Cardinal Becciu hoped to use the money to definitively derail Cardinal Pell’s transparency programme, which threatened to expose Cardinal Becciu’s allegedly corrupt management of Vatican cash.
Isn’t it all going to be so glorious if this turns out to be true? That entire witch hunt against Pell purely bought and paid for?
True, it seems a bit of a stretch but then…….
Blackfriars Bridge is taking bookings.
All gleefully enabled by the ABC in Australia. One of their journalists wrote a book about Pell.
Ah, I saw reports that Becciu had been very swiftly sacked, and rumors that Pell was on his way back, but I hadn’t realised the two were quite so directly linked.
The name Becciu sounds a bit … Sicilian
I don’t understand why you think it’s a bit of a stretch.
Send for Tom Hanks.
More like “Send for Al Pacino”. Wasn’t this one of the side plots of Godfather III?
My money would have been on George Soros. Who knew?
But it is a world wide campaign to frame Catholics.
Much as I approve of jailing Cardinals I suspect Pell was treated shamefully. The idea that it was all bought-and-paid-for is a revelation though. Except I suppose nobody should be astonished by corruption in the Roman church; c’est son metier.
Much as I approve of jailing Cardinals I suspect Pell was treated shamefully.
You think? The Victorian filth, in the absence of any complaints, set up a task force to investigate Pell and invited “victims” to come forward. The Victorian pigs are, without doubt, the most corrupt police farce in Australia, and that is saying something in a country where politicians and public servants almost exclusively work in their best interest. Honest politicians and public servants are stuffed and put in museums.
It’s good news for the world that the Church hasn’t mobilised the more, er, enthusiastic members whose faith tends towards the more direct and vibrant expression of their faith, ie with guns, etc. High Church politics is limited to buying up accusers in show trials.
Not that limited. Look at Calvi. Vatican and Finance go together like….police informers and fresh concrete.