“Annus Horribilis” for the Vatican Secretariat of State. But It’s Not Over

On what remains of the legendary, omnipotent secretariat of state, the coup de grace fell between Christmas and New Year, with the “motu proprio” of Pope Francis that carried away the strongbox with everything it contained, meaning a good part of that billion and 400 million euros that Cardinal George Pell - during the few months at the beginning of the pontificate when he was able to act with the pope’s full mandate to clean house - had uncovered outside the official Vatican budgets.

From now on, therefore, what was the great power center of the Vatican curia will no longer wield funds or properties, all of these moving over to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, APSA, and under the control of the secretariat for the economy. Of the administrative office of the secretariat of state only the emblem and a couple of desks will survive, on which to keep the few house accounts with money to be requested each time from whoever is responsible. Even the discretionary fund that is available to the pope will no longer be kept by the secretariat of state, but by the APSA.

Compared with what it was at the apogee of its history, therefore, the secretariat of state is now touching the lowest point of its orbit. But it’s not over, because in the coming months its reputation and power could fall even lower.

It was Paul VI, during the 1960’s, who conferred the greatest powers on the secretariat of state, from which he himself had come and which in point of fact he continued to govern.

And it was John Paul II, in 1979, who appointed as secretary of state a cardinal of the first magnitude, Agostino Casaroli, architect of the Ostpolitik beyond the iron curtain but also the man who in 1984 managed to save the Holy See and the Institute for Works of Religion, IOR, from the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, with a “voluntary” outlay of 250 million dollars to the creditor banks.

Casaroli was succeeded in 1991 by Cardinal Angelo Sodano and in 2006 by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. With whom the authority of the secretariat of state embarked on a descending parabola so marked that at the conclave of 2013 Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected with the request for its drastic downsizing, within the framework of an overall reform of the curia.

The new pope, in fact, began by calling around him as his advisers in reforming the curia and in governing the universal Church eight cardinals from the five continents, from among whom the secretary of state was deliberately excluded. And he created a brand-new secretariat for the economy, endowed with full powers and with Cardinal Pell as prefect, which already by its name heralded the removal of financial activities from the secretariat of state.

But this “incipit” was quickly contradicted by the facts. To the eight cardinal councilors Pope Francis soon went back to add Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state since August 31 2013. And the housecleaning work of Cardinal Pell and auditor Libero Milone met with a very violent counter-offensive, especially from the second-in-command of the secretariat of state at the time, substitute Giovanni Angelo Becciu, and the cardinal president of the APSA, Domenico Calcagno, both - at that stage - in the good graces of the pope, who unexpectedly switched over to their side.

The result was that in 2016 Francis took away from Pell the powers he had initially given him and would no longer receive Milone in audience. The following year the cardinal had to give up all his duties in order to return to Australia, hounded by accusations of sexual abuse ultimately recognized as baseless - but after 404 days in prison - while Milone was forced to resign on the basis of the accusation - in reality not even subjected to a judicial investigation - of having wished to violate, in his analyses of the accounts, “the private lives of officials of the Holy See.”

After the attack had been repelled and it was shielded from any supervision the secretariat of state was thus able to continue its wheeling and dealing, in some cases - as with the purchase of the Dermopathic Institute of the Immaculate, a hospital in Rome owned by a religious order and ultimately a prey to bankruptcy - with financial support from the APSA and the US-based Papal Foundation, still backed at the time by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

The business was conducted by the administrative office headed by Monsignor Alberto Perlasca. Always, however, under the supervision of Cardinal Parolin and under the command of substitute Becciu, who in turn met with Pope Francis daily and kept him informed of everything.

Francis knew and approved. In the summer of 2019, however, the pope suddenly switched to the side of those who opposed the biggest of the financial operations underway at the secretariat of state - where in the meantime the role of substitute had been taken over by the Venezuelan Edgar Peña Parra, succeeding Becciu, who had been promoted to cardinal - the purchase of a large building in a prestigious district of London, at no. 60 Sloane Avenue.

The operation, badly conducted through unreliable outside agents, was a disastrous loss, and in remedy the secretariat of state had asked the IOR for help. Where Pope Francis had and has in crucial roles two men appointed by and strictly obedient to him: director general Gian Franco Mammì, previously the manager of the Vatican bank’s clients in Latin America and from that time forward close to Bergoglio, and the “prelate” Battista Ricca, a former career diplomat recalled to Rome because of his homosexual intemperance, but publicly acquitted by Pope Francis at the beginning of his pontificate with the famous phrase: “Who am I to judge?”

The fact is that the IOR not only refused to help the secretariat of state with a loan, but it judged the entire London operation as wrongful and filed a complaint with the Vatican tribunal, also charging with failure of oversight the Financial Intelligence Authority, AIF, headed at the time by the Swiss financier René Brüelhart and directed by Tommaso Di Ruzza, son-in-law of former Bank of Italy governor Antonio Fazio.

Today, more than a year later, the Vatican judicial investigations still seem to be up in the air and the trial is yet to come. But in the meantime Pope Francis has already let loose a flurry of convictions, at his sole discretion.

On October 1 2019 he had the offices of the AIF searched by the papal gendarmerie and suspended its director, Di Ruzza, along with four officials of the secretariat of state, including Becciu’s former secretary, Monsignor Mauro Carlino.

A few days later he fired gendarmerie commander Domenico Giani, only to confess on November 26, on the return flight of his trip to Thailand and Japan, that he, the pope, had ordered the search.

On November 18, he showed Brüelhart the door and secured the resignations of two other members of the AIF’s board of directors, Switzerland’s Marc Odendall and the American Juan Carlos Zarate, regardless of the fact that after the searches on October 1 the Egmont Group - the “intelligence” network of 164 states of which the Holy See is a member - had excluded the AIF from this group on account of the violation of confidential information.

On January 20 he definitively fired, after having suspended him, former AIF director Di Ruzza.

In February of 2020 he removed Monsignor Perlasca as director of the administrative office of the secretariat of state, temporarily switching him over to adjunct promoter of justice of the supreme tribunal of the apostolic signatura.

On April 30, he also removed Perlasca from it, sending him back to his diocese of origin, Como, and definitively fired three more of those suspended on October 2: Monsignor Carlino and the two laymen Vincenzo Mauriello and Fabrizio Tirabassi, the latter already Perlasca's right hand man.

Finally, on September 24, he removed Becciu as prefect of the congregation for the causes of saints and stripped him of all his “rights” as a cardinal, including participation in a conclave.

It goes without saying that this flurry of convictions issued by Pope Francis not only before any trial but without even formulating any specific accusation or ensuring the minimum right to defense was accompanied, at the secretariat of state and among those affected by these measures, by a war of all against all, in particular of Perlasca against Becciu.

And Cardinal Parolin? Also at daggers drawn with Becciu, has not yet been brought under accusation personally, but it is clear that his authority has gone to pieces, given the disaster in the Vatican offices under him.

That Francis has already taken note of this loss of Parolin’s authority is proven by at least one recent indication: the removal of the secretary of state, for the first time, from the commission of cardinals that oversees the IOR, renewed by the pope last September 21.

But in addition to this conspicuous expulsion, the “new entries” into the aforementioned commission also speak volumes, in particular those of three cardinals devoid of any financial expertise: the Polish Konrad Krajewski, apostolic almoner, the Italian Giuseppe Petrocchi, archbishop of L’Aquila, the Filipino Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle, prefect of “Propaganda Fide.”

Their call to be part of the commission is simply linked to their being cosy with Francis.

As well as for Archbishop Nunzio Galantino as president of the APSA. It was surely not his early studies on the theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Romano Guardini but only his proximity to the pope that enabled him first to become secretary of the Italian bishops’ conference - which certainly does not miss him - much less, since 2018, to preside over what is the central bank and strongbox of the Holy See.

Just as for Cardinal Kevin Farrell at the head of the newly created Vatican body for “confidential matter,” that is, financial transactions to be kept secret. This promotion of his certainly did not stem from his having roomed from 2002 to 2006 with then-archbishop of Washington McCarrick without ever having “any reason to suspect” anything about the sexual debauchery of his superior, but from his being a protege of Francis.

And also for Argentine bishop Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta, a very close friend of Bergoglio and incredibly called to Rome by the pope in the brand-new role of “assessor” of the APSA, in spite of the fact that back home he made a very poor show of himself as administrator of his diocese and is now on trial for the sexual abuse of seminarians.

The paradox is that with characters of such mold Pope Francis has for several months been restarting precisely that process of cleaning up and reorganizing the Vatican finances which he had initially entrusted to Cardinal Pell for a short time, only to spend the rest of it contradicting his guidelines.

Fortunately, it should be noted that alongside the Riccas and Zanchettas there are also personalities of financial expertise demonstrated in previous high-level roles who are working at the Vatican today, such as APSA secretary Fabio Gasperini, the new president of the ASIF, the Supervisory and Financial Information Authority, Carmelo Barbagallo, IOR president Jean-Baptiste Douville de Franssu, auditor general Alessandro Cassinis Righini.

But one can expect everything and its opposite from Francis. If one just looks up from financial management for a more general view of the economy, here too contradiction triumphs in him. This was seen on the occasion of the recent pontifical initiative entitled “Economy of Francesco,” in which the pope, wearing the habit of his homonymous saint of Assisi, proposed to the world “a pact to change the current economy,” indeed, to radically overthrow it in the wake of the “popular movements,” only to elect right afterward as his partner in the enterprise the “Council for Inclusive Capitalism,” meaning the magnates of the Ford Foundation, Bank of America, British Petroleum, Rockefeller Foundation, and the like.

Getting back to the secretariat of state, from now on there remains only one field on which to operate: that of diplomacy.

Where in recent years it has certainly not reaped success, given the disappointing outcome of the secret accord signed in 2018 with Beijing on the appointment of bishops in China.

But in the financial field as well its tribulations are not over. The strongbox has been taken from it, but it will still have to answer for the operations carried out to this point.

And one of these is particularly hot to handle. It concerns the huge sum of money thought to have left the secretariat of state bound for Australia, before and during Cardinal Pell’s painful homecoming.

At first the amount transferred had shown up in the amount of 800 thousand euros, then it was reckoned at almost 2 million, but in recent days the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Center, the agency that deals with financial crimes, has certified it at 2.3 billion Australian dollars, equivalent to one billion and 400 million euros, transferred from the Vatican to Australia over the last six years in more than 47,000 transactions.

The president of the episcopal conference of Australia, Brisbane archbishop Mark Coleridge, said that the country’s bishops were “astonished at the scale of the transfers” and never knew anything about all this, much less to whom the money was sent and why.

Even anonymous Vatican sources are demonstrating incredulity. But the secretariat of state will not be able to sidestep its duty of providing explanations. 2021 will be another year of thorns and thistles.

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