Vatican Magistrature, or the Saga of Juridical Mishap

A look at the deep corruption in Vatican finances and the coverups that have been carried out.

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

After its penultimate inspection, in 2017, Moneyval had reproved the papal judiciary for slacking off, failing to act on suspicious cases identified and reported by the Financial Information Authority, AIF, of the Vatican itself.

But now that a new report from Moneyval - the committee of the Council of Europe that assesses compliance with the international financial standards of the participating states - is expected any day now, following an inspection that began last September 30 and lasted a dozen days, the fear at the Vatican is that the reprimand will be even more severe.

If it is true, in fact, that the papal judiciary has finally completed a drawn-out proceeding, the one that on January 21 sentenced Angelo Caloia, the former president of the Vatican “bank,” IOR, Institute for Works of Religion, it is no less true that the mother of all the latest disasters, namely the messy takeover by the Secretariat of State of the luxurious building at 60 Sloane Avenue in London, not only remains far from coming to trial but has also registered a merciless sequence of judicial setbacks.

The photo above was taken at the crucial stage of the story. It is December 26 2018 and alongside Pope Francis, at Santa Marta, is Gianluigi Torzi, foremost among the financiers to whom the Secretariat of State is relying on in the purchase of the London building.

On that date the purchase is made, for a total of 350 million dollars, but the Secretariat of State cannot take possession of the building without paying off the intermediaries and in particular shelling out to Torzi himself for the decisive shares still in his keeping.

This last settlement alone will cost 15 million euros, money that the Secretariat of State will later complain was extorted by Torzi himself, who will however say it was duly arranged in a meeting at the Vatican between him, deputy secretary of state Edgar Peña Parra, and Pope Francis in person.

This meeting, with the pope pressing for a solution and for a “just salary” for Torzi, will be admitted by the Vatican judiciary itself in February 2021. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and turn back to 2019.

To close the deal and get full possession of the building, on June 4 of that year the Secretariat of State asked the IOR for a loan of 150 million. At first the IOR seems willing to grant it, but then suddenly refuses. Indeed, IOR director general Gian Franco Mammì, very close to Jorge Mario Bergoglio since he was the agent for Vatican “bank” clients in Latin America, judges the entire operation to be incorrect and lodges a complaint with the Vatican tribunal, also implicating for failure of oversight the AIF, chaired 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.

Pope Francis goes along with this twist of fate, as he himself will declare at a press conference shortly after the events. It is he himself who signs - on behalf of the Vatican magistrates - the order to search the Secretariat of State and the AIF. On October 1 2019 the Vatican gendarmerie under the orders of commander Domenico Giani raids the offices and seizes documents and electronic devices. Posted the next day are the names and photos of five middle and upper-level officials suspended from service. And to cap off this purge carried out in contempt of due process Francis fires commander Giani as if he were to blame for the mayhem, when instead he had simply acted on the pope’s mandate.

The five, later to become six, will all be kicked out. And soon both Di Ruzza and Brüelhart will be gone from the AIF, with the subsequent controversial resignation of two members of the board of directors, the Swiss Marc Odendall and the American Juan Carlos Zarate.

In the meantime, however, a first setback hits the Vatican and its judiciary. On account of the October 1 raid, with the resulting violation of confidential information, the Egmont Group - the “intelligence” network of 164 states in which the Holy See takes part - unanimously expels the AIF from this circuit. In order to be readmitted the Holy See will have to eat crow and sign a “memorandum of understanding,” offering more stringent guarantees of reliability.

On the evening of June 5, 2020, at the end of a long interrogation, a locked cell is where the Vatican magistrates send Torzi, accused of extorting the aforementioned 15 million. They will release him ten days later, in exchange for 3 million that he deposited in Swiss accounts, which the Vatican magistrates will discover they cannot collect. Storzi will take refuge in Great Britain, pursued by a Vatican indictment that will lead him to be tried in London.

On September 24 2020, another sensational coup de theatre. Pope Francis summons Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, deputy secretary of state until June 2018, and without providing any explanation forces him to resign as prefect of the congregation for the causes of saints and to give up all of his “rights” as a cardinal , including participation in a conclave. The cardinal protests his innocence and six months later, on the evening of Holy Thursday, the pope will make a surprise visit to his home to celebrate the Mass “in coena Domini,” but still without stating the reasons for the defenestration. Among the accusations against Becciu circulating in the media is also that of having had his hands in the London affair, but soon afterward another bombshell falls on the cardinal.

On October 13 2020, after the Moneyval inspection has just ended, the Vatican magistrates have Cecilia Marogna arrested in Milan and asked for the extradition of the self-styled secret service expert, recruited years earlier by Becciu among the “public officials” of the Secretariat of State, now accused of misappropriation and embezzlement of Vatican money allocated to her. After two weeks in prison, however, the Italian court of cassation releases her and declares the Vatican initiative “null,” because it was incorrect in form and substance. The following January 18, the Vatican magistrates will throw in the towel: they will revoke any measure of arrest of the accused and will assure her that she will be able to participate freely in the trial against her.

In November 2020, another setback for the magistrates of the Holy See. After they have the home of Fabrizio Tirabassi, one of the Vatican officials dismissed a year earlier, searched in Italy, the Italian judiciary declares the search warrant “null” and “illegitimate,” and orders the return of the money and objects seized.

At the end of the year, on December 28 2020, a “motu proprio” by Pope Francis obliges the Secretariat of State to empty its coffers and to hand over all the money and properties it holds to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, APSA. The provision has all the appearance of a downgrading of the major Vatican government institution, planned for some time but finally approved on the pretext of the ill-fated operation in London.

But from none other than London comes, in March of 2021, the worst of the setbacks. The British judiciary acquits Torzi of the charge of extorting the infamous 15 million from the Vatican. The magistrates of the Holy See ask in vain that the reasons for the verdict remain secret. On March 24 these make their way around the world and make mincemeat of the Vatican reconstruction of the facts. No fraud, but a regular agreement between the parties, dating back to when Torzi was familiarly received by the pope at Santa Marta, during the Christmas holidays of 2018, and then had arranged, again with the pope's blessing, his “salary.”

Yet, incredibly, at the Vatican they don't give up. The promoter of justice of the Holy See requests and obtains from an Italian examining magistrate the issuing, on April 12 of this year, of a new arrest warrant for Torzi, now at large in the United Kingdom, this time for his allegedly wrongful use of part of the 15 million received from the Vatican.

But astonishing above all are the reasons given by the Vatican for this arrest warrant. It states, among other things, that if an error was made right out of the gate in buying the London building, it is because “acquisitions of properties for investment purposes cannot be carried out by the Secretariat of State, as they are reserved for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See,” nor “can the Secretariat of State use the funds received for charitable purposes such as Peter's Pence.”

But neither reason holds up. Until December 2020, the Secretariat of State had the full access to its funds and Pope Francis himself, at the press conference on November 26 2019 on the flight back from Japan, in answering a question about the London affair, had warmly praised the “good administration” - “we say ‘a widow's investment’”- that “can buy a property, rent it, and then sell it,” in order to put one’s money to good use, all of it, including Peter’s Pence.

On March 27, at the Vatican, Francis opened the current judicial year with a speech in which he made “regulatory changes” - afterward translated into practice in a “motu proprio” of April 30 - in order to be able to bring to trial in like manner all members of the Church, “with no more privileges dating back over time.” As if to say that a future trial over the London affair could even bring before the bar cardinal secretary of state Pietro Parolin and substitute Peña Parra, so far not subjected to any investigation despite being clearly involved in the affair.

But one wonders how it is possible that the Vatican judiciary, after years of updates and personnel changes, could be in such sensational disarray.

Observers among the most attentive trace the continuous procedural errors into which it falls partly to its being almost entirely composed of Italian magistrates who work not full-time but intermittently, continuing to carry out their work as lawyers in Italy, and therefore with little involvement in the most intricate cases.

The only one who works full time is the president of the Vatican tribunal, Giuseppe Pignatone, in office since October 3 2019, a now retired Italian judge famous for having built the case years ago in Rome for the trial he improperly called “Mafia Capitale.”

Curiously, however, Pignatone continues to write for the newspaper “La Stampa,” which is part of the publishing group most active in denouncing Vatican malfeasance, often with never-before-published documents coming precisely from there. And in his last article, of April 12, he admitted that there may be “improper interventions, abuses and irregularities in the behavior of individual magistrates,” but above all he criticized that “journalism which is more inclined to anticipate future (and only possible) convictions, especially if to the detriment of a political opponent,” violating the golden principle of innocent until proven guilty.

Pope Francis is neither a magistrate nor a journalist. But in the Vatican justice system it is he who is the supreme “dominus.” What happens there is also his doing.