What on Earth is Going On With Cardinal Becciu?

The last 24 hours have been a windmill in Catholic news. I will mostly be relying on links to CNA for links to the stories.  Cardinal Becciu, the prefect for the Congregation of the Causes of the Saints (and the former equivalent to the Vatican's Chief of Staff) was forced to resign Thursday evening, and had his ability to vote as a cardinal revoked.

In a frankly bizarre press conference today, Cardinal Becciu (in a statement that probably made his lawyers cringe) stated the following:

- The Pope demanded his resignation upon learning of a blockbuster story in Italian media accusing Becciu of misappropriating millions of dollars in charitable money, diverting it to his family members who in many cases invested the money (making profit off of the transactions) and in a few cases nobody knows what they did.

- He admits to all the behavior but says it is perfectly legal, though admits he has "made mistakes."

- Eagerly looks forward to a criminal trial where he can offer a spirited defense.

If Ed Condon is right (and he probably is), Becciu will get his wish with a criminal trial.  The Catholic Church will likely to have to endure the spectacle of a member of the Roman Curia standing trial in an Italian court for fraud and possibly embezzlement.  This is also not the first time Becciu has come under scrutiny for some of his financial dealings.  He has been connected to an italian hospital that was a money laundering front for the mafia.  (He steered a major loan obtained through dubious means from a US charity, causing many of the board to resign in protest when senior church leaders on the board forced it through.)  He's been involved in speculative land deals that went south and cost the Vatican a fortune, but not before several of his close allies and friends made a lot of money first.  He was accused of then obscuring the loss through accounting measures explicitly banned by Pope Francis in 2014.  What I'm trying to say is that if prosecutors want to investigate Becciu, they certainly have a lot of things to go on.

So what are we to make of all of this?  I actually think the cynical interpretation (that Francis knew about this all along but only cared once it leaked) is not the correct one.  Becciu's news conference today confirms what the story was about, and there honestly wasn't a lot of media talk about Becciu stealing from Peter's Pence.  There was talk about other speculative deals, but Becciu says those were not part of the deal, and I believe him.  I think its perfectly reasonable to believe that Francis was not going to take action over complex financial transactions unless there was definitive proof the law was broken, at least enough to a prosecutors satisfaction.  That's not the defense it sounds like.  Personally, I think the Pope was doing whatever he could to avoid taking too hard of a look at what Angelo Becciu was doing, and only when it started getting out of control did he take action.  That's consistent with how he treated McCarrick:  he knew of the homosexual relationships and the sleeping with seminarians, and only defrocked him once it became clear he was also a pedophile.  Like most in the post-concilliar Church, the pope is often allergic to discipline and governance, especially of his allies.

It is precisely that allergy that allows these prelates to get away with the indiscretions they do.  This is not the first senior francis aide accused of misappropriating church funds.  His former right hand man Oscar Maradiaga (a famously loud personality who has been awfully quiet the last 2 years) was accused of taking donations from poor Catholics in honduras and funneling them into investment companies that only existed on paper.  It allowed a bishop, Gustavo Zanchetta (a former secretary of then Jorge Bergoglio) to sexually harass seminarians and carry around pornography, but there wasn't anything *that* bad, and besides, my critics are your critics, right padre?  Once that became untenable, the Pope then whisked him away to Rome with a desk job he never actually reported to.  Only when that became revealed was Zanchetta suspended and then sent back home to stand trial.  The McCarrick scandal speaks for itself.  The decision not to discipline and govern has real consequences, and the pope is responsible before God for those consequences.  That should comfort everyone but the Holy Father.

Another way this is a bed of their own making comes in the various defenses offered.  The first is that this is proof the system worked, as Francis sacked Becciu.  Yet Becciu was under a massive cloud of scrutiny for years, and he was still made a cardinal.  He was now clearly under investigation for financial misdealing when Francis promoted him to the Prefect of a Curial Congregation, which now looks like a promotion to get him away from everything, a classic Vatican practice:  screw up minorly, get a reprimand, screw up majorly, get a promotion.

A more creative defense comes from individuals like Gladdin Papin (and many integralists online) who say that the financial scandals are a product not so much of Vatican malfeasance as malfeasance of liberalism.  The argument goes that if the Vatican hadn't been reduced to a small city state, it would have had greater access to money, and wouldn't have engaged in highly speculative endeavors that are a magnet for con artists.

The only way you arrive at this conclusion is if you start with the conclusion that the Holy See can never be blamed for any mistake.  That's a cult, not a religion.  The Vatican lost a lot of access to many of the tools of modern finance because they habitually failed to behave honestly in their finances dating back to the 60's and 70's, if not earlier.  This is where that allergic reaction to governance haunts them.  Combine this with the growing tendency to centralize everything after the Council (viewed as an unfortunate accident but was clearly the intent of most of the experts who helped implement the council) and you have a system with almost zero accountability and millions of dollars.  Even the noblest of men will be tempted to abuse that power, and the noblest of men are by and large not in the College of Cardinals.

As to what the Church can do, there is honestly precious little it can do.  That window has long closed.  The ones who can do something will be civil authorities, and at least in Italy (buttressed by civil authorities in the Vatican) they will be doing something.  While mentioning integralism in passing, it does make one wish for the glory days of Christendom in one respect:  when a powerful Emperor viewed himself as the protector of Christendom, and if he had to throw his considerable weight behind reform, that's what he did.  While Rod Dreher waits for Benedict, maybe we are waiting for Otto, or the Second Coming, whichever comes first.