Australia’s highest ranking Catholic cleric and the pope’s former treasurer, Cardinal George Pell, has said he feels a dismayed sense of vindication as the financial mismanagement he tried to uncover in the Holy See is now being exposed in a spiralling Vatican corruption investigation.
Pell made the comments to the Associated Press in his first interview since returning to Rome after his conviction-turned-acquittal on sexual abuse charges in Australia. Pell said he knew in 2014 when he took the treasury job that the Holy See’s finances were “a bit of a mess”.
“I never, never thought it would be as Technicolor as it proved,” Pell said. “I didn’t know that there was so much [alleged] criminality involved.”
Pell’s comments come ahead of the 15 December release of the first volume of his memoir, Prison Journal, chronicling the first five months of the 404 days he spent in solitary confinement in a Melbourne maximum security prison.
Pell left his job as prefect of the Vatican’s economy ministry in 2017 to face charges that he sexually molested two 13-year-old choir boys in the sacristy of the Melbourne cathedral in 1996. After a first jury deadlocked, a second unanimously convicted him and he was sentenced to six years in prison. The conviction was upheld by Victoria’s court of appeal, only to be thrown out by the high court, which in April found there was reasonable doubt in the evidence of his lone accuser.
In the prison diary, Pell reflects on the nature of suffering, Pope Francis’ papacy and the humiliations of solitary confinement as he battled to clear his name for a crime he insists he never committed.
Pell and his supporters believe he was a scapegoat for all the crimes of the Australian Catholic church’s botched response to clergy sexual abuse. Victims and critics say he epitomises everything wrong with how the church has dealt with the problem.
Pell was criticised in the findings of the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, which found that Pell had been told about abuse by priests in Ballarat and failed to act. The inquiry also heard it was “implausible” that Pell did not know about the offending of one of Australia’s worst paedophile priests, Gerald Ridsdale, who was moved from parish to parish.
In the book, Pell makes repeated reference his three years at the Vatican trying to impose international accounting, budgeting and transparency standards on the Holy See’s notoriously siloed bureaucracy.
That secretive culture has come under a microscope as Vatican prosecutors investigate the Vatican secretariat of state’s €350m (A$568m) investment in a London real estate venture and the tens of millions of euros in donations from the faithful that it paid to Italian middlemen to manage the deal.
After more than a year of investigation, no one has been indicted, though a handful of Vatican officials and Italian businessmen are under investigation. Pell said he was watching the developments as they unfolded.
“It just might be staggering incompetence,” he said of the scandal, adding that he hoped eventual trials would ascertain the truth.
“It would be better for the church if these things hadn’t happened, if I wasn’t vindicated in this way,” he said. “But given that they have happened, it’s quite clear” that the reforms he sought to impose were necessary.
Pell clashed with other high-ranking Vatican officials in his role, including, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the secretariat of state.
Pell claimed in 2014 that he had “discovered” hundreds of millions of dollars that were “tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on the balance sheet” – a reference to the secretary of state’s in-house asset portfolio that Becciu controlled that never appeared on the Vatican’s consolidated financial statements.
Becciu hasn’t been charged in the corruption investigation, but it came as little surprise that Pell issued a blistering statement after Francis on fired Becciu, over apparently unrelated allegations of embezzlement, which Becciu denies. Pell congratulated Francis then and said: “I hope the cleaning of the stables continues in both the Vatican and Victoria,” a reference to his home state of Victoria, where he was initially convicted.
After Pell returned to Rome last month, he had a well-publicised private audience with Francis. “He acknowledged what I was trying to do,” Pell said of the pope. “And, you know, I think it’s been sadly vindicated by revelations and developments.”
