Is Becciu arguing to abolish the sostituto?

The cardinal seems to be arguing he's a victim of the same kind of power he used to exercise

Disgraced former sostituto Cardinal Angelo Becciu engaged in a public media spat last week with Vatican media’s editorial director. 

In an exchange of editorials with Andrea Tornielli, carried in L’Osservatore Romano, the cardinal mounted his latest protest, following his conviction for embezzlement and abuse of office by a Vatican City court last year.

Pope Francis and then-Archbishop Angelo Becciu as sostituto.

But while Becciu was superficially taking aim at Tornielli’s assessment of the criminal trial which convicted him, his real topic appeared to be his claim that he is the victim of a “political agenda” not a legal process.

Since Becciu’s 2020 departure from the curia and his criminal indictment the following year, the cardinal has repeatedly insisted on his personal loyalty to Francis, while hinting that any and all alleged criminal abuses of office by him during his tenure as papal chief of staff were papally sanctioned acts.

In his column last week, the cardinal tried to contextualize the office he once held — simultaneously playing up its unique influence, while seeking to downplay his own personal responsibility for his actions — a strategy which seems on track to pit him personally against Francis.

But if the cardinal’s appeal case hinges on his former office’s closeness to Francis, and the special powers that it confers, he may end up making a more credible case against the office of sostituto than for his own innocence.

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In Tornielli’s short column, carried by Vatican News just over two weeks ago, the site’s editorial director made a brief case for the fairness of the judicial process which convicted Becciu and several other defendants in December.

Published on the day the court issued the judges’ full and final reasoning for convicting Becciu and his codefendants, Tornielli insisted that “a fair trial has been held with the right of defense and the presumption of innocence,” despite vocal and at times tendentious claims to the contrary from Becciu’s lawyers.

Citing the final document of last month’s synod, Tornielli also noted that “a consequence of clericalism there is an implicit assumption that those in authority in the Church should not be accountable for their actions and decisions” — observations Cardinal Becciu appeared to take personally.

Criticizing Tornielli’s “vaguely moralistic tone,” the former sostituto insisted that it was not the case that clerics like him operated in an unscrutinized and unaccountable manner.

In all things, the cardinal insisted, “I have always acted according to my prerogatives, without ever going beyond my powers.”

But Becciu has a difficult needle to thread in defending how he exercised those powers — which by his own account were exceptionally broad and virtually independent of any oversight.

In the space of a few paragraphs, Becciu boasted of “the importance of the role of the sostituto,” and its effective independent authority, noting it is “the intermediary between the Pope and the Secretariat of State.” 

“For this reason it has management autonomy,” Becciu said. “It is the substitute who has to make the machine work. It is the substitute that everyone in the Vatican refers to, from the Gendarmerie to the Court itself.”

It is a curious boast for Becciu to make, in the context of an op-ed about his own rights to the presumption of innocence and to due process.

Coincidentally, in the same week that the cardinal’s article was published in L’Osservatore, the former auditor general of the Vatican, Libero Milone was back in court in the city state for a hearing his his own appeal case. 

Milone is suing the Secretariat of State for wrongful dismissal after Becciu used — or perhaps abused — the power of his office as sostituto to force his resignation from office for “spying” on the private financial dealings of curial officials, including Becciu.

Ironically, Milone’s lawyers have long contended that Vatican City gendarmes were acting under the sostituto’s orders to spy on him, and threaten him with arrest and criminal prosecution if he and his deputy refused to resign. 

In the initial ruling in Milone’s case, Vatican judges found that there was no proof the sostituto could make the gendarmes do his bidding, and they must have acted independently. Yet now Becciu appears to be saying that Vatican City cops do indeed “refer” to his former office for their marching orders.

The ruling in Milone’s case is now under appeal. 

Becciu’s expansive description of his former role is also curious, given that at the same time he appears to complain that it was Francis who authorized the criminal investigation into his conduct in the first place, and sent him to trial in ordinary Vatican court. 

If, as he says, the entire Vatican apparatus, including law enforcement and the judiciary, is expected to “refer,” and perhaps defer, to his former office in lieu of the pope, Becciu appears to be making an obvious case that Francis and only Francis could have green lit a process to hold his former deputy to account.

Becciu’s real argument seems to be that so fully does his office act with Francis’ own authority — generally or specifically — that any effort to hold him to account legally is an attempt to indict the pope personally. 

This has long been Becciu’s argument: that anything he did which might appear to be illegal was done on papal authority, and by virtue of that fact, could simply not be illegal.

The problem Becciu faced during his trial, and continues to face into his appeal, is that the facts do not always appear to bear out this argument.

In his column last week, the cardinal referenced directly his conviction for embezzling more than half a million euros for the benefit of his self-described private spy, Cecilia Marogna. Becciu contended again last week that “that painful initiative was conducted by me solely and exclusively to carry out the humanitarian operation agreed with the pope, without any other different purpose.”

Throughout the course of his trial, Becciu repeatedly attempted to argue that his payments to Marogna were personally and secretly authorized by Pope Francis, as part of a bid to free a kidnapped religious sister in Mali. 

However, secret recordings by Becciu of conversations between him and the pope, as well as private letters between them submitted as evidence during the trial, showed Francis repeatedly denying any knowledge of the affair.

The cardinal has sought to make his stand on his credibility versus the pope’s, arguing, essentially, that Francis is disowning him and the operation to free the captured nun. 

For some skeptical observers of the Francis papacy, that defense might seem at least plausible, given the pope’s known preference for keeping his formal signature off of Vatican documents he finds distasteful. Instead, according to officials in several Vatican departments, the pope has a habit of “waiving” at the paperwork presented for his signature, literally and metaphorically, to signal his approval.

The problem for Becciu in the Margona case is that, in addition to the evidence showing Francis denying knowledge of Becciu’s payments to Margona in what he thought were private conversations, financial records show the cardinal appearing to “double dip” on the Mali rescue operation.

The judges at trial identified payments to a London security consultancy, engaged by Becciu and Margona “to which the total sum of €575,000 was paid by the Secretariat of State in two installments between February and April 2018.” 

But, in a second set of payments from December 2018 to April 2019, “the same amount was paid instead by means of nine wire transfers to a Slovenian company,” which operated as a front for Margona. The court found evidence that the company was actually “set up ad hoc on the day immediately preceding the first payment” from Becciu and was “the exclusive possession of Cecilia Marogna.”

From there, corporate records show the money was spent on luxury hotels and designer label goods.

Despite this and other inconvenient points of fact established during the trial — for example his funneling of Church funds into his own brother’s personal bank account — Becciu continued last week to frame his conviction as a railroading.

“From the first conversation with the Pope on the subject I was considered guilty,” he said. “It seems that the political will is only to close the narrative on the trial, while trying not to damage the Holy See or the Pope. It is a shame, however, that the truth must be sacrificed on this altar.”

“But,” Becciu concluded, “the truth, according to a saying attributed to Saint Augustine, is like a lion and will defend itself.” It is a somewhat ominous sounding statement. Though it is not clear what truth Becciu can hope will emerge at appeal.

Since that decision was published he’s offered no new evidence, nor advanced any new arguments as to why those judges decided wrongly.

Instead, Becciu has made a series of statements questioning the motivations behind his prosecution and conviction and even suggested that the pope should be removed as head of state of Vatican City.

The problem facing Becciu is, if he is serious about pressing this claim at appeal, he will eventually have to be more explicit for it to stand any chance of being taken seriously. 

If, as he says, he is the victim of a political agenda, he will eventually have to state plainly who he thinks is trying to railroad him. In that, he seems to have made a more compelling case against his own former office.

By so starkly describing the crude power and effective autonomy enjoyed by the office of sostituto, Becciu has appeared to point the finger more effectively at his own successor, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, than at the pope directly, since it is the sosituto, not the pope, to whom everyone in the Vatican, “from the Gendarmerie to the Court itself,” apparently refers.

Of course, since following Becciu into the role in 2018, Peña Parra has shown himself every bit as willing as his successor to avail himself of the full influence of his office, and its apparent ability to function above the law. 

The archbishop has admitted on record, and defended, ordering extra-legal surveillance of Vatican banking officials in retaliation for their denying him a loan. 

And, more recently, he attempted to overturn the entire legal process for handling clerical abuse cases in favor of a twice-convicted abuser of minors.

The immediate problem for Becciu at appeal remains the weight of evidence on which he was convicted last year. But it is ironic that in defending that case he is now casting himself as a victim of the same exercise power he used to enjoy himself.

In the end, the best case Becciu appears to be able to make is that the office of sostituto has become a danger to the rule of law in the Vatican.