A Listening Church, But to Whom?

The trial of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, former substitute for the Vatican Secretariat of State, involved in the “London building” financial scandal, gives a bleak aspect of the functioning of the current Roman curia. Obviously, there is an intensive espionage culture there.

As Vaticanist Ed Condon notes on the American site The Pillar, during the hearings we witnessed an exchange of accusations of espionage between the defendants and the witnesses. On one side, the First Auditor General of the Vatican, Libero Milone, and, on the other, Cardinal Becciu and the head of the Vatican Gendarmerie, Domenico Gianni.

Libero Milone, who presents himself as the one who “discovered the ruse,” was fired in 2017 by his superior, Cardinal Becciu. The prelate justified this dismissal by the fact that the First Auditor allegedly spied on the private financial affairs of senior Vatican officials, including his own.

An accusation that Libero Milone denied, affirming that he was only “following the money trail,” according to the mandate received from the pope. In return, the First Auditor said that his office was bugged and that his team's computers and telephones were under surveillance. Which he reported to the Vatican Gendarmerie, but without obtaining a response.

This passivity is explained, according to him, by the fact that the head of the Gendarmerie, Domenico Gianni, was himself the target of his investigation. We then learned that Cardinal Becciu shamelessly used personal information networks.

This practice took an incredible turn with Cecilia Marogna, an adventurer and self-proclaimed “geopolitical analyst,” who for years worked as the cardinal’s “private secret agent.” She declared that she had compiled “files” for the Sardinian prelate on the private moral failings of senior Vatican officials.

In addition, it has been discovered that Cardinal Becciu made clandestine recordings of the Pope exposing state secrets, which is a crime under Vatican City security laws. 

Venezuelan Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, who replaced Cardinal Becciu as substitute, after his ouster in 2018, did not deny having also hired external service providers to protect himself from a possible internal investigation and to organize electronic surveillance of other officials for the purpose of retaliation. He even said he was ready to do so again, if necessary.

How far away are the days of secretaries of state like Merry del Val or Pacelli! Today there are frogs – not only in the holy water fonts – of substitutes who have adopted the “Barbouzes*” espionage methods, as filmed by Georges Lautner, with dialogues by Michel Audiard.

Cardinal Becciu resembles Eusebio Cafarelli, known as “the canon,” cynical and clumsy, wearing headphones plugged into microphones hidden almost everywhere… Let no one tell us anymore, in a grandiloquent tone, that we now have a Church “listening to the people of God,” and to the “cry of the Earth.”

*Reference to the film The Great Spy Chase, a French comedy made in 1964.