The game between the Vatican side founded this year and a Vienna outfit was cancelled Saturday when several Austrians lifted their shirts to reveal pro-choice messages painted on their stomachs and backs when the anthems were played before kick-off, media reports said. Yet only low-ranking Vatican officials and external businessmen are known to be under investigation.The Vatican called off a friendly football match involving its new women’s team in Vienna over the weekend after several Austrian players protested the church’s anti-abortion stance. Those same court documents, however, have made clear the entire venture was approved by top officials in the Secretariat of State, and witnesses say Francis himself approved a “just” compensation for the broker. But in court documents, prosecutors have accused an Italian broker involved in the London deal of trying to extort the Holy See of 15 million euros in fees, and they have accused a handful of Vatican officials of involvement. No indictments have been handed down after two years of investigation. But now Becciu has been sacked, Francis has stripped the secretariat of its ability to manage the money and Vatican prosecutors are investigating the office's 350 million euro investment in a London real estate venture. He largely failed, as his nemesis in the Secretariat of State, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, blocked his efforts to impose international accounting and auditing standards. As Italy's COVID-19 resurgence hit, Pell spent the winter watching as the scandal over Vatican corruption and incompetence that he tried to uncover as Pope Francis’ finance czar exploded publicly in ways he admits he never saw coming.įor the three years that Pell was in charge of the Vatican’s finances, he tried to get a handle on just how much money the Secretariat of State had in its asset portfolio, what its investments were and what it did with the tens of millions of dollars in donations to the pope from the faithful. Pell had returned to Rome to clean out his apartment, intending to make Sydney his permanent home.īut he never left. But in Rome, even many of his critics believed in his innocence, and since returning in September he has enjoyed a well-publicized papal audience and participates regularly in Vatican events. Pell still has many detractors - he freely uses the term “enemies" - who think him guilty. “Looking back, I was probably excessively optimistic that I’d get bail,” Pell says now, crediting his “glass half-full” attitude to his Christian faith. The book charts his emotional low after the appeals court upheld his initial conviction, and ends with a sign of hope after Australia’s High Court agreed to hear his case. release of the second volume of his jailhouse memoir, “Prison Journal, Volume 2,” chronicling the middle four months of his term.
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Pell spoke to The Associated Press ahead of the U.S. Yet victims and critics say Pell epitomizes everything wrong with how the church has dealt with the sex abuse problem and have denounced his exoneration. Pell and his supporters strongly denied the charges and believe he was scapegoated for all the crimes of the Australian Catholic Church’s botched response to clergy sexual abuse.
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The conviction was upheld on appeal only to be thrown out by Australia’s High Court, which in April 2020 found there was reasonable doubt in the testimony of his lone accuser. Pell left his job as prefect of the Vatican’s economy ministry in 2017 to return home to face charges that he sexually molested two 13-year-old choir boys in the sacristy of the Melbourne cathedral in 1996.Īfter a first jury deadlocked, a second convicted him and he was sentenced to six years in prison. But I’m regional: I go immediately to Lazio,” which surrounds Rome. “I’ve become very Italian,” Pell tells a visitor one morning, referring to his daily routine checking coronavirus cases in Italy.
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Pell, who turns 80 in June, is buoyed by the perks of being a retired Vatican cardinal even as he tries to put back together a life and career that were upended by his criminal trials and 404 days spent in solitary confinement in a Melbourne lockup. ROME - Cardinal George Pell is enjoying his first Roman spring since being exonerated of sex abuse charges in his native Australia: He receives visitors to his Vatican flat, sips midday Aperol spritzes at the outdoor cafe downstairs and keeps up religiously with news of a Holy See financial scandal that he suspected years ago.