When greater than 130 cardinals solemnly file into the Sistine Chapel on May 7 to start voting on who amongst them will lead the Roman Catholic Church as the following pope, there will probably be one cardinal disregarded within the chilly.
Cardinal Angelo Becciu — a former energy participant earlier than his involvement in a Vatican monetary scandal led him to resign his positions and surrender a number of the privileges of being a cardinal — stated on Tuesday that he would sit this one out.
For the great of the church, he stated in an announcement despatched by his lawyer, he vowed to obey “the desire of Pope Francis to not enter into the conclave, regardless that I stay satisfied of my innocence.”
However within the days after Francis’ death final week, it was unclear whether or not the pope had truly stripped the cardinal of his voting rights, or whether or not he had maybe reinstituted them. Cardinal Becciu, who in 2023 obtained a responsible sentence from a Vatican tribunal for fraud and embezzlement, noticed the migration of cardinals to Rome for the conclave and wished in.
The cardinal, a former papal chief of employees who had additionally led the church’s saint-making workplace, flew from his native Sardinia to Rome. He insisted on becoming a member of his fellow cardinals in pre-conclave conferences behind closed doorways the place they mentioned the good challenges to the church. But in addition him.
The prospect of Swiss Guards bouncing a 76-year-old cardinal from the Sistine Chapel led to gossip and hypothesis at eating places across the Vatican. Italian tv reporters ran after cardinals round St. Peter’s Sq., shouting, “Will Becciu be on the conclave?” The difficulty hijacked Vatican press briefings, the place reporters requested whether or not the Becciu case would postpone the conclave’s begin date. (“Within the sense,” one requested, “that no Becciu, no conclave?”)
Cardinal Becciu himself felt the burden of historical past.
“The second,” he informed The New York Instances final week, “is delicate.”
The query of his eligibility was not delicate just for his emotions. It additionally had ramifications past his single vote, prompting a disaster for the Vatican as fellow conservatives, who’re bracing for a bruising in an election stacked with voters appointed by the extra progressive Francis, steered {that a} conclave that barred Cardinal Becciu can be illegitimate, doubtlessly rendering the pope it elects illegitimate, too.
The outcome was, for the Vatican, a distracting and doubtlessly disastrous sideshow by which a single outraged cardinal risked unleashing havoc on the traditional and deeply orchestrated course of to elect the chief of the world’s roughly 1.4 billion Catholics.
In 2023, a church court docket discovered Cardinal Becciu responsible of fraud and embezzlement and sentenced him to 5 and half years in jail. He’s interesting his conviction and denies any wrongdoing. However the extra related strike towards him for conclave participation got here in a single line from the Vatican press workplace in 2020, when Pope Francis stripped him of what the Vatican referred to as “his rights related to the cardinalate.” That left the cardinal’s standing within the public realm considerably imprecise and open to interpretation.
On the time, Cardinal Becciu acknowledged that voting within the conclave was one of many rights he had forfeited. However final week he modified his tune.
“The pope has acknowledged my cardinal privileges as intact,” Cardinal Becciu informed his hometown Sardinian newspaper, l’Unione Sarda, sustaining that the pope had by no means formally stripped him of his voting rights. He meant, he stated, to “take part within the conclave.”
Vatican regulation states that cardinals who’ve misplaced the proper to vote within the conclave can not have them restored by their fellow cardinals within the interval between popes. And Cardinal Becciu stated that Pope Francis had taken mercy on him after years of personal conferences. The cardinal informed Reuters final week that in one assembly in January about his standing, Francis had informed him, “I believe I’ve a discovered an answer.”
The Vatican web site itemizing the cardinals who’re beneath 80 and subsequently eligible to vote within the Conclave nonetheless categorized Cardinal Becciu as a “non-elector.” (“No authorized worth,” Cardinal Becciu informed the l’Unione Sarda concerning the record.)
Cardinal Becciu and his supporters stated there was nothing in writing from the pope that makes his disenfranchisement official.
So the Vatican apparently scrambled to supply some proof. The Italian newspaper Domani reported final week that Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Cardinal Becciu’s former boss and Francis’ second-in-command, might need confirmed Cardinal Becciu letters signed with an F by Francis, signed as just lately because the February hospitalization earlier than his dying, barring the cardinal from the conclave.
Conservatives who assume Cardinal Becciu obtained a uncooked deal stated they wished to see such proof.
“It’s a query of the place is the doc the place the pope expressed it,” stated Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller of Germany, who stated he had by no means seen something past the one line from the press workplace. “And to exclude the cardinal from his rights? There have to be not solely a call of the pope, there have to be a trigger, a failure. And he did nothing flawed, no?”
A Vatican court docket dominated that he did some issues flawed.
In 2021, Cardinal Becciu turned the primary cardinal ever to be tried by the Vatican’s legal court docket. It discovered him responsible of fraud associated to greater than half one million euros, or $570,000, from Vatican funds, a few of which was used to pay for the discharge of a Colombian nun kidnapped by jihadists in Mali.
The court docket discovered that the cardinal had channeled the cash by a lady engaged on the discharge from Sardinia who church prosecutors and Italian information stories stated used a number of the money to purchase luxurious items, together with Chanel and Prada purses. She subsequently said the goods were necessary for her professional activity.
The tribunal additionally convicted him of embezzlement. One case stemmed from utilizing Vatican funds to make a donation of about €125,000 to a charity run by his brother that was utilized in half to construct a bread oven in his Sardinian diocese.
One other accusation concerned the funding of tons of of hundreds of thousands of euros in a London constructing that plummeted in worth, costing the church greater than €200 million in complete losses when it offered — a disastrous actual property deal that the Vatican stated amounted to criminal speculation.
Attorneys for Cardinal Becciu and different defendants maintained that they’d been railroaded by the pope, saying that Francis had secretly modified legal guidelines in the course of the investigation, making it tougher for them to defend themselves. (“Worldwide heresy,” responded the Vatican prosecutor.)
After such a steep fall from grace and Vatican energy, Cardinal Becciu’s vote within the conclave amounted to his final little bit of leverage. However by Tuesday morning, he appeared to have spent, or misplaced, that, too. Within the assertion despatched out by his lawyer, Cardinal Becciu wrote that he would “proceed to serve” the church with love, and promised to not crash the conclave, so as to contribute to its “communion and the serenity.”
Elisabetta Povoledo and Emma Bubola contributed reporting.
