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ROME—An Italian cardinal whose former workplace has been embroiled in a monetary scandal resigned instantly Thursday from his Vatican put up and renounced his rights as a cardinal, a shock escalation of an affair that has overshadowed that Holy See for the final 12 months.
The extraordinary transfer was introduced with out clarification in a terse night communique from the Holy See press workplace.
Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu had been head of the workplace that oversees the canonization of saints. At age 72, he would nonetheless have been eligible for the subsequent eight years to vote in a conclave to elect a future pope. Some Vatican watchers even spoke of him as a severe candidate for the papacy.
But for the final 12 months, he has been shadowed by affiliation with scandal that has touched a number of of his former subordinates.
Last October, Vatican police raided the workplaces of the highly effective Secretariat of State, the place Cardinal Becciu had served because the second highest official till June 2018. The police, who additionally raided the workplaces of the Vatican’s monetary watchdog, have been investigating an funding in actual property in London’s posh Chelsea neighborhood.
The Vatican prosecutor’s investigation got here in response to a grievance from the Vatican Bank, which had objected to a request from the Secretariat of State for a mortgage of greater than €100 million, equal to about $116 million, to finance the acquisition. The Vatican Bank considered the deal, which required clearance by the monetary watchdog, as suspicious.
Several Vatican staff have been investigated in reference to the deal however none has been charged with wrongdoing. In June, Vatican prosecutors charged an Italian businessman with counts of extortion, embezzlement, fraud and cash laundering, carrying a possible sentence of as much as 12 years in reference to the deal.
Cardinal Becciu hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing within the matter. He didn’t reply to a request for remark Thursday.
The Vatican communique referred to the cardinal as “His Eminence,” suggesting that he has retained his title.
It is extraordinarily uncommon for a cardinal to be publicly disgraced in such a approach. In 2018, then-Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington, resigned from the College of Cardinals after a church investigation discovered credible a cost that he had sexually abused a minor within the 1970s. The subsequent 12 months, after a Vatican trial discovered him responsible of sexual abuse and sexual misconduct with adults, he was faraway from the priesthood, the primary former cardinal in fashionable instances to obtain that punishment.
In 2015, Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien renounced the rights and privileges of cardinal—together with the fitting to vote in a conclave—however retained his title after an investigation into allegations that he had sexually harassed grownup seminarians within the 1980s. Cardinal O’Brien died in 2018.
Write to Francis X. Rocca at [email protected]
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