VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis will bid a final farewell to Cardinal George Pell at a funeral service Saturday, the Vatican said, as revelations emerge about the Australian prelate’s growing concern over what he deemed the “disaster” and “catastrophe” ”. of the papacy under Francis.
The Vatican said Thursday that the dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, will officiate Pell’s funeral service at St. Peter’s Basilica. As is customary at cardinal funerals, Francis will offer a final compliment and salute.
Pell, who had been Francis’s chief finance minister for three years before returning to Australia to face child molestation charges, died Tuesday in a hospital in Rome from heart complications following hip surgery. He turned 81.
He split his time between Rome and Sydney after being cleared in 2020 of charges that he abused two choirboys while Archbishop of Melbourne. The Supreme Court of Australia overturned a previous court conviction and Pell was released after serving 404 days in solitary confinement.
Pell had repeatedly run afoul of the Vatican’s Italian bureaucracy during his 2014-2017 term as prefect of the Holy See’s secretariat for economics, which Francis had set up to get a handle on the Vatican’s opaque finances. In his condolence message, Francis credited Pell with laying the groundwork for ongoing reforms, including the imposition of international budgeting and accounting standards on Vatican offices.
But Pell, a staunch conservative, became increasingly disillusioned with the direction of Francis’ papacy, including its emphasis on inclusion and recruiting the laity about the future of the church.
He wrote a remarkable memorandum outlining his concerns, and recommendations for the next pope in a future conclave, which circulated last spring and was published under a pseudonym, “Demos,” on the Vatican blog Settimo Cielo.
Blogger Sandro Magister revealed on Wednesday that Pell was indeed the author of the memo, which is an extraordinary indictment of the current pontificate by a former close associate of Francis.
The memo is divided into two parts — “The Vatican Today” and “The Next Conclave” — and lists a range of points covering everything from Francis’s “weakened” preaching of the gospel to the precarious state of the Vatican’s finances. Holy See and the “lack of respect for the law” in the city-state, including in the ongoing financial corruption lawsuit that Pell himself had defended.
“Commentators of every school, if for various reasons… agree that this pontificate is in many or most respects a disaster; a catastrophe,” wrote Pell.
Also on Wednesday, conservative magazine The Spectator published a self-signed article written by Pell in the days before he died. In the article, Pell described as a “poisonous nightmare” Francis’s two-year investigation of Catholic laity into issues such as the Church’s teaching on sexuality and the role of women, which is expected to come to a head at a meeting of bishops in October. .
Referring to the Vatican’s summary of the recruitment effort, Pell complained of a “profound confusion, the attack on traditional morality and the inclusion in the dialogue of neo-Marxist jargon about exclusion, alienation, identity, marginalization, the voiceless, LGBTQ as well as the displacement of Christian notions of forgiveness, sin, sacrifice, healing, redemption.”
Pell’s anonymous memo, however, is even harsher, targeting Francis himself in particular. While other conservatives had criticized Francis’ crackdown on traditionalists and the priorities of mercy over morality, Pell went further and devoted an entire section to the pope’s involvement in a major financial fraud investigation that has led to the prosecution of 10 people, including Pell’s former nemesis. , Cardinal Angelo Becciu.
Pell had initially welcomed the charge, which stemmed from the Vatican’s €350 million investment in a London real estate deal, as it justified his years-long effort to expose financial mismanagement and corruption in the Holy See. But in the course of the trial, uncomfortable questions have been raised about the rights of the defense in a legal system in which Francis has and has exercised absolute power.
Pell noted that in the course of the investigation, Francis issued four secret decrees “to aid the prosecution” without the right of appeal for those involved. The defense has argued that the decrees violate the human rights of the suspects.
Pell also defended Becciu, who removed Francis in September 2020 before he was even under investigation. “He was not given a fair trial. Everyone has the right to a fair trial,” wrote Pell, who, given his own experience, holds the issue particularly dear.
“The lack of respect for the law in the Vatican threatens to become an international scandal,” Pell wrote.
