Originally published at National Catholic Register
VATICAN CITY — In a new television interview, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the Vatican’s former deputy secretary of state claims that the late Cardinal George Pell had authorized a large bank transfer to Australia, contradicting what the Australian cardinal had said prior to his death.
In an hour-long Belgian television documentary “Het Vaticaan: de staat van de kerk” (The Vatican: The State of the Church) that aired on Oct. 24, Cardinal Becciu also dismissed speculation that the money may have been intended to influence Cardinal Pell’s 2017 criminal trial, calling the accusation “crazy, crazy stuff.”
He asserted that Cardinal Pell, then prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, had authorized the transfer of AUS$2.3 million (US$1.5 million today) in 2017 and 2018, a claim that was questioned in the same documentary by the Vatican’s ex-auditor general, Libero Milone.
Cardinal Becciu told the program that the large funds transfer “had been requested from us at the time by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications because the ‘.catholic’ domain was to be guaranteed. The funds were sent to a tech security company called Neustar so that the Church could use “.catholic” on the internet instead of, for example, “.com” or “.org.”
“But not
