Did Pope Francis restrict defendants’ rights?

IT HAD BEEN billed as the trial of the century. It would spotlight Pope Francis’s determination to stamp out financial jiggery-pokery by establishing whether and how the Vatican was tricked and extorted out of tens of millions of euros in a botched property deal. Among the defendants was a “prince of the church”: Cardinal Angelo Becciu (pictured), former deputy head of the Vatican’s most exalted department, the Secretariat of State. Yet seven months after Cardinal Becciu and nine other defendants were arraigned in court in the Vatican, not a word of evidence has been heard. The main outcome from seven preliminary hearings has been awkward questions about the genial pontiff’s respect for the rule of law.The case centres on the Secretariat of State’s purchase and subsequent sale of a commercial property in London—transactions in which more than €100m ($113m) in donations collected from the faithful were lost. Like previous Vatican financial scandals, this one is richly spiced with improbable detail. The latest twist to emerge is that in 2019, shortly before the scandal broke, Pope Francis signed an edict authorising the Vatican’s prosecutors to use wiretaps that were placed on Italian subjects in Italy.