Adding to the dense murky fog swirling around the Holy See’s finances, Australian financial authorities have finally identified a gap of $2 million between actual money transfers from the Vatican to Australia and what can be accounted for.

A credible rumor suggests that the secret funds were used for bribes to secure a conviction of Cardinal Pell, who was appointed to the Secretariat for the Economy in 2014 and wished to reform Vatican finances.

It has been alleged that Cardinal Becciu, dismissed late in 2020 by Pope Francis for financial irregularities that included embezzlement charges against his assistant, might be behind the payment. Becciu opposed Pell’s reforms.

This is how many Italian papers have portrayed the affair. But, since Francis is a corrupt, worldly politician who promotes the Green agenda more than he preaches the Gospel of Jesus, this is unlikely to be the whole story.

Francis’ decision in December 2020 to take over Vatican finances sounds less like cleaning up the place than it does putting whatever was going on into his direct control to keep the dirt out of the public eye, says Gizadeathstar’s Joseph Farrell:

“In other words, Francis has moved the Vatican Bank from the Secretariat of State, normally headed by an archbishop or a cardinal archbishop, to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, in other words, placing the bank directly, for the first time in its chequered history, under the Pope. To draw a somewhat clumsy analogy, this is akin to President Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum, that removed the CIA from oversight of covert operations, and placed those operations directly under the military, i.e., directly under the chain of command ending in the Presidency. In effect, what Francis has done is to move the whole “hidden system of finance” that is the Vatican Bank, a participant in that global “hidden system” that I’ve speculated about for so long, and placed it directly under papal control.

It might be argued that this was the only way to deal with the bank, to gain any measure of real oversight or transparency in the institution.

But I suspect it augurs something entirely different, and far more ominous, namely, the final capture of the papacy by ‘the high financial cabal’. “