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Pope Meets Cardinal Sentenced for Financial Crimes, Banned From Conclave

  • Pope Leo XIV, who has led the Catholic Church for nearly a month, held a private meeting on May 27 in Rome with Cardinal Angelo Becciu, a disgraced Italian prelate convicted of financial crimes.
  • The meeting followed Becciu's December 2023 sentencing to five and a half years in jail over a $250 million Vatican real estate scandal in London, which marked the Vatican's Trial of the Century.
  • At 76 years old, Becciu was ordered to pay a fine near $8,700 and is banned for life from occupying any public Vatican office; despite this, he rejects the accusations and has appealed the verdict, while Pope Leo is concentrating on other urgent matters within the church.
  • Pope Leo has prioritized addressing unfinished issues from Pope Francis's tenure, such as the Vatican’s financial situation and the clerical abuse crisis, demonstrated by his recent meetings with key officials and naming Robert Sarah as special envoy.
  • This encounter with Becciu does not imply his reinstatement but suggests Pope Leo's intent to engage with difficult matters while working to reconcile divisions within the Church and College of Cardinals.
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The Italian, protagonist of a great corruption scandal and whom Francis forbade to enter the conclave, defended his innocence in the audience with Prevost, but the Pope dismisses an amnesty or a reduction to the sentence of five years for embezzlement, which will be reviewed in SeptemberHEMEROTECA - The cardinal, the spy and the palace: the Vatican faces the greatest macrojudgment of corruption in its history He was one of the protagonists of th…

·Spain
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Cardinal Angelo Becciu met for the first time this Tuesday with Pope Leo XIV to reiterate his innocence and personally give him his version of why he was forced on 23 September 2020 to renounce cardinal rights and why he was sentenced in 2023 to five years and six months in prison by the Vatican's civil court. Becciu has filed an appeal against that conviction for alleged crimes of embezzlement and aggravated fraud against the Holy See in the ma…

·Spain
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Lean Left

The cardinal, deprived by Francis of the rights attached to the cardinalate for the affair of the sale-swinding of a palace in the center of London, did not participate in the Conclave

·Turin, Italy
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Becciu, despite fulfilling the requirement to be under 80 years of age, was not included in the list of cardinal electors published by the Holy See and did not enter the Conclave in which Robert Prevost was elected as successor to Francis.

Leo XIV received in audience the cardinal sentenced in first instance for peculatus and scam aggravated against the Holy See. The new elements revealed by Tomorrow and the role of Diddi

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La Repubblica broke the news in Turin, Italy on Tuesday, May 27, 2025.
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