When more than 130 cardinals solemnly file into the Sistine Chapel on May 7 to begin voting on who among them will lead the Roman Catholic Church as the next pope, there will be one cardinal left out in the cold.
Cardinal Angelo Becciu — a former power player before his involvement in a Vatican financial scandal led him to resign his positions and renounce some of the privileges of being a cardinal — said on Tuesday that he would sit this one out.
For the good of the church, he said in a statement sent by his lawyer, he vowed to obey “the will of Pope Francis to not enter into the conclave, even though I remain convinced of my innocence.”
But in the days after Francis’ death last week, it was unclear whether the pope had actually stripped the cardinal of his voting rights, or whether he had perhaps reinstituted them. Cardinal Becciu, who in 2023 received a guilty sentence from a Vatican tribunal for fraud and embezzlement, saw the migration of cardinals to Rome for the conclave and wanted in.
The cardinal, a former papal chief of staff who had also led the church’s saint-making office, flew from his native Sardinia to Rome. He insisted on joining his fellow cardinals in pre-conclave meetings behind closed doors where they discussed the great challenges to the church. But also him.
The prospect of Swiss Guards bouncing a 76-year-old cardinal from the Sistine Chapel led to gossip and speculation at restaurants around the Vatican. Italian television reporters ran after cardinals around St. Peter’s Square, shouting, “Will Becciu be at the conclave?” The issue hijacked Vatican press briefings, where reporters asked whether the Becciu case would postpone the conclave’s start date. (“In the sense,” one asked, “that no Becciu, no conclave?”)
Cardinal Becciu himself felt the weight of history.
“The moment,” he told The New York Times last week, “is delicate.”
The question of his eligibility was not delicate only for his feelings. It also had ramifications beyond his single vote, prompting a crisis for the Vatican as fellow conservatives, who are bracing for a bruising in an election stacked with voters appointed by the more progressive Francis, suggested that a conclave that barred Cardinal Becciu would be illegitimate, potentially rendering the pope it elects illegitimate, too.
The result was, for the Vatican, a distracting and potentially disastrous sideshow in which a single outraged cardinal risked unleashing havoc on the ancient and deeply orchestrated process to elect the leader of the world’s roughly 1.4 billion Catholics.
In 2023, a church court found Cardinal Becciu guilty of fraud and embezzlement and sentenced him to five and half years in prison. He is appealing his conviction and denies any wrongdoing. But the more relevant strike against him for conclave participation came in a single line from the Vatican press office in 2020, when Pope Francis stripped him of what the Vatican called “his rights connected to the cardinalate.” That left the cardinal’s status in the public realm somewhat imprecise and open to interpretation.
At the time, Cardinal Becciu acknowledged that voting in the conclave was one of the rights he had forfeited. But last week he changed his tune.
“The pope has recognized my cardinal privileges as intact,” Cardinal Becciu told his hometown Sardinian newspaper, l’Unione Sarda, maintaining that the pope had never formally stripped him of his voting rights. He intended, he said, to “participate in the conclave.”
Vatican law states that cardinals who have lost the right to vote in the conclave cannot have them restored by their fellow cardinals in the period between popes. And Cardinal Becciu said that Pope Francis had taken mercy on him after years of private meetings. The cardinal told Reuters last week that during one meeting in January about his status, Francis had told him, “I think I have a found a solution.”
The Vatican website listing the cardinals who are under 80 and therefore eligible to vote in the Conclave still categorized Cardinal Becciu as a “non-elector.” (“No legal value,” Cardinal Becciu told the l’Unione Sarda about the list.)
Cardinal Becciu and his supporters said there was nothing in writing from the pope that makes his disenfranchisement official.
So the Vatican apparently scrambled to produce some evidence. The Italian newspaper Domani reported last week that Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Cardinal Becciu’s former boss and Francis’ second-in-command, might have showed Cardinal Becciu letters signed with an F by Francis, signed as recently as the February hospitalization before his death, barring the cardinal from the conclave.
Conservatives who think Cardinal Becciu got a raw deal said they wanted to see such evidence.
“It’s a question of where is the document where the pope expressed it,” said Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller of Germany, who said he had never seen anything beyond the single line from the press office. “And to exclude the cardinal from his rights? There must be not only a decision of the pope, there must be a cause, a failure. And he did nothing wrong, no?”
A Vatican court ruled that he did some things wrong.
In 2021, Cardinal Becciu became the first cardinal ever to be tried by the Vatican’s criminal court. It found him guilty of fraud related to more than half a million euros, or $570,000, from Vatican funds, some of which was used to pay for the release of a Colombian nun kidnapped by jihadists in Mali.
The court found that the cardinal had channeled the money through a woman working on the release from Sardinia who church prosecutors and Italian news reports said used some of the cash to buy luxury goods, including Chanel and Prada purses. She subsequently said the goods were necessary for her professional activity.
The tribunal also convicted him of embezzlement. One case stemmed from using Vatican funds to make a donation of about €125,000 to a charity run by his brother that was used in part to build a bread oven in his Sardinian diocese.
Another accusation involved the investment of hundreds of millions of euros in a London building that plummeted in value, costing the church more than €200 million in total losses when it sold — a disastrous real estate deal that the Vatican said amounted to criminal speculation.
Lawyers for Cardinal Becciu and other defendants maintained that they had been railroaded by the pope, saying that Francis had secretly changed laws during the investigation, making it harder for them to defend themselves. (“International heresy,” responded the Vatican prosecutor.)
After such a steep fall from grace and Vatican power, Cardinal Becciu’s vote in the conclave amounted to his last bit of leverage. But by Tuesday morning, he seemed to have spent, or lost, that, too. In the statement sent out by his lawyer, Cardinal Becciu wrote that he would “continue to serve” the church with love, and promised not to crash the conclave, in order to contribute to its “communion and the serenity.”
Elisabetta Povoledo and Emma Bubola contributed reporting.
