Most senior cardinals who are supposed to elect a new Pope to succeed the late Pope Francis are scratching their heads as they are trying to decide whether a convicted cardinal of embezzlement and fraud can join the Conclave to vote for a new Pope.
Cardinal Becciu was summoned and fired by Pope Francis in 2020 by accusing him of nepotism and embezzlement as Pope Francis openly told him “I no longer have trust in you.”
Francis fired him from the job as head of the Vatican department that decides who should be saints, as he recounted with Reuters.
The late Pope allowed Becciu to keep his ecclesiastical title and his Vatican apartment but stripped him of what the Vatican said was “the rights associated with the Cardinalate.”
According to Reuters, Cardinal Angel Becciu was sentenced to 5 1/2 years in jail in 2023 for embezzlement.
At the time of his conviction, he was the most senior Catholic Church official ever to stand trial before a Vatican criminal court.
However, Becciu denied all wrongdoing and appealed to the Vatican criminal court, making him free, pending his appeal, and he felt he should be allowed into the conclave.
Becciu said he met with the Pope in January before he was hospitalised in February, and the Pontiff was quoted as saying, “I think I have found a solution.”
But with his death, Becciu said he doesn’t know if the Pontiff had left any written instructions about his situation.
Meanwhile, the Vatican, through spokesperson Matteo Bruni, has repeatedly declined to answer questions about Becciu’s position as he was played as a “non-elector.”
About 135 cardinals under the age of 80 are currently eligible to take part in the voting for the new Pope by entering through the Sistine Chapel for a secret conclave where they will cast votes under the gaze of a severe God depicted in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco behind the main altar.
