George Pell ‘a ticking time bomb’, says family

George Pell’s family has no ­complaints about his medical treatment in Rome’s Salvator Mundi Hospital and the autopsy report of his death.

George Pell. Picture: Nick Cubbin

George Pell’s family has no ­complaints about his medical treatment in Rome’s Salvator Mundi Hospital and the autopsy report of his death, which they have had translated and scrutinised by Australian doctors.

The Cardinal, who had several serious heart conditions, the first dating back to the 1990s, was “a ticking time bomb’’, his brother, David Pell, told The Weekend Australian.

The Vatican’s first auditor-­general, Libero Milone, who worked closely with Cardinal Pell in the corruption fight in the ­Vatican, in an interview published in The Australian this week described the Cardinal’s death as “shrouded in mystery” and revealed he had made a heartfelt vow to “get to the truth” for his colleague while paying final respects at his coffin in Rome.

“I promised my friend, Cardinal Pell, at his funeral that I would not give up on seeking the truth on what happened to our reform team and why I and my late colleague Ferruccio Panicco were so brutally dismissed,” Milone said.

“We were colleagues, united in our goal to see in financial reform as the Pope asked but we also became friends and he was a great support to me in the years we have tried to seek justice. I promised to get to the truth of what happened, and I will continue to seek justice.”

Mr Milone’s speaking out triggered others to voice longstanding claims that the late Cardinal’s body was treated with disrespect at the Vatican and that his clothes and shoes were “thrown in his coffin’’ when his body was returned to Australia for burial.

David Pell said his brother’s body was dressed but the vestments “weren’t on in the correct sequence”. His brother’s nose “was askew’’ and “could have been ­broken by the lid of his tight fitting coffin’’ which was zinc lined. Or, as a medico suggested, the Cardinal’s nose could have been damaged by hospital tubes while nursing staff were trying to revive him.

The late Cardinal’s size 14 shoes were not on, Mr Pell said, because there was no room. They were in the coffin and the family asked the undertaker to give them away. They went to a St Vincent de Paul shop in Sydney.

“You’ve got to be practical,’’ Mr Pell said. “We don’t know if someone has filled those shoes yet.’’

Mr Pell did not see his brother’s body in Rome. It was transferred to Australia immediately after the funeral Mass in St Peter’s Basilica. Mr Pell decided the coffin should not be open at St Mary’s Cathedral because the embalming “was not up to scratch’’ and by the time of the funeral on February 2 the Cardinal had been dead for three weeks.

While a number of the Cardinal’s friends, including other ­cardinals, had urged him to return to Australia for his hip replacement Mr Pell said the family had no say. “The big boy made up his mind,” he said.

The Cardinal, who was in pain, had believed, erroneously, that Pope Francis was close to death and wanted to remain in Rome to address his brother cardinals at meetings ahead of the conclave.

Mr Pell, an experienced accountant, has followed some of the results of his brother’s work “cleaning out the Augean stables’’ in Rome as George Pell described the financial reform.

In a new development, ­Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra, a Venezuelan church diplomat who replaced disgraced Cardinal Angelo Becciu as Deputy Secretary of State, appeared in the High Court in London late on Thursday in a bid to explain his role in a controversial London property deal.

Wearing a black cassock and clerical collar, he was called to explain the Secretariat of State’s role in UK proceedings filed by Raffaele Mincione, the Italian businessman at the centre of the Sloane Avenue property deal that lost the Vatican more than £100m ($190m).

Mincione was one of nine defendants – including Becciu – who were convicted of financial crimes, including embezzlement and money laundering, in a corruption case dubbed the Vatican “trial of the century’’.

Mincione received a 5½-year sentence from the Vatican court but has remained in London and not served any time behind bars.

He is one of several financiers accused of fleecing and extorting the Vatican of millions of euros in a series of contorted negotiations to seize control and final ownership of the London building, at 60 Sloane Avenue, Chelsea.

Mincione’s lawsuit, filed two years before he was convicted by the Vatican, asks the British courts to declare that he acted in “good faith” in his dealings with the Vatican.

Pena Parra told the High Court that the first he had heard of the controversial London investment was in October 2018, when he replaced Cardinal Becciu. And while he authorised several important steps in the Vatican’s dealings and negotiations over the building, he did so without knowledge of the complex debt and company structures set up behind the scenes.

Pena Parra focused attention on the role in the doomed deal of his deputy, Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, who was first investigated and then became a star witness during the “trial of the century’’.

He signed the contracts approving Mincione’s investment in 2013 and has since been promoted. The Vatican has not allowed him to appear for cross-examination.

In Rome this week, after a preliminary appeal hearing in his wrongful dismissal appeal against the Vatican, Libero Milone said the judges had pledged to provide their decision on how to proceed “in the near future”.