Pope Francis holds mass with cardinal he cast out of the Vatican

In a surprise move, Pope Francis celebrated Holy Thursday mass privately with Cardinal Angelo Becciu, whom he abruptly fired last September amid financial scandals.

Pope Francis blows inside an amphora of holy oil during a mass inside St Peter’s Basilica on Thursday. Picture: AFP

In a surprise move, Pope Francis celebrated Holy Thursday mass privately with Cardinal Angelo Becciu, whom he abruptly fired last September amid financial scandals. They said the mass, one of the most important of the year, commemorating the Last Supper and Christ’s instituting the Eucharist, in the chapel of Cardinal Becciu’s private apartment.

A Vatican source would not comment on the Pope’s “private engagements”, but said “a fatherly gesture like this, on a day like Holy Thursday, does not seem strange”.

Francis normally celebrates Holy Thursday mass in public. But this year he delegated the task to the dean of the college of cardinals, Giovanni Battista Re, who offered the mass in St Peter’s ­Basilica with restricted attendance due to COVID-19.

At the time of his sacking last year, Cardinal Becciu said the Pope “told me that he no longer has trust in me because a report came from the magistrates that I allegedly committed acts of ­embezzlement’’. He denied any wrongdoing. Four months ago, he sued an Italian magazine for €10m, claiming reports of corruption investigations had ruined his reputation and eliminated his chances of becoming pope.

In October 2019, Vatican police raided the offices of the Secretariat of State, where Cardinal Becciu had formerly been second in charge. There, he was an ardent opponent of the financial reforms initiated by Cardinal ­George Pell when he was the Vatican’s prefect for the economy. Cardinal Becciu banned internal and external audit processes, Police reportedly raided the Secretariat of State because they were investigating a dubious ­investment of several hundred thousand euros by the Vatican in real estate in London’s up-market Chelsea. The deal reportedly cost the Vatican millions of euros in payments to middlemen.

The Pope’s gesture of reconciliation towards Cardinal Becciu was made amid seething tensions in the highest levels of the church over the banning of private masses at the 45 side altars and chapels of St Peter’s Basilica. Outspoken Hong Kong cardinal Joseph Zen this week became the fifth cardinal to speak out against the move.

“If it were not for the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus, I would take the first flight to come to Rome and get on my knees in front of the door of Santa Marta (the papal residence) until the Holy Father has this edict withdrawn,” he said on his website. Cardinal Zen, 89, is a vocal critic of the Vatican’s secret pact with the Chinese Communist Party. Before the pact was renewed last October he travelled to the Vatican to meet Francis to discuss it. But he left after four days, without being granted an audience.

Cardinal Zen said the private masses he has said in the Basilica during visits to Rome over many years were “the masses that, in my life, I celebrated with more fervour and emotion, sometimes with tears praying for our living martyrs in China.

“It was the thing that strengthened my faith most every time I came to Rome: At exactly seven o’clock I would enter the sacristy, a young priest would come forward and would help me to dress in the vestments, and then they take me to an altar in the Basilica proper or in the grottoes, that would make no difference to me, we were in St Peter’s Basilica!’’

In a passing reference to the same controversy in his Easter feature in Inquirer today, Cardinal Pell wrote: “Individual masses have been banned on the side altars at St Peter’s Basilica; stopped, probably for the first time since Charles V’s German Protestant troops sacked Rome in 1527.’’