Archbishop of Canterbury joins Pope Francis to co-host South Sudan retreat

Archbishop Gänswein and Pope emeritus Benedict XVI. / EWTN/Paul Badde, Mazur/www.thepapalvisit.org.uk

Vatican City, Oct 21, 2021 / 04:40 am (CNA).
Archbishop Georg Gänswein has said that Benedict XVI is “full of zest for life” after the pope eme… […]

Pope Benedict XVI’s coffin is carried in St. Peter’s Basilica on Jan. 5, 2023. / Vatican Media

Vatican City, Jan 5, 2023 / 06:14 am (CNA).

Benedict XVI was buried in the Vatican on Thursday in a strictly private ceremony.

His wooden coffin was placed in the crypt under the central part of St. Peter’s Basilica in the first tomb of St. John Paul II, following the Jan. 5 funeral Mass presided over by his successor, Pope Francis.

The casket was carried from St. Peter’s Square through the main entrance of St. Peter’s Basilica toward the altar, flanked by cardinals, before being brought to the crypt underneath.

Benedict XVI’s coffin was closed in the evening of Jan. 4 after three days of public visitation in St. Peter’s Basilica. The private ceremony took place in the presence of Benedict’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, and a number of cardinals, including Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

Before the casket was closed, a one-page summary in Latin of Benedict XVI’s papacy, called a “rogito” in Italian, was rolled into a metal cylinder and placed inside.

According to the Vatican, 195,000 people visited the body of Benedict XVI during the three days of public viewing.

He was laid to rest in the same tomb where St. John Paul II was buried before his beatification.

Before the burial, a ribbon was placed around the coffin, along with three seals: from the Apostolic Chamber, the Pontifical Household, and the office of liturgical celebrations. The coffin was then placed in a zinc coffin and sealed. 

The zinc coffin was placed in another wooden coffin and then entombed on the north side of the central part of the Vatican crypt. On the wall above the spot there is an image of the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus flanked by angels. 

Queen Christina of Sweden, who died on April 19, 1689, is buried in a sarcophagus immediately to the right.

Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re, Pietro Parolin, Angelo De Donatis, Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, Edgar Peña Parra, Mauro Gambetti, and the consecrated women of the pope emeritus’ household were present for the closing of the coffin on Jan. 4.

St. John Paul II’s tomb was in the crypt from the date of his funeral April 8, 2005, until April 29, 2011, when his casket was moved to the upper part of St. Peter’s Basilica a few days before his beatification ceremony.

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Vatican City, Dec 17, 2019 / 01:50 pm (CNA).- Two investment funds used by Vatican dicasteries were also used by a major Italian bank to conceal illegal investments for which the bank was eventually closed.

On Friday, Matlese media reported that the IOR, or Vatican Bank, is suing Optimum Asset Management over 230 million euros in losses through a fund under its management. The IOR is being sued in turn by Optimum for breach of contract; the firm claims the Vatican’s bank owes an additional 24 million euros as an already agreed-upon investment in another of its funds.

Optimum was in 2015 identified by Italian authorities, as a fund manager through which Banca Popolare di Vincenza fraudulently funneled money meant for outside investments back into investment in the bank itself.

While the bank was required by European law to maintain a diversified investment portfolio as a hedge against risk, it was found to have used Optimum to fraudulently invest in itself instead, leaving the accounts and investments of customers at a high degree of risk.

The bank used the same tactic, channeling investment funds back into itself, through the Athena Global Fund, run by Raffaele Mincione.

Italian media have estimated that the fraud involved hundreds of millions of euros in bank funds.

Mincione’s Athena Global Fund was also used by the Holy See’s Secretariat of State to invest hundreds of millions of Church funds, most notably through the purchase of a luxury property development in London from his own holding company, Time & Life SA.

Through dedicated funds created by Athena in which the Vatican and Banca Popolare were the exclusive investors, Mincione also used funds from both to buy unrated, non-recourse bonds in Time & Life – essentially using investor funds to make no-strings-attached loans to his own holding company.

Time & Life used some of the money raised this way to buy shares in Banca Popolare – meaning that Mincione was returning bank invested funds to the bank through the back door.

By using its own investment funds to purchase its own shares indirectly through Optimum and Mincione’s holding company, Banca Popolare secretly consolidated its ownership and evaded regulatory requirements to raise additional equity capital. The scheme inflated the bank’s financial returns and concealed its portfolio’s exposure to risk at the same time.

When the scheme was discovered by Italian authorities, Banca Popolare was fined, and then closed by a forced sale to Intesa San Paolo, one of Italy’s largest lenders, in 2017. 

Mincione and Optimum were paid millions of euros in management fees for redirecting the bank’s investment back into itself, while also benefiting by directing the remainder of the bank’s investment funds.

According to filings made on the Irish Stock Exchange in 2012 and 2013, Mincione also borrowed tens of millions of euros from his own company Time & Life, in which the Vatican’s Secretariat of State was heavily invested, through low-interest loans made to a trust, of which he was the beneficiary, based in the Isle of Jersey – a well-known European tax haven. 
 
These funds were in turn used by Mincione for other investments in high-risk ventures.

In 2015, Mincione bought a 5% stake in EZTD Ltd, an Israeli-based company providing an online options trading platform to American investors. That investment lost 90% of its value after a 2016 SEC finding that the company had misled investors and violated both the Securities Act and the Securities and Exchanges Act. The SEC found that fewer than three percent of the company’s 4,000 U.S. account holders made a profit investing through the company.

While the Vatican spent hundreds of millions buying control of the London property development from Mincione, he also cleared an additional 60 million euros in management and transaction fees, on top of his profits from actually selling shares of the building to the Secretariat of State.

The Holy See’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, has said that the Vatican’s London investment must be investigated, but has not yet indicated what parties are responsible for the investment, or whether internal investment policies have been violated. Pope Francis said last month that some involved in the investment have done things that seem, to him, “not clean.”

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