Claims have surfaced Cardinal George Pell’s body had a broken nose and was not properly dressed when it was repatriated to following his death in Rome.
Pell, 81, died on January 10, 2023 in Salvator Mundi Hospital when he suffered a cardiac arrest following a routine hip replacement operation.
His funeral at St Peter’s Basilica four days later reportedly ‘raised eyebrows’ among Vatican insiders because there was no traditional open casket.
Pell had been responsible for managing the Vatican’s treasury, its third highest role, and was specifically tasked by Pope Francis with bringing transparency and oversight to hundreds of years of the institution’s murky finances.
The process had earned him significant pushback from figures within the Vatican, some of whom have since been charged with financial crimes such as fraud, conspiracy and embezzlement.
The task was also made more difficult when Pell was charged by Victoria Police in 2017 over historic child abuse allegations, leading him to spend 13 months in an n jail before he was acquitted on all charges on appeal.
According to a report in The n this week ‘rumours have swirled around the Holy See for months that his body was left in post-autopsy disarray’, that he was not wearing shoes and his clothes has been ‘thrown’ into the coffin.
Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, following a call to Pell’s brother, revealed the family had found the cardinal’s nose was broken upon the body’s return to , in what Bolt called a ‘final insult’.
According to Bolt it might have been ‘incompetence’ but some of Pell’s closest associates had told him they suspect the rough treatment of his body ‘could be a sign some in the Vatican had not forgiven Pell for hunting down corruption’.
‘Pell once told me he did not feel safe in the Vatican as he chased the crooks,’ Bolt said.
‘What was done to his body makes me suspect he was right.’
Pell himself said in 2021 he was surprised by the amount of resistance he had encountered within the church to modernising its finances.
‘I underestimated the ingenuity and resilience of the opponents of reform,’ Pell said in September 2021.
Pell had been part of a three-man team looking into the Vatican’s finances which also included former Deloitte accountant Libero Milone as auditor-general.
Milone was sacked under mysterious circumstances on June 19, 2017, the same year as Pell was charged, after he was accused of spying.
At a press conference, Milone said the sacking was an attempt to slow down the reform agenda of Pope Francis and he made allegations his phone had been bugged.
The third member of the financial probity team was Milone’s deputy Ferruccio Panicco, who was forced to resign a day later after his office was raided by Vatican police who confiscated his computers.
Pannicco died last year from prostate cancer.
On December 16 last year, ten senior Vatican figures were found guilty of financial crimes.
The Vatican ‘Trial of the Century’, as it was dubbed, was sparked in 2021 after the Vatican lost 350million euros in a London real estate deal.