VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Libero Milone, the Vatican’s former auditor general who claims he was forced to resign because he had turned up financial irregularities, said Wednesday (July 30) that corruption continues at the highest levels of the Catholic Church and that he plans to bring his wrongful termination lawsuit directly to Pope Leo XIV after it was dismissed by the Vatican Court of Appeals.
“I want to speak to the pope,” Milone told a handful of reporters in his lawyer’s office in Rome on Wednesday. “There are 1.4 billion faithful in the world who donate money to the church thinking they’re doing good — and I’m here to say that they’re not doing good. That money is being put in people’s pockets.”
He claimed to have proof of continued financial mismanagement at the Vatican, including irregularities in its accounting of its gold inventory and suspicious transactions regarding Vatican-owned hospitals.
Milone was hired by Pope Francis in 2015 as the Vatican’s first auditor, a position Francis created as part of an effort to inject transparency and accountability into church finances. In June 2017, the Vatican police raided Milone’s office, and Cardinal Angelo Becciu, then the third-highest-ranking official at the Vatican, accused him of espionage. Milone and his deputy, Ferruccio Panicco, were told to resign or be arrested.
Milone and Panicco proclaimed their innocence and launched a legal battle to restore their reputations. The two men said they were framed by Becciu and Domenico Giani, the former head of the Vatican police, known as the gendarmerie.
Shortly after the raid, Becciu was accused of embezzlement and aggravated fraud, and after being found guilty in December 2023 by a Vatican tribunal he was sentenced to 5 ½ years in prison and a lifetime ban from public office. (He is appealing his case.) Milone said at the time of Becciu’s arrest he had started asking questions about a questionable 2019 real estate purchase by the Secretariat of State that eventually resulted in Becciu’s sentence.
Milone sued the Vatican in November 2022 for 9.3 million euros — $10.6 million — for restitution, but the Vatican dismissed the suit in 2024, saying the Secretariat of State was not liable for the behavior of its employees. When he appealed, a Vatican tribunal asked that Milone’s lawyers remove 22 pages from their legal filing, as some of its claims damaged the “good name” of influential figures at the Vatican.
Milone’s lawyer, Romano Vaccarella, resigned in dismay, stating at the time that he had never in his career been told how to present a case.
“This whole thing is getting to be rather ridiculous. But we will win at the end,” Milone said.
The accusations against Milone were classified as pontifical secrets, meaning Milone never had the opportunity to see them. The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, agreed to lift the pontifical secret, Milone said, but church officials then claimed the files never existed. Milone said he has still never seen the files.
Milone said he met with Parolin more than a dozen times to plead his case but now regrets that. “I trusted the wrong person. He led us along the garden path,” he said.
Milone said that money laundering was “prevalent” in the Vatican when he started investigating its finances. He claims to have written 15 reports to the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency, now called the Supervisory and Financial Information Authority, but that none of them was investigated.
Milone claimed, as he has before, that some cardinals, including a former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal department, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller, had taken money from the Vatican. Muller has denied any wrongdoing, calling the allegations “cheap tabloid literature” last year, and while Francis declined to renew the cardinal’s leadership of the doctrinal department in 2017, no charges have been filed against Muller.
The former auditor also told reporters that the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, a Vatican financial agency known as APSA, had a system that allowed it to manipulate names, routing numbers and SWIFT codes in bank transfers to obscure who was receiving funds. Milone said he was asked to look into the system by Cardinal George Pell, whom Francis had appointed head of the Secretariat for the Economy to effect financial reforms.
Milone said he requested documentation of transactions from the Swiss bank that held APSA’s accounts and asked Francis’ permission to pursue the matter. Milone never got those papers, but he said he has other proof of his claims. Milone also alleged that other Vatican officials had illicitly used church funds for personal expenses and that some employees were being paid 40 hours of overtime a week.
In a statement from APSA provided by Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni, the agency denied Milone’s accusations, noting that SWIFT processes “cannot be modified or altered” and that it conducts all transactions through providers certified by SWIFT that “operate according to strict control criteria.”
The statement said “APSA did not have, in 2016, and does not have today, any ‘private’ clients among its users, but exclusively Curial Institutions and institutions of the Vatican City State,” a fact confirmed by the international anti-money laundering agency MONEYVAL in 2017. Audits of the Vatican’s financials were conducted between 2020 and 2024 by ASIF, the statement added, “and no irregularities emerged in their final reports.”
Milone vowed to bring his case to the highest appellate court at the Vatican, the Court of Cassation, whose judges, who are mostly clergy, are personally selected by the pope.
The ex-auditor said he has been personally and professionally damaged by his experience at the Vatican. His colleague, Panicco, who died of cancer on June 21, 2023, claimed the Vatican gendarmes had prevented him from seeing important medical records.
Milone said that “they haven’t changed anything” at the Vatican despite the financial reforms, and he cast doubt on an APSA report released Tuesday that showed the church had netted 62.2 million euros in profit in 2024.
In the Vatican statement, APSA said that its reports are verified by ASIF and the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy.
Milone said that if the institution does not commit to reform, and listen to his accusations, trust in the Vatican will continue to plummet along with donations.
