Vatican City - Tuesday, 22 July 2025, the Court of Appeal of the Vatican City State filed the judgment that rejects the claims brought by Libero Milone and the heirs of Ferruccio Panicco against the Secretariat of State of the Holy See. The suit revolved around the alleged invalidity of the two former auditors’ resignations, which they say were extorted through intimidatory methods carried out by certain executives of the Vatican Gendarmerie at the explicit request of the then Substitute for General Affairs, Angelo Becciu. That circumstance, moreover, was clumsily confirmed by Monsignor Angelo Becciu himself when he told the press: “If Milone had not resigned, we would have prosecuted him criminally.” A rather ham-fisted way of admitting he had coerced the former auditor into quitting.
The Background
On 5 June 2015, Pope Francis appointed Libero Milone the first Auditor General of the Holy See, with a five-year mandate. For several months Milone met the Pontiff regularly—about once every four weeks, like the heads of dicasteries. But in April 2016 everything changed: he was barred from seeing the Pope. From that point on, every request for an audience was ignored. On 18 June 2017, the Vatican Gendarmerie raided his office. Shortly beforehand, Milone’s personal computers—and those of his secretariat—had been tampered with and infected by spy-ware installed entirely illegally. The next day, 19 June, Milone underwent a 12-hour interrogation at the end of which he was forced to sign his resignation under threat of arrest. The charges? Using office funds to hire an external firm to test cyber-security; conducting inquiries deemed “improper” under the Auditor’s statutes; and examining situations involving high-ranking clergy without authorisation. Charges that have never produced any judicial follow-up or documentary evidence. Those who accused him, on the other hand, showed very concretely what they themselves were capable of. Domenico Giani, then commander of the Vatican Gendarmerie, was later removed after a scandal over his personal use of Corps funds to refurbish his own apartment. Under Giani the Gendarmerie gradually took on an opaque, militaristic and authoritarian character, staffed by people often lacking adequate training and driven more by power ambitions than by institutional duty. Even the basic respect owed to ecclesiastical figures was regularly ignored. Giani himself authorised publication of the mug-shots of several employees and clergy involved in an internal criminal proceeding—violating every confidentiality guarantee and feeding a climate of intimidation.
The Court’s Decision
Although the Tribunal acknowledged that Milone and Panicco did indeed have valid contracts and that their resignations occurred in questionable circumstances, the Court held that any abuses should be imputed directly to the individual members of the Gendarmerie concerned—persons who were not summoned to trial. In other words, the civil liability of the Secretariat of State was excluded because the contested acts were allegedly not formally ordered by it.
But how can one possibly assert such nonsense?
In the Vatican there are not only people who blatantly ignore Vatican law—and have never opened a canon-law book, as the case of Alessandro Diddi shows—but also figures who, in trying to be more papal than the Pope, end up dragging the Holy See and the Holy Father into embarrassing and potentially irreparable situations. Are we really to believe that an ordinary citizen can command the public force—as happened to Libero Milone and Ferruccio Panicco—with no formal institutional responsibility? Such a thesis is not only legally untenable; it undermines the very credibility of the Vatican legal order. Besides, is it plausible that police officers obey the wishes of just “some random person”?
This ruling, while clarifying certain procedural and jurisdictional points, leaves unresolved substantive issues that are anything but marginal. The most urgent: Does a criminal proceeding exist—or has one ever been opened—against Angelo Becciu for the facts in question? One cannot forget that the method used against Milone and Panicco—pressure, isolation, forced removal—is the same that rebounded on Becciu a few years later, when he was compelled to resign by the Pope himself. It is the paradox of wielding power without restraint, convinced one will never have to answer for it. Yet in the Vatican someone should finally grasp that institutional arrogance is never a sound investment: today power allows you to strike, tomorrow it exposes you to being struck. That is the inevitable dynamic when procedures, law and the elementary but often flouted principle that the rules apply to everyone are abandoned.
Furthermore, is there a criminal case against the Gendarmerie officials who, according to the Court, acted at the behest of a private citizen, pursuing personal rather than institutional interests? We can already answer: no, no investigation has been opened. And that is hardly surprising: Alessandro Diddi, the current Promoter of Justice, has already shown himself unable to follow even elementary deductive logic, let alone Vatican law, of which he demonstrates a daily, approximate and arbitrary knowledge.
A Strategic Blind Spot
But the deeper, more strategic point is this: What serious professional would agree to work in the Vatican institutions today, knowing that the system tolerates—and even protects—abuses of power, arrests with no legal basis, forced removals, threats and blackmail? In a context where legal safeguards seem the exception rather than the rule, the risk is not merely individual injustice but a broad exodus of competence. Who would ever trust a State that treats its collaborators as expendable pawns, with neither guarantees nor justice?
Silere non possum has repeatedly denounced the phenomenon of those “young ladies”—often very talkative on social media—who boast of “getting into the Vatican” as if it were an honorific title. Some of them have even been sadly ordained. But the real question today is another: Who among serious people still wants to frequent this State in such a climate? The answer is simple: it is now frequented only by people looking for visibility, hungry for selfies and symbolic recognition, those who want to buy petrol a few cents cheaper, or characters devoid of competence and critical spirit, who precisely for that reason pose no threat to the opaque—at times mafia-like—equilibrium within the Leonine walls. The others, those with a modicum of intelligence, independence and sense of duty, approach it with far less “excitement.” And not without reason. No one disputes the reasons that may have led to requesting those resignations. But if there is concrete evidence of illegal acts by a person—especially a senior official—the correct route is a trial, not blackmail. One proceeds in the proper venues, not with illegally planted bugs, computers hacked without warrant, and threats during punitive raids.
There are those who now pose as a “good-natured country curate,” leaving it to others to raise their voices and pronounce judgments. There are those who waged an outright war with the former Substitute, and the results are plain for all to see. Yet one wonders: Where is Christ in all this? Can it be that people are publicly defamed and slandered, delegitimised and even prevented from working—without evidence, without trial, without a shred of concrete proof—in the very heart of the Church? And at whose behest? At the behest of a “private citizen,” as he is naïvely called, who used the Gendarmerie for personal ends? Is this a State governed by law, or have we drifted into the Wild West?
What the Court refuses to acknowledge is that Angelo Becciu acted precisely in his capacity as Substitute for the Secretariat of State. This was no personal whim, but the application of a consolidated modus operandi inherited from his predecessors and replicated by those who hold the same post today. The problem is that this way of acting has no basis in the current norms: it is the product of a distorted practice, a symptom of a diseased system. A system that Becciu himself ultimately experienced—and suffered—when, once the balance of power shifted, he found himself on the other side of the fence. Until the courage to recognise its own errors is found, the Holy See will remain trapped in a vicious circle that regularly drags it—along with the very image of the Pope it is supposed to protect—onto the pages of tabloids and scandal sheets.
p.E.A.
Silere non possum