Scandal In The Vatican 2 «SAFE»

Cecilia Marogna was a self-styled security expert with no formal intelligence background. She claimed to have worked with NATO and the Italian secret services, but prosecutors later found little evidence of any genuine credentials. Nevertheless, Cardinal Becciu authorized payments totaling over €500,000 to Marogna’s Slovenian-registered company.

What was the money for? Becciu initially said it was a ransom payment to free a kidnapped Italian nun in Mali. Later, he claimed it was for intelligence gathering on Vatican enemies. Prosecutors presented a different story: text messages and invoices showed Marogna spending the money on luxury hotels, designer clothes, and a €35,000 handbag from a boutique in Milan. When Italian financial police froze her accounts, they found a note in her phone: “The Cardinal said to bill everything as ‘security consulting.’ No one checks.”

Becciu denied any wrongdoing. He insisted Marogna was a legitimate operative and that the luxury purchases were her private matter. But when Vatican gendarmes searched his apartment, they found over €150,000 in cash stuffed into envelopes and drawers—money he claimed was for “papal charities” but had never been disbursed. Scandal in The Vatican 2

For nearly two millennia, the Vatican has been portrayed as the unshakable fortress of faith—a city-state where divine guidance trumps human fallibility. Yet, beneath the gilded frescoes of the Apostolic Palace and the marble corridors of St. Peter’s Basilica, a different story has often unfolded. If the first great "Scandal in the Vatican" involved Medici popes, murder, and the selling of indulgences, the second great scandal—the one history may well label Scandal in The Vatican 2—is a far more modern, yet equally labyrinthine, tale of financial fraud, espionage, secret London real estate, and a disgraced cardinal who became the richest man in Rome while wearing a Franciscan cord.

This is the story of how a whisper in a dusty Vatican filing room grew into a criminal investigation that reached the Pope’s own door. Cecilia Marogna was a self-styled security expert with

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This guide will focus primarily on the dramatic narrative found in The New Pope and the themes of corruption in The Great Beauty, as these represent the artistic "sequel" to stories of Vatican intrigue.