Italian journalist Sandro Magister has said that late Australian Cardinal George Pell was the author of an anonymous memo he published on his blog last year that called Pope Francis’s pontificate was a “catastrophe”.
The prefect emeritus of the Secretariat for the Economy, who spent over a year in jail in his homeland before being cleared of sexual abuse charges in 2020, died in Rome last week following heart complications that arose after a hip operation.
The memo said a wide range of commentators considered “this pontificate is a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe”.