Ousted Vatican auditor: ‘I need to speak to the Pope!’

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 30, 2025

“I need to speak to the Pope,” says Libero Milone, the former Vatican auditor general, who was forced to resign in 2017—because, he says, he had exposed widespread financial corruption.

In a July 30 session with journalists, Milone said that efforts to restore integrity and accountability in the Vatican’s financial affairs, led by the late Cardinal George Pell, were thwarted by a powerful bloc of officials of the Roman Curia, who ultimately arranged his removal.

Last week a Vatican appeals court dismissed Milone’s wrongful-termination lawsuit, confirming a lower court’s verdict. The former auditor now plans to take his appeal to the Court of Cassation, the Vatican’s top court. But more importantly, he hopes to arrange a private meeting with Pope Leo XIV, in which he could inform the new Pontiff about the situation that he uncovered. As Milone put it, “at the end of the day, the best thing is for two people to sit down in front of each other and talk this through.”

A struggle for power

Milone paints a dramatic picture of the bureaucratic maneuvering for power within the Roman Curia, comparing the situation to Animal Farm. “Little did George Orwell know when he wrote it in 1944 that he was writing about the Vatican in the year 2000,” he says. Orwell wrote his novel after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and abdication of Czar Nicholas. “You know, we had a Pope who abdicated as well,” Milone observes. “Because of a pressure group—a pressure group that insisted on doing certain things, and Pope Benedict didn’t think he was up to managing that situation, and he retired.”

The former auditor sees Cardinal Pell as the primary victim of a Vatican cabal determined to resist economic reforms. Pell, he says, “was imprisoned unjustly, because it was all a big frame-up, in my opinion. And he died in mysterious circumstances.”

As for his own experiences as auditor, Milone says that he was shocked by what he found. He confirms reports that at least one Vatican office had a system in place to alter records of financial transactions in order to conceal the true source of the funds. In his many years of previous experience as an auditor, he says, he had rarely encountered clear evidence of money-laundering in the corporate world. At the Vatican, he reports, “it was prevalent.”

In the wake of Milone’s dismissal, some of the specific findings of his audits have come to light: secret bank accounts, undisclosed expenses and no-bid contracts, Vatican offices in which large sums of money were literally kept in paper bags. During his July 30 interview, he mentioned a case in which a donor gave $2.5 million to build a new hospital ward, but the audit found no evidence that any new ward has been built. “But we did find a plaque,” he says: a plaque on a ward that already existed. “We checked where the money went and didn’t go for a hospital ward.”

To date Milone has not made public the information that he uncovered about Vatican financial corruption. But he has left open the possibility that he will open those files if his quest for justice through the Vatican court system is unsuccessful. In any event, he suggests, more scandals will inevitably emerge, because “there’s some things hanging out there, and sooner of later people get hold of them.”

During his term as auditor, Milone reveals, he sent 15 reports to Vatican prosecutors, providing evidence of wrongdoing. “On how many did they act?” he asks rhetorically, before answering his own question: “None.”

A ‘ridiculous’ court decision

Last week’s court decision dismissing his appeal was “rather ridiculous,” Milone maintains. The appeals court ruled that the case was groundless because even if Milone had been wrongly removed, the officials who forced him out—then-Archbishop Angelo Becciu and Domenico Giani, who at the time was the head of the Vatican gendarmerie—were acting as individuals, not as officers of the Secretariat of State.

When he characterizes this finding as ridiculous, Milone makes a persuasive case. If Becciu and Giani were acting purely as individuals, and not as representatives of the Secretariat of State, how could they force the resignation of an officer who had been appointed by the Pope? And as a general principle of law, an institution can be held responsible for the misconduct of its officers. So why was Milone not allowed to bring his suit against the Secretariat of State?

Moreover, even before issuing its ruling, the Vatican appeals court had ordered Milone’s lawyers to remove 22 pages of their argument: the crucial section in which they detailed the financial misconduct that the auditor had discovered. The court explained that the public disclosure of this information might harm the reputation of the individuals involved. Thus the appeals court effectively gutted the plaintiff’s case to preserve the defendant’s reputation.

In retrospect, Milone has concluded that in his handling of his dismissal and his efforts to reach a settlement with the Vatican, “I trusted the wrong person.” He explains that he discussed his case “17 or 18 times” with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State. The cardinal repeatedly promised to help reach a resolution, the former auditor says. “But maybe he didn’t try to help; he was helping himself.”

Restoring confidence

Now Milone takes his uphill battle against the Secretariat of State to the Vatican’s court of last resort—where, he says, it “could be six months, could be a year” before a hearing. But while he professes confidence that he will ultimately be vindicated, he is not so optimistic about his chances in the Vatican judicial system.

Nor is he confident that new policies and procedures, instituted since his departure, have cleaned up the Vatican’s financial affairs. The policies and procedures, he notes, depend on the people enforcing them. Commenting on one recent upbeat financial report, he says: “Do you believe it? I don’t.”

The Vatican’s straitened financial circumstances will not be improved, the former auditor reasons, until the faithful regain confidence that their donations will be handled properly. And that confidence, in turn, will come only when all Vatican officials are held accountable.

When Cardinal Pell’s campaign for financial accountability stalled, Milone recalls, the Australian prelate said that it would be the task of the next Pontiff to resolve the problem. Pope Benedict XIV had found himself unable to control the Vatican bureaucracy; Pope Francis had based his plans for reform on “a lot of wrong information,” Milone believes. Thus the urgency of his wish to meet with Pope Leo and explain what is at stake before the same bureaucratic powers establish their dominance once again.