Report: New Allegations of Spying in Vatican Financial Scandal

The Pillar ^ | 2/10/22

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The second-ranking officials at the Vatican Secretariat of State engaged Italian intelligence officers to sweep his Vatican offices for bugs, a former official at the department told Vatican prosecutors.

Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, who is sostituto at the Secretariat of State, along with Msgr. Mauro Carlino, asked Italian intelligence officials to examine their offices and phones for electronic surveillance, and requested information on individuals who were “trying to break into the economic structures of the Holy See with malicious intent,” according to newly-reported testimony in the Vatican’s financial crimes investigation.

The testimony reportedly comes from Vincenzo Mauriello, a former lay official in the Secretariat of State’s protocol office who reportedly helped connect Peña Parra with an Italian intelligence agent, according to a Feb. 9 report from the Italian news site ADN Kronos.

Mauriello told Vatican investigators that during a meeting in May or June 2019, Peña Parra told him that he wanted to have his new offices swept for bugs, because he discovered that elements of his private conversations he had had were regularly becoming known around the Vatican.

In response, Mauriello reportedly told the archbishop that he knew a suitable person who could carry out a sweep — an officer he knew at the Italian Internal Information and Security Agency (AISI), who was “a practicing Catholic,” the former official testified.

Mauriello claims that after making the introduction, he escorted the intelligence officer, who is not named in the ADN Kronos report, to Peña Parra’s office, and then left him in the company of Carlino to carry out the sweep. He returned two hours later to escort the officer out of the building, Mauriello told investigators.