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Italian police investigate after three bullets sent in post to Pope Francis

An envelope containing three bullets and addressed to Pope Francis has been found near Milan.

Authorities are now investigating the source of the envelope and who could be behind it, according to Italian paramilitary police.

It was sent from France and intercepted by postal employees working on sorting the mail overnight in the small sorting facility of Peschiera Borromeo in a Milan suburb, the carabinieri provincial command in Milan said.

It reportedly contained three 9mm-calibre Flobert-type pellets, according to the Milan-based newspaper Affaritaliani.

The envelope was addressed by hand in pen to: “The Pope, Vatican City, St. Peter’s Square, Rome,” and contained a message referring to financial operations at the Vatican, but further details were not disclosed.

Last month, the Vatican indicted ten people, including an Italian cardinal, for several alleged financial crimes, including extortion, corruption, fraud, embezzlement, and abuse of power. The accusations included bleeding the Holy See of tens of millions of dollars in donations through bad investments, deals with shady money managers and apparent favours to friends and family.

An investigation is ongoing by the carabinieri investigative unit after the command office in Milan has been notified about the envelope by the sorting centre manager, according to the Italian newspaper.

There was no immediate comment from the Vatican.

On Sunday, Pope Francis led prayers in Saint Peter’s Square in Vatican City, almost 360 miles away from where the envelope has been initially found.

While he still enjoys sweeping popularity among many believers, Pope Francis has held non-traditional views that sometimes attracted strong opposition from conservative believers.

This week, the Pope is expected to fly from Rome to Budapest, where “he will meet with the country’s bishops and meet with representatives of the Ecumenical Council of Churches and Jewish communities”, according to the itinerary of his Hungary and Slovakia visit published by the Vatican News.

The 84-year-old pontiff had colon surgery last month. The Vatican declared after the surgery that the Pope had responded well to the treatment for “symptomatic diverticular stenosis” of the colon. Since then, he returned to his full-time duties.

The Vatican security chiefs have previously voiced concerns over life threats to the Pope, which have mounted after the rise of the Islamic State group in the Middle East in recent years.

Additional reporting by AP 

Reference: Independent: Ahmed Aboudouh

Vandals desecrate ancient church days after £150,000 restoration

An ancient church is being restored by volunteers after it was ruined by vandals.

St Mary Magdalene’s in Caldecote, Hertfordshire, was damaged on Thursday, 10 days after it had reopened following its nine-month renovation costing £150,000.

The Grade-II medieval building saw in excess of £5,000 worth of damage after trespassers smashed windows, set off powder fire extinguishers and poured bleach over the pews and wooden floor.

Images of the damage were posted on social media and donations and reinforcements for its clean up operation came flooding in. 

Around £3,000 has been raised so far to repair the damage caused, with volunteers coming from miles away to help with the effort.

One man travelled from London “with a bucket and a sponge” to join the team cleaning the church.

Rachel Morley, director of the charity Friends of Friendless Churches, which runs St Mary Magdalene's, said: “I’m just really blown away. I wasn’t expecting the [donations]. We’re just a small little church in Hertfordshire - it just seems to have touched a nerve.

“That people have reached into their pockets to support putting this right has restored my faith in the world.

 “I was completely bowled over by the support. From the first thing in the morning there was just a stream of people turning up with vacuum cleaners, and cloths and coffees and biscuits, willing to clean up.

“To have people rallying round like that was great, people we’ve never met before. I left last night and it was much better.”

But the effort to restore the church to its short-lived condition before the attack is not complete, with the damage done by the fire extinguisher persisting despite the best efforts of the volunteers.

“It’s everywhere,” said Ms Morley. “It’s in every single crack in the furniture and in the floor, so when you walk over it, the powder balloons out.” 

Reference: Olivia Rudgard, Mason Boycott-Owen

A playboy, a femme fatal spy and a powerful cardinal: Vatican's biggest corruption trial begins

A playboy, a femme fatal spy and a powerful Italian cardinal are preparing to stand trial in the Vatican's biggest corruption probe that has changed the way the Holy See conducts criminal justice.

Cardinal Angelo Becciu, 73, once one of Pope Francis’ closest confidants, is accused of syphoning off at least 100,000 euros from Vatican funds to help his brother in Sardinia, but also of trying to sabotage a wider investigation that landed him and nine other defendants on the dock.

The case centres around a botched real estate deal involving a former Harrods’ warehouse converted into luxury flats, on which the Vatican lost an undisclosed figure, running into millions of pounds, mostly coming from donations to Peter’s Pence, the papal charity fund.

History will be in the making when the trial begins on Tuesday as it is the first time a Cardinal - or so-called “Prince of the Church” - is facing charges before a Vatican criminal court, thanks to a recent papal reform that stripped cardinals of the privilege to be judged only by their peers, rather than professional judges.

“It shows not only that cardinals are not above the law - something Pope Francis made clear - but that the Vatican itself has judicial resources which it is willing to invest in prosecuting and convicting Vatican officials,” Austen Ivereigh, a British biographer of the pope, told the Telegraph.

“I think a lot is hanging on this trial. If the prosecutors have done their job and the new machinery works well, it will be a breakthrough.”

In their 487-page indictment, seen by the Telegraph, prosecutors claim to have uncovered “a rotten predatory and lucrative system, sometimes made possible thanks to limited but very effective internal collusion and connivance.”

It allowed a motley crew of financiers to use Vatican donations "as a sort of ATM”.

Other defendants include: Raffaele Mincione, a playboy Italian financier once engaged to the model Heather Mills before she married and then divorced Sir Paul McCartney; Cecilia Marogna, an Italian intelligence expert nicknamed the Vatican’s Mata Hari; and Fabrizio Tirabassi, a long-serving Vatican accountant found to have a Swiss bank account with 1.3 million euros and a collection of precious coins and medals worth 8.5 million euros.

The Secretariat of State, the Vatican’s central bureaucracy, bought a 45 per cent stake in the London property in 2014, via a 200-million-dollar investment in a fund run by Mr Mincione that included other holdings. 

The operation was negotiated during Cardinal Becciu’s time as “Substitute” of the Secretariat of State, a highly powerful position akin to Vatican chief of staff.

Court documents show that four years later, a new substitute decided to cut ties with Mr Mincione, after he ran up significant losses and stopped returning calls and emails. 

But the financial bleeding continued. Mr Mincione was given a 40-million-pound payoff, but the Secretariat of State also paid 15 million euros to another middleman, Gianluigi Torzi, who demanded more money to let the Vatican secure full ownership of the Sloane Avenue flats. 

Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, the pope’s deputy, signed off on the deal, but prosecutors say he was hoodwinked into doing it.

Mr Tirabassi, a key player in the negotiations with Mr Torzi and Mr Mincione and who is accused of corruption, extortion, embezzlement, fraud and abuse of office, in the indictment was once told “you are either a crook or an idiot” by a lawyer who reviewed his conduct, prosecution papers show. 

Mr Torzi faces similar charges, including money laundering.

There is no suggestion that Cardinal Becciu lined his own pockets - instead, he is accused of raiding Vatican funds to help family members and proteges like Ms Marogna, who received 575,000 euros, ostensibly to pay for the release of nuns and priests kidnapped by terrorist groups. 

Investigators claim she spent much of it on luxury goods, expensive hotels and restaurants. Like all the other defendants, she has denied any wrongdoing.

Ms Marogna, sometimes referred to as “the cardinal’s lady” by the Italian press, was close enough to the cardinal to have an overnight stay at his apartment in September 2020, prosecutors say. 

But she has dismissed as “absurd” talk of her being Cardinal Becciu’s lover. 

As for the cardinal, he reportedly had only one word for prosecutors when he heard from an aide that they were probing his links to the woman - according to indictment papers.

"Pigs." 

Reference: The telegraph: Alvise Armellini

Churches burned down as anger over 'cultural genocide' of indigenous children sweeps Canada

Reference: The Telegraph: Rozina Sabur