Carles Puigdemont requested the mediation of the Vatican with the Government of Spain in his efforts to achieve the independence of Catalonia. In the hot autumn of 2017, shaken by the celebration of the illegal referendum, a letter arrived at the Holy See on letterhead from the then president of the Generalitat requesting a meeting between the pro-independence leader and Angelo Becciu, then a substitute for the Secretary of State, a key position in the internal workings of the Roman Curia. Becciu was willing to meet with Puigdemont to see “if there were margins for a diplomatic intervention by the Vatican”, although the conversation, which was to be held electronically, in the end did not take place due to the conditions imposed by the Catalan politician.
The request for the intervention of the Holy See in the ‘procés’ came to light thanks to a statement presented by Cecilia Marogna this Thursday in the Vatican court that judges the possible financial irregularities committed by Becciu. Marogna is a supposed expert in security and international relations to whom the ecclesiastic resorted for secret operations in which she preferred that Vatican diplomacy not be openly involved. Among them, the case of the Colombian nun Gloria Cecilia Narváez stands out, kidnapped in Mali in 2017 and released in 2021, an operation that would have cost the Vatican around one million euros.
Becciu received Puigdemont’s letter from Marogna, to whom it was in turn delivered by Piergiorgio Bassi, an Italian businessman who had contacts with “delegates for private diplomatic issues” of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, around whom an envoy of the independence leader had already tried to gather support. After trying to send to Russia part of the relics of San Nicola de Bari, for which Putin feels great devotion, and after the Vatican sold Russia a building in its extraterritorial zone, both requests being rejected, Bassi delivered Puigdemont’s letter to Marogna, who “already had doubts about his operational integrity and that of his Russian colleagues.”
When he spoke to Becciu about the letter, the latter expressed his interest in knowing “what was happening in Spain” and also in checking the possibilities of a Vatican intervention in the conflict. Bassi informed Marogna that Puigdemont could not travel to Rome at that time, so the meeting had to be held via Skype, but the conversation could only take place in Becciu’s private apartment, located inside the Holy See, under the supervision of a collaborator of the alleged Russian agent and with a precise account of this platform to make video calls over the Internet.
“The request seemed unusual to me,” says Marogna in the statement, assuring that Becciu also thought there was something unclear. After Bassi insisted that it was only possible to carry out the conversation with Puigdemont in this way, Marogna suggested to the senior Vatican official that he reject the pro-independence leader’s proposal, inviting him instead to send a formal request to the Secretary of State. In this way, it was also intended to avoid “possible manipulations” and a possible “diplomatic incident” with the Spanish authorities.
Marogna’s statement comes within the framework of the Vatican process that judges the alleged financial irregularities committed during Becciu’s time at the Secretary of State, in particular with the purchase of a building in a luxurious London neighborhood. In this million-dollar operation, in which funds from the donations that the faithful give to the Vatican for the maintenance of the Catholic Church were used, the Holy See was swindled, while various intermediaries to whom Becciu would have resorted made huge profits.
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