Someone there is who does not like an auditor general. Two years ago one was forced out, arguably for trying to do his job.

. . .  consider this measure of the Vatican’s commitment to financial transparency: In June 2017, when [Libero] Milone resigned, the Vatican promised that a new auditor general would be appointed “as soon as possible.”

Heh.

More than two years later we’re still waiting. Instead of filling the post, in February of this year the Vatican issued new statutes for the office of the auditor general, trimming his powers.

Sure.

via Catholic Culture

A case of quis custodiet custodes.

Di Ruzza was appointed by Pope Francis in 2015 as director of the AIF [ Financial Information Authority], serving under the president, Rene Brulhart. The AIF, ironically, was established in 2010 to monitor Vatican financial affairs, to guard against graft and money-laundering. [emphasis added]

Plus:

Prior to his current assignment in the information section of the Secretariat of State, Msgr. Carlino [also suspended] was secretary to then-Archbishop (now Cardinal) Angelo Becciu, who until June was the sostituto, or deputy secretary of state, in charge of the daily administration of Vatican affairs.

Big job!

(He is now prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.) According to L’Espresso, the suspicious transactions that are now under investigation date back to the period when Cardinal Becciu was sostituto. [Again, emphasis added]

He had a say in who became a saint? What next?

via News Headlines | Catholic Culture

One for the ages here.

Dallas County sentenced former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger to 10 years in prison for murder after she shot and killed 26-year-old Botham Jean in his own apartment.

Guyger said she “mistook Jean’s apartment as her own and thought he was a burglar. Guyger lived one floor directly below Jean. She was off duty, but still in her uniform when she shot Jean.”

The final verdict for the case occurred this week.

Jean’s brother, Brandt,  provided a victim statement after the jury announced Guyer’s sentence. Brandt addressed Guyers, giving a powerful statement that truly represents Christ’s mercy and forgiveness.

Listen to his statement, which begins:

“I don’t want to say twice or the hundredth time…how much you’ve taken from us,” Brandt began. I think you know that. But I hope you go to God with all the guilt, all the bad things you’ve done in the past.”

“If you truly are sorry, I know, I can speak for myself–I forgive you, and I know if you go to God and ask him, he will forgive you.”

Etc.

In an elaborate comparison of a 2016 Hillary-Donald debate, a longtime liberal news sheet worked up a latter-day Moby-Dick story that made of Donald a thwarted Ahab, obsessed with his enemies the Clintons but unable to harpoon them.

D. had planned to confront H’s husband Bill with four female accusers, thus to embarrass the old womanizer and do him and his protector-enabler serious harm but had to settle with seating them in his family box.

The sheet’s conclusion:

Trump may have now fulfilled his destiny. Perhaps it, too, was foretold in some Fedallah’s prophecy. [Of doom for his captain, in Melville’s novel.]

But his party is now as shattered as The Pequod, [Ahab’s ship] and Trump’s presidential ambitions are sinking to the bottom of the sea. [Yow.]

How wrong can an insider source be? They were so sure and were themselves so thwarted a few months later, when Trump won, as to become instantly Ahab themselves, obsessed.

via Washington Monthly