Are the Pope’s allies funding people smugglers?

Some of Pope Francis’s closest allies in the Catholic Church are alleged to have secretly given more than €2 million to an Italian migrant rescue charity whose senior staff are charged with people smuggling. They include Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna, who is among other things the papal peace envoy to Ukraine, and Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, Archbishop of Luxembourg. These senior figures in the Church organised payment of the money, it is claimed, at the bequest of the Pope who had established a special rapport with the far-left founder of the charity. The payments were kept secret for fear of adverse publicity. 

The disclosure has been made in internet chatroom conversations between members of the charity’s staff, recorded on the orders of prosecuting magistrates in the Sicilian city of Ragusa, as well as in seized documents. Transcripts of the intercepted conversations and copies of the documents were subsequently leaked to the Italian weekly, Panorama,