While Müller’s term as prefect was not renewed after the investigation, another DDF official who faced investigation remains in post at the department.
Cardinal Müller led the Vatican’s doctrinal department for five years, following his appointment in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI, until July of 2017, when Pope Francis declined to renew his term of office.
At the time of Müller’s departure, Francis’ decision not to renew his tenure at the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was widely interpreted as the “sacking” of a prominent theological conservative in a senior curial role, and a signal that the pope wanted a new direction from the doctrinal department’s leadership.
But sources close to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Secretariat for the Economy, and the Vatican’s Office of the Auditor General have independently told The Pillar that Müller’s departure from office came after financial problems at the DDF, which led to an investigation and the cardinal being ordered by the pope to repay hundreds of thousands of euros to his own department.
Sources familiar with the investigation told The Pillar that tens of thousands of euros in departmental funds were kept in cash in office drawers and used as unreceipted discretionary funds by officials; that money meant for the DDF’s departmental bank account was instead deposited in Müller’s personal account; and that the cardinal gave a centuries-old conference table, used to convene the doctrinal office’s most senior meetings, to a personal friend.
Cardinal Müller has not responded to questions from The Pillar.
According to sources close to the Secretariat for the Economy, an investigation began in 2015, as the secretariat began implementing new norms for financial accountability.
During a series of workshops for curial officials on proper record-keeping, Vatican officials discovered that several departments maintained large undocumented and unsecured amounts of cash, The Pillar was told, leading to a series of “spot inspections” at different dicasteries.
When officials from the Secretariat for the Economy, then led by Cardinal George Pell, arrived at the offices of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, they discovered a DDF official attempting to remove several plastic shopping bags of cash from the office premises, leading to a scene one official described as “extraordinary.”
“Here we were counting out thousands, thousands of euros in cash, in the office [of the DDF] which they were trying to move out the back door in plastic bags,” the official said.
“It was just surreal.”
The incident prompted Cardinal Pell to refer the DDF to the Office of the Auditor General for a more thorough investigation, officials told The Pillar, which was conducted in autumn of 2015 and found that hundreds of thousands of euros at the DDF were either misappropriated, improperly documented, or otherwise unaccounted for.
One senior official of the auditor general’s office put the figure at more than half a million euros in total, much of which was in cash, they said, with the rest of the money deposited in non-CDF bank accounts, including Cardinal Müller’s personal accounts.
According to a source close to the auditor general’s office, when Müller was asked to explain why some 200,000 euros of departmental funds were deposited in his personal bank accounts, the cardinal blamed a “clerical error” with the account numbers, an explanation which the official said “beggared belief.”
“It is hard to see how any kind of credible accounting process could allow for hundreds of thousand of euros to go unaccounted [for], or for hundreds of thousands to be deposited in the wrong accounts and have no one notice [until there was an external investigation],” the official told The Pillar.
A source close to the Secretariat for the Economy told The Pillar that they saw no evidence that Cardinal Müller used the departmental funds in his bank account to fund his own expenses, but speculated instead that the deposits — along with the bags of cash discovered being removed from the DDF offices — were evidence of a “panic” as news of spot inspections spread around the curia.
“I don’t think Cardinal Müller was looking to get rich from the dicastery,” the source close to the secretariat said, “but I think the aim was to get all the cash, and it was a lot of cash, out of the office and out of sight.”
Sources close to the Secretariat for the Economy and the Office of the Auditor General both told The Pillar that the findings of the investigation were presented to Pope Francis directly in the latter months of 2015.
In response, Francis ordered Müller to repay the money deposited into his own account which, sources told The Pillar, amounted to approximately 200,000 euros.
On July 30, The Pillar sent Cardinal Müller several questions via email, asking him to confirm and comment upon the inspection and the amount allegedly repaid by the cardinal. No response was received by time of press.
According to sources close to the DDF, Müller’s tenure as head of the doctrinal department was well-known for financial mismanagement and the “very casual” treatment of dicastery funds.
One source close to the department told The Pillar that as much as 100,000 euros at a time was kept in cash in an office, with virtually no formal oversight of its use.
Sources close to the DDF told The Pillar that the thousands of euros identified by financial authorities’ investigation came from taxa — formal administrative fees — collected by the DDF for the processing of canonical cases in the department’s disciplinary section.
“Under [Archbishop Charles] Scicluna, during his time [as head of the disciplinary office],” one DDF official recalled, “we would keep a small amount of petty cash in the office for ordinary expenses and an office dinner, maybe once a year, for the disciplinary section. When he left [after being made a bishop in his native Malta], though, the money just started accumulating.”
According to sources close to the DDF and the Office of the Auditor General, the money accumulated in the office of a single administrative official, Msgr. Mauro Ugolini.
“I don’t think anyone, including the administrator [Ugolini] could tell you how much was there, or came in and out,” one DDF official recalled, “but it was in the hundreds of thousands — there was something like 80,000 euros in cash left when it was finally discovered [during the secretariat’s inspection].”
In previous decades, it was customary for visiting bishops and other senior Church officials to make generous cash donations, informally called bustarella, to prefects of Roman dicasteries, often leaving it ambiguous as to whether the funds were personal gifts or donations to the department.
Such donations were banned by reforms issued by Pope Francis in the wake of the 2018 scandal surrounding former cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
But sources close to the DDF told The Pillar that the thousands of euros identified by financial authorities’ investigation were not bustarella, but part of the dicastery’s administrative income from canonical cases, including instances of clerical sexual abuse of minors, canonical marriage cases undertaken according to the Petrine and Pauline privileges, as well as cases involving the violation of the sacramental seal.
Another instance of financial maladministration detailed by the auditor general’s report concerned a large, antique conference table that formed the centerpiece of the main conference hall in the DDF offices.
According to sources at both the auditor general’s office and the DDF, Cardinal Müller ordered a new, modern-style table for the room, priced at tens of thousands of euros, and in exchange gave the antique conference table to a Bavarian-based furniture maker and antique dealer, allegedly a personal friend of Müller’s.
“To see [the antique dealer] come in and disassemble the table around which so much history had taken place, at which [Cardinal Joseph] Ratzinger had presided, was very affecting for everyone,” one DDF official recalled to The Pillar.
Apart from the questions about the relative value of the old and new conference tables, the arrangement was flagged by the investigation because the antique table, along with all curial furnishings, did not belong to the dicastery, and the prefect did not have the authority to dispose of it. All Vatican furnishings and art are owned centrally by a separate office of the Roman curia, APSA.
The Pillar asked Cardinal Müller via email to comment upon and confirm the acquisition of the new conference table and the disposal of the antique table. By time of press, no response was received.
Despite the findings of the Secretariat for the Economy and auditor general’s investigation, neither Cardinal Müller nor Msgr. Ugolini was subject to formal sanction, The Pillar was told by officials at the DDF, Secretariat for the Economy, and Office of the Auditor General.
“If [Pope Francis’] financial reforms were applied to the letter, they should have meant Müller was sacked,” said one senior source close to the office of the auditor general. “If thousands and thousands of euros just ‘accidentally’ ending up in a cardinal’s account isn’t evidence of inexcusable administration, if not corruption, what is?”
But an official close to the Secretariat for the Economy told The Pillar that in 2015, the early days of Pope Francis’ financial reforms, “there was a preference for ‘looking ahead not looking back.’”
“Very few dicasteries didn’t have problems,” the source said. “Very few had situations as bad as the CDF, but if heads started rolling everywhere it would have made it harder to get people to come clean about where we really were.”
One source close to the DDF told The Pillar that the investigation split responsibility for the numerous financial issues at the department between Cardinal Müller and Msgr. Ugolini, but both men were allowed to remain in post — Müller until the end of his five-year term of office in 2017 and Ugolini until he reaches curial retirement age, believed to be next year.
“[Cardinal] Müller wasn’t fired, though perhaps strictly speaking he should have been,” the senior official told The Pillar. “The politics of the day kept him from being removed; but the financial mess was substantially why he was not renewed in office.”
At the time his term was not renewed, Cardinal Müller complained publicly about the way he was informed that he was leaving office: a brief meeting with Pope Francis in which he said he was informed he would not be given a second five-year term in office, and apparently given no explanation for the pope’s decision.
“I cannot accept this way of doing things. As a bishop one cannot treat people this way,” Müller complained to media in Bavaria at the time. “[Pope Francis] did not give a reason.”
“The Church’s social teaching must also be applied to the way employees are treated here in Rome,” Müller said in an interview in 2017, but made no reference to either the Secretariat for the Economy’s inspection, the auditor general’s report, nor having previously been directed to repay thousands of euros to the DDF by Pope Francis.
Müller was succeeded at the DDF by his deputy, then-archbishop and later Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, in a move widely interpreted as reflecting theological differences between Müller and Francis.
Müller was also widely reported at the time to have turned down the offer of another curial assignment, which one source close to the Secretariat for the Economy told The Pillar was “normal” for moving a cardinal after evidence of maladministration.
“Generally speaking, when we [the secretariat] found a serious issue that couldn’t be overlooked, there was a default to the Roman tradition of ‘promoting to remove’ — this is what happened with [Cardinal] Becciu at the Secretariat of State. It wasn’t up to [the secretariat], but that’s often how it went.”
News reporting at the time of Müller’s departure suggested that the cardinal had turned down another Vatican role because, after leading the DDF, any other position would have appeared to be a demotion.
The Pillar requested comment from Cardinal Müller on the circumstances of his departure from office, and for his opinion on what, if any, influence the financial affairs at the DDF may have had on the pope’s decision. No response was received by time of press.
Following his departure from office, Müller emerged as a public critic of Pope Francis, claiming that the pope had “uttered plenty of material heresies” and criticizing the “growing confusion about the doctrine of the faith.”
In December last year, Müller published an essay denouncing his former department’s declaration Fiducia supplicans, which offered a framework for clerical blessings of individuals in same-sex couples.
Shortly before Müller’s term was not renewed in 2017, the then-auditor general, Libero Milone, was forced to resign from office under threat of criminal prosecution by the then-sostituto of the Vatican Secretariat of State, Cardinal Angelo Becciu.
Milone is currently suing the Secretariat of State and his own former office for wrongful dismissal.
The Pillar requested comment from Milone on his former office’s work involving Cardinal Müller and the DDF.
In response, Milone told The Pillar that “it is not appropriate to comment” on the matter.
“At the present time, I have a court proceeding in progress with the Vatican City tribunal and it is essential for me to focus on this matter,” Milone said.
Milone previously told The Pillar that Becciu accused him of “spying” because his office was undertaking legitimate auditing work — and that he had personally briefed Pope Francis on curial corruption.
“What it was,” Milone told The Pillar in 2022, “is that I discovered that there were cardinals putting money in their pockets, they were doing strange things, and my reporting line was to the pope, so I reported everything to the pope.”
Becciu was himself sacked from his curial roles in September 2020, and forced to resign the rights and privileges of a cardinal. He was convicted of financial crimes by a Vatican City court in December of 2023. He has publicly taken credit for ousting Milone but insisted he did so on Pope Francis’ personal orders.
Speaking at a press conference in 2022, Milone said his work as auditor general uncovered the misappropriation of hundreds of thousands of euros by individual cardinals and prelates, fictitious building projects to justify expenses, and the use of a Church institution to allegedly launder money to Italian political parties. Milone has also charged that doing that work successfully resulted in him losing his job.
“Evidently, Becciu and his friends must have come across these reports because he was the pope’s chief of staff at the time, and got worried because ‘this guy’ was putting these cardinals in difficulty,” he told The Pillar in 2022.
“Regarding one cardinal, one in particular, who took a lot of money, when I informed the pope, the pope went through the roof and said to go to see him and get the money back. I said that’s not my job, and it wasn’t my job — my job was auditor, I’m not there to collect money,” Milone said in 2022.
“But the pope said, ‘I’ll tell him, you just go and explain how you found out,’ and the cardinal did give the money back.”
“But these are the reasons for which I was apparently accused of spying.”
Milone declined to comment when asked whether the situation he described in 2022 was that of Cardinal Müller.
He filed suit in Vatican City in 2022.
In a Jan. 22 decision earlier this year, the Vatican City’s court of first instance rejected the claims made by Milone, and by his recently deceased former deputy, Ferruccio Panicco, over their ousting from office in 2017.
While the court did not conclude that Milone and Panicco had been rightly forced from their jobs in 2017, the judges rejected the argument that the Secretariat of State was liable for their ouster, loss of earnings, and subsequent damage to their reputations.
The judges ruled that Milone’s own narrative of his ousting placed responsibility on the senior leadership of the Vatican City corps of gendarmes, which did not create a chain of liability for the Secretariat of State, despite the then-number two official in the department, Cardinal Becciu, publicly acknowledging his involvement.
The case is currently being heard at appeal.
“It says something about a culture of clericalism and the real commitment to financial reform that [Milone] was forced out of his job, while [Cardinal] Müller was given a graceful exit and allowed to finish his term,” one official close to the Office of the Auditor General told The Pillar.
“If you ‘accidentally’ take thousands of euros from the office funds, you don’t lose your position. But if you push too hard for accountability, you get threatened with criminal prosecution and made to resign.”