Financials in the bed column dark cabinet and Simone report

The cache hidden inside the late Pope’s bed contained personal financial records, material about the Church’s property administration, and a report alleging that Joseph Tremblay had used payments to advance his candidacy. Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli’s discovery makes the bed’s concealed compartments a passage from suspicion to documentary evidence, but not to certainty: he must decide what the papers justify, disclose them to the other electors, and accept the political consequences of doing so.

Discovery and Contents

The documents were concealed inside a wooden case fitted within a bedpost in the late Pope’s room. Among the papers, Lomeli found bank statements, money transfers, addresses of apartments, and handwritten annotations. One document listed official apartments occupied by serving and retired members of the Curia, with the names of cardinal-electors underlined. Lomeli’s own apartment in the Palace of the Holy Office was listed at 445 square metres; those of Aldo Bellini, Joshua Adeyemi, and Tremblay were listed at 410, 480, and 510 square metres respectively. The late Pope had added his own accommodation at Casa Santa Marta: 50 square metres.

An attached report from special commissioner D. Labriola assessed the property administered by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See at 347,532 square metres. It put the potential value above €2.7 billion but the stated book value at €389.6 million, and reported a paid occupancy rate of only 56 percent. The report concluded that much of the income appeared not to be properly declared. These figures turn a general concern about Curial finances into a specific discrepancy recorded for the late Pope’s attention.

Other papers contained summaries of personal bank records held by the Vatican Bank. Lomeli found his own balance—€38,734.76 as of 30 September—among the records, despite not knowing the amount himself. The same list showed €42,112 for Bellini, €121,865 for Adeyemi, and €519,732 for Tremblay. It also included much larger holdings, among them €2,643,923 attributed to Calogero Scozzazi, Archbishop Emeritus of Palermo, who had previously worked at the Vatican Bank and been investigated for money-laundering. Some cardinals from Africa and Asia had accumulated large deposits over the preceding year. Beside the figures, the late Pope had written a biblical warning about a house of prayer made into a den of robbers.

From Suspicion to a Simony Report

The records did not all carry the same evidentiary weight. The financial papers documented balances and transfers, while another document, which Lomeli later showed Bellini, was a report on the activities of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples and, more specifically, its prefect, Tremblay. Lomeli described it as an overwhelming prima facie case of simony: the purchase of ecclesiastical office or sacrament.

According to the report as Lomeli presented it, Tremblay had obtained votes on the first ballot by paying cardinals, chiefly in Africa and South America. The document named Cárdenas, Diène, Figarella, Garang, Papouloute, Baptiste, Sinclair, and Alatas. Lomeli said the payments had been made in cash, making them harder to trace, and had taken place during the preceding twelve months, when Tremblay might have anticipated the end of the late Pope’s pontificate. Lomeli based his account in part on bank statements he had seen, but the ballots had already been burned. The records therefore did not establish how any named cardinal had voted or prove that a recipient had acted corruptly; Lomeli acknowledged that the money might have been intended for church purposes.

His narrower charge concerned Tremblay’s conduct: that he had disregarded official procedures and distributed tens of thousands of euros in a way designed to advance his own candidacy. Lomeli stressed that the stipulated penalty for simony was excommunication. In his view, the report also supported Archbishop Janusz Woźniak’s account that the late Pope’s final official act had been to order Tremblay to resign, though that connection remained part of the larger dispute rather than an independently demonstrated conclusion of the financial records.

Disclosure and Competing Duties

Lomeli showed the report to Bellini and urged him to read it. Bellini initially asked Lomeli to leave, but Lomeli insisted that he would not be turned away and placed the papers before him. As Bellini considered the report, he questioned whether the payments might have served legitimate purposes. Lomeli answered that he had seen the recipients’ bank statements, then distinguished suspicion about those recipients from the allegation against Tremblay. The exchange makes the report’s central difficulty explicit: financial documentation can sharpen the case without resolving every question about purpose, individual responsibility, or proof.

Lomeli also acknowledged that he had entered the late Pope’s rooms and searched for evidence after suspecting that Tremblay might have helped bring Sister Shanumi to Rome to damage Adeyemi’s chances of election. Tremblay had denied doing so and said the transfer was at the late Pope’s request. Lomeli could not determine whether that explanation was true. In the room, however, he had found private emails and telephone transcripts as well as the financial papers, evidence that the late Pope had conducted some kind of inquiry into his colleagues. The discovery thus implicated the investigative methods of the deceased pontiff even as it furnished material for an inquiry into Tremblay.

Lomeli decided that the electors should receive the report while the conclave was still in session, so they could discuss the matter in secret rather than discover it only after electing a new Pope. When he circulated the document, he accepted responsibility for breaking the seals and for sharing it. He told the cardinals who questioned him that he had acted because he had been alerted to a potentially excommunicable offence and suspected it had been covered up; he had investigated, placed the information before his fellow electors, and left them to judge its significance.

Consequences and Significance

The disclosure did not unite the electors behind a single judgment. Giulio Sabbadin objected that Lomeli had surrendered a weapon that could have been used to control Tremblay after an election, and warned that the immediate result was to strengthen Goffredo Tedesco. Archbishop Fitzgerald of Boston, a prominent Tremblay supporter, accused Lomeli of denying his fellow cardinal a chance to defend himself and compared Lomeli’s action to acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Other cardinals voiced agreement. The report’s circulation therefore raised a question not only of whether the evidence was persuasive, but also of who had authority to expose it and when.

The discovery also reframes the late Pope’s reforming pontificate. Bellini recalled that he had refused the full regalia of office, chosen to live at Casa Santa Marta rather than the Apostolic Palace, and demanded transparent accounts, proper books, competitive tenders, and receipts. He had brought accountants and management consultants into the Casa Santa Marta to examine files. The resulting scrutiny, leaks, and internal opposition left him increasingly isolated and distrustful. Against that history, the hidden records suggest both the scale of the administrative suspicions he pursued and the secrecy with which he pursued them.

The bedpost cache is consequently more than a store of incriminating papers. Its figures document a stark contrast between the late Pope’s modest 50-square-metre residence and the much larger apartments assigned to senior churchmen, while its bank records expose private wealth that he had obtained without the subjects’ knowledge. Yet the material’s force depends on distinctions between documented balances, reported transactions, inference about motives, and claims that cannot be verified from burned ballots. Lomeli’s decision to disclose the report does not settle the charges; it transfers responsibility for weighing them to the electors and makes his own conscience, as well as Tremblay’s conduct and the late Pope’s surveillance, part of the crisis.