Top Vatican official testifies in UK court over London real estate deal

ROME – This week the pope’s chief of staff, Venezuelan Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, became the first Vatican official to testify at a trial in a foreign court, offering a detailed overview at London’s High Court of Justice of the Holy See’s actions in the so-called “trial of the century.”

Peña Parra, substitute in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, was called on Thursday and Friday to testify on behalf of the Holy See in a British civil proceeding brought against the Vatican by Italian financier Raffaele Mincione...