After a staggering total of 30 months, 85 hearings stretching over some 600 courtroom hours, 69 witnesses and almost 150,000 pages of documentation, the Vatican’s “Trial of the Century” reached a crescendo Saturday night with guilty verdicts against Cardinal Angelo Becciu and eight of the other nine defendants. In a sense, the results marked an early birthday present for Pope Francis, who today turns 87, and who set this whole thing in motion in April 2021 by amending the law of the Vatican City State to allow its civil tribunal to judge the cases of cardinals and bishops who work in the Vatican.