The Church and money
A year ago the cardinals in conclave sent the freshly elected pope into his new mission with a mandate to institute reforms in the Roman curia, the Vatican’s administration, which was perceived as being inefficient and touched by corruption.
The Vatican announced that Cardinal Pell has been appointed by Pope Francis to head a new Vatican office overseeing Vatican finances. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
Within 12 months Pope Francis has made great strides in meeting this mandate. He established a special commission to investigate the Vatican Bank, expanded the Vatican City laws concerning money laundering, and began an overdue revamp of the curia.
The establishment in late February of a new structure to deal with the Vatican’s finances is the most significant move yet.
The Council of Economics and its secretariat will replace what seems to have been a shambolic mess, one that created budgets which, in Cardinal Wilfrid Napier’s estimation, were not fit to bear the name.
Where fiscal oversight is deficient, corruption is nourished. Pope Francis has signalled with clarity his determination to root out financial mismanagement.
The appointment of Cardinal George Pell as the Vatican’s quasi-finance minister has been received with joy by his flock in Sydney, but will have been met with disquiet by those who preferred the more casual management of the Vatican’s finances.
Cardinal Pell may not be a specialist in matters of finance — on these matters the experts on the Council of Economics will guide the trained Church historian — but the cardinal’s capacity to assert his agenda is well documented.
The conclave that elected Pope Francis a year ago met under the shadow of the so-called VatiLeaks scandal of 2012, in which confidential documents that showed corruption, mismanagement and incompetence within the curia were leaked to the media.
In October 2012, Pope Benedict XVI’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was found guilty by a Vatican court on charges of having leaked the documents, and sentenced to a jail term of 18 months. Pope Benedict XVI pardoned him in December that year.
A report subsequently commissioned by Pope Benedict into maladministration in the Vatican was prepared by a group of three cardinals, but its content has not been publicly released. The cardinals’ findings reportedly were, however, the subject of deliberations in pre-conclave meetings. These discussions and the report itself presumably have informed the nature of Pope Francis’ reforms.
Mr Gabriele has done the Church he professes to love a great service, even if in doing so he employed illegal means and embarrassed the pope.
As a whistleblower who has played a pivotal role in launching the process of the much-needed curial overhaul — reforms which the world’s cardinals saw as vital and which Pope Francis is carrying out energetically — Mr Gabriele deserves the Church’s gratitude.
It remains a cause for concern that Mr Gabriele should have to live with a certain notoriety while those whose trespasses he exposed have not been held to public account.
We are still owed an explanation, for example, as to why and at whose petition Archbishop Carlo Viganò was effectively fired from his position as secretary-general of the governatorate of Vatican City State after he turned, in just one year, a $10 million deficit into a $44 million surplus.
While the Vatican is cleaning up its fiscal act, dioceses and parishes must likewise ensure that their financial dealings are above reproach. They must be rigorously transparent and accountable.
Financial mismanagement in the Church damages our evangelising mission. The experience of German Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst of Limburg is instructive.
The bishop’s extravagances — including the installation of a new bathtub in his episcopal residence at the cost of R225000 — scandalised not only the faithful but also many of his brother bishops.
As a result of the Limburg scandal, and the (now suspended) bishop’s arrogant response to criticism, an alarming number of German Catholics decided to formally leave the Church.
It is good, therefore, that almost half of the members of the new Council of Economics are drawn from the laity. This is very much in keeping with Pope Francis’ vision for the Church.
Indeed, there is no reason why other curial departments should not likewise be populated, and in some instances, run by qualified lay people, including women.
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