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Pope: ‘Vatican’s finances are out of control’
Buenos Aires Herald
ROME — The scale of the challenge facing Pope Francis as he struggles to overhaul the Vatican’s finances will be laid bare today by the publication of confidential documents and private recordings of his meetings. Two new books, released in Italy and other countries today, will highlight the secrecy, mismanagement and huge wealth at the heart of the scandal-ridden Catholic Church. They depict a Vatican plagued by mismanagement, greed, cronyism and corruption. One of the books even quotes a secretly recorded conversation involving the pontiff. “Without exaggerating, we can say that a good part of the costs are out of control,” Pope Francis says in the recording, according to Merchants in the Temple, by Gianluigi Nuzzi. The author writes of irregularities in the funding of causes to declare saints in the Roman Catholic Church, the purported diverting of funds intended for the poor to plug administrative deficits and the lavish lifestyle of some cardinals. Interestingly, Nuzzi also comments on the resistance to Francis’ desired reforms, saying the Argentine pontiff often encounters “entrenched and tenacious resistance” to his agenda. A second book, Avarice by Emiliano Fittipaldi, a reporter for the L’Espresso magazine also details financial wrongdoing at the Vatican. The journalist reports claims that a foundation set up to support a children’s hospital paid 200,000 euros toward the renovation of the apartment of the Vatican’s number two at the time, Tarciso Bertone. Bertone came under fire last year over the apartment, described in the book as a “mega-penthouse,” which sat ill with Francis’ vision of a “poor Church.” He says he paid for the renovations himself. The Vatican said the books “generate confusing, partial, and tendentious interpretations” in a statement. On Monday, the Holy See arrested a senior high-ranking Church cleric and a public relations consultant in an investigation into an alleged leak of confidential documents dubbed “Vatileaks 2.0.” “Publications of this nature do not help in any way to establish clarity and truth,” the Vatican said in a statement. Secret recording The leaks in the new books are seen as part of a bitter internal struggle between the reformers and the old guard. The new book by Nuzzi makes some startling allegations, including a report that Vatican “postulators” — officials who promote sainthood causes — bring in hundreds of thousands of euros in donations for their causes but are subject to no supervision as to how the money is spent. Nuzzi estimates the average price tag for a beatification cause at around 500,000 euros — and some have gone as high as 750,000 euros. Causes of saintly candidates who don’t inspire rich donors can languish, he adds. “Holy Father... there is a complete absence of transparency in the bookkeeping both of the Holy See and the Governorate,” five international auditors wrote to Francis in June 2013, according to Nuzzi’s book. He also recounts a tale involving Monsignor Giuseppe Sciacca, a top official in the Vatican City State administration, who in 2012 apparently wanted a fancier apartment. When Sciacca’s neighbour was hospitalized for a long period, Nuzzi writes, the cardinal took advantage, broke down a wall separating their residences and incorporated an extra room into his apartment, furniture and all. The elderly priest eventually came home to find his possessions in boxes. He died a short time later, the book says. Francis, who lives in a hotel room, summarily demoted Sciacca and forced him to move out. Another highlight of Nuzzi’s book, which was made available to selected outlets before publication, is the transcript of a recording of the pope at a meeting in July, 2013 — four months after his election — in which he complains to top Vatican officials about its murky finances. “We have to better clarify the finances of the Holy See and make them more transparent,” he is quoted as saying in the recording, which the author says was made secretly by someone in the room. “C-l-a-r-i-t-y. That is what’s done in the most humble companies and we have to do it, too,” he says, adding that “without exaggerating, we can say that a good part of the costs are out of control.” Nuzzi rose to fame in 2012 with the book His Holiness, which was in large part based on leaked documents from Paolo Gabriele, the butler of former Pope Benedict who stole documents from the pope’s desk. That scandal, which led to the butler’s arrest and imprisonment, became known as “Vatileaks” and the uproar it caused is believed to have led at least in part to Benedict’s decision to resign the following year. Nuzzi writes that the management of Peter’s Pence, a collection taken up yearly around the world for charities and sent to Rome, “is an enigma cloaked in the most impenetrable secrecy.” Maintenance and restoration contracts were handed out at inflated prices, Vatican real estate is worth seven times what it is listed on the account books and the city-state’s pension fund is fast approaching collapse, he writes. According to Nuzzi, poor book-keeping includes the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), better known as the Vatican Bank. Account holders there still include Pope John Paul I, credited with a balance of 110,864 euros, and his predecessor Paul VI, in credit with 125,310 euros on one account and 296,151 dollars on another. Both have been dead since 1978. ‘Gravely illegal’ In the second book, Avarice, Fittipaldi writes that some funds from a foundation that runs a Vatican-owned children’s hospital in Rome were diverted to pay for the renovation of an apartment belonging to a senior cardinal. Fittipaldi says the foundation paid 24,000 euros for a helicopter flight to take the same cardinal to southern Italy for a charity event, according to excerpts published in Rome’s La Repubblica newspaper yesterday. He also said nearly 400,000 euros donated in 2013 by churches worldwide to help the poor wound up in an off-the-books Vatican account. Real estate owned by the Church is worth an estimated four billion euros, four times as much as its book value, he concludes. The Vatican’s statement accused the authors of the books of trying to reap advantages from receiving stolen documents, saying this was “a gravely illegal act.” Both have rejected the accusations, saying they are just doing their jobs. “The revelations are more embarrassing for the Church than for Pope Francis,” Fittipaldi told Bloomberg. “There’s a great difference between the pope’s words, and his will to change things, and the Church which is still very rich and often works for itself rather than for others.”
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