British Aristocrat "Warned Vatican It Needed to Sort out Its Finances"

By Alice Philipson
The Telegraph
November 5, 2015

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/11976608/British-aristocrat-warned-Vatican-it-needed-to-sort-out-its-finances.html

A British aristocrat tried to warn the Vatican it needed to sort out its murky finances years before the full extent of the Holy See’s waste and money mismanagement emerged, a new book has revealed.

Lord Camoys sent a memo to Vatican officials in 2004 Photo: Andrew Crowley

Thomas Stonor, the 7th Baron Camoys and a former prominent banker at Barclays, predicted the Vatican’s reputation would be damaged by the corrupt officials handling its money after he worked as an adviser to the Holy See between 1991 and 2006.

His strongly worded memo, sent to Vatican officials in 2004, was revealed in Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi, an Italian journalist, who lays bare the chaos of the Vatican’s finances in which millions of euros – including donations meant for the poor – are lost in waste and mismanagement.

The book's publication on Wednesday came just days after the Vatican arrested two suspected moles for allegedly leaking confidential documents to journalists revealing gross financial mismanagement.

In the five-page letter, Baron Stonor wrote that the historic structure of the Holy See’s finances “is not only inappropriate for the 21st century but also dangerous to the resources of the Holy See and potentially to its reputation”.

Lack of oversight had created a “a very serious risk of becoming involved in episodes of money laundering".

However the concerns of Baron Stonor, a Catholic descendant of Charles II and former Lord Chamberlain to the Queen, were ignored and he expresses his obvious frustration at this in the letter.

“I mentioned some of these concerns, but in vain: perhaps I did not explain myself clearly enough,” he wrote.

Nearly a decade later, in 2013, Baron Stonor urged Nigel Baker, the British ambassador to the Vatican, to resend the letter.

The response to the letter was very different second time round, Mr Nuzzi reveals in the book.

“The document was read and interpreted by the men closest to the pope as further proof of the fact that many at the Apostolic See knew how critical things were but had no intention of changing their approach,” he wrote.

The book, which is based on confidential Vatican documents, details stories of cardinals living in luxury apartments, a bureaucracy determined to thwart Pope Francis's attempts to promote transparent management, and the questionable use of charitable funds.