VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
by John L Allen Jr on Jan. 27, 2012 All Things Catholic
We already knew that Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, named by Pope Benedict XVI in October as his new nuncio, or ambassador, to the United States, seriously rocked the boat in his brief but tumultuous run as the No. 2 official in the government of the Vatican city-state from 2009 to 2011.
What we didn’t know until this week, however, was just how vigorously Viganò had campaigned to be allowed to finish the financial house-cleaning he started. As it turns out, the pope’s new man in Washington is something of a whistle-blower.
Viganò, 71, who has degrees in both civil and canon law, is a veteran Vatican diplomat who took over what amounts to the chief of staff position in the Vatican city-state in July 2009. He quickly earned a reputation as a take-no-prisoners financial reformer, reportedly turning a $10.5 million deficit into a $44 million surplus in one year alone by insisting on centralized accounting procedures and strict accountability for cost overruns.
No good deed, of course, ever goes unpunished, making it natural that Viganò’s efforts produced fierce backlash among some mid-level managers in the various Vatican fiefdoms. They were long accustomed to being accountable only to God and the pope — and in both cases, that accountability was fairly nominal.
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