VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio
The Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC, Donald W. Wuerl is in Rome this week at the head of a delegation from the Papal Foundation – a US lay organization that supports the charitable works of the Holy Father. As part of their visit to Rome this week, Cardinal Wuerl and several delegates from the Foundation toured the Institute for the Works of Religion – the IOR. Philippa Hitchen asked Cardinal Wuerl about the reasons for his visit and especially to discuss the ongoing efforts to ensure transparency in line with international banking norms and procedures.
Below is a transciption of Cardinal Wuerl’s interview with Philippa Hitchen.
CW “Well we were invited to come and learn first hand directly from the people responsible for the Institute, how it functions and how it carries out its activities. And so, we were very pleased to have the board of the Papal Foundation have this experience and we spent two hours this morning reviewing with the leadership of the Institute what it does and how it does it. It was clearly an effort to be as transparent as possible with how this Institute that cares for funds to carry out the works of religion actually goes about its business. I found it to be a very reassuring thing as did the members of our, our board who were there, manyof whom are people who are deeply engaged in finance, they know the world of finance, they know the world of accountability and book keeping and they told me they were quite impressed with the whole procedure.”
PH So what kind of assurances did you receive that the IOR is really is committed to compliance with international norms because as you know there have been accusations of a lack of transparency in the past?
CW “One of the things that struck me as most convincing was the fact that they have outside auditors, they have just like we in the Church in the United States use outside auditing firms to come in and take a look at what we’re doing and then report on how well it complies with the regulations. Well, they do the same thing at the Institute, they’ve had on the level of just book keeping analysis and on the level of procedural analysis, they’ve had outside firms come in examine them and say you’re in complete compliance. They’ve also asked the entities that have the oversight on the part of international institutions to do the same thing and they were pointing out to us today that they have gotten a clean bill of the health every time they’ve asked for outside auditing.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.