VATICAN CITY
Los Angeles Times
By Tom Kington, Los Angeles Times
March 23, 2013
VATICAN CITY — As he begins work, Pope Francis will find a pile of files in his in-tray on sex abuse and squabbling cardinals. But he will also come across a thick dossier on the Vatican’s secretive bank, which his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, tried to drag into the daylight after years of suspicion that it was a haven for money launderers.
After struggling to get the Vatican onto a coveted European “white list” for clean banks, Benedict suffered a setback last year when his top manager, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was fired by the bank’s board, officially for incompetence. Gotti Tedeschi saw things differently, contending that “an honest person [at the bank] who wants to do good is ousted!”
Then, in January, the Vatican was humbled into using a Swiss firm to process credit card payments after the Bank of Italy warned Italian banks not to do business with the Holy See, temporarily forcing visitors queuing at the Sistine Chapel to pay cash if they wanted to get in.
It was the latest in a series of mishaps at the institution that prompted Italy’s biggest-selling Catholic magazine, Famiglia Cristiana, to urge the Vatican to dump the bank altogether.
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