VATICAN CITY
The New York Times
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: May 30, 2013
VATICAN CITY — From the cheerful ease with which the newly minted president of the Vatican Bank fielded questions on a recent morning, it could be easy to forget how the bank has long been a mystery wrapped in an enigma, tangled up in some of the most opaque scandals in Italy.
“Our mission is to serve and shine,” the bank’s president, Ernst von Freyberg, said with a smile. “Our first pillar is transparency.” He spoke from an office in the medieval tower that houses the bank inside the Vatican, beneath a painting depicting the Gospel lesson, “Render unto Caesar, what is Caesar’s, and to God, what is God’s.”
Appointed in February by Pope Benedict XVI in one of his last acts before retiring, Mr. von Freyberg, 54, a German aristocrat, industrialist and Roman Catholic with a friendly manner and a subtle sense of self-irony, will have a lot of shining to do.
After the ouster of the previous president of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, in a boardroom coup last year, Mr. von Freyberg was brought in with the help of an outside headhunting firm — revolutionary by the standards of the insular Vatican — and is the bank’s first non-Italian president since its founding in 1942.
In recent years, the Vatican Bank has been under increasing pressure from European officials and the Bank of Italy to shed its reputation as an offshore haven and bring its practices in line with European norms to curb money-laundering and terrorist-financing as a condition for using the euro. Until it is deemed fully compliant, the Vatican will face higher costs and difficulties in finding banks to do business with it.
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