VATICAN CITY
Sacramento Bee
By FRANCES D’EMILIO
Associated Press
Published: Saturday, Jun. 29, 2013
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis told prelates Saturday to shun the ”logic of human power,” pressing his campaign to root out corruption and other wrongdoing from the Vatican’s scandal-tainted power structures.
The admonition came a day after the latest embarrassment for the Vatican hierarchy – the arrest by Italian authorities of a Vatican accountant, in a probe of an alleged attempt by the prelate to secure the smuggling of 20 million euros ($26 million) in banknotes from Switzerland into Italy. The Italian monsignor, who was suspended a few weeks earlier from his job in the Vatican’s finance office, is also under investigation in a separate money-laundering probe by prosecutors in southern Italy.
Francis is making reforms aimed at ensuring his papacy’s priorities, which include paying more attention to the world’s poor and concentrating on cultivating spiritual, not material, wealth. He delivered a kind of moral pep talk to church leaders, including Vatican cardinals, gathered in St. Peter’s Basilica for an annual ceremony to welcome newly made archbishops.
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