VATICAN CITY
The Tablet (UK)
09 October 2014 13:40 by Christopher Lamb in Rome
The man picked by Pope Francis to sort out the Vatican’s finances admitted last night that details of the Holy See’s financial health remained opaque for many years to the very committee supposed to be overseeing them.
Cardinal George Pell, Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, who also sits on the Pope’s nine-member advisory body, recalled how he had sat on a 15-member committee of cardinals whose job was to oversee the finances of the Vatican.
“For seven or eight years I was on a committee that was supposed to be overlooking Vatican finances. The only thing that was absolutely clear is that we didn’t know what was going on!” he said last night at the Rome launch of the Crux website at the North American College.
He recalled that Cardinal Joachim Meisner, the 80-year-old Archbishop Emeritus of Cologne, explained to Cardinal Pell how he for 23 years had tried “to improve things”.
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