UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Christmas miracles have come early this year, it seems. As Gaia Planigiani reports for New York Times yesterday, Pope Francis’s Vatican finance watchdog Cardinal Pell announced Wednesday that he has found hundreds of millions of euros “tucked away” in accounts that the Vatican had no notion it owned.
Isn’t that a lovely find? Hundreds of millions just “tucked away,” to be happened on by accident as one dithers with one’s bank books . . . . If I had a penny for every time this has happened to me, I’d be a much richer man, indeed.
A lovely find, especially as yet another U.S. archdiocese, the archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, announces it may have to declare bankruptcy as it faces claims from victims of clerical sexual abuse .
. . . Surely the Vatican will be inclined to share some of those lovely serendipitous millions, one would hope, with Catholics dealing with the horrendous consequences of childhood sexual abuse by Catholic authority figures, whose archdioceses keep sadly shaking their heads and claiming that they just cannot assist, due to lack of money.
As Colleen Baker says in response to Pell’s finding (Colleen posted this in a discussion thread responding to a National Catholic Reporter article by Michael Sean Winters about fixing the Vatican),
Do you honestly believe Pell? Do you honestly think hundreds of millions of Euros just magically appear? That no one knew anything about any of it prior to this discovery? I am much less naive. I want the names of the hierarchical types that go with all those suddenly appearing hundreds of millions of Euros.
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