VATICAN CITY
The Australian
PAOLA TOTARO THE AUSTRALIAN JUNE 20, 2015
On May 25, a relatively new but increasingly important ritual unfolded with some ceremony behind the ‘Mure Leonine’, the ancient walls of the Vatican City State.
This rite, however, involved neither sacrament nor prayer: just a phalanx of forensic accountants, international bankers and behind the scenes, a quartet of increasingly powerful Australians, led by the Pope’s Financial Tsar, Cardinal George Pell.
It is only the third time in two centuries that l’Istituto per le Opere di Religioni (IOR) – probably best known as the scandal-plagued Vatican Bank – has released its financial accounts, allowing public scrutiny of its income, assets and expenditure.
And while the balance sheets at last clarify the size of a particularly secretive slice of the Catholic Church’s historically nebulous, global wealth (set down this year at approximately €6 billion), they tell an even more intriguing back-story of the seismic reforms underway inside the world’s smallest and mysterious independent state.
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