VATICAN CITY
BBC News
Caroline Wyatt
Religious affairs correspondent
The latest revelations of dirty dealings swirling around the Vatican have not only shown that the price of sainthood is high (around £350,000), but also the price that Pope Francis is paying for his attempts to reform Roman Catholic HQ.
As the CEO of a global organisation, whose mission statement is spreading the word of God and whose bottom line is saving souls, Pope Francis has called often for a “poor Church” that serves the poor.
His problem, though, is that the Church is not poor.
And in the past, the temptation to abuse the Vatican’s coffers – and money donated by ordinary Catholics – has been too much for some of the Church’s most senior servants to resist, with such dealings obscured until recently by a veil of secrecy.
Three years after the original “Vatileaks”, in which the revelations of the then Pope Benedict’s butler shook the Vatican, two new books based on leaked documents (Avarice by Emanuele Fittipaldi and Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi, of Vatileaks fame) created headlines over the past week.
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