VATICAN CITY
The New York Times
By GAIA PIANIGIANI
NOV. 3, 2015
ROME — Pope John Paul I, who died in 1978, still holds more than 110,000 euros, or about $120,000, in a Vatican bank account. The Vatican pension fund is running an €800-million deficit. The Vatican’s real estate holdings total €2.7 billion, seven times more than what is listed on its balance sheets. And the Vatican’s governing body had agreed to push Philip Morris cigarettes, for a fee.
If they are to be believed, those are some of the revelations set to be published in a new book by Gianluigi Nuzzi, “Merchants in the Temple.” The sources of the claims are not revealed in the book, an advance copy of which was provided by the publisher to The New York Times, and the claims are impossible to verify.
But the Vatican has apparently taken the leaks of internal documents seriously enough to arrest two people who had worked on a special commission set up by Pope Francis to overhaul the Roman Catholic Church’s deeply troubled financial management.
The arrests over the weekend came just days before the publication on Thursday of Mr. Nuzzi’s book and that of another book, “Avarice,” by an Italian reporter, Emiliano Fittipaldi, who also claims to reveal widespread misuse of Vatican finances.
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