AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
February 19, 2016 –
Desmond O’Grady
Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis’s Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican
GIANLUIGI NUZZI
HENRY HOLT, $58.95
Preventing further Vatican financial scandals was a key motive in the election of Pope Francis in March 2013.
He appointed a commission, whose acronym was COSEA, to investigate Vatican finance and administration.
Nine months later, after thoroughly irritating Vatican bureaucrats, COSEA wound up its work with a report that identified mistaken investments, contracts for cronies, an ever-mounting debt for Vatican Radio, irregularities in places such as the Vatican supermarket, use of worldwide offerings for the Pope’s charities to cover Vatican shortfalls, excessive charges in saint-making procedures, an ominous future for Vatican pension funds and huge apartments assigned to cardinals. Cardinals have always occupied them but now the contrast with the pope’s two-room digs is striking.
Sections of this report, which were leaked to the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, are the main basis for Merchants in the Temple.
Pope Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, had stopped the Vatican being an offshore financial refuge in central Rome by agreeing to stringent international controls to prevent money laundering, but lacked the energy to overcome Curial resistance to reform.
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