VATICAN CITY
Irish Times
Paddy Agnew in Rome
An external audit of Vatican finances being carried out by global firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has been suspended by the Holy See.
The move raises further questions about whether Pope Francis continues to encounter internal resistance in carrying out reforms of the Vatican’s often haphazard and chaotic administration.
Since his election in 2013 the pope has made cleaning up the Holy See’s finances one of the key elements of his reform process.
To that end, he created two new bodies in 2014, the Secretariat for the Economy and the Council for the Economy, which were to exercise “oversight for the administrative and financial structures” of the Holy See and the Vatican City state.
It now seems that the Secretariat for the Economy, which is headed up by Australian cardinal George Pell, is on a collision course with the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, the traditional engine at the heart of Holy See administration.
This week, two senior figures at the Secretariat of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu, wrote to all Vatican entities to tell them that the ongoing audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers had been “suspended immediately”.
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