VATICAN CITY
Crux
Inés San Martín July 16, 2016
VATICAN CORRESPONDENT
ROME – Cardinals who elect a pope are sworn to secrecy, so there are some details about conclaves the world may never know, but after the choice of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in March 13 as Pope Francis, many participants were crystal-clear on one point.
They elected him in part because of his profile as a Vatican outsider, who would carry out an ambitious program of reform.
As his first move, Francis created a study commission which recommended a series of changes to the Vatican’s scandal-plagued finances, and which itself became engulfed in controversy when a former official and former member were both charged and convicted in a Vatican trial of leaking its secret documents to journalists.
As it turns out, that’s hardly the only complication that has beset Francis’s reform effort.
Based on the commission’s recommendations, Francis created three new financial bodies in the Vatican in 2014.
* A Council for the Economy, composed of both cardinals and laity, to set policy.
* A Secretariat for the Economy, headed by Australian Cardinal George Pell, to implement those policies.
* An independent Auditor General, to provide a system of checks and balances.
An internal tug-of-war broke out to define the scope of the authority of those new entities, especially Pell’s department. Early on it seemed the secretariat would take over direct administration of most Vatican finances, but on July 9, Francis issued a decree giving most of those powers back to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (ASPSA.)
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