VATICAN CITY
Crux
Inés San Martín
July 9, 2016
VATICAN CORRESPONDENT
ROME- Continuing his attempts to clean up the Vatican’s finances, Pope Francis on Saturday released a document defining the relationship between two key offices: one to administer the Vatican’s resources, the other to provide oversight on how that administration is carried out.
In February 2014, Francis established three new bodies as part of the Vatican’s economic overhaul: a Council for the Economy to set policy, a Secretariat for the Economy to oversee implementation, and an Office of the Auditor General to provide independent verification.
Statutes for the three were approved “ad experimentum” in 2015, with the pontiff acknowledging that the new system was still being built and could take different shapes.
Long before these three were created, the main financial player in the Vatican was the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), which managed the Church’s real estate assets and its investment portfolio. As part of the early reform in 2014, many of those functions were transferred to the new secretariat.
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