VATICAN CITY
The Guardian (UK)
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Wednesday 4 November 2015
Chaos, greed, and financial mismanagement. The Vatican has been rocked by yet another scandal, and it is one that has painted the bureaucracy at the heart of the Catholic church as an institution dead-set against Pope Francis’s reform efforts – in large part because some officials have been free to use the church’s coffers as their own personal piggybank.
From stories of cardinals living in luxury apartments and the questionable use of charitable funds to a complete lack of transparency into how tens of millions of euros are spent within important Vatican offices, two books published this week have sought to shine a bright light on the church’s murky finances.
Although the accounts are based on confidential documents – allegedly leaked by two Vatican insiders sincearrested – the authors of the two books, journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, insist they are trying to help the pope in his mission of cleaning up the church. The Vatican has so far refused to comment on the accuracy of the allegations and said the books were the “fruits of a grave betrayal of the trust given by the pope”.
Vatican finances
Early in his papacy, in 2013, Pope Francis was offered a shocking assessment of Vatican finances. A never-before-seen letter to the pope by auditors who were concerned about the management of the Vatican’s vast financial assets described “a complete lack of transparency in the book-keeping … [that] makes it impossible to provide a clear estimate of the actual financial status of the Vatican”. The letter added: “We only know that the data examined show a truly downward trend and we strongly suspect that the Vatican as a whole has a serious structural deficit.”
After sharing the assessment with a meeting of cardinals, the pope issued a 16-minute indictment that was described as harsher than any that had been expressed by a pontiff to an assembled group of cardinals. In the “scathing, even humiliating” dressing-down, the pope told the cardinals present that he would not tolerate improper financial payments. “An official told me, ‘But they come with a bill and we have to pay …’. No, we don’t pay. If something is done without a tender, without authorisation, it doesn’t get paid,” the pope said, according to a transcript in Nuzzi’s book of a secret recording of the meeting.
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