In his memorable article for the Catholic Herald last December, Cardinal George Pell predicted that Vatican financial reformers would “find some static on the lines” in 2015. So it has proven. Not one, but two sensational books have appeared in Italy claiming that corruption still has free rein in the Eternal City. The Vatican has responded with an iron fist: putting five people, including two journalists, in the dock, accused of leaking confidential documents. (All five deny the charges and the trial was ongoing as we went to press.)
Both Cardinal Pell, prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, and Pope Francis remain undaunted. We know that because on Saturday the Vatican announced the first external audit of its assets. This will be conducted by Pricewaterhouse Coopers, one of the Big Four accounting firms, and will begin immediately.
The external audit is significant. Cardinal Pell provoked uproar in some quarters of the Vatican when he revealed in his article that his team had discovered hundreds of millions of euros “tucked away in particular sectional accounts”. Some officials claimed the cardinal was accusing them of wrongdoing over the “missing millions”. In fact, he blamed the Vatican’s traditionally loose structures. “Congregations, Councils and, especially, the Secretariat of State enjoyed and defended a healthy independence,” he wrote. “Problems were kept ‘in house’ (as was the custom in most institutions, secular and religious, until recently). Very few were tempted to tell the outside world what was happening, except when they needed extra help.”
The cardinal’s observations were confirmed by a financial statement this year which showed that Vatican departments possessed €1.1 billion (£791 million, $1.2 billion) of assets previously undeclared on any balance sheet.
The external audit will give Cardinal Pell and Pope Francis – and, one hopes, eventually the wider world – a true picture of the Vatican’s assets. The exercise will not only discourage officials from squirrelling away cash, it will also serve the ultimate goal of the reforms: freeing up more money for charitable works. If the Vatican can get its financial house in order, it’s likely that millions of the world’s poorest will benefit.
The audit should also help Vatican financial planners to look confidently to the future. In his article, Cardinal Pell expressed concern about the Vatican pension fund, which, he said, “needs to be strengthened for the demands on it in 15 or 20 years”. At the cardinal’s suggestion, the Pope has now created a “Working Party for the Economic Future”. This will bring together the Secretariat of State, the Vatican bank and other agencies “to address the financial challenges and identify how more resources can be devoted to the many good works of the Church, especially supporting the poor and vulnerable”. It will be interesting to see how well these traditionally independent bodies are able to cooperate for the greater good.
The latest wave of negative publicity about Vatican finances should not unduly alarm Catholics around the world. We can be confident that, despite meeting pockets of resistance, the reformers are basically winning. On his flight home from Africa, Pope Francis rightly gave a great deal of credit to Benedict XVI for launching the financial purge. He left little doubt that he intends to finish what his predecessor began.
According to Gianluigi Nuzzi, one of the two journalists currently on trial at the Vatican, Francis was aghast when he was informed about the Vatican’s financial troubles shortly after his election. During one meeting, the Pope reportedly said: “If we don’t know how to look after money, which you can see, how can we look after the souls of the faithful, which you can’t see?” That’s a question all Vatican officials should keep before them in 2016 as the reforms enter their most decisive – and perhaps most painful – phase.
There’s something rather charmingly English about Anglicans calling for less Anglicanism in public life, as the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life does in its new report, Living with Difference, released this week.
The commission calls for public life to have a more “pluralistic character” and for schools to have an “inclusive time for reflection” rather than prayers at school. This, it says, would be an appropriate response to Britain becoming more diverse and religion more “socially divisive”. For once we might sympathise with the National Secular Society, which described the report as “handwringing”, reflecting the wish of the great and the good that public life should celebrate “all faiths and none”.
The report reflects the characteristically English tendency of refusing to confront difficult problems head-on – in this case, that religion per se is not divisive but that Britain has a particular problem with certain forms of Islam. Islamism likewise is the real target of the Government’s absurd “British values” agenda, although that tends to be more radically secular, while this report merely offers more of the multiculturalism of the 1990s – the same policies that empowered political Islam. The commission’s idea is to replace Anglicanism as the national faith with the cult of diversity. The report took two years to compile, but it reads like something from 25 years ago.
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