AUSTRALIAN Cardinal George Pell, who is no friend of Pope Francis’s evangelical initiatives and religious reforms, explained how the financial scandals of the Vatican had been misunderstood and misrepresented in the Western media, which had grabbed every chance they got to recall this isolated event: a bishop who hanged himself from a London bridge after he was implicated in the shenanigans of the anti-Communist and Argentine junta-connected P-2 Masonic Lodge, which was—get this—anti-Catholic.
Pell explained that the Catholic Church had 3,000 dioceses spread across the world. This rules out anything but local management. Indeed, Pope Leo XIII—who committed the Church to the cause of social justice in the last years of the 19th century; had he lived longer, he would have been dragged through US Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee on Un- American activities as a protocommunist—discovered early on what local management meant. He sent an apostolic visitor (a checker-upper, so to speak) to check on the 25 bishops of Ireland. The visitor reported back to Leo that he had found no bishops, just 25 popes.
Sure, hundreds of millions of euros were recently uncovered by Pell tucked away in different Church accounts, but the media deliberately forgot to explain that “tucked away” means held in reserve for emergencies—not stolen or misaligned, like the Disbursement Acceleration Program. There is no equivalent for the islet of Batanes in Italy, to which almost all Vatican funds are funneled. The good news is that the Vatican is not broke, but the need for reserves is still there.
The financial independence of dioceses is somewhat like that of Wall Street banks, except the money is not other people’s money that they expect to get back with interest. It is Church money coming from donations. They don’t expect it back, although the big donors expect their gifts to be handled efficiently and honestly, Pell said. That way, the best returns are achieved to finance Church work, especially preaching the Gospel and helping the poor escape the inevitable mass poverty generated by rampant capitalism.
“A Church for the poor should not be poorly [managed],” said Pell, who has divided financial decision-making in the Church, while leaving finances to local management as the only viable option. What Pell has done is impose layers of checks and balances and—here I worry—subject Church finances to auditing by the big four accounting firms that connived with thieving bankers to rob the planet blind until the global financial system fell to pieces in the 2007 to 2009 global financial crisis, from which the world has not yet fully recovered. For this, the bankers were bailed out by the US Federal Reserve and awarded themselves fat bonuses from the bailout.
Pell said his aim was to make Vatican finances so efficient, transparent and honest that the Church would stop attracting the hostile attention of the same Western media that spared, if not concealed, the patent dishonesty of the Wall Street banks, because the Western media, especially the business newspapers, are in the pockets of Wall Street. There you go—the truth about Vatican finances.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano