In the history of Christian
economic thought, theologians, with the exception of Clement of Alexandria,
interpreted the biblical story of the rich man who refuses to part with his
wealth in order to follow Jesus as meaning that having wealth is itself indicative
of the presence of the underlying sin of greed. The dominance of this
anti-wealth paradigm only began to give way during the Commercial Revolution in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the expansion of trading made it
possible for ordinary people to save, and thus hold wealth without any sense of
an underlying sin. Hence, Aquinas differed from Aristotle in allowing for
moderate profit without the assumption of any underlying greed. In the
Renaissance, theologians generally agreed that the Christian virtues of
liberality and munificence could justify even being rich. Even Cosimo de
Medici, who made his fortune from the sin of usury (i.e., interest on loans),
gained the approval of the Pope in Rome by donating a fraction of the fortune
to the Church. Under the dominance of the pro-wealth paradigm, Christians could
be wealthy without being assumed to be greedy.[1] As for the Church itself
being able to hold wealth, the collective wealth, gained from donations and
selling goods, of monasteries in the Middle Ages was the door-opener. It was
not as if a greedy individual could be said to exist if a religious
organization owned the wealth. Aquinas approved of such wealth, a stance that,
with his approval of moderate profit earned (and held as wealth) by individual
Christians, began the shift that would result in the hegemony of the pro-wealth
paradigm.[2]
Unlike individual Christians holding coin without being presumed greedy,
monasteries owning substantial wealth could be subject to a critique based on
Jesus’ objection to money-changers in the Temple. When I visited a convent in
Tucson, Arizona once, a sister rebuffed my request to pick a couple of oranges
from the trees behind the building. “We make juice that we sell,” she replied.
I had the impression that I had witnessed greed over charity in a religious vocation. Such hypocrisy,
enabled by the allowance for collective monastic wealth, rivals Pope Eugene IV’s
absolution of Cosimo de Medici, in spite of his fortune having been gained entirely
from usury, because he renovated a monastery in Florence. This historical
background can help us situate the Vatican’s financial scandal that culminated
in five Vatican officials being suspended in 2019.
The scandal centered “on a
large building in Chelsea [an upscale area of London] that was co-owned by the
Vatican and an Italian business partner, London-based financier Raffaele
Mincione,” who said “that the Chelsea investment had been highly profitable for
the Vatican, which he said bought out his share [in 2018]. Mr. Mincione said
the Vatican had invested a total of €320 million ($353 million), including the
assumption of a €130 million mortgage, but that the building, at 60 Sloane
Avenue, [was] worth €390 million” in 2019.[3]
Complaints from the Vatican Bank itself and the office of the Vatican’s auditor
general led Vatican investigators to raid and seize documents and electronic
devices “from the offices of the Vatican’s powerful executive, the Secretariat
of State, as well as the Vatican financial watchdog that monitors the long
scandal-plagued Vatican Bank.”[4]
The scandal was thus hardly the first for the Church’s bank. Even the Vatican’s
financial watchdog had become culpable. The suspended employees “include
Tommaso Di Ruzza, the number-two official of the financial watchdog,” as well
as “Msgr. Mauro Carlino, a former aide to then-Archbishop Giovanni Angelo
Becciu, one of the highest officials at the Secretariat of State [the Vatican’s
executive office] until 2018, when Pope Francis made him a cardinal and put him
in charge of the office for the canonization of saints.”[5]
Besides a possible unethical
collusion between the Vatican’s executive’s office and the financial watchdog,
the connection between Carlino and Becciu may mean that Becciu was ethically
compromised even when he served as head of the office of the saints. That
office may have been ethically compromised before Becciu, when Pope John Paul
II, who had kept Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston in office there and then
promoted him all while knowing that Law had knowingly moved rapist priests
around rather than defrocking them and handing them over to the local police,
was made a saint regardless. The corruption in the Vatican was thus not limited
to financial scandals. Greed and ideological favoritism are arguably both
species of self-aggrandizement, or self-idolatry in religious terms.
From an institutional perspective, the suspension of Di
Ruzza, the number-two official of the financial watchdog founded by Pope
Benedict in 2010, implicates the functioning of the department itself as a
check on financial wrongdoing. Fortunately, “Pope Francis established the office
of auditor general in 2014.” However, the auditor general position was still
vacant since 2017, when the occupant “resigned and accused powerful officials
of obstructing him.”[6]
Given Di Ruzza’s suspension, as well as that of Carlino of the Secretariat of
State office, perhaps powerful officials involved in the London real-estate
scandal captured the financial watchdog. In short, the Vatican’s internal
firewalls had likely failed completely, meaning that the Vatican could not hold
itself accountable. This was readily observable to the public in the Vatican’s
cover-ups protecting clergy, whether high officials such as Cardinal Law, or
the rapist priests themselves, during the sex-abuse scandal.
Finally, in historical perspective, the unbridled greed
even at the highest staff levels in the Vatican can be said to have been not
sufficiently constrained by Christian economic ethics. In decoupling wealth
from the stain of greed, the pro-wealth paradigm is susceptible to wealth from
greed. This is not to suggest that a return to the hegemony of the anti-wealth
paradigm, which held sway for at least the Christianity’s first millennium (with
a last stance amid Europe’s economic (and population) contraction during the plague-infested
mid-fourteenth century, after the Commercial Revolution). To say that virtually
any profit-seeking and wealth must
invariably involve the sin of greed is to make an overgeneralization, but so
too is the claim that wealth itself is devoid of greed. I submit that given the
power of the Roman Catholic Church due to its membership-size and sheer wealth,
even high-ranking clergy are subject to a significant temptation of greed both
personally and for their institution. Wealth held collectively is not immune
from the greed of members whether religious or not. With the pro-wealth
paradigm as a floor, Christianity itself may not be able to proffer a
sufficient constraint, especially on the money-changers in the Temple—the Vatican
Bank, whose existence itself may instantiate hypocrisy. This may be why the
auditor general and the financial watchdog failed as checks.
