Politics over Finance at the Vatican: The Status Quo Vanquishes a Reformer

Late in 2015, Cardinal Pell hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a comprehensive audit of the Vatican’s finances. Beforehand, he had hired McKinsey to do a review of assets; that company found a total of €1.4 billion (about $1.6 billion) “tucked away” off the books.[1] Other church officials, led by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State, let Pell know that the audit wouldn’t happen. This was a setback for the financial overhaul that Pope Francis had charged Pell with wide authority to do a thorough job. That pope had been given the mandate to clean up the Curia, as the last pope had resigned amid allegations of “cronyism, inefficiency and corruption.”[2] So why did Pope Francis take Parolin’s side in scrapping any audit even though that pope had given Pell the o.k. to have it done?

Additionally, in July, 2014, Pope Francis had given Pell authority over the properties managed by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (or APSA), which at the time managed most of the Vatican’s mammoth real-estate portfolio, valued at €1 billion or more.[3] Pell found substantial mismanagement in that department. As APSA’s president, Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, “developed a strong relationship with Francis, however, the pope stripped Pell of control over APSA’s real-estate holdings.”[4] The pope also declined to approve Pell’s recommendations to reorganize the management of the financial portfolio.

Vatican spokesman Greg Burke tried to play down the demise of Francis’s mandate to reform the Curia. “When a new administrative body is created, it always takes a while until it fits into the broader organization. . . . We shouldn’t be distracted by the noise.”[5] Burke’s take seems euphemistic to me. The pope charged with fixing the financial mismanagement and corruption in the Vatican strangely backed down on the authority he had given to his principal reformer, Cardinal Pell. The man must surely have felt betrayed.

My question is this: Francis is no dummy; he no doubt knew his mandate. At the very least, he appointed Pell to reform the Vatican’s finances. Francis had been in church administration long enough to know that in siding with the men opposing the audit and new management procedures (even outsourcing the investment portfolio to money managers in Luxemburg), he was going against his own efforts at reform (i.e., appointing Pell with sweeping powers to clean the place up). All of a sudden, Pope Francis looks like a Vatican conservative rather than a reformer. The cardinals who voted for Francis and gave him his mandate must also have felt betrayed. What was going on in Francis’s head requires more explanation. Crucially, he did not have to take back the powers he had granted to Pell, yet he did so anyway.

Interestingly, as in the film, The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), Francis could have really reformed the Vatican by announcing that many of the properties would be sold and most (but not all) of the financial instruments cashed in, and the resulting money would be given to the poor as rent assistance and food. Catholic social services would be invigorated. That the Vatican spent €550,000 on a manger scene for St. Peter’s Square suggests that priorities were at odds with the religion itself, certainly not in line with what Jesus would do with the money.

Moreover, in spite of taking in millions from parishes and more from investments, the Vatican had a deficit of e26 million in 2014 (and a larger one the next year). This indicates that dealing with lots of money is not what the Vatican is good at—so why not give much of the money away?

In short, I contend that Francis did not go far enough in his conception of reform, which is ironic given all his preachments on helping the poor. Had his notion of reform been consistent with his view of the mission of the Church, Francis would have been more motivated to stave off the pushback from the status-quo conservatives in the Holy See. In fact, they may not have had so much power to obstruct real change that would fundamentally change many Vatican departments because wholesale reform is more difficult to pick apart. It is time, perhaps, to ask, just what kind of business lies within the Vatican’s forte? I submit that banking and investment management (and even just dealing with so much money) is beyond the Vatican's ability, whereas helping the poor is not. I suspect that Jesus’s answer would likewise shock many in the Curia—and, incredibly, maybe even the pope who made Mother Teresa a saint after caving in on financial reform of the Curia.

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[1] Francis Rocca, “Vatican Finance Chief Runs into Resistance,” The Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

Pope Francis: A Poor Church Rich in Humility

Fifty years after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Pope Francis set about implementing the spirit of the letter after the two last popes had concentrated on holding the Roman Catholic Church in check lest it lose itself in accommodating itself too much to the modern world. I submit that the pope's primary objective was to change a problematic clerical attitude rather than to rid the Church of its wealth or drastically change the Church's moral stances.

On the surface, the pope’s “vision of Vatican II has translated into a dramatic shift in priorities, with an emphasis on social justice over controversial moral teachings” such as on abortion and gay marriage.[1] Calling out the clerical obsession on the “social issues,” the pope sought as he assumed the papacy to provide his colleagues with a dose of perspective. To be sure, the pope did not alter the Church’s position on those issues or on whether divorced Catholics should be allowed to take Communion. Nor did he act on his demand for a “poor church for the poor.”[2] Rather, his main concern was directed against the “theological narcissism,” as he put it, that imposes rather than proposes to the larger secular society.[3] 

Perhaps then a poor church would be one that is humble, rather than necessarily without wealth. This would dovetail with Clement of Alexandria’s “Sermon on the Rich Man,” in which the early theologian claims that a rich Christian can indeed get into heaven as long as one does not desire more than necessities (and that which is to be given to the poor).[4] What is important, that is, is which master the rich man serves—God or money. Indeed, Hermas and John Chrysostom emphasized the value of charity as a good use of wealth, and the Church could not give what it does not have.

So the poverty that the pope might have had in mind could be that of humility in spirit. As one bishop put it, the pope “is saying, ‘We have the revelation, but we don’t have the application for all times; don’t presume that we know everything and that we have every answer.”[5] Hence the pope called the Synod of Bishops to debate how the Church should regard divorced, remarried, and gay Catholics. From the pope’s point of view, being against divorce, for example, does not preempt being welcoming toward Catholics who have divorced. After all, it is difficult to imagine Jesus slamming the door on them even if he did not approve of divorce. Compassion particularly to those people who are regarded as impure was Jesus’s strong suit. Indeed, this put him on a collision course with the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. Pope Francis’s agenda can be characterized in such terms, wherein attitude ideally checks ego at the door even among priests and bishops, for nothing is worse for a religious institution than the veneer of hypocrisy.

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[1] Francis X. Bocca, “The New Rome,” The Wall Street Journal, April 4-5, 2015.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth.

[5] Ibid.

Pope Francis Goes on the Offensive against Conservatives: Credible Christian Leadership?

Credibility is absolutely essential to viable leadership, whether in religion, politics, or business. A leader who undercuts one of his or her promises effectively expunges it of any worth and is essentially a “lame-duck” leader thereafter unless he or she puts difficult effort into becoming worthy of being trusted again. It does not take long for followers to get the message if one of them who relied on the promise is punished for doing so. Chairman Mao is infamous for having made such a promise in the Hundred Flowers movement. Unfortunately, he killed many Chinese who relied on Mao’s word. A similar dynamic, though much less extreme, occurred just after a synod in 2014 called by Pope Francis, who in this respect can be likened to Mao. Fortunately for the Catholic pope, his own religion offers him a way out.

In the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which began in May 1956 under Mao Zedong, the Chinese government permitted, and even encouraged, intellectuals greater freedom of thought and speech. Mao used a famous line from Chinese classical history as the campaign’s slogan. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend.”[1] It was not long, however, until Mao came down harshly against those intellectuals who had used their new freedom to criticize the Communist Party. Had another opening been made and free discourse encouraged, doubtless few intellectuals would have been critical of the party under Mao.

Similarly, Pope Francis presided over a synod of bishops on whether the Roman Catholic Church should relax its stances on divorced and gay Catholics. Debate at the 2014 meetings was indeed open, with both liberal and conservative bishops making their arguments. The pope came out in favor of allowing divorced and remarried church members to receive Communion and of welcoming gay Catholics back. Among the more vocal conservative bishops was Cardinal Raymond Burke. He was instrumental in watering down the synod’s concluding summary statement. Before the synod, the pope had removed him from a position that had given him substantial influence in appointing new American bishops. In the wake of the synod, the pope removed Burke from being the head of the Vatican’s highest judicial authority, the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura; the Cardinal found himself appointed instead to the ceremonial position of chaplain for the Knights of Malta, a charity group.[2]

The problem with the demotion is that the pope had called another synod for 2015 in which the bishops will make final recommendations on the same topics. Any conservative bishop wanting to climb the Vatican hierarchy would of course remember Burke’s fate and either adopt the Pope’s reforms or remain silent at the second synod. In other words, Francis undercut his own claim that the bishops should feel free to express whatever view they have rather than be sycophantic.

In Kantian terms, the demotion makes the pope’s maxim of tolerance self-contradictory, and thus the demotion is unethical. To be sure, religion does not reduce to ethics, and the history of religion is replete with gravely unethical acts. Theologically, both the pope and Burke could truly reform their Church by applying benevolentia universalis (universal benevolence, or neighbor-love) to the other. Pray for those who persecute you. Do not do anything that would cause your brother or sister to stumble. Practice agape, which is self-emptying love. Presumably a person’s ideology is among the first things to be poured out. Viewing the matter of Church reform as a distant second to the spiritual value of aiding those persons who attempt to prevent your ideology from becoming actualized is, I submit, more important than whether a religious is a reformer or a conserver.

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1. Enclyclopedia Britannica, Hundred Flowers Campaign." (Accessed November 8, 2014).
2. Jim Yardley, "Pope Demotes U.S. Cardinal Critical of his Reform Agenda," The New York Times, November 8, 2014.