The new Pope Liu, the fourteenth, is expected to find a great financial deficit in the Vatican budget against the backdrop of a culture of financial neglect rampant in managing the Holy See. For 12 years, Pope Francesco has tried to face this financial chaos, but he failed to do so.
A report by the Wall Street Journal said that the late Pope Francesco, despite his shortness of breath, is working in the recent period of his life to implement the last minute plan to arrange financial matters in the Vatican, which is one of the most mysterious bureaucrats in the world.
For more than a decade, Pope Francesco has strived to achieve a degree of transparency in the Vatican budget, which doubled its deficit three times in 12 years and the retirement fund has faced a great deficit.
Since his election in 2013, Pope Francesco has expressed a preparation for the administrative culture rampant in the Vatican bureaucracy. To achieve that purpose, he rented a professional financial auditor, which sparked a state of panic among the clergy, adding the report.
Professional accountants, with the encouragement of Pope Francesco, organized training workshops for clerics who rejected accounting rules such as obtaining multiple approvals on expenses.
The clerics tried to hide the money from scrutiny, pointing to concerns related to national security regarding the secret records of financing missionaries in countries where preaching is considered a crime.
The problems will now be the responsibility of the new Pope Liu XIV, amid a variation in the ranks of the Cardinals about the financial situation of the Vatican between those who are concerned about the financial fragility of the Apostolic Chair and others who consider financial pressures merely secondary worldly minority fears compared to the spiritual task of the Church.
Mismanagement
To understand the formula for deficit and mismanagement that pushes the Vatican to accumulate an unsustainable debt, correspondents of the Wall Street Journal met with officials from the Vatican Bank, the retirement fund and organizational institutions, in addition to a number of Cardinals.
The speakers told the American newspaper that the source of the first concern was the culture of financial neglect that Pope Francesco was unable to overcome.
They pointed out that there is a deep concern related to the strict accounts of the management of a country that suffers from a lack of cash liquidity, but it has huge wealth such as Michael Angelo, Caravaggio and Leonardo, murals in the Vatican Library and more than a million old and rare books, including some of the oldest remaining manuscripts in the Greek language of the Old and New Testament.
But the Vatican- the report- says- has no intention to sell his inheritance at all, as it records many precious artistic works, including the Cistin Church, in its mathematical records with a nominal value of one euros for each of them, as a way to indicate that it appreciates its religious and artistic importance on its financial value.
The result is that there is a paradox that is a small country with huge wealth that has become unable to support the basic functions of the state from facing a dangerous deficit, because its budget is subject to clerics who have knowledge of the spiritual message of the Church greater than their familiarity with the administration of the government, the bank or the Ministry of Treasury.
The Vatican was trying to take advantage of his exempt from taxes to become a financial center, and over time, a newly created bank acquired large shares in Italian and European companies.
But the Vatican gained a bad reputation due to its suspicious financial practices, and the Vatican Bank was suffering from scandals, including allegations of smuggling and laundering money, for decades.
In the early 1980s, the bank was involved in the collapse of the Italian Bank of Ambrosiano, which was found by its president, Roberto Calvi, who was dead under the Blackfraries Bridge in London.
The Vatican Bank agreed to pay nearly $ 250 million to settle the claims of the Italian bank creditors. But the question still exists on how to fund a tax -exempt state of taxes and has debts, adds the Wall Street Journal.
When Pope Benedict XVI was elected in 2005, successive scandals evolved into a financial crisis. The German Pope created a unit to combat money laundering and asked the Financial Crime Control Authority to investigate accounts. For the first time, the Vatican Bank started issuing annual reports.
However, by July 2012, it became clear to that financial body that the Vatican fails in nearly half of the sixteen major fields of financial standards, and invited him to enhance the measures aimed at preventing money laundering and terrorist financing.
In January 2013, the Italian Central Bank lost his patience and banned all electronic payments to the Vatican city, which made tourists unable to withdraw money from ATMs or use their banking cards. Within a month, Pope Benedict announced his resignation.
One step forward
Weeks after his election, Pope Francesco summoned a committee of Cardinals from all over the world to request their advice. The Financial Crime Control Authority in Europe has warned that the Vatican Bank will be included on the blacklist if it does not tighten the rules for fighting money.
Pope Francesco reached an internal report indicating that the retirement box was in trouble. About a third of this fund was linked to real estate and the entire fund has faced up to 1.5 billion euros of obligations that will not be able to fulfill it, a number that is expected to continue to rise if a large reform is not made.
Pope Francesco has established a new trust in the economy to manage the Vatican Financial Affairs. The group consisted of external clerics and experts, headed by Australian Cardinal George Bell, according to the Wall Street Journal report.
Jean -Babetst de Fransu, former CEO of Invasco Europe, was chosen to manage the Vatican Bank, who closed thousands of accounts, and the most suspected customers were removed from the Vatican for tax evasion.
When the Bell administration began to track the budgets of all sectors of the Vatican Administration, the complex of belief and faith, a office of the Vatican, was annoyed that implements the teachings of the Church and is historically known as the Inquisition. The officials in that office were concerned that the new Ministry of Bell might control the money it was using for estimated spending.
Soon after, the Pope in the spring of 2015 appointed Libero Meloni, one of the former executives at Deloitte who worked for the Accounting Company for more than 30 years, to become the internal auditor of the Vatican. Bell asked him to see the accounts of the doctrine office, which was late in providing his budget.
Mellon achieved with the faithful office treasurer, and eventually discovered that more than $ 500,000 was missing from the office’s account at the Vatican Bank.
Meloni informed the Financial Supervision Authority in the Vatican and the Prosecutor’s Office of the results. But neither of them took any action, he said.
In early October 2015, Meloni raised the issue to Pope Francesco himself. Instead of taking legal action, the Pope, simply, asked the financial auditor to fix the problem.
In March 2016, Meloni began pressure on bishops, Giovanni Angelo Pico, and other officials in the strong Vatican Foreign Ministry to obtain documents on investments of 750 million euros, half of which are in real estate, but the Busha administration refused to submit the documents.
After about two years of investigations, Cardinal Pico was accused of embezzling more than $ 100,000 through a non -profit group run by his brother. The judges also claimed that Pichao was neglected in overseeing what became an investment of $ 400 million in a building in the upscale neighborhood of Chelsea in London.
Piccho and 9 other people have faced accusations also related to the use of money for the editing of a hijacked nun.
Amid this chaos- the newspaper says- the Vatican abandoned its real estate investment in London for about $ 225 million in 2022, a huge loss. Piccho was condemned for fraud and embezzlement in 2023.
In the midst of his struggle with the Vatican Administration on Financial Affairs, the Pope has reduced the salaries of approximately 250 Cardinal in the church 3 times, and in early 2023, he said that he would stop providing reduced housing in the Vatican for senior officials. These measures have expressed Pope Francesco’s vision of the clergy: living with humility and channel.
The height deficit continued, and last September, Francesco issued a message calling for the Vatican to determine a strict schedule for the final elimination of the financial deficit.
A few weeks later, he signed another message, in which he warned that the current retirement system suffers from a “likely dysfunction”, and expected that the Vatican would have to make “difficult decisions”, but he died before any fundamental decisions were made – the newspaper concludes its report.
