"The final year of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy was exposed as being a place of petty turf battles and corruption."
I was told that was good for an economy, but what do I know?
A few things found:
"Vatican’s finance czar reports $1.5 billion in hidden assets" by John L. Allen Jr., Associate editor February 13, 2015
ROME — Pope Francis’ finance czar today informed fellow members of the College of Cardinals that the Vatican has more than $1.5 billion in assets it didn’t previously know it possessed, although that potential windfall has to be balanced against a projected deficit of almost $1 billion in its pension fund.
The discoveries mean that the Vatican’s total assets rise to more than $3 billion, roughly one-third more than previously reported.
The cardinals were also informed that the Vatican’s real estate holdings may be undervalued by a factor of four, meaning that the overall financial health of the Vatican may be considerably rosier than was previously believed.
The disclosures at the closed-door meeting by Australian Cardinal George Pell, installed as secretary for the economy a year ago, was part of a wide-ranging overview of efforts at financial reform under Francis presented today to cardinals from around the world.
“We’re sound,” Pell said of the Vatican’s financial condition. “We’re muddled, it’s been muddled, there’s been inadequate information, but we’re far from broke.”
Then they can afford the lawsuit settlements and payouts.
Pell spoke in an exclusive interview with Crux from his Vatican office.
I found this advertisement placement rather strange:
I suppose it's better than pumping altar boys.
In a speech to cardinals on Friday who were meeting in Rome ahead of a Saturda
In a speech to cardinals on Friday who were meeting in Rome ahead of a Saturday ceremony in which Pope Francis will create 20 new Princes of the Church, Pell said the Vatican’s total assets include some $500 million in various accounts that were purposefully excluded from an overall 2013 balance sheet, as well as $1 billion in assets that should have been included in that report but weren’t.
Pell stressed the discrepancies were not the result of illegal activity, but an overly compartmentalized and unwieldy reporting system that allowed significant pockets of assets to go undetected. He styled Friday’s revelations as a major step forward for transparency.
“This is the first time we’ve had a comprehensive and, we believe, accurate picture about what’s going on economically,” Pell said.
Then this Pope better watch his back and get a food taster.
He said the clean-up effort on finances drew “massive support” from the cardinals gathered in Rome.
On other matters, Pell conceded that his clean-up operation stirred “enthusiastic opposition” earlier in the process, especially from some of the Vatican’s other traditional centers of power such as the Secretariat of State, but said much of that has dimmed.
“There was a bit of a dream world that this wouldn’t really take off, that after some huffing and puffing the world would return to way it was,” he said.
He pointed to last October as a turning point, when Pope Francis approved a set of procedures for money management intended to bring the Vatican into line with international best practices.
“The penny dropped after that,” Pell said. “People realized the game has changed.”
More than a penny in there, but....
He also confirmed a point made recently by Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of South Africa, a member of the Council for the Economy, in an interview with the Catholic News Service: That a proposed set of statutes for the new secretariat, prepared by the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, would have hamstrung their efforts.
In early December, Pell revealed in an essay for a Catholic publication in England that his office had discovered “hundreds of millions” of Euro in previously unreported assets, although by Friday’s report to the College of Cardinals, that total had risen to $1.5 billion.
Pell told Crux that while he can certify that number is accurate, he’s not yet sure that’s everything that was previously unreported.
He cautioned, however, that those discoveries have to be balanced against difficulties in maintaining the pension fund.
“We don’t want to frighten people, because the fund is secure for the next 10-15 years,” he said. “But to make sure we can fund pensions in 20 years’ time, we’ll have to somehow put in progressively at least $800 million to $900 million.”
Pell said the actual number may be higher still, given that projections on fund performance going forward may be overly “fanciful,” given trends in interest rates.
Uh-oh.
One of the Vatican’s senior financial officials, Pell said, went out of his way on Friday to reassure elderly cardinals that “their pensions are secure.”
Forget that the flocks are poor and starving.
Pell said that providing an honest picture of the Vatican’s true financial condition is the opening salvo of the broader reform effort.
“What we’ve got to do is to get in place structures so that the Vatican is a model to others and not a scandal,” he said. “We have to make it terribly difficult to return to waste and inefficiency and some measure of corruption.”
In terms of future steps, Pell vowed that an independent auditor general for the Vatican, reporting directly to the pope, will be appointed by the summer, and that sometime later in the year, a new supervisory board will be in place for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, another of the Vatican’s important financial centers.
Pell also promised that sometime later in the year, “for the first time ever in Vatican history,” the various departments will be providing quarterly reports comparing expenditures to budgets.
In general, Pell said, Pope Francis has supported the reform effort at every turn.
“Whenever there were things we couldn’t clean up on our own, he’s been there to support us,” he said.
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Related: O’Malley says cardinals more open to reform
Are they?
"The Vatican’s financial reform: The nasty is back" by John L. Allen Jr., Associate editor February 28, 2015
Over the centuries, court politics at the Vatican sometimes have had a seriously nasty side. If anyone was wondering whether that aspect of its culture had been killed off in the Francis era, or had simply gone dormant, late February 2015 provided a fairly clear answer.
In a word, the nasty is back.
The focus this time is Cardinal George Pell of Australia, the pope’s chosen fix-it man on Vatican finances. Francis tapped Pell a year ago to end a cycle of scandal and corruption in money management, and in the year since he took over a newly created Secretariat for the Economy, he’s become a lightning rod of the first order.
This week the Italian newsmagazine l’Espresso published leaked receipts from Pell’s new department purporting to show that it has racked up more than a half-million dollars in expenses during its first six months of existence, including a tab of more than $3,000 at Gammarelli’s, a famed clerical tailor shop in Rome.
A rumor ensued that Francis had called Pell on the carpet about those expenses, something the Secretariat for the Economy called “completely false” and “complete fiction” in a statement on Saturday. In fact, the statement insisted, the new department’s expenses are actually below the budget set when it was established last March.
In a defiant coda, the statement also asserted that Pell does not even own a Cappa Magna, a fine silk ecclesiastical vestment with a long train that’s become a symbol of old-school liturgical tastes, and which some people believed must have been what Pell bought from that tailor.
L’Espresso also revealed the minutes of a meeting from last September in which some veteran Vatican cardinals objected to various aspects of Pell’s leadership, with one bitterly referring to what’s happening as a form of “Sovietization,” meaning totalitarian control.
On Friday, the Vatican released its own statement denouncing such leaks as “illegal,” calling the criticism of Pell “undignified and petty,” and backing his performance by saying it’s proceeding with “continuity and efficacy.”
The spectacle is eerily reminiscent of the “Vatileaks” scandal of 2012, when a tidal wave of supposedly confidential Vatican documents appeared in the Italian press. Many believe the chaos revealed by those disclosures influenced Pope Benedict’s decision to resign.
In the background to today’s Vatileaks 2.0 is a strikingly polarized climate of opinion in the Vatican about Pell.
On one side are his fans, prominently featuring English- and German-speaking Catholic heavyweights committed to the notions of transparency, accountability, and good business practice that the Australian prelate purports to represent.
Critics, including some longstanding Vatican officials, reply that Pell has surrounded himself with cronies and centralized power in his own hands, while scoring PR points by trying to make everyone else look bad.
It can be difficult to get an objective read on the situation, in part because reaction to Pell is complicated by three factors:
Theologically and politically, Pell is a strong conservative. Some people feel an ideological compulsion to defend him and others to oppose him, neither of which has anything to do with his performance in his current post.
For a financial manager, the fault line that matters isn’t supposed to run between left and right but between red and black.
There’s a longstanding tension between the Vatican’s Italian majority and everybody else. It’s hard to tell sometimes whether reactions to Pell are truly about him, or if he’s become a symbol for deeper cultural divides.
Pell is a hard-charging and sometimes pugnacious personality. In an ideal world, whether people like him personally wouldn’t color their assessment of how well he’s doing his job — yet alas, in the Vatican as the rest of creation, the real world is often far from the ideal.
Or how it is portrayed in the ma$$ media, too.
Why is the anti-Pell resistance cresting right now?
For one thing, Pell clearly hasn’t been intimidated by lower-intensity pushback. On Monday, his Secretariat for the Economy released a set of procedures for closing the books on 2014, which among other things require every department head in the Vatican, for the first time, to sign a legally binding declaration that their reports are complete and correct.
The procedures also stipulate that external assets of a Vatican department have to be certified by the banks or other financial institutions that hold those assets, a classic expression of “trust but verify.”
Pope Francis also returned on Friday from a week-long annual Lenten retreat, and sometime soon he’s expected to issue a new legal framework for Pell’s department and other financial oversight bodies he’s created.
The effect will be either to rein Pell in, as his critics hope, or to turn him loose.
While the catfight may continue for a while longer, a make-or-break moment is approaching. Sometime by mid-year, the Secretariat for the Economy will release its first-ever consolidated financial statement covering the Vatican’s fiscal year in 2014.
If that statement comes off as comprehensive and accurate, most of the objections lodged against Pell will likely fade, seeming like sour grapes. If the perception, however, is that he’s produced the same sort of vague and unreliable report as in the past, then no amount of soothing press releases will save him.
I'm tired of whining about sour grapes.
In the meantime, the fracas certainly has made one point clear: The Vatican’s capacity for nastiness may wax and wane, but it never really goes away.
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At least they can afford this:
"Vatican offers free showers and shaves to the homeless" Associated Press February 17, 2015
VATICAN CITY — Homeless men and women lined up Monday off St. Peter’s Square to take advantage of Pope Francis’ latest charitable initiative: a free shave and shower for the least fortunate.
Francis’ chief alms-giver, Monsignor Konrad Krajewski, has said the project is needed because homeless people are often shunned for their appearance and smell. The initiative is being funded by donations and the sale of papal parchments by Krajewski’s office.
Barbers volunteering on their days off — Rome’s barber shops are often closed Mondays — as well as students from a local beauty school are donating their time, as well as some sisters from religious orders and other volunteers.
Mauro Casubolo, 49, says he gets by with handouts from local charitable organizations but what he wants most is a job. He added: “I’m 49 years old — it’s not like I’m 60 or 80. For me, it’s tragic that I’ve ended up this way.”
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Not funny.
You hear any bells?
"Pope asked to silence bells at night in Austria" by Rick Noack, Washington Post February 14, 2015
WASHINGTON — Austrian architect Wolfgang Lassy says he hasn’t been able to get a good night’s rest for years, with the Catholic Church waking him up every 15 minutes.
That’s because for hundreds of years the church bells of Linz were allowed to chime at night every quarter of an hour, disrupting many residents’ sleep. Now, Lassy is seeking to end the centuries-old practice.
The Austrian has sued the Catholic Church in Linz and has even expressed his discontent in a letter to Pope Francis. So far, he hasn’t heard back from the Holy See.
‘‘Lassy has been unable to sleep at night for years because the church bells chime exactly 222 times every night with a volume of 75 decibels,’’ Lassy’s lawyer, Wolfgang List, said Thursday. His client lives only about 250 feet away from the Mariendom Cathedral, which houses the bells.
According to his lawyer, Lassy had tried to resolve the problem for two years before he decided to take his concerns to court last December.
When it became clear that the local church representatives would not simply stop the bells without a holy or judicial order to do so, Lassy sent a letter to the pope Feb. 4.
Both the Catholic Church and Lassy have agreed to meet Feb. 24 to discuss a possible solution through nonjudicial means.
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I'm sure the church wishes this kind of ringing would stop:
"Pope may rethink Chile appointment" Associated Press March 07, 2015
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis met Friday with the bishop running a Chilean diocese where there has been unprecedented opposition to the nomination of his successor, accused of covering up for Chile’s most notorious pedophile.
The Vatican released no details of Francis’s audience with Monsignor Fernando Natalio Chomali Garib, who has been running the Osorno diocese temporarily.
In January, Francis appointed Bishop Juan Barros Madrid to take over permanently. But in the ensuing weeks, some 1,300 lay faithful from Osorno, 51 of Chile’s 120 national lawmakers, and many of the 35 priests from the diocese urged Francis to rescind the appointment.
They have accused Barros of covering up for the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a prominent priest sanctioned by the Vatican in 2011 for sexually abusing minors. A criminal complaint against Karadima was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired, but the Chilean judge handling the case determined the abuse allegations were truthful.
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The volcano is apparently a non-event because all I saw was a photo in the print copy.
"Boston church taps land to ease finances; Cathedral plan to lease lot may be parish model" by Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff February 17, 2015
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston is experimenting with commercial development in an effort to leverage underused church real estate to pay for its ministries.
In a first-of-its-kind deal for the church in Boston, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End has signed a 99-year lease with a developer on a parking lot the cathedral owns at Harrison and Malden streets. The developer is transforming the parcel into a sleek 160-unit rental apartment building with ground floor retail space.
The lease will produce steady income for the cathedral for the duration of the agreement, the parties say, though it is unclear how much because the details are confidential. The cathedral will also essentially keep its parking lot; 70 spaces in the new building’s underground garage will be assigned to the church.
Deborah Dillon, director of property services for the archdiocese, said the deal could serve as a model for the church, whose parishes tend to be property rich but cash poor.
****************
The neighborhood surrounding the cathedral is one of the city’s most economically diverse, with multimillion dollar lofts cheek-by-jowl with public housing projects. Showing a visitor around the cathedral recently, O’Leary greeted a homeless Haitian man hunched in a back pew, and invited him in French to move to the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, where it was warmer.
“At Christmas, the number of people we knew personally looking for some kind of assistance here was colossal,” O’Leary said.
The cathedral, whose weekend Masses were packed a half-century ago, slid into a long period of decline, and its pews emptied. But in the last decade or so, the cathedral has undergone a slow renaissance, and it now draws about 1,350 worshippers to Masses over the course of an average weekend, O’Leary said.
In addition to English- and Spanish-speaking congregations, it is home to a Ge’ez Rite (Ethiopian/Eritrean) Catholic community. It also offers the traditional form of the Mass in Latin.
Its size makes it a popular venue for large celebrations, particularly among the archdiocese’s ethnic communities; in the last year, Masses for Haitian Independence Day and for Vietnamese martyrs each drew more than 2,000 people, as did confirmation for the Brazilian community, O’Leary said. In 2013, Bostonians gathered there for an interfaith prayer service attended by President Obama in the aftermath of the Marathon bombings....
It's a “beacon.”
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Also see: Scituate parishioners to respond today to order to vacate church
They went quietly but not without a fight. Not even a miracle can $ave them despite the shouting.
Time to say a prayer before withdrawing.
Just wondering why all my previous posts are now submerged, and can't help but think it is because of this one.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
Two years in, survey shows Pope Francis' popularity is high in the United States
This post wasn't very popular, and do I look like I give a damn?
