Merchants in the Temple (21 page)

On the Canadian television program “Salt and Light,” Maradiaga revealed that he already knew about the appointment of Parolin on March 17, during a conversation with the Pope only four days after his election.

Bergoglio had broken every record in changing his top collaborator. His predecessor Benedict XVI, by contrast, had waited fourteen months before appointing Bertone to replace then Secretary Angelo Sodano.

Fears of the Revolution: Less Power to the Cardinals in the Curia, More Room for Laypeople

In the holy palaces Francis's enemies were increasingly concerned by the sharply political slant that the two pontifical commissions were taking. COSEA and the Commission on the IOR were in fact working on two different fronts. The findings of COSEA were well known: throughout its analysis of the accounts of the pope's bank and the other administrative bodies of the Holy See, it identified the inertia, incompetence, and abuse described in previous chapters.

Yet there was another battlefield that was less known. The COSEA commissioners had received a specific new request from the eight cardinals of the C8: don't only look for problems and crisis areas, propose clear solutions, give us advice on how to revolutionize the administration and the whole organization of the state. It was absolutely necessary to redefine once and for all the internal power structure of the Vatican.

A meeting of the C8 in Rome was set for December 2013. To prepare for this appointment, the COSEA members drafted and proposed a strategy to change the Church from the ground up. First there needed to be a readjustment of the balance between temporal and religious power. The laypeople had to take on greater importance in the economic and administrative areas: this was a revolutionary suggestion for an absolute monarchy whose king is a religious person.

The powerful lobbies and networks that had always ruled at the Vatican could not accept this new direction; if the project were to take effect—so argued the many “courtiers,” to use Francis's expression—it would be the end.

It was October 2013. The four draft pages of the report of that meeting, which I was able to examine, deserve to be read in their entirety. One gets the impression the members of COSEA have reached the point of no return. Francis's loyalists had no intention of easing the pressure. As the minutes from the meeting attest, the first person to take the floor was George Yeo, the only member of the Commission with experience as a politician, having served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Singapore. Yeo envisioned a sharp separation between economic power and political-religious power:

The decisions of the Holy See should be independent from the composition of the Colleges of Cardinals. It is difficult for the Holy See's function to combine those of a Minister of Foreign Affairs and a Prime Minister. We need a Minister of Finance that has full powers and that manages the budget. The Prefecture for Economic Affairs could be transformed into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in such a way that all the other congregations would have to contribute to the budget and stick to its demands and projections. The Ministry of Finance should have responsibility for the budget. The Church is missionary and therefore trans-border, and the Ministry of Finance has to oversee its finances. Through the establishment of the Ministry of Finance, the role of function of APSA would be redefined.

He then addressed the question of whether APSA would continue to be the central bank:

The pre-existing agreements that, as the central bank, it currently has with the Fed, the Bank of England, and the German Bundesbank, should be maintained because it would be difficult to renegotiate them.

On the issue of whether the Governorate should be run by different figures than the present, the men on the Commission felt that the Holy Father would have to be directly involved:

The Governorate [is another question]. These items should be discussed with the Holy Father: the government of the City with its accounts and its budgets; self-sustenance and the sources of financing of the Ministry of Finance; the uselessness of the cardinals and the other members of the clergy. And other obvious questions such as: security, transparency and good governance [also with regard to] the Vatican museums, [which should be] an autonomous entity.

The meeting helped to align the works of the Commission with the indications that the C8 cardinals had provided after discussing them with Francis. The minutes of the meeting place us at the heart of the revolution, and illustrate clearly the chain of command: the Pope, after consulting them, gave the guidelines to the eight cardinals, who in turn forwarded instructions and priorities to the members of COSEA. And they were briefed by their coordinator, Monsignor Vallejo Balda, who had just received indications about the need for a radical reshaping of the central power in its current formation.

The Curia should be governed by a bishop and not a cardinal, with the power not to “exercise authority” over the Congregations but simply to coordinate their work. The title “Secretary of State” should be changed, and in the future referred to as “Papal Secretary.” The position would have even less power than it had under Paul VI, considering that it was especially during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI that “the fact that the Secretary of State had to give his approval to every question proved to be an obstacle.” For Vallejo Balda, “pontifical councils should be abolished, because among the various functions [of the Secretary of State], the only truly valid one is coordination of the various bishops' conferences.” In the field of culture, for example, “Rome cannot spread teachings to influence the rest of the world. In this way the Curia will be more agile and manageable.”

The central theme of the meeting is captured in another passage regarding the need to reassess the importance of laypeople with respect to cardinals. This was the strategic policy outlined by COSEA and made available to the C8 cardinals:

There should not only be cardinals at the head of the administrative bodies: purely administrative organizations like APSA do not require a cardinal. The councils of cardinals will continue to exist. The Governorate can return to its former configuration as a governor, comparable to a mayor, with an assembly of councilors.
7

Jean Videlain-Sevestre was more prudent, seeking a path that did not break too sharply with the past and that might receive the consensus of the cardinals themselves. He knew that it would be difficult for the reform to succeed otherwise:

We can see in practice what the problems and critical points are … [By resolving them] we will uproot the evil. We go to the roots of the dysfunction and we attain the consensus of the cardinals: they are experts in ecclesiastical life, not in economics. We have to recognize that we run the risk of proposing unrealistic solutions.
8

In contrast to Sevestre, Jochen Messemer recommended a decisive, resolute approach:

It is useful to isolate the guiding principles of our reorganization proposal. We should advance 1–3 proposals. We should not be afraid. Our job is to propose solutions that we consider improvements. After that the Holy Father and the C8 will assess them and draw their own conclusions.

But it was not as simple as that. Monsignor Vallejo Baldo made this clear with crude realism: “The truth is that we need money to achieve financial freedom.” Without financial independence, in other words, the Curia would always be fragile and exposed to scandals.

Zahra would have the last word:

We must take into consideration the facts and the objectives mentioned by the advisors. The guiding principles, especially with regard to the laity. The priests should not be careerists. For some positions competent professionals rather than prelates would be more fitting.

After this confidential meeting of the Commission, the international advisors put into practice their recommendations and outlined the organizational chart of the new state that would serve the Church in the world, from the United States to Japan. One's role in the ecclesiastical hierarchy would no longer be considered a form of “power” but of “service.”

On November 20, 2013, the Americans of Promontory offered the COSEA members an outline of the new state. Different variants of the organizational structure were proposed, depending on whether there was to be a Ministry of Finance, a central bank, or another type of institution. At the Vatican, a radical constitutional reform of the power arrangements was taking place, with some religious people taking on unprecedented temporal responsibilities.

When these prospects reached the ears of the cardinals in the Curia, the shock could not have been more absolute. Signals, warnings, and actions began that in some cases gave rise to illegal behavior. Some people were ready to do anything to stop the revolution that had arrived in St. Peter's Square from a far-flung corner of the world. The reaction of those adverse to change, which until now had been unorganized, reliant on individual resistance, started to escalate into a full-fledged war between two opposing armies.

 

9

The War, Act I: Blocked Budgets and Bureaucratic Assaults

As If Nothing Had Happened

“Money contaminates our thinking, it contaminates our faith.” When greed wins out, human beings lose their dignity and become “corrupt in mind, and risk treating religion as a source of income.” May God “help us not to fall into the trap of the idolatry of money.”
1

Francis repeated these words in his homilies at Santa Marta and St. Peter's while the commissions pored over the accounts demanding explanations of wild expenses, random privileges, and utter superficiality. But the road to change was long and strewn with obstacles. At the holy palaces, everything continued as it had before, as if nothing had happened. While it had seemed as if something might really change at the beginning, the Pope's new direction provoked discomfort within the walls; a clear sign that his decisions had been right on target. Hypocrisy and smugness seemed to gain ground again, however, when the time came to present the 2014 budgets for the Holy See and the Governorate in December 2013. Six months had gone by since the confidential meeting of the auditors that had given rise to the COSEA Commission.

Anyone who had envisioned an endorsement of the Pope's fresh approach in the new budgets was sorely disappointed. The bitter truth came out on the morning of December 18, 2013, the day of the biannual meeting of international auditors to review and approve the 2014 budgets. The auditors had received the financial documents only two days earlier, studied them hurriedly, and were aghast at what they read.

A heavy silence fell over the room when the Prefecture's consultants entered, knowing they were about to face one of the most dramatic sessions in recent years. After the ritual prayer, Cardinal Versaldi opened the proceedings and put on a display of optimism, underlining “the relative acceleration in the timetable and the structural nature of the reform.”

In other words, the “COSEA Commission has set into motion a process of renewal that the Prefecture had hoped for many times and that, in the past, had generated a sense of frustration over the failure to enact the reforms.” Murmuring could be overheard in the room: the auditors were not of the same opinion. The papers they had just seen spoke clearly: everything in the budgets was just as before, without a trace of the new era invoked by Francis. Cardinal Versaldi understood this better than anyone. He stopped, took a deep breath, and, in a rhetorical flourish, let a few seconds go by to impose greater authority on the words he was about to utter:

We should also underline the human and Christian aspect of the reform. All the shortcomings should be highlighted in a spirit of fraternal correction, inspired by evangelical rather than diplomatic criteria. First, a discussion should be pursued with the interested parties. In the event they have persisted in the error of their ways, the Supreme Authority should intervene. We should maintain this approach so as not to lose the results achieved so far. Before “punishing” we must seek to correct. Let it be noted, furthermore, that the collaboration of the heads of the Administrative bodies has been good and there is no bad will, but rather a problem of mind-set and the structure of the system.

Although his language was in perfect curial style, open to a variety of interpretations, the gist of the Cardinal's “advice” was not lost on the COSEA commissioners. Versaldi was anticipating the obstacles ahead and wanted to limit the discontent and placate the auditors and their requests for stricter measures. The hunt for the culprits—the senior prelate sensed—would hurt everyone. Any punishment of the wrongdoers would have one effect and one effect only: “to lose all the results achieved.”

Versaldi wanted to build a protective wall around the miscreants. But he went further: with all due respect to the Pope, the changes had to achieve general agreement, otherwise the obstructionists would win. While the Cardinal was clearly acting in good faith, to respond to inertia with an equal dose of inertia would lead nowhere. The problem—as the new budgets confirmed—was that the Commission had no results to show, attesting to the indifference if not the hostility of the Church's managers toward the papal dispositions. Versaldi was unsparing about the meager results of the first few months of the new pontificate:

Despite all our efforts, we find ourselves before two budgets that show no progress over last year, with the exception of the cuts APSA has made to its previous draft estimates.

The data was disheartening. Versaldi's critique dampened all enthusiasm. “No progress” had been made, he repeated. So the Commission found itself back at square one, where they had been in June 2013, when Francis first decided to create the COSEA Commission to address the Vatican's catastrophic finances. Then, too, the Cardinal had lamented that, “in the Vatican great progress has not been made. The finances are unsustainable in terms of expenses. We cannot hope for an increase in income [from donations]. The only solution remains to cut costs.” This made it all the more regrettable that the 2014 budgets planned for higher expenditures, as noted by the Secretary of the Prefecture, Monsignor Vallejo Balda. “The budget has clearly gotten worse in every area.”