Merchants in the Temple (24 page)

With my warmest regards, Pietro Parolin

But the situation was not as simple as the Secretary of State would have it. Forty-eight hours later, Zahra sent him this reply:

It seems that the question of gathering financial information from the Secretariat of State is far from settled. Last night I received the financial documents from Mr. Profiti, who to my surprise is saying in his letter (attached) that he had sent the communication to the Secretariat. I also refer to the dicasteries indicated in points (1) and (2) of your January 4 letter. The Prefecture of Economic Affairs does not have this information or else [the information is incomplete]. Now we are writing directly to these dicasteries even if we would not be surprised to find this information already available at the Secretariat.

I now refer to the items in my January 3 letter [regarding the bank accounts of the Secretariat of State]. Your reply to my letter does not refer to these two items. You are aware that we need this information to complete the whole financial picture of the Holy See. Naturally I respect the fact that there might be confidential accounts at the Secretariat, but what I am asking for is information on these other accounts. You can understand how difficult my job is and you are aware of the resistance I am facing in fulfilling the wishes and the mission of the Holy Father. Your intervention with the managers to help us in the work we are carrying on would be most appreciated.

With my best wishes, Joe

The only person who could break the stalemate now was Francis, as was stated nakedly in the weekly status report of the McKinsey consultants:

Secretariat of State, status:

•
Received a letter from the Secretariat of State confirming that none of the financial information requested is available.

Next steps:

•
Receive guidance from the Holy Father on the unshared accounts.

•
Keep in touch with Mons. Parolin.

Parolin had never given too much credit to COSEA or to the Commission on the IOR. In an interview published in the daily newspaper
Avvenire
in February 2014, he stated:

The Curia is a reality of service, not a center of power or control. There is always a danger of abuse of power, large or small, that we have in our hands, and the Curia has not and does not escape from this danger. “But ye shall not be so,” as the Gospel warns us, and on this Word, so demanding but so liberating, we seek to model our activity in the Roman Curia, despite limits and flaws. I would like to emphasize that while a reform of the structures is needed, it will not be enough unless it is accompanied by a permanent personal conversion. The commissions? They have a limited term and a job to “refer,” that is to say, their purpose consists in submitting to the Pope and the Council of Eight Cardinals suggestions and proposals in the framework of their competence.
10

It was only thanks to the intervention of Francis, at the urging of Zahra, that on January 30 the Commission received a twenty-nine-page file of answers—incomplete—regarding the Holy See's tangled financial web. Something had finally broken. The laypeople on the Pontifical Commission, in this last phase of their work, could sense a crumbling of the opposition thanks to the Holy Father's intercession. A harmful and mutual distrust began to insinuate itself among them.

In the meantime, Francis was reflecting. When he has to make painful decisions, he regroups in private to find strength and focus. He prayed in his room, a simple environment in its furnishings and decorations: a crucifix, a statue of Our Lady of Luján, an icon of St. Francis giving mercy and hope, and a statue of St. Joseph sleeping.

The Curia as a whole deserved to be admonished. Once the budgets were unblocked, the entire community had to share Francis's concerns over the financial future of the Church, and he would have to impose with force, if necessary, the longed-for changes that were only on paper so far. There was a growing risk that the erosion of the patrimony would become unstoppable. On the one hand the economic crisis was striking the richest Catholic countries, reducing their generosity to the Church. On the other hand, in the Vatican, despite the arrival of Francis, expenditures kept going up. And while all of this was happening behind closed doors, faithful pilgrims continued to fill St. Peter's Square, unaware of the hard work it would take to turn the Pope's dictates into reality.

Francis realized that he needed to act immediately, taking drastic measures if necessary. So he decided to intercede mainly on the question of personnel, not only because all of his appeals to take greater care in hiring and assigning jobs had been ignored, but especially because personnel measures more than any other would change the daily perceptions of the people who lived and worked inside the walls. Drastic human resource measures that would make everyone understand that the situation was serious and that the Argentine Jesuit meant what he had promised.

The Holy Father summoned Parolin and immediately ordered the application of emergency measures to the entire Apostolic See. It was a turn of the screw. On February 13, 2014, the Secretary of State sent a memo indicating all the cuts that had to be made. In the document, sent to all the cardinals who headed dicasteries in the Curia, Parolin referred to the crisis, and called for the following:

The immediate adoption of measures that will help contain expense items concerning personnel so that in this difficult moment of economic crisis the application of these decisions will contribute, in general, to guaranteeing the maintenance of the whole community of work at the service of the Holy Father and the Universal Church.

Bergoglio urged greater mobility between departments, and he imposed a freeze on overtime, on the renewal of temporary contracts, on new professional positions, on promotions, and, of course, on hiring. When a person retired, “the employees in our work force”—Parolin advised—“will not fail to shoulder generously the activity no longer being performed by their colleagues.” But the ultimate goal was still remote. “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor,” Francis had said without guile on March 16, 2013, at his audience with the media. In the Curia there were many who now remembered those words and contrasted them to the notorious remark of Monsignor Marcinkus, the head of the IOR during its worst scandal, who often quipped, “You can't run the Church on Hail Marys.” With that he dictated a mind-set that would dominate a dark chapter in Vatican history, a mind-set that persists in some corners of the Curia today.

 

10

The War, Act II: The Revolution of Francis and the Rise of Cardinal Pell

The Revolution of Francis

On February 21 and 22, 2014, Francis celebrated his first Consistory, where he appointed nineteen cardinals. Meanwhile, during moments of reflection and prayer, he defined the final details of the reorganization of the state. Among the papers he brought with him into his room at Casa Santa Marta, there was a six-page document that the COSEA Commission had prepared and delivered on February 18. The title was “Proposed Coordination Structure for Economic-Administrative Functions,” and it contained a series of suggestions for revolutionizing the small state.

It was a tense and difficult moment. Earlier in the month, on February 3, Francis had also received the final report on COSEA's works, with observations on the critical failures and major risks they had come across. The tone of the report was unsparing:

Final proposals to present to the Holy Father …

1.
A lack of governance, control and professionalism lead to high risks at APSA. 92 recommendations for addressing those risks have been identified … COSEA proposes to involve the adequate juridical authorities wherever particular findings require this.

2.
A concrete recommendation for each commercial activity and a proposal for the future organization of the Governorate have been prepared. The summary report will also include a qualitative analysis of the benefits and downsides which a tax on income and sales (VAT) in the Vatican State would bring about.
1

On the morning of Sunday, February 23, St. Peter's Square was filled with pilgrims. The cardinals who had gathered here less than one year earlier—at the Conclave that beneath Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel had elected an Argentine Jesuit as the next Pontiff—were back in Rome. Francis had carefully prepared the homily that he would read during the Mass at St. Peter's Basilica, where he would be facing the nineteen brother cardinals he had just appointed.

He spoke to them forcefully: “A Cardinal enters the Church of Rome, my brothers, not a royal court … May all of us avoid, and help others to avoid, habits and ways of acting typical of a court: intrigue, gossip, cliques, favoritism and partiality.” A brief pause, and then the successor of Peter repeated his exhortation for an end to the infighting: “May all of us avoid intrigues … May we love those who are hostile to us. We are required not only to avoid repaying others the evil they have done to us, but also to seek generously to do well by them.”

His message of peace was meant to ease tensions as well as to introduce the dramatic move he would be presenting the next day to the Council of 15 (C15), the body created by John Paul II to audit the Vatican's finances. It was a touchy situation. Once the Consistory was over, the cardinals of the Council would stay behind in Rome to discuss the 2014 budgets that had been blocked by the auditors. The documents had just been revised, and the Pope in person had ordered the elimination of unnecessary outside consultants and imposed a hiring freeze to reduce personnel costs. If the cardinals did not approve the budget now, the Holy See's activities could grind to a halt. While they were well aware of the situation, not everyone realized that a new super-dicastery was about to be created and that they themselves would be pushed aside. Bergoglio had prepared this new development along the lines indicated by both COSEA and the C8.

The confidential meeting of February 24 would go down in history and I was able to hear it documented in a digital recording. After decades of stalling, the most important reform of the Curia in many years was about to be announced by the Pope. The cardinals were sitting in the room, waiting to hear the news.

The Establishment of the Secretariat and Council for the Economy

Francis was the first to take the floor, making his big announcement immediately in his typically blunt and direct manner:

During the Consistory I decided to make this dicastery for finance, the Secretariat of the Economy, and today I left the establishing document with the Secretary of State. This morning I signed the
motu proprio
, I spoke with Cardinal Pell, whom you know, and I asked him if he would be the head of this dicastery. The head, I said … I don't know if he will be a Secretary or President, the terminology has to be studied, it's written down but I don't remember it … I am aware that for him this is a
deminutio capitis
[reduction of power], because he is the head of a church. He is leaving that church to be a banker, which is a
deminutio capitis
, but he said without hesitation that he would do it. I thank him very much. I signed it with today's date, in collaboration with the Secretariat of State and bearing in mind the unique nature of the administrative bodies. For example, the Governorate is not the same as the dicastery for the Causes of Saints, and Propaganda Fide also has a special nature because of the donations it receives … I wanted to say personally to the members of the Council of 15 that now there will no longer be 15 cardinals but rather 8 bishops and cardinals and 7 laypersons.

After the Holy Father's statement the cardinals applauded, but Parolin silenced them with a gesture of his hand. A new dicastery, the Secretariat of the Economy, was being created and the Council of 15 was being suppressed. Or rather, it was being replaced by a twin body that would be called the Council for the Economy, on which seven of the fifteen participants would be qualified experts from the professional world who would serve not as simple consultants but as voting members, on equal footing with the religious members. Francis was now making concrete and clear to the Church hierarchy the rebalancing of religious and laypeople that had been studied for months by COSEA and the consultants of Promontory and McKinsey. This was a radical change: for the first time a group of lay officials was being allowed into the closed and inviolable world of Vatican finances.

Parolin slightly raised his right hand again, asked for everyone's attention, and thanked the Pope:

Thank you, Holy Father for coming, thank you for the communication you have brought to us, and we are here to assure you of our collaboration.

And Francis:

Of that I am certain, I have seen how you have collaborated with COSEA and I am certain.

An Exceptional Secret Document

Here are excerpts from this groundbreaking meeting, transcribed from a digital recording to which I was given exclusive access. We are thus able to enter for the first time into the secret council of cardinals and get a better understanding of the financial issues afflicting the Church:

Parolin: Thank you, truly. The Holy Father has announced and offered his best wishes to Cardinal Pell. We join the Pope in congratulating him on this appointment, also if it means, as the Pope said, a
diminutio
. Nevertheless he accepted, in the spirit of service, the exercise of this new responsibility.

Question from a cardinal: Will the new dicastery be made public immediately?

Parolin: It is not public, the Pope has told me. I myself did not know about it … I imagine it will be made public in the next few days. Perhaps Cardinal Pell knows something more …

A cardinal's joking remark in a low voice:… Of course … Pell knows everything … (
laughter
)