It turns out that the Vatican, one of the world’s more secretive institutions, has even been keeping some secrets from itself.
Cardinal George Pell, who took over as the Vatican’s chief financial official in February, on Thursday said that his staff had turned up hundreds of millions of euros that the Vatican did not know it had. The funds were “tucked away” in various accounts, he said, and had not been tallied on the Vatican’s main balance sheets.
The cardinal presented the found money as a happy surprise.
“We have discovered that the situation is much healthier than it seemed,” he wrote in an article for the magazine Catholic Herald, which was scheduled to be published yesterday. “It is important to point out that the Vatican is not broke.”
Between the lines, though, there was less to be happy about. Pell did not say that there had been any malpractice, but he hinted that it might explain why his own branch of the Curia, as the Vatican’s central administration is known, had been in the dark about the money.
“Problems were kept ‘in house,’” Pell said of the various arms of the Curia. “Very few were tempted to tell the outside world what was happening, except when they needed extra help.”
He did not say exactly where the cash had been kept, or by whom, but he did note that individual departments and congregations of the complex Vatican bureaucracy had long had “an almost free hand” with their finances and had historically preserved a high degree of independence, especially the Secretariat of State.
Pell moved to Rome early this year to head the new Secretariat for the Economy, which has been given responsibility for the financial affairs of the Holy See and the almost 200 other entities that answer directly to the Vatican.
His appointment has been seen as a response to criticism from both within and without that the Vatican is too opaque and resistant to scrutiny. So he has started by the giving the books a thorough going-over.
“It is all the Vatican’s money, anyway,” said Carlo Marroni, who covers the Vatican for Italy’s leading financial newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore. “Its balance sheets are worth billions of euros, so the findings are not even particularly crucial to their budget. Cardinal Pell’s announcement speaks more of how he is proceeding to centralize the Vatican’s economy and administration, without leaving anything behind.”
Pell has asked all Vatican departments to start following international accounting standards, and to prepare detailed reports.
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