PopeWatch: Mammon

Christ noted that the love of money was the root of all evil, which certainly seems to be the case for many of our clergy.  Phil Lawler at Catholic Culture takes a look at one of the reasons why financial scandal at Vatican is a perennial head line:

The Vatican’s Secretary of State, then, occupies a position similar to that of a prime minister. One of his deputies, the Secretary for Relations with States, is the Vatican’s top foreign-affairs officer. The other, the “Substitute for General Affairs”—commonly called the sostituto—is like the papal chief of staff, handling all the paperwork that flows through curial offices. It is this latter office, the Office for General Affairs, that has caused so much embarrassment in recent months.

The former sostituto, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, has been stripped of his privileges in the College of Cardinals, as Vatican prosecutors exposed a series of improper financial transactions that he had arranged. Cardinal Pietro Parlin, the Secretary of State; and Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, the current sostituto, have been tarred by their involvement with the same transactions.

But if Cardinal Becciu had begun those financial adventures in any ordinary office environment, the damage would have been contained by the ordinary checks and balances that are in place in any normal bureaucracy. Instead, his misdeeds had an extraordinary impact because—as the sostituto, with the power of the Secretariat behind him—he was able to silence, remove, or intimidate those who questioned the propriety of his dealings.

Thus, as as I recounted last September, Cardinal Becciu managed to forestall an audit ordered by Cardinal George Pell, then head of the Secretariat for the Economy. He pressured other Vatican offices to lend money to shore up his investments, and then to cover the tracks of these transactions. As questions persisted about those transactions, he forced out the Vatican’s auditor general, Libero Milone, explaining that Milone was “spying on the private lives of his superiors and staff.” After the Financial Information Agency (AIF) began to probe his real-estate deals, Rene Bruelhart, the president of the AIF, resigned his post. And after the shocking police raid on the Secretariat of State, Domenico Giani, the head of Vatican security, also tendered his resignation. One by one the Vatican officials who were questioning Becciu’s moves were eliminated; for months, the sostituto himself—the man they were all investigating—survived.

Last November, as the real nature of the problem became unavoidably clear, Pope Francis has issued new orders barring the Secretariat of State from investing Vatican funds. So the specific problem that caused this crisis should not be repeated. But the more general problem—the fact that the Office for General Affairs can run roughshod over other Vatican offices—remains.

Go here to read the rest.  That the funds being played around like so much Monopoly money come from the sweat of the laity makes this criminality doubly obnoxious.