Merchants in the Temple Read Free Page B

unreal silence that dominates the room, the Pope delivers the final blow by raising the most embarrassing issue:
    It is no exaggeration to say that most of our costs are out of control. This is a fact. We always have to check the legality and clarity of contracts with the utmost attention. Contracts can be very tricky, right? The contract might be clear but in the footnotes you find the fine print—that’s what it’s called, right?—which is tricky. Examine it carefully! Our suppliers should always be businesses that guarantee honesty and propose a fair market price for both products and services. And not all of them can guarantee that.

    The Pope’s Accusation: “Our costs are spiraling out of control”
    The financial situation inherited from Ratzinger and Bertone—as described by the auditors and seconded by Francis—was a dead-end, prebankruptcy scenario. On the one hand there was total chaos in the management of resources and spending, which was spiraling out of control, with inflated costs, deceptive contracts, and dishonest suppliers dumping obsolete and overpriced products on the Vatican. On the other, cronyism and shady financial dealings prevented change and undermined the policies already adopted by Benedict. This might have been the unspoken reason for Ratzinger’s decision to step down. By giving the helm of Peter’s Bark to someone else, he hoped to break their grip on power and prevent a storm that might ultimately compromise the financial and the evangelical future of the Church. Francis delivered his indictment in the same room used in the dramatic days leading up to the Conclave, when there had been talk about irregularities and concerns at the meetings on the eve of the voting for the new pope—concerns that may have led Bergoglio to choose the name of Francis, the first pope in history to do so—after the saint who dedicated his life to poverty.
    The Pope was not done. While condemning the items that fell under “expenses,” the Holy Father reserved his greatest wrath for the handling of revenue—the donations and inheritances left by the faithful. There was a complete lack of “oversight of investments.” As we shall see in the next chapter, the question is very simple: does the money left by the faithful end up in good works or is it swallowed up by the black holes in the Holy See’s wasteful administration? This question demands an investigation.
    So concerned was Francis that he pressed on with another disturbing example. The situation illustrated by the auditors reminded him of Argentina in the dark days of the military junta, of the desaparecidos , when he discovered that the Church in Buenos Aires had made some truly unholy investments:
    When I was a provincial prelate, the general accountant told me about the attitude we should take toward investments. 8 And he told us the story of how the Jesuit province of the country has a good many seminaries and made investments into a serious, honest bank. Then, when they changed accountants, the new man went to the bank to check up on things. He asked how the investments were doing: he came to find out that more than 60 percent had gone to weapons manufacturing!
    Oversight of investments, ethics, and even risks, because sometimes [you are tempted by interesting proposals and people say]: since this yields high interests, then … Don’t be so trusting, we need to have technical assessors for this. Clear guidelines are needed on how and into what investments should be made, and they must always be made with scrupulous care and the utmost attention to risks. One of you reminded me of a problem that led to our losing more than ten million with Switzerland, through a bad investment, and the money was gone. There is also a rumor that there are satellite administrations [whose investments are not reported in their financial statements]. Some dicasteries have their own money and