Vbook on vati an corruption4/30/2023 ![]() According to the 2021 Vatican budget, the institution is bracing for a $60 million deficit. The COVID-19 pandemic, which imposed travel bans in Italy and globally, was a huge blow to an institution that relies heavily on the millions of tourists who visit the Vatican museums every year. “We don’t know how many people are going to heaven or hell, but we do know when we are under financial pressure, and we do know if we’re going broke.”įinancial scandals involving millions of dollars have depleted the Vatican’s coffers for decades. “The financial pressures at the Vatican are, really, very real,” he added. His time at the Vatican was cut short once he was summoned to court in Australia, but he said he keeps a keen eye on the recent developments in the church’s finances. Pope Francis appointed Pell as prefect for the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy in 2014, to spearhead the pope’s ambitious plans to reform the Catholic institution’s troubled finances. ![]() Pell also pushed back against criticism from Cardinal Angelo Becciu - often portrayed as his rival during his efforts to reform the Vatican’s finances - and questioned Becciu's transfer of funds from the Vatican to Australia, which some speculate had an influence on Pell’s trial and imprisonment in 2019. That’s the primary reality at the moment,” Pell said, adding that the red balance sheet is due to “years of old-fashioned methodology, incompetence and corruption.” “I think the main challenge is the Vatican is short of money. The book touches on a variety of subjects, from how the cardinal’s faith and support sustained him during imprisonment, to his political views, but it also addresses “corruption in Rome,” Pell told Religion News Service during a phone interview on Wednesday (Nov. Pell was jailed for more than a year in 2019 after being accused of sexually abusing minors in Victoria, Australia, and was acquitted on appeal by the country’s High Court in April 2020 for lack of evidence. Pell's newest book, “ Prison Journal, Volume 3: The High Court frees an Innocent Man,” was published in November and is the final installment detailing his experiences in prison. The book says that if market rates were applied, homes given to employees would generate income of 19.4 million euros rather than the 6.2 million euros currently recorded, while other "institutional" buildings which today generate no income would generate income of 30.4 million euros.Former Vatican economy czar Cardinal George Pell warns in a new book that the Catholic institution is facing a growing deficit, but he hopes financial reform efforts have put a stop to money laundering in the small city-state. Rents were sometimes 30 to 100 percent below market, the commission found, including some apartments that were given free to cardinals and bureaucrats as part of their overall compensation or retirement packages. Nuzzi cites a commission report that found that the value of the real estate was some 2.7 billion euros (dollars), seven times higher than the amount entered onto the balance sheets. ![]() The book cites a memo listing six priorities when the commission began work, starting with the need to get a handle on the Vatican's vast real estate holdings. ![]() That said, the book is clearly written from the point of view of the commission members, sympathetic to their plight and setting up an "us against them" narrative of the new reformers battling the Vatican's entrenched Old Guard, without addressing why the Old Guard might have had reason to distrust them. ![]()
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