On Pope Leo’s Desk: Fixing Vatican finances
The good news is the pope has the chance to think big, act fast, and capitalize on enthusiasm in the first days of his reign, the bad news is time is short.
When Pope Francis emerged on the loggia in 2013, it was widely understood that the “pope from the peripheries” had been elected with a mandate to reform the Roman curia, and especially to clean up corruption.
Twelve years later, the morass of curial finances may not have been top of many people’s list of expectations for Pope Leo XIV as he introduced himself to the Church and the world, but it will be at the top of the pile on the new pope’s desk.
If anything, the situation is even more acute than it was in 2013.
Francis acted big and bold in the first years of his pontificate, issuing sweeping regulatory and legal changes and erecting a host of new curial oversight and watchdog bodies to bring some measure of control to what amounted to an often interdepartmental budgetary and accounting free-for-all.
But, famously, the 2017 departures of his key lieutenants Cardinal George Pell and Libero Milone saw the initiative stall, and a period of institutional retrenchment set in.
The subsequent criminal investigation and trial of Cardinal Angelo Becciu and others, resulting in convictions carrying millions in fines and years in prison, did much to illustrate the seriousness of the problem, and the potential effectiveness of his early reforms — if not exactly the smooth turning of the wheels of justice in Vatican City.
But rooting out corruption and installing minimum standards of best practice are a beginning, not an end, to calming the Vatican’s financial turmoil, and despite a decade of warnings, little was ultimately done to address a runaway structural budget deficit in the curia, or plug a ballooning black hole in the Vatican’s pension fund.
The seriousness of the situation now facing Pope Leo was underscored several times during the final months of the Pope Francis pontificate, when the late pope issued a series of letters to the College of Cardinals warning of the dire financial straits facing the curia and admitting the pension fund would be unable to meet its obligations in the near future.
Pope Leo now faces the triple task of revivifying the structural reforms instituted by Francis, reigning in Vatican spending, and finding new sources of curial income, short and long term. And even though his pontificate is less than a week old, the pope is working against the clock.