Pope Leo XIV is at Castel Gandolfo this week, the new pope’s second stint at the papal summer residence, while work is completing on renovations to the papal apartments where he is set to take up residence with a small Augustinian community.
In the meantime, his curia is also enjoying something of the traditionally more relaxed August schedule.
Summer doesn’t last forever, of course. And in a few weeks the working year will begin in earnest. When it does, there is no shortage of pressing issues on the pope’s desk awaiting his attention — and no lack of anticipation to see how Leo will go about shaping his pontificate.
For obvious reasons, much of the speculation so far has concerned the new pope’s pending curial appointments. The first, most pressing, and perhaps most indicative of these will be Leo’s selection to replace him as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops.
In other corners, eyes remain fixed on how the pope will choose to press ahead (or not) with the implementation of Pope Francis’ motu proprio on the extraordinary form of the Mass, Traditiones custodis.
A more personal priority for Leo might be his first encyclical letter — whatever topic he may have in mind. But lurking somewhere near the top of the papal inbox will have to be the thorny issue of the Vatican’s finances, much as it was for Pope Francis more than a decade ago.
The new pope will want — reasonably — to think hard and consider the Gordian knot of Vatican finances from every angle before acting. But he will not have the luxury of time, nor the scope for many false starts.
Given the weight of scandal and dysfunction which has stubbornly clung to Vatican financial affairs for decades, it would be understandable if Pope Leo is mulling a kind of “great reset” and gaming out how to reboot the entire curial system.
On the other hand, avoiding a “fresh start” mentality might actually prove to be the new pope’s best hope for real change.
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Leo inherits many of the same issues which demanded his predecessor’s attention: a curial structural budget deficit estimated in the tens of millions of euros; a pension black hole; an underperforming asset portfolio; and a laundry list of scandals and legal issues sapping the Holy See’s credibility.
In many respects, things are in a worse state for Leo than they were for Francis.
Long-term concerns about the Vatican pension fund have given way to a billion euro unfunded liability, and the “Vatileaks” trials of the Benedict era appear positively tame (and cheap) next to the circus of scandal around the case of the London property fiasco.
Leo can, though, thank Francis for digging up and repouring the foundations of the curial economic framework, creating a host of new bodies like the Secretariat for the Economy and the Office of the Auditor General, and passing reams of legislation and regulation, even if many observers might note their full potential has been left untapped — if not at times been outright sabotaged.
Speaking to veterans of the early years of the Francis pontificate, the sense is that the previous pope’s reforms didn’t fail — they were never really allowed to work in the first place. Previous reporting has established that many of the most acute issues now on Leo’s desk were discussed in some depth 10 years ago, and real solutions were proposed — only to languish under the weight of establishment inertia.
The wheel of reform, they say, does not need to be reinvented but set in motion. How best to do that, and whom to entrust with the task, would seem to be the basic questions facing Leo.
Some, like the former auditor general Libero Milone, have spoken publicly of their concern that the pope will be kept in the dark by his advisors, both about the true state of affairs now, and about past scandals and legal issues.
Of course, Milone has his own reasons to suspect there is a concerted effort to bury uncomfortable financial realities and potentially illegal activities. His lawsuit for wrongful dismissal in Vatican City has seen him locked in a legal Catch-22 as he attempts to prove his case.
Even from the outside looking in, it seems clear that, at least at some level, the Vatican’s official response to evidence of potential wrongdoing is to deny either the evidence or the wrongdoing could exist.
Earlier this month, The Pillar reported on an internal report generated by the Secretariat for the Economy under Cardinal George Pell in 2016 in which the cardinal flagged for “urgent and immediate” investigation “potentially illegal” banking transactions by APSA.
The cardinal, in a letter to Milone’s then-department of the Office of the Auditor General, outlined his concerns about a mechanism by which APSA could alter financial records to “shield the true identity of owner/source of funds” sent in international banking transactions and supplied a list of specific transactions to investigate.
The Pillar also reported that Milone’s office generated a substantial report which was presented to the Holy See’s Council for the Economy that same year, which substantiated Pell’s concerns.
In response to that reporting, which included internal Vatican documents with departmental protocol numbers, the Holy See Press Office called The Pillar’s report “completely unfounded,” and denied any such system could exist or that illicit financial transactions at APSA took place or were fraudulently recorded.
In so doing, the press office appeared to prefer a version of events in which Pell’s letter and Milone’s report simply never existed, rather than engage with what either document said.
While there is no means for journalists to compel any different approach from a press office, the problems which would arise if the same “alternative facts” were imposed upon the pope by his officials are obvious.
The temptation for Leo, meanwhile, might be to simply “let bygones be bygones” and not concern himself too deeply with the intricacies of previous misdeeds or problematic systems. If the pope hopes to make maximal progress in financial reform in the shortest possible time, some might suppose, he will need the full cooperation of his curial team — something harder to secure if they are asked to account for past behavior.
However reasonable that instinct might be, however, the lessons of the Francis pontificate would seem to be that it should be resisted. According to those there for the early years of his pontificate, Francis himself took a “clean slate” approach to bringing in new, in many ways dramatic, reforms to how the Vatican does business.
As The Pillar has reported previously, there was, in the words of financial officials, “a preference for looking ahead not looking back” as new basic standards of accountability were introduced, even when apparently egregious instances of misadministration were uncovered.
But, as subsequent events appear to have shown, the risk of each pope opting to start afresh and not insist on a reckoning with past events and actions is that any future reforms can remain superficial as old personnel and mentalities remain in place and intact.
The Vatican’s greatest financial scandal of since the 1980s, the London property fiasco, came about because officials with track records of ignoring previous regulations and financial laws were allowed to remain in post to resist the implementation of new ones.
And when they did resist, Pope Francis was persuaded to trust entrenched curial figures like Cardinal Angelo Becciu, rather than Vatican outsiders like Cardinal George Pell and Libero Milone.
In so doing, Francis was persuaded to delay or decline the kind of radical changes to the Holy See’s financial management which could have headed off the worst of the current crises — again essentially being persuaded to accept “alternative facts” in which the Vatican’s budget deficit and pension black hole were not as bad as they were being made out to be.
Leo, in turn, will now face the same choice about who to believe as he tries to bring himself up to speed on curial financial affairs.
While Pell and Milone left office at the same time in 2017 for different reasons, both their departments noticeably lost momentum after their departures and have cycled through a succession of leaders in the years since.
With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that, dating back at least to the end of the Benedict XVI era, the Vatican’s financial woes have only increased, despite successive waves of structural and legislative reforms.
For Leo, his greatest challenge, and most thankless task, may prove to be understanding why those reforms have failed to yield results, and confronting the people, and their preference for “alternative facts,” which have kept the Vatican on a course for financial ruin for so long.