By Chiesa
Sandro Magister
October 1, 2009
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1340361?eng=y
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The new president of the IOR is a staunch proponent of a capitalism inspired by Christianity. For him, a high birth rate is the main engine of the economy. Meanwhile, in Italy, another important replacement is being prepared: at the head of the media outlets owned by the bishops
ROME, October 1, 2009 – At the same time when in Italy, between August and September, a dramatic ouster was underway for Dino Boffo, the sole director of the media owned by the Catholic Church, on the other shore of the Tiber there were silent, subdued preparations for a change at the top of another key organization, the IOR, Institute for Works of Religion, the Vatican bank.
The IOR itself is going through stormy times. A book describing its misconduct, with indisputable documentation, has for months been at the top of the best-seller lists. But in it, the villain is not so much the IOR as such, but its black sheep of former times, bishops Paul Marcinkus and Donato De Bonis. The banker Angelo Caloia, president of the IOR over the past fourteen years, is instead depicted in the book as a knight in shining armor, the hero who kicked out the crooks, cleaned out the stalls, and brought a virtuous image back to the pope's bank. His resignation, and his replacement by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi (in the photo), were announced in peace and with mutual esteem between the two, on the morning of September 23.
That same day, the executive board of the Italian bishops' conference – its thirty most prominent cardinals and bishops – met in Rome behind closed doors to discuss many issues, including the successor to Boffo. But neither that summit nor the secretive meetings that followed have produced a unified stance.
Boffo was much more than a media professional: he was the "cultural project" of Cardinal Camillo Ruini as implemented in the field of communications, he was the bridge by which the Church's message became part of "popular culture."
Ruini was president of the CEI for sixteen years, from 1991 to 2007, and with him the Church had become a participant in the public sphere as never before. His project was the perfect application in Italy of the global vision of John Paul II.
With him gone, opposition to the Ruini plan regained strength among the bishops, the clergy, the Catholic laity, as well as in the Vatican secretariat of state. Boffo was there to hold the line of resistance, at the editor's desk of the newspaper "Avvenire," at the television station Sat 2000, with the radio stations. Now that he is gone too, mowed down by Vittorio Feltri and Silvio Berlusconi's "il Giornale," not to mention being sidelined by influential Catholics who were among his best writers, from Vittorio Messori to Giovanni Maria Vian, the latter being the current director of "L'Osservatore Romano," the choice of his successor will also reveal the strategy of the Italian Catholic hierarchy for the future.
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At the IOR it's a completely different tune. There the replacement has already taken place, and in full transparency, at the wishes of the secretariat of state and with the consent of Benedict XVI.
If Angelo Caloia revealed little about himself, made only rare public appearances, and kept his thoughts hidden, the exact opposite is the case with his successor as head of the Vatican bank. With Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, we know his life and legacy, friends and acquaintances, agenda and ideas.
His most recent appearance, before his appointment, was on September 19 at the Palazzo della Borsa in Genoa. Together with the archbishop of the city and president of the CEI, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, he discussed the encyclical "Caritas in Veritate" by Benedict XVI. He said that the current global economic crisis "originated in the failure to follow the guidelines of 'Humanae Vitae', that is, in the rejection of life and the suppression of childbirth."
Gotti Tedeschi had expressed the same idea in an editorial in "L'Osservatore Romano" last June 6. If the economic hegemony of the world passes from the West to China, he wrote, it will be because of their different birth rates and population densities. Demographic trends determine the increase or decrease of an economy's productive capacity.
Gotti Tedeschi has five children, "all from the same mother," he specifies. He lives in the countryside of Piacenza, where he was born 64 years ago, in Pontenure, not from from the Po river. He gets up very early in the morning, like a monk. In his BMW, he gets to Milan by dawn. He reads the newspapers in his office as president for Italy of Banco Santander, the biggest private bank in Europe, owned by a lay Spanish family, the Botins. Then he goes to Mass, every morning, without fail.
He teaches financial ethics at the Catholic University of Milan. But he is also a board member of Banca San Paolo in Turin and of the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, the operational wing of the treasury ministry.
On September 23, while the Vatican was making public his appointment as the new president of the IOR, Gotti Tedeschi was in Rome for a decisive meeting of the Cassa, to approve a 50 billion euro infrastructure and residential construction project. The Cassa Depositi e Prestiti is the pet project of treasury minister Giulio Tremonti, for whom Gotti Tedeschi is an advisor "on economic, financial, and ethical problems in international systems," a post instituted specifically for him.
Before his appointment, Gotti Tedeschi had never set foot in the IOR, or even paid any attention to it. But he had already been at home at the Vatican for some time. Secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone had asked for his help last year, to straighten out the financial management of the Vatican's central administration, which had a shortfall of more than 15 million euro in 2008.
The cure seems to have worked. The main culprit of the mismanagement, the secretary general of the administration, Bishop Renato Boccardo, was sent away to be bishop of Spoleto and Norcia. He had aspired to one of the top nunciature positions, and because of this had even turned down the see of Vienna. In his place now is Carlo Maria Vigano, from Lombardy, who will soon rise to the highest position of the central administration, replacing Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo.
Gotti Tedeschi was formed as a banker in the American McKinsey school of international finance. As a Catholic, he converted from "superficial" to fervent in the 1960's, under the spiritual direction of the traditionalist thinker Giovanni Cantoni. The books that revealed his thought to the general public are "Denaro e Paradiso [Money and Paradise]," published in 2004, with a preface by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, and "Spiriti animali. La concorrenza giusta [Animal Spirits: The Right Kind of Competition]," published by Universita Bocconi and with a preface by Alessandro Profumo, president of the largest Italian bank, Unicredit.
But after this there were other publications that were less prominent, but no less revealing. In 2007, Gotti Tedeschi, the most Catholic of the bankers, signed an ultraliberal manifesto in 13 points, spearheaded by the former secretary of the highly secularist radical party, Daniele Capezzone. The manifesto proposed a single 20 percent "flat tax," presidential government according to the American or French model, tax credits for health care and education, the requirement that the public administrator pay for all damages incurred, the changing of the retirement age to 65, tax exemption for overtime work, the abolition of professional associations and of the legal status of study certificates.
Years ago, Gotti Tedeschi proposed awarding the Nobel prize in economics to John Paul II, for his encyclical "Centesimus Annus." More recently, he nominated Benedict XVI for "Caritas in Veritate," which he participated in writing.
He also wished the Nobel prize for English prime minister Gordon Brown, for supporting his ambitious proposal in "L'Osservatore Romano," "advantageous" for all, of investment in poor countries, on behalf of the two or three billion people who are only waiting to improve their lives.
The IOR seems too narrow for a new president with such vast and explosive proposals. But the adventure has just begun.
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