God’s New Banker Brings Teutonic Thoroughness to Vatican

By Guy Dinmore and Rachel Sanderson
Financial Times
May 31, 2013

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On his last full day of a troubled papacy, Benedict XVI bade farewell to his household staff lining up in the Vatican, greeting cleaners, drivers and gardeners, before stopping to exchange just a few words with a newly arrived fellow German.

“I got a rosary. He wished me strength,” recalls Ernst von Freyberg, who two weeks earlier had been named head of the Vatican bank in the Pope’s last major appointment before his historic abdication in February.

Mr von Freyberg will need plenty of prayer and strength as he sets out to rescue the scandal-torn reputation of the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), as the bank is formally known, and help bring the Holy See in line with international financial norms, particularly in combating money laundering.

But what comes across in a lengthy interview in his office, adjacent to the medieval bastion housing the bank, is a Teutonic thoroughness that the lawyer and financier has applied in 25 years of managing in Germany’s Mittelstand, its backbone of small and medium enterprises.