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Pope Francis' popularity depends on George Pell
By Desmond O'grady
Cardinal George Pell's performance as the first Vatican financial tsar will be a factor in whether Pope Francis maintains popularity during his second year. Attendances at Francis' weekly audiences are more than twice as numerous as those of his two predecessors, but some observers suspend judgment awaiting action on matters such as clerical child abuse. If the Pell era means an end to financial scandals - and there is little excuse if it doesn't - it could help persuade the sceptical that Francis is steak as well as sizzle. The cardinals who elected Francis agreed that the stench of scandals from the central administration, the Roman Curia, had to be eliminated. The financial shenanigans and leakage of documents from the Pope's study was confusing, but one thing was clear: the Italians, with their fierce turf wars, were the protagonists. Francis has now selected Pell to clear up the money. Some commentators make it sound as if Pell's job will be to pistol-whip shifty Italian functionaries on the grounds that Italians have no idea of Anglo-Saxon financial probity. But as there have been no Italian bank collapses or home-financing scandals as in the United States and England, some Italians consider Anglo-Saxon finance irresponsible. Yet Italians in the Curia feel like equivalents of the victims of the Crusaders who, in the 13th century, massacred heretics in southern France to the cry of ''Kill them all, God will know his own''. It would be a mistake to condemn all Italian curialists, as some did oppose shady practices in Vatican finances. For instance, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano denounced corruption and cronyism when at the Vatican City Governorate and subsequently was removed to Washington as the Vatican ambassador. For the past year there have been resignations and arrests of dubious Vatican employees and closure of more than 1000 dicey accounts, so that the worst have been weeded out and additional controls have been installed. Nevertheless Pell still faces a minefield. He will find a bureaucracy that has been demoralised. Pell will have to restore morale as well as be a financial watchdog. Under pressure from the European Union to combat money laundering, Pope Benedict XVI pushed Vatican finances to measure up to international standards. But his No.2, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, fluffed the task. In 2009 he appointed Italian banker Ettore Gotti Tedeschi as president of the Institute for the Works of Religion, known as the Vatican Bank. Tedeschi, an Opus Dei sympathiser, was sacked three years later with a communique that described him as ''manifestly incompetent''. It seems that the dismissal of Tedeschi was a victory for American Carl Anderson, a member of the bank's board and head of the Knights of Columbus, in a struggle against Opus Dei influence. The Gotti Tedeschi sacking has been followed by a series of changes of personnel that indicate the difficulties of the path to reform, even though Moneyval, the Council of Europe's anti-money laundering unit, gave the Vatican's finances a transparency pass mark last year. Pope Francis seemed disposed to abolish the Vatican Bank but has been persuaded it can be useful. It was founded in 1942 when the church needed to deliver money to churches under dictatorial regimes. From the 1980s when American Archbishop Paul ''you can't run the church on Hail Marys'' Marcinkus was in charge and bankers Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, who dealt with it, were killed, there have been accusations that it was used to launder Mafia money. After the collapse of Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano in 1982, the Vatican paid $US242 million of its debts without accepting liability. More recently it has clashed with the Bank of Italy over evading currency controls. Being nicknamed the Vatican Bank, it has attracted huge press interest; according to its first published annual report, its profit for 2012 was €86.6 million. Yet it is less important than the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA) based on investments in stocks, bonds, currencies and property resulting from the compensation Italy paid in 1929 for the Papal States which it had seized in 1870. The most recent Vatican financial scandal concerns an APSA employee, Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, a banker before becoming a priest, who is facing charges of smuggling €20 million and money laundering. Pell's Secretariat of the Economy reports directly to the Pope rather than being under the Secretariat of State, which blocked previous whistleblowers such as Vigano and American cardinal Edmund Szoka, overseer of Vatican finances in the 1990s, with a brief similar to Pell's but without direct access to the Pope. Pell's office will draw up an annual budget for the whole Curia, oversee detailed financial statements and implement policies set by a new board of eight bishops and seven lay financial experts. It remains to be seen how far Pell will venture beyond auditing to reshaping the Curia. Even those critical of Pell as a pastor welcomed his appointment on the grounds that a tough outsider was needed. But there was a previous one: Paul Marcinkus, a big no-nonsense athlete who, confident of papal endorsement, threw his weight around before being brought down by the Ambrosiano Bank scandal. His mistake was to condone shady dealers because he believed that all Italian bankers cut corners. It would be a mistake for Pell to make a similar generalisation about the Italian curialists. When the future Francis became Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he found a murky financial situation. But management consultants Arthur Andersen resolved it. This seems to be the basis for his faith in management consultants, although some Vatican employees are surprised that Francis, who is critical of global capitalism, favours these consultancies closely linked to it. The transparency of Vatican finances, they add, has not extended to disclosure about the consultancies' fees. It is said wryly that they may be the fast track to the poor church that Francis evokes. The queries about the consultancies' cost has added point because the Vatican's 2800 employees, half of them lay people, work under an austerity regime. Francis' popularity should mean increased annual offerings by Catholics worldwide, known as Peter's Pence ($US65.9 million in 2012), but cost cutting is likely to continue as the mantra at the Vatican's lower levels. Pope Francis does not need more critics in the Vatican. While his approachable style has revived the hopes for a less defensive church deriving from the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), some in the Vatican distrust the stirrer who has scrapped the idea of assured ecclesial career paths; they think he ducks the hard issues, spreads confusion and is a pig-headed Peronist-style populist too keen on currying consensus. He needs to win in Rome as well as in the broader world if his impact is to be enduring. And for this he needs Pell. But Pell has to help rebuild morale among the Italian majority in the Curia who say their bosses have to recognise that ''we're not all cretins or corrupt''. Desmond O'Grady is a journalist and Vatican expert.
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