The Pope and the Vatican Bank, The New York Times (July 14, 2014)

Pope Francis is showing that he means business — sound fiduciary business — in his campaign to clean up the Vatican Bank. Since the pope made his promise of credible reform last year, investigators and bank officials have vetted and closed out 3,000 suspect and unwanted accounts.

Francis continued the shake-up last week with the hiring of a veteran European fund manager, Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, to be the bank’s new president, the naming of an advisory board dominated by banking specialists, and the sweeping redesign of Vatican finances and assets under the direction of a trusted troubleshooter, Cardinal George Pell.

“Our ambition is to become something of a model for financial management rather than a cause for occasional scandal,” Cardinal Pell candidly explained. He announced that the Vatican would hand over management of its billions of euros to external banking specialists and be subject to regular reports by an auditor general.

The pope reportedly considered shutting down the bank given the decades of scandal. The latest was the arrest in January of Msgr. Nunzio Scarano, the former accountant for the Vatican’s vast real estate holdings, on charges of trying to launder millions of euros through the Vatican bank. But Francis opted for full-scale reform, which has prompted the bank to restrict its customer base to Catholic institutions, clerics, employees and resident diplomats to the Vatican.

Decades of corruption at the bank were grimly punctuated in a bankruptcy scandal in 1982 when Roberto Calvi — a private banker dubbed “God’s banker” for his close involvement with the Vatican bank — was found hanged under London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Over the years, Italian prosecutors have brought criminal cases against bank officials and frozen the bank’s credit.

The pope’s ambition to change the bank’s culture was underlined by the announcement that Cardinal Pell’s new responsibilities would also involve reform of the Vatican’s media practices. Chris Patten, the former BBC Trust chairman, was appointed to run an advisory committee to overhaul the Vatican’s newspaper and broadcast operations, with an emphasis on the digital future and social media — including the pope’s popular Twitter feed.