Pope’s Money Man Tightens Control over the Power of the Purse

By Ines San Martin
Crux
September 5, 2014

http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2014/09/05/popes-money-man-tightens-control-over-the-power-of-the-purse/

Cardinal George Pell met with Pope Francis during the Pope's Audience with Cardinals March 15. (Vatican photo)

In another milestone along the path to financial reform, Pope Francis’ new “Council for the Economy” met for the third time Thursday, among other things working out details for transfering the Vatican’s power of the purse ever more completely to Australian Cardinal George Pell.

The Council for the Economy was established Feb. 24 by Francis, and is composed of eight cardinals and seven lay experts, marking the first time at such a senior level that laity have sat on a decision-making body in the Vatican as full equals with cardinals.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston is the lone American on the council.

The council’s function is to oversee financial operations, principally the new Secretariat for the Economy established by the pope in February and entrusted to Pell, who has moved quickly to bring the Vatican’s various financial centers under his control.

Francis has made the financial clean-up operation the leading edge of his broader project of Vatican reform, and the 73-year-old Pell is the man he’s tapped to make it happen.

According to Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, during the one-day meeting the council discussed the statutes outlining the powers and responsibility of the Secretariat for the Economy, as well as those for a new Vatican auditor general as well as a transfer of operations from the “ordinary section” of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA) to the new secretariat.