VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Service
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In ongoing efforts to strengthen the oversight of the Vatican’s finances, an auditor general will be appointed who will have the power to audit any Vatican agency and be a lay expert who is answerable only to the pope, said Cardinal George Pell.
The massive overhaul of the Vatican’s current accounting and budgeting procedures has also revealed that the Vatican’s economic situation is “much healthier than it seemed,” the cardinal said in an exclusive article for the London-based Catholic Herald magazine Dec. 4.
The brighter financial picture emerged after the secretariat discovered “some hundreds of millions of euros were tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on the balance sheet,” he wrote.
Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, told reporters Dec. 5 that the money did not represent “illegal, illicit or badly managed funds,” but was money that was never included in the Vatican’s old system of budgeting and reporting.
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