VATICAN CITY
Sydney Morning Herald
November 27, 2015
Desmond O’Grady
Cardinal George Pell is fighting battles on two fronts, one financial and the other in the realm of church doctrine, an area in which he managed to irk Pope Francis.
The Australian cardinal is attacked in two new books by Italian journalists as a “spendthrift moraliser” who spent €500,000 ($730,000) in his first six months as Prefect of the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy.
The journalists, Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, are being tried in the Vatican for using its secret documents, together with three Vatican employees for supplying them. The trio of employees worked for COSEA, a now dissolved commission set up by Pope Francis to identify financial situations needing reform after much mismanagement and corruption.
Fittipaldi’s book is called Avarizia (Avarice), Nuzzi’s book has been translated into English as Merchants in the Temple.
The COSEA documents portray the situation at the beginning of last year when Francis appointed Cardinal Pell as a new broom and the two books are largely based on them. Nuzzi’s book has a transcript of a February 24, 2014, meeting in which Francis surprised the 15-member cardinalate commission, which controlled the Vatican budget, by telling them they were being replaced by Cardinal Pell and his Secretariat. He praised Cardinal Pell for stepping down from being Primate of the Australian Catholic Church to become a banker.
The Secretariat has replied that the expenses were not €500,000 but €292,000 and included establishing both the Secretariat office and its chapel.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.