VATICAN CITY
America
Vatican Dispatch
April 4-11, 2016 Issue
Gerard O’Connell
Continuing his reform of Vatican finances, Pope Francis issued a decree on March 4 approving new norms relating to the administration of the “goods,” mainly money, of the causes for beatification and canonization of saints in order to ensure full transparency and accountability in this area.
He took this decisive step after the commission he set up in July 2013 concluded that there was little or no oversight on how the considerable sums of money collected for a particular cause were spent. The commission’s report revealed that the system approved by St. John Paul II in 1983 lacked effective oversight and failed to prevent abuses. John Paul II beatified 1,138 persons and declared 482 saints, and it was known in Rome during his pontificate that money had been an important factor in advancing some of them.
In early August 2013, Francis received alarming reports from the commission on this matter, and he immediately ordered the blocking of some 400 accounts of the postulators of the causes of beatification and canonization held at the Institute for the Works of Religion (commonly called the Vatican Bank). That was but the first step; the new norms are the latest.
That there were abuses in the system was long known. It became public knowledge when two Italian journalists, Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, drawing on the commission’s leaked report, published books that revealed that while hundreds of thousands of euros were collected for a particular cause, there was little or no control over how this money was spent. The average cost for a beatification was around 500,000 euros (US $550,000). Fittipaldi, for example, highlighted the high costs for the cause of Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Most of the 450 postulators are religious, but Nuzzi cited the report as revealing that two lawyers (laypeople, both named) handled a disproportionate share of the 2,500 causes, with 90 cases each. Moreover, the family of one of them was among the three printers given contracts by the congregation to print the position papers (sometimes several volumes) for the causes.
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