ROME
Crux
John L. Allen Jr. June 25, 2017
EDITOR
Almost a week later, it remains mysterious why Libero Milone, an Italian businessman and auditing expert hired in 2015 for a five-year term as the Vatican’s first-ever Auditor General, abruptly resigned. Whatever the case, the optics don’t seem encouraging in terms of the current state of Pope Francis’s reform effort.
This past Monday, phone lines across Rome began to heat up with rumors that something had happened with Libero Milone, a veteran Italian businessman and expert in auditing and tax services who had been hired in June 2015 as the Vatican’s first-ever Auditor General, billed as the final piece of the puzzle in terms of building a culture of accountability and transparency.
On Tuesday, the other shoe dropped: The Vatican released a terse, four-line statement saying that Milone had submitted his resignation, Pope Francis had accepted it, and, by “common agreement,” his relationship with the Vatican was over.
The statement wished Milone well, and said that a search will soon be launched to find his successor.
What the statement didn’t offer was any explanation of why Milone was walking away, two years into what was supposed to be a five-year term, and well before anything like an actual audit of Vatican finances had been brought to completion.
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