VATICAN CITY
Crux
By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor February 28, 2015
Over the centuries, court politics at the Vatican sometimes have had a seriously nasty side. If anyone was wondering whether that aspect of its culture had been killed off in the Francis era, or had simply gone dormant, late February 2015 provided a fairly clear answer.
In a word, the nasty is back.
The focus this time is Cardinal George Pell of Australia, the pope’s chosen fix-it man on Vatican finances. Francis tapped Pell a year ago to end a cycle of scandal and corruption in money management, and in the year since he took over a newly created Secretariat for the Economy, he’s become a lightning rod of the first order.
This week the Italian newsmagazine l’Espresso published leaked receipts from Pell’s new department purporting to show that it has racked up more than a half-million dollars in expenses during its first six months of existence, including a tab of more than $3,000 at Gammarelli’s, a famed clerical tailor shop in Rome.
A rumor ensued that Francis had called Pell on the carpet about those expenses, something the Secretariat for the Economy called “completely false” and “complete fiction” in a statement on Saturday. In fact, the statement insisted, the new department’s expenses are actually below the budget set when it was established last March.
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.