VATICAN CITY
Bloomberg Business
by Jeremy Kahn
Pope Francis listens attentively at the front of the packed lecture hall, a one-man island of white amid a sea of cardinals in black cassocks and scarlet zucchettos, or skullcaps. The pope and these “princes” of the Roman Catholic Church have gathered in Vatican City’s Synod Hall, a modern glass and steel building steps from the Renaissance-era St. Peter’s Basilica, to get an update on the financial health of the Holy See.
In any other setting, the scene would have been unremarkable: PowerPoint presentations, charts, graphs. But the Vatican has until recently regarded its finances as so sensitive that its full accounts were known only to the pope and his closest aides. The Feb. 13 briefing, says Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi, was the first time the Consistory of Cardinals had ever received such a detailed look at the books. Equally groundbreaking, the presenters included lay experts, not just clergy. And some of them spoke in English, the language of commerce, not in one of the Vatican’s
As Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its June issue, the Synod Hall gathering reinforced the notion that Pope Francis is not your father’s Holy Father. From his stand on homosexuality (of gay priests, he once said, “Who am I to judge?”) to helping midwife a rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba to his social-media savvy (he tweets!), Francis has made headlines and stirred the faithful. He’s reinvigorated a church poisoned by years of sex-abuse scandals and perceived even by many devout Catholics as out of sync with modernity. What’s more, the princely assemblage highlighted a more earthly side of Francis’s church reforms: risking a potentially crippling confrontation with the Roman Curia, the Holy See’s powerful governing bureaucracy, in order to attack waste, mismanagement, and corruption.
The Vatican isn’t a financial powerhouse. Aside from its priceless art collection, it controls less than $7 billion in assets—and that’s being generous in valuing its real estate portfolio. Separately, the Vatican Bank, formally known as the Institute for the Works of Religion, has less than $6.5 billion in assets, most belonging not to the Vatican itself but to Catholic dioceses, orders, and charities. Still, management of the Vatican’s finances matters because it reflects on the moral authority of the church, says Joseph F. X. Zahra, a Maltese businessman and economist who is one of Francis’s closest financial advisers.
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