Epilogue: Will Francis Resign, Too?

An Incomplete Revolution

I have described how Francis, upon his election, found the Curia in disarray, characterized by inertia, scandals, thefts, wrongdoing, and opaque interests. An unreliable Curia had led Benedict XVI to resign and alienated many of the Church’s faithful. To change that dynamic Francis had invested the best minds in the Vatican and spent millions of euros on consultants, hiring lay professionals from outside the walls and inviting them to comb through the accounts of the Holy See. This was an unusual gesture of trust but also a necessary path. Only in this way could the Pope defeat the old power centers that had taken root during the Cold War and grown in the shadows for decades. Only in this way could he restore full credibility and a future to a Church suffering from a chronic crisis in vocations, followers, and offerings.

Of all the reforms contemplated during the first year of his pontificate, very few managed to get off the ground. This unfortunately meant one thing: Bergoglio’s plan to drive out the merchants from the temple was still unfulfilled some three years after his election. The only project that did become concrete was the communications hub, through the establishment of the new Secretariat for Communications. All the other projects and changes announced remained in the drawer or were only partially realized. This situation was a source of discontent all around. More and more cardinals were criticizing the Holy Father, some quite openly, like the Slovenian Franc Rodé, the former Archbishop of Ljubljana.

“Without a shadow of a doubt”—Rodé stated to the Slovenian national press agency—“the Pope is a communications genius. He communicates quite well with the crowds, the media and the faithful.” He then added, “A great advantage is that he seems likeable. On the other hand, his opinions, on capitalism and social justice, are too far to the left. You can see how the Pope is marked by the environment from which he comes. In South America there are great social differences and lively debates on this situation take place every day. They are people who talk a lot but solve very few problems.”

There was also the Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship. In March 2015, upon his return from a trip to France, he said, “Inside the Catholic Church there are signs of a certain confusion on fundamental doctrinal, moral and disciplinary questions.”

Some cardinals made their dissent even more explicit, such as Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who did not participate in a Mass because he did not share some of the Holy Father’s interpretations of theology. Or Camillo Ruini, the former President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, who in October 2014, out of disagreement with positions on the remarriage of divorced persons, refused to shake Francis’s hand after the Synod.

There were open manifestos, such as the book Remaining in the Truth of Christ, written by five cardinals—Müller, Raymond Lee Burke, Velasio De Paolis (former leader of the Prefecture), the Italian Carlo Caffarra, and the Austrian Walter Brandmüler—disputing the idea that divorced people can partake of the sacraments.

For a progress report, let’s start with the Secretariat for the Economy, where Cardinal Pell was supposed to achieve the goal of consolidating all the Vatican’s finances. This was Francis’s wish, but so far it hasn’t happened. Its twin, the Secretariat of State, continues to hold full control over the resources that it managed in the past—starting with the Peter’s Pence, the generous flow of money from dioceses all over the world that is meant to support the pastoral mission of the Church and instead ends up being used to cover the deficits of the dicasteries.

Management of the Peter’s Pence was supposed to be transferred to the Secretariat for the Economy, but there was huge resistance from Parolin’s offices. For that matter, Pell and Parolin never managed to establish a true collaboration and have sometimes clashed bitterly. One example of this occurred in December 2014 and February 2015, when Pell spread the word that the investigations of previous months had turned up hundreds of millions of euros not reported in the Vatican’s balance sheets.

“At the Consistory I explained that to date [February 13, 2015], there are 442 million euros in additional assets in the dicasteries, in addition to the 936 we had identified in an earlier moment.” In the end it was found that a total of 1.4 billion euros had not been entered into the balance sheets. Then came Parolin’s cutting reply: “The Secretariat of State also did not know it was not the only one to have set aside so much money for a rainy day.” Some Vaticanists interpreted these statements as an attack by Pell on Parolin, and corrections and rectifications were quickly issued by the Vatican press office to clarify that the euros had been kept in reserve, off the books, and not in a slush fund. But the most significant fact was that the revelation of such a huge amount of money off the books had taken away both resources and discretionary power from those who, until recently, had managed those sums with complete autonomy.

As for the other dicasteries, the Governorate remained autonomous, as did Propaganda Fide and APSA. While it is true that APSA had to give up management of rental income, which was handed over to Pell, it still controlled the properties themselves. Here, too, there were daily tensions between Team Pell and Team Calcagno. The latest news that I can relate before this book goes to press took place in July–August 2015, when there was yet another tug of war between APSA and the Secretariat for the Economy over who should keep the archives for the Holy See’s immense real estate holdings. These files contain the secrets on the sales and leases of palaces and houses to friends of friends. Who did the archives belong to? To APSA, the owner of the assets, or the men of the Australian Cardinal, who were trying to make better use of rental income? This was another occasion for infighting and misunderstandings.

A census and estimate of the artistic patrimony was in the works but still hadn’t gotten off the ground. The reform of employee pensions was still in the planning stages, although it was a matter of urgency to prevent the more than 800 million euro deficit predicted by COSEA. All of the projects regarding health insurance and creating a single office for human resources were at a standstill. Secretary of State Parolin had taken upon himself the job of coordinating the various personnel offices, but centralization was still a distant dream, despite the fact that it would prevent the many fiefdoms and feuds that foster private interests and privileges.

The Auditor’s Office—the control tower for all the Vatican’s finances—would open for business after a one year delay. It reports directly to the Pope but the roles and responsibilities will not be defined until approval of the regulations enabling the office to become fully operational. So there has been some progress on accounting procedures to obtain standardized and, above all, credible, financial reporting.

Resistance, Sabotage, and Fake Bugs

Francis may never have imagined that he would encounter such entrenched and tenacious resistance. It was no easy matter to uncover dirty business dealings, not even for a pope. The evidence was hard to collect: at the Vatican no one reports wrongdoing, and few trust or confide in one another. The reform juggernaut of Francis was always at the center of misinformation campaigns and acts of outright sabotage—not only anonymous letters, burglary, and veiled threats like the forwarding of letters to Michele Sindona, but also criminal operations, such as various illegal wiretaps.

Stories like this pop up periodically like underground springs, leaving the small Vatican community aghast. The latest case was in March 2015 and it took place at the Vatican, but as usual, no news of it leaked outside the Leonine Walls. Hidden microphones had been discovered in some offices of the Prefecture. “Unknown hands” had planted a system of bugs in the cars, offices, and homes of some of the priests who work there. They were not just ordinary priests and monsignors. The Prefecture is the control center for the whole financial system of the Holy See. During those weeks the astonished cardinals and monsignors could not stop wondering who would have planted those bugs, and why. The news also landed on the desk of Francis’s personal secretary. One detail made the mystery even more complicated: not all of the hidden microphones worked. Some of them might have been bluffs, rudimentary electronic devices put there to send a message, a warning, to the Pope’s collaborators that no secrets were safe.

Another mystery was that the Gendarmerie, as far as anyone could tell, had not been involved in the investigation. Whose job was it to identify the culprits if not the small state’s internal security forces?

These questions troubled the men who had chosen to collaborate with Francis and believed in his message. And they forced greater caution on this Pope who had arrived in Rome from the ends of the Earth. Perhaps it was no accident that the whole block of Italian cardinals considered responsible for the Vatican’s woes had managed to resist the Argentine Pope with such determination. Many of them were removed from office, it is true, but not all of them. Bertello remained at the helm of the Governorate. Calcagno was leading APSA. Versaldi had left the Prefecture, but only recently, for the new job of Prefect to one of the most important congregations, the Congregation for Catholic Education.

Francis’s actions are never crude. He is waiting patiently for the majority to step down when they are forced to, at age eighty. In the meantime, he is monitoring them through the figures of men he trusts, like Monsignor Fernando Vérgez Algaza, a Spanish bishop. Promoted to Secretary of the Governorate, for many years he was close to the Argentine Cardinal Eduardo Francisco Pironio. Pironio was one of the cardinals whom Bergoglio used to see at the Vatican with pleasure during his trips from Buenos Aires in the 1980s and 1990s. Francis didn’t seem to mind that a monsignor or cardinal belonged to an organization like Opus Dei, the Legionnaires of Christ, or the Focolari. What he valued above all was the independence, reliability, and consistency of various cardinals. And those who erred were cast out.

The story is told that Francis once met a monsignor with positions of responsibility behaving in a manner unbecoming the cassock he was wearing. Without batting an eye, Francis said: “I want you out of here by tomorrow. Later we’ll decide where.” Only Francis knows if the story is truth or legend. Whatever the case, it is certainly plausible, and it captures his character perfectly.

Divide and Conquer

It would be simplistic and misleading to reduce the conflicts to a division between two worlds: on the one side the reformers, Francis together with Pell, Zahra, and de Franssu, who since July 2014 has been the number one man at the IOR; on the other, the “Italian” curia that obstructs and resists him. The situation is much more complex and muddled. The clearest example of this may be Vatican Asset Management (VAM), the project realized by de Franssu to better handle the assets of the Vatican.

There were fundamentally two versions of VAM. In the first, the project was meant to gather under one roof the real estate patrimony of the Vatican by creating a kind of sovereign fund. Then the proposal was made to manage part of the IOR investments in a SICAV (Société d’Investissement à Capital Variable—Investment Company with Variable Capital), similar to an open-ended mutual fund in the United States. As a member of COSEA, de Franssu had already heavily promoted this plan in January 2014, for the purpose of building alliances. There were many dinners and meetings with Monsignor Wells of the Secretariat of State and Ernst von Freyberg, who at the time was the head of the IOR. De Franssu found an ally in Zahra, whom he had known ever since their days of working together at MISCO, the Maltese company that Zahra had founded to create incentives for Italian investment into the small island state. In this way COSEA was giving its endorsement and de Franssu presented the VAM project for the approval of the IOR board, chaired by Cardinal Santos Abril y Castelló. But the elderly Cardinal vetoed the idea. De Franssu considered the project fundamental to his future, however, and he refused to give up, so he decided to involve the Pope directly.

The VAM project ended up on the Pope’s desk, in his small suite in the Santa Marta guesthouse. At the end of May, the Pope also rejected the idea, confirming the decision of his cardinal friend. The Holy Father did not want to put too much power in the hands of so few people. Divide and conquer as the ancient Romans used to say: in this case, divide the power among the subordinates and command. In 2015 trust in de Franssu was declining, but not so much because two years earlier Bertone himself had indicated de Franssu as a candidate for the leadership of the IOR, to replace Ettore Gotti Tedeschi. It was more because of the information finding its way into Santa Marta. A very thick and detailed file was delivered to the Pope in June 2014 on the relations between de Franssu and Zahra, and on relations between Zahra and the Vermiglio law office of Messina, for which the Maltese economist had done some work. These relations were completely transparent and above board, but they forced the Pope to reflect on the risk of placing too much power in laymen’s hands.

Another thorn in Francis’s side came from the selection of auditing companies in 2013 and 2014 to redesign the structure of the Curia. Some of the most delicate tasks had been assigned to the American company Promontory Financial Group, including oversight of the IOR’s accounts. Promontory was supposed to be a guarantee, considering the prestige of its founder and CEO. He was Eugene A. Ludwig, a friend and law school classmate of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, with whom he had worked from 1993 to 1998. Many of the company’s managers had been hired after cutting their teeth in federal agencies, to such an extent that the wags in the Vatican and conspiracy theorists saw Promontory as the long hand of the CIA.

In the Holy See there was a torrent of criticism of the powerful American company for its contradictory practices. A prelate who shall remain anonymous was interviewed in June 2015 for the television weekly news magazine Report. In his words, “To be considered transparent you need an independent consultant to certify your accounts. Today the IOR’s accounts are being audited by the American company Promontory, which is paid by the IOR, so it will say whatever the IOR wants it to say. Not to mention that de Franssu’s son was given a job at Promontory.” He was referring to Louis Victor de Franssu, who after studying at Notre Dame in Indiana, had been an intern in London at Goldman Sachs and a parliamentary assistant at the House of Commons before entering Promontory, where he deals with risk management and regulatory compliance.

As if this were not enough, a few weeks later American newspapers reported that the Department of Financial Services was investigating Promontory for its alleged role in the transfer of funds to Iran from the New York branch of the English bank Standard Chartered, back in 2011, when the country was under embargo. This was a source of embarrassment for the Vatican, considering all the sensitive information the Promontory advisors had viewed during their audit of the IOR. Consequently, a thorough control of all outside consultancies was ordered in the summer of 2015 with the instruction to suspend operations with any auditing companies that were not irreplaceable.

The attempt to reform the IOR was another unresolved issue. I have only hinted at it here because the IOR was not a target of the wide-ranging investigation conducted by the COSEA Commission that is the focus of this book. Today the Vatican bank is still impenetrable in many respects, and a world unto itself. It is hardly as opaque as it was during the pontificates of John Paul II—when it didn’t even present a financial report and its clients laundered money from government kickbacks—and of Benedict XVI, but the Vatican bank is still far from trustworthy. The international auditing bodies have expressed positive assessments of the transparency measures introduced, but Francis still has profound doubts about it, though he has said or done nothing decisive about its internal structure. Various old-guard officials and directors have kept their prominent positions. And there are fears of a recurrence of the situation under former President Gotti Tedeschi—worries that money will continue to be misused without the leadership knowing about it.

Will the Pope Win the Battle?

It is hard to answer this question with any certainty. I believe that his project cannot be deferred or avoided, but it is hard to argue that he will succeed in bringing to completion his ambitious mission. There are too many interests at stake, both inside and outside the walls. The Mafia has always fought anyone who tried to destroy criminal systems that were able to launder huge amounts of money, and to turn dirty money into apparently normal legal financial realities. It is no accident that Italian prosecutors who are experts in organized crime, such as Deputy Prosecutor Nicola Gratteri, have repeatedly expressed their fear about threats to Pope Francis’s safety. But he is following the path that he must take, and he will not allow himself to be intimidated—unless the pressures ultimately become so unbearable that he will feel forced to resign, as he slyly insinuates every so often. Francis—the great, singular Pope—has to count the number of his friends every day to make sure he will not be left alone.