Merchants in the Temple (14 page)

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To be requested with cardinal vouchers (white) to be used at the internal facilities of the Holy See.

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and/or vouchers for use outside of Rome at gas stations that do not belong to the AGIP-Eni group, exclusively for motor vehicles with Vatican City and Diplomatic license plates. To get these arrangements under way, it would be useful for a member of your staff to contact the fuel office of the Economic Services Department of the Governorate.

While remaining at your disposal for any further clarification you may require, I avail myself willingly of this opportunity to renew the assurances of my humble regard for Your Most Reverend Eminence.

Your devoted servant, Fernando Vergez Alzaga

Perks and preferential treatment were still being offered under Francis and promised to the Curia nomenclature and even the new Pope's trusted men. The letter left a bitter taste with Cardinal Pell, who filed it away. The following October someone from inside the Apostolic Palaces leaked it to a reporter who covers the Vatican for the newspaper
la Repubblica
, Marco Ansaldo. The journalist remarks that he has almost never seen a cardinal smoking. So who are all those cigarette cartons going to? In his article Ansaldo does not exclude the possibility that they are resold by someone who is pocketing the difference between the discount and the resale price: “There are even nasty rumors that the person who receives the cartons turns around and sells them on eBay.”

 

6

The Immense Real Estate Holdings of the Vatican

The Roman Catholic Church has immense real estate holdings, ones that are internationally unique. No one knows their true extent and value, however—not even the Curia. Some data is registered in its financial statements, but the COSEA Commission soon discovered that those statements were unreliable. APSA's holdings—ranging from commercial and residential properties to institutional buildings—turned out to be worth seven times the amount recorded in the account books. The market value of APSA is 2.7 billion euros, a figure that the Commission was able to document accurately the first time that they investigated the holdings.

The rentals in question were managed with both carelessness and cunning. This practice applied not only to apartments granted to Vatican higher-ups—the princely residences provided free of charge to some cardinals, described in Chapter 3—but also to homes leased to many outside collaborators or friends. I had exclusive access to all of APSA's rental records. Of about five thousand properties, mostly in the center of Rome and in the Vatican City, the monthly rent is less than 1,000 euros. Hundreds of documents were classified as
A0
(
Affitto 0
), which stands for “zero rent.” Other tenants pay less than 100 euros per year: that's right, per year. One particularly lucky tenant—whose apartment is located in the heart of Rome—pays 20 euros a year. In the Curia, the home is a status symbol, the proof of how much its inhabitant counts.

Favoritism and opportunism are the order of business for APSA. The Commission discovered that one of Italy's largest banks, Banca Intesa, had paid a security deposit of only 1,864 euros for an office it was renting from the Vatican. These vulgar, paradoxical circumstances are particularly intolerable by comparison to the situations of ordinary citizens. I was able to document this through my access to the papers reserved for Francis's trusted men.

A little background will help the reader to understand the climate and the characters that Francis and his men were confronting. One example of a grasp for power is illustrated in this story focusing on Monsignor Giuseppe Sciacca. Born in 1955 in Aci Catena, Sicily, a small municipality in the Province of Catania, His Eminence apparently had a weakness for comfortable and—above all—spacious living. He loved to throw cocktail parties and dinners for friends, but he apparently considered his beautiful apartment in the Palazzo San Carlo too modest (for which he paid no rent, of course).

On September 3, 2011, Sciacca was appointed Secretary General of the Governorate. Benedict XVI's loyal friend, Tarcisio Bertone, had convinced him to entrust the Monsignor with the delicate role of number two man at the Governorate, taking the place of Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò. As I related in
His Holiness,
Viganò had attempted to straighten out the finances of the Governorate, denouncing the inflated contracts, excessive spending, and even episodes of outright theft. Rather than be rewarded for his efforts, he was exiled to Washington as Apostolic Nuncio, after a vigorous mano a mano with Bertone. He had encroached on too many interests, making enemies along the way, and the Curia doesn't forgive.
1

Viganò had lost his position after a vigorous standoff with Secretary of State Bertone. Sciacca, on the other hand, posed no threat to the status quo. He would serve under the President of the Governorate, Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, another Italian and a Bertone loyalist, like most of the heads of the various dicasteries that control the Church's finances. Bertone's influence in the Curia was at its peak in the fall of 2011. He had managed to create a power block by putting Italian cardinals and bishops that he trusted into the most strategic positions: a block that Francis inherited from Ratzinger, and with which he engaged immediately in a pitched war.

Less than one year into his prestigious appointment, Monsignor Sciacca was itching to do something about his “modest” home. He wanted another apartment, more spacious and accommodating, but he didn't know how to go about getting it. The only solution was to wait for the right opportunity, and the right opportunity came knocking one fateful morning. All he needed was a little cynicism and cunning and the deal would be done. With the speed of a jackal, the Monsignor devised a plan that was so brazen that it seems unbelievable even today.

Sciacca's target was his neighbor, an elderly mild-mannered priest in declining health who lived with a nun and who had stopped going out some time ago. He was no longer seen taking walks around the Vatican. The Monsignor inquired after him and learned that in recent months the poor priest had been under constant care and medical supervision. At the moment, he was in the hospital receiving emergency specialized care. Rumors about his health started to spread: many wrote him off as dying while others doubted he would ever return to his apartment.

The time had come to act. Sciacca called in his trusted construction company, pointed to the dividing wall between the two apartments, and asked them to knock it down to connect the two units. He needed more valuable square footage to make his abode more comfortable. Although the workers were surprised at the request, in a few hours the job was done and a passage had been built into the neighboring apartment. A new room, to be used as a parlor, appeared magically in the Monsignor's residence, while the apartment of the ailing priest, unbeknownst to him, was downsized.

Sciacca did not stop there. He also “incorporated” the furniture of the appropriated room, which had come from the “Floreria,” the Governorate office that also handles the furniture of senior prelates. The priest's personal belongings were placed in cardboard boxes and left in the hallway, as if he were preparing to move. Finally, the door from the newly conquered room to the rest of the priest's apartment was walled up.

The story was greeted by shock, hilarity, and discontent within the Curia—especially when the elderly priest, who had no intention of moving on to greener pastures, returned home. Imagine his astonishment! As soon as he opened the door he realized something was wrong: his apartment had been modified, and was missing one room, but he was too old to fight back and seek justice.

Not so his brave and trustworthy housemate, the nun, who conferred with some other nuns, asking their advice. While they invited her to use caution, she found the injustice intolerable and decided to go all the way to the top and address the Pope himself. She wrote a passionate letter to Benedict XVI telling him the story and pleading for justice and mercy. But these were the last months of his papacy, and a few weeks later the situation changed irreversibly: the elderly priest died, Ratzinger resigned, and Francis became the new Pontiff. The tide was turning.

Only five months into Francis's papacy, he demoted Monsignor Sciacca, sending him notice of his transfer to a new assignment. In a matter of a few days he was to leave his office at the Governorate and assume a new post. Rather than wait for a coveted spot to open up on the Holy See's roster of senior positions, a new position was tailor-made for Sciacca. On August 24, 2013, he was appointed as the Adjunct Secretary of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. This was the Tribunal that handles legal and administrative cases, and its Prefect was American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, who was not exactly in Francis's good graces. Burke and Bergoglio had sharp theological differences. The Wisconsin prelate, born in 1948, continued to celebrate the Tridentine Mass despite the liturgical reforms almost sixty years earlier through the Second Vatican Council. His days were also numbered: in November he, too, was removed from office as part of the ongoing “soft revolution” of Francis, which would continue throughout 2014.

Getting back to the matter of the enlarged apartment, the Monsignor was called upon to quickly evacuate the premises after losing his post at the Governorate, and the apartment was assigned to another prelate. Stories such as these went public for the first time, traveling all the way to Casa Santa Marta and Francis, who was left speechless. The incidents also revived old stories about misdeeds that had never been addressed with the necessary firmness. Cardinal Santo Abril y Castelló related to Francis and the priests and monsignors closest to him problems he had discovered upon his appointment as archpriest of the Santa Maria Maggiore. The treasurer of the Basilica, the Polish Monsignor Bronisław Morawiec, was convicted of embezzlement and misappropriation of Church funds and sentenced to three years imprisonment for withdrawing large sums from the rich Basilica's account at the IOR. To understand what and how much had been misappropriated, the new archpriest wrote up an inventory of sorts.

One of the missing items was a set of keys to an apartment in the adjacent building, one which houses priests and ecclesiastics. The front door of the apartment was locked and the entrance was clean and neat. Officially, the home did not appear to be rented, and it was ready for a new tenant when necessary. At least, this was the situation on paper—but as soon as the inspectors gained access, they were shocked to find that the apartment had been inhabited for quite some time. The priest in the apartment downstairs had cut a hole in the ceiling to connect the two units with a spiral staircase, which he bought at his own expense. This allowed him to double the square footage of his living space, convinced that no one would ever notice. Once the illegal expansion was discovered, his superiors were immediately notified.

Cut-Rate Deals on Real Estate

These two cases are not isolated. The immense real estate holdings of the Vatican are a challenge to Francis's program and another thorn in the side of his Pontificate. The recent history of the Vatican's management of its real estate has not exactly been happy. Under both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the convents, buildings, and churches were administered without a common strategy, and management was characterized by waste, nepotism, and outright scandals. But these problems were never addressed, and passed along from pope to pope for decades. The status quo prevailed, enabling the more powerful or more astute to take advantage of the general state of neglect.

Fundamental information was missing from the records, starting with the most important: the value of the real estate holdings, which no one knew. There was no comprehensive assessment of properties of all of the Vatican's administrative bodies or of the Church's entities and religious orders in the world, such as a general land registry that would provide a standardized list of all of the properties. The dicasteries' data banks did have assessments, but their listings and descriptions were incomplete. Not all of the properties were listed, and the units that were listed did not always include the basic financials. This created the potential for many more stories like that of Monsignor Sciacca.

I am not speaking of religious orders with properties in remote corners of Africa but rather about entities within the Holy See. I was able to see the internal database of APSA, which administers 5,050 assets in apartments, offices, stores, and land in the City of Rome. It's a highly confidential database that I managed to access and make public. Until 2014 APSA's financial statements were not even published. In combing through the data, a number of peculiarities crop up. First, no one within the Vatican walls has apparently updated photos of the assets, nor are they organized in any way. Even the square footage is often missing: for over 50 percent of the units—2,685 to be exact—there is no indication of the size of the apartment, shop, or office, making it impossible to assess the appropriateness of the rent. In many other cases the exact location within a building is missing or there is no indication of the rental fees. Taken as a whole, these factors prevent income optimization and the adoption of effective strategies when properties are being bought or sold.

The fact that the Vatican's real estate holdings outside the Holy See are subject to taxation, thereby greatly reducing its rental income, should not be underestimated. APSA President Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, a Bertone loyalist, addressed this uncomfortable issue in his July 30, 2013, letter to Zahra:

It appears that a number of assets have not been recorded in the APSA patrimony, despite their belonging to various entities in the Roman Curia (as a by no means exhaustive example, there is real estate held by the Apostolic Camera, the College of Cardinals…), while, on the opposite side, there are properties [that appear] to be formally owned by the Holy See but have for some time been fully possessed and used, often without any form of contractual agreement, by parishes and religious institutions … As things currently stand, delicate issues relating to both the financial profile and more in general to the responsibilities stemming from ownership of these assets remain unsettled.… Although these assets are considered tax exempt because they are “formally” declared to be related to “needs of worship,” they are instead used for other purposes (even commercial) without any possible inspection or assessment by the current administration, which remains ignorant of the way the asset is actually used. The tax issue is a very serious one because exemption is strictly limited to use of these properties “for needs of worship,” while no exemption is granted for other uses, exposing APSA to the risk of a tax audit.