Merchants in the Temple (26 page)

The meeting concluded with two solid points. The first was the reorganization of the Curia hierarchy in matters pertaining to the economic and financial structure. The second was the budgets: they would have to be approved by the new Council for the Economy. Pell had won the battle: for months the budgets would remain in limbo, waiting to be approved, leaving the Holy See in a kind of financial purgatory: they would carry on with the budgets corrected by the auditors—this was Parolin's policy—until the new Council ordered by Bergoglio kicked into action.

The stalemate would last until March 21, when Father Luigi Mistò, the right-hand man of Calcagno, would send to all the departments that reported to APSA the guidelines for rewriting the 2014 budget with “corrections and modifications to the expenses initially planned, thereby incorporating the observation of the international auditors.”

Pell made it clear that he was very familiar with the Curia's secrets. At the conclusion of the Council of 15 he gave his cardinal brothers advance notice of what the COSEA experts had discovered in their analysis of the Holy See's finances: namely, that many administrative bodies had “buried treasure” that was not recorded on the balance sheets. Do not fool yourself—the Australian Cardinal intimated—those mysterious off-budget reserves are providential today, in the midst of the crisis: they will become indispensable as we move forward, given the constant revelations of deficits in the account books, which are only destined to get worse.

Starting in March 2014, Pell dedicated himself to his new assignment. He met often with Francis on a confidential basis to come to an agreement on the new members of the Council for the Economy, and he flew to Malta to meet with Zahra, who would be one of the five COSEA commissioners chosen to be a lay member of the new Council. The other two laypersons included a friend of Zahra, the Italian Francesco Vermiglio. The selection of Vermiglio sparked discontent and criticism because of a potential conflict of interest. According to an investigation by the Italian magazine
l'Espresso
, Vermiglio was Zahra's partner in Misco Advisory Ltd., a joint venture created to stimulate Italian investments in the small Mediterranean island of Malta.

Seven of the cardinals who had served on the preceding C15 were also confirmed. The only new religious faces were Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo from the diocese of Galveston-Houston, and Reinhard Marx, the Archbishop of Munich. The Secretariat's offices would be in the St. John Tower, a medieval structure located in the highest part of the Vatican gardens, generally used to receive important guests. In practice, it was the only free building in the whole state.

Logistics would be handled by Xuereb, who asked Calcagno and Monsignor Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, Secretary of the Governorate, to order “20 computers, 6 printers, 21 landline phones, a loudspeaker for sending and receiving calls,” so that all the work stations distributed over four floors and their relative internet connections would be immediately operative.
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He also asked that the most important offices be equipped with shredders to guarantee the confidentiality of the most sensitive files.

The new Council had four important appointments on the calendar for 2014: the first was on May 2 in the Sala Bologna of the Apostolic Palace, then there were others in July, September, and December. The seating arrangements for these first meetings already gave a sense of the change under way. Religious and laypersons would alternate, a visual demonstration of how power is distributed. But unfortunately that didn't happen. The community chosen by Francis, made up of strong personalities from different cultures and backgrounds, was riddled with venom, malicious gossip, and traps. And month after month, its initial ambitious project would be downsized.

The Rise of Pell, Survivor of the Pedophile Scandals

Pell had been promoted to cardinal in 2003 by John Paul II. His controversial past deserves the appropriate attention. In 2010 Benedict XVI had mentioned him as a possible prefect of the powerful Congregation for Bishops, to succeed Giovanni Battista Re, who had reached the age of retirement. But when Francis arrived at the Vatican he didn't know Pell, or at least they weren't friends, although they had met in 2012 when the Australian was appointed Father of the XIII Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.

At the Vatican, immediately after the election of Francis, Pell became one of the Councilors on the C15. The Council is a venerable body but without great power. Yet by increasing its functions through an internal audit, it had the capability of becoming the operative arm of the Pope's soft revolution.

In the spring of 2013, Pell was trying to envision the pathway to change and to identify the councilors closest to the Pope. He guessed correctly the new climate that the Pope wanted to bring into the Curia, and he wanted to play a central role in the project of restructuring the Vatican. In particular, he started to spend time with Cardinal Santos Abril y Castelló, Francis's good friend and the next President of the IOR. He also approached Monsignor Vallejo Balda, the Secretary of the Prefecture and later the Coordinator of COSEA. (Vallejo Balda was the prelate who had immediately reported many critical flaws to the Pontiff, starting with the embezzlement he had discovered at the St. Mary Major Basilica.) Finally, the Australian Cardinal developed a solid relationship with Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and the coordinator of the then C8.

Pell's detractors claimed that the Cardinal had a single objective in those weeks: to obtain for himself a post in the Apostolic Palace and leave Sydney behind, thereby fleeing the aggressive investigation being conducted by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. There had been many reported cases of pedophilia in the diocese of Melbourne from 1996 to 2001, when Pell was Archbishop. It was suspected that the new Prefect had not cooperated with the investigators and had concealed the dramatic stories of minors who had been abused by priests in his diocese.

There was also the time, in October 2012, that Pell himself had been cleared of accusations that he had abused a twelve-year-old catechism student at a camp for altar boys in 1961. Or the accusations against him by a former altar boy, John Ellis, shortly after his appointment as Prefect. Ellis named the Church responsible for the violence he had suffered between 1974 and 1979, when he was abused by a priest who has since died. The former altar boy lost the first lawsuit in 2007. During the investigation his physical scars verified the abuse but the diocese was not found legally responsible for the appalling incidents.

Pell was left legally unscathed by these various accusations, which he had always rejected, but they did land him in the headlines of newspapers throughout the world. His biggest accuser was Peter Saunders, a victim of abuse during his childhood in Wimbledon and as of December 2014, handpicked by Bergoglio to be a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Saunders had repeatedly demanded that Pell be fired. During an episode of the Australian edition of
60 Minutes
, Saunders accused Pell of dodging the work and the questions of the Australian Commission of Inquest. “He is making a mockery of the child victims of sexual abuse. He is a dangerous individual, almost sociopathic. He acted with callousness and cold-heartedness.”

Nor should we forget the criticisms of the “Melbourne Response,” the 1996 protocol approved by Pell that provided for modest damages to the victims of pedophile priests. The document put a cap on damages of $50,000, whereas in court the victims were being awarded even six times that amount. The Cardinal had a ready response: “Many of the people we helped through the compensation panel would have received nothing or very little if they had gone through the courts.” But the findings of the Australian Royal Commission in its preliminary report were truly negative:

The high prelate did not act fairly from a Christian point of view. The archdiocese over which he presided preferred to safeguard and protect its own resources rather than provide justice.

Pell was also famous for some of his particularly unfortunate public statements, starting with his remarks about Islam being “an essentially bellicose religion, the Koran is studded with invocations to violence.” Another incident was on August 22, 2014, when, during a hearing of the Royal Commission on videoconference, Pell argued that “pedophile priests are like truck drivers who molest hitchhikers: neither the Church nor the trucking company can be held responsible,” sparking outrage in the courthouse and in public opinion. Yet it should also be mentioned that during his testimony, the Cardinal confessed that his archdiocese had not “acted fairly.”

The Commission's Costs

But nothing seemed to slow down the career of this cardinal, who now had an agenda filled with appointments, for the purpose of rationalizing the Curia's accounts once and for all. The action would be planned and developed over a three year period, from 2014–2016. The roadmap would create conflicts and enemies but it could also count on sizable resources.

The Secretariat had a surprisingly large budget: 4.2 million euros. To understand how it was used, let's take a look at its ledgers. First, there were the expenses of COSEA, which cost 2.5 million euros. Much of this amount went to consultants' fees, since the Commission's members all worked pro bono.

Thanks to my access to the documentation, I am the first who can specify who was paid what. Promontory received 980,000 euros for its audit of APSA, McKinsey 420,000 for the Vatican Media Center, Oliver Wyman 270,000 for its analysis of the pension funds, Ernst & Young 230,000 for its inspections of the Governorate, and KPMG 110,000 for accounting procedures. Although the official amounts would never be released by the small circle of the Pope's loyalists, the consultancy fees were the basis for one of the first attacks on Francis: how could the Holy Father balance the budget if he was spending such large amounts of money on a new round of consultants?

The Secretariat for the Economy would not become operative until March 2015, when its rules and regulations were approved. But in 2014, according to the reconstructions of newspapers, more than 500,000 euros were spent on travel, computers, clothing, and consultancies. Danny Casey, an economist and longtime friend of Pell, reportedly received 15,000 euros a month for his services:

For Casey the Secretariat of the Economy even rented an apartment for 2,900 euros a month on Via dei Coronari and paid for top-quality office and home furnishings: under the item “wallpaper” the table indicates 7,292 euros; more than 47,000 for “furniture and cabinets,” including a kitchen-sink cabinet for 4,600 euros, in addition to various jobs for 33,000 euros. The Cardinal added in a handwritten note expenses also for purchases at Gammarelli's, the historic tailor shop that since 1798 has dressed the Curia of the eternal city: in general the cardinals pay out of pocket for their cassock and cap, but this time the Secretariat received a bill directly of 2,508 euros for clothing.
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Despite his controversial past and expensive tastes, especially at a time of budget cuts and austerity, Pell was a frightening figure, and for many in the Curia this was the main reason behind the attacks on him. Cardinal Maradiaga would brand these reports as “slander: it's like Marxism that attacked the person since it couldn't attack the idea. Pell is a frugal man and he does not like luxury.”

Poisonous Rumors

From the day of his installation at the Secretariat of the Economy, poisonous rumors had been spread about Pell in an effort to isolate, discredit, and exhaust him. The consolidation of all the economic departments under a superdicastery was behind schedule. For months there was no movement on the transfer of competencies, such as placing the Secretariat of State's personnel office under a single unit directed by Pell. Key staff members had still not been appointed. All of this left the situation of the economic dicasteries exactly as it had been before: apart from public announcements, nothing had changed. For example, although there was an announcement of the transfer to Pell's jurisdiction of APSA's ordinary section—which handles the real estate—nothing was done.

Although the Prefecture was supposed to be closed as early as possible, it was still open for business throughout the summer of 2015. The position of auditor general had been authorized in February 2014, but there would not be an appointment until sixteen months later, on June 5, 2015. The man selected was Libero Milone, a professional with thirty-two years of experience at Deloitte, a consultancy company in which he had also served as CEO (for Italy). Into the summer of 2015, there was still friction between the Secretariat for the Economy and APSA over who should keep the archives, since they shared jurisdiction over real estate: one handled management, the other supervision.

Vatican managers opposed and obstructed Pell and Bergoglio's plans, in the conviction that they could stop innovation and discredit the Pope through a war of attrition. “They used to say,” a cardinal confided in me, “that the Church is two thousand years old and will survive even the priests. Today they might regret to admit that some bad apples in the Curia will survive even the pontiffs of change.”

The Cleaning Crew

To accelerate the reform and disempower the opposition, on both the theological and financial fronts, Francis began to replace en masse the members of the old guard still in command at many of the offices that controlled the activities of the small state. But first he equipped himself with the means to make it easier. In the fall of 2014 he enacted regulations that would set the retirement age at 75 for directors of dicasteries. He also introduced a measure allowing him to request early retirement for members, “after having made known the reasons for the request” to the person affected in the context of a “fraternal dialogue”—as can be read in the document signed by Parolin on November 5, 2014.