Merchants in the Temple (5 page)

As their working quarters, the team chose a modest first-floor location in Casa Santa Marta: Room 127, just a staircase and a corridor away from the papal suite. The office would be dubbed “Area 10,” the sum total of its numbers. A more revealing nickname was coined by Nicola Maio, the Secretary of the Commission: “St. Michael's Room,” after Michael the Archangel, the guardian angel of delicate tasks. (The winged Archangel Michael, with armor and a sword, is always celebrated as the defender of faith in God against the satanic hordes of Lucifer.)

The most popular saying among the members during their meetings was in Spanish, the language of Bergoglio: “
Aquì
la gracias de dios es mucha pero el demonio está
en persona
”—Here the grace of God is great but the devil is here in person.

The utmost attention and discretion was required to protect the sensitive information that was being gathered. A revolution was about to begin and the Pope's men knew the risks involved. To prevent wiretaps, Zahra immediately signed an agreement with Vodafone (a multi-national mobile phone company): every advisor would receive a special Maltese phone number and an iPhone 5. The members called it the “white telephone,” after the color of the cover. A private line would be used to send all the passwords for access to encrypted documents, which would be sent by email. At the cost of 100,000 euros, an exclusive server was also provided that would be accessible only to the computers of the COSEA members. Don Alfredo Abbondi, the office chief of the Prefecture, requested from the procurement office of the Governorate a safe in which to keep the most highly classified dossiers. The members of the Commission felt protected by these measures. Little did they realize that every precaution would prove to be useless.

Objective Number One

Four days after the formal act of establishing the Commission, COSEA was already operative. The members were excited and highly motivated. The work promised to be both delicate and massive. “The Holy Father has identified seven key elements to be evaluated in the Holy See,” according to the preliminary document.
10
The most important ranged from the “over-expansion in employees” and the “lack of transparency in expenditures and procedures,” to “insufficient control over suppliers and their contracts.” They needed to find out the “number, physical condition and rents of real estate whose status was unclear,” as well as the revenue, to counter the “inadequate oversight of investments in terms of risk and ethical standards.” There would also be a careful examination of the so-called “satellite administrations” and the cash-flow and financial transactions in certain dicasteries.

On July 22, the Coordinating Secretary, Monsignor Vallejo Balda—who handled communications between the Commission and the various representatives of the Curia—asked Cardinal Versaldi, the President of the Prefecture and his direct superior, to circulate a letter prepared by COSEA addressed to every administrative body within the Vatican walls. Versaldi did so a few hours later. In the letter, the Commission requested the following documentation: financial statements from the past five years, lists of employees, lists of outside collaborators and their résumés, all wages and compensation, and, finally, contracts for the supply of goods and services that had been signed since January 1, 2013.

The next to the last paragraph of the long letter containing COSEA's requests set off the loudest alarms within the Curia. It was a specific, targeted request on a very sensitive issue in the Church that touched the hearts of millions of the faithful: saints, who through their actions set an example of universal goodness and love. For many Catholics, saints were objects of worship. The Commission wanted to receive immediately the financial statements, movements, and banking documents “of the economic entities relative to postulators of beatification and canonization causes.”

The first battle front had been opened. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints was being summoned for questioning. This structure manages the complex process for conferring sainthood or beatitude on individuals who have distinguished themselves by their good deeds. Every cause is handled and proposed by a postulator, who opens the cause, prepares the investigation, documents it, and, over the years, bolsters the file with acts and findings that will hopefully lead to the beatification or canonization of the candidate. Currently there are 2,500 pending causes filed by 450 postulators.

The Congregation was headed by a staunch ally of Bertone, Cardinal Angelo Amato, who was also a close associate of the previous Pope. Amato had taken Bertone's place at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as the deputy of Joseph Ratzinger, who after his election to the throne of St. Peter made Amato the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

This powerful cardinal grasped the exact meaning of the message forwarded by Versaldi: the Pope knew where to strike. He was well informed and he acted quickly. COSEA gave the departments only a few days to collect the information: “While taking into consideration the period in which the present request is made, we expect to receive the documentation by July 31.” Eight days, for a Curia accustomed to peaceful summer months with little work and a Pope at Castel Gandolfo taking refuge from the summer heat, was an unprecedented timeline.

There were various explanations for this tight deadline. First, the Commission wanted to prevent any alteration and manipulation of information: the less time for the ill-intentioned, the better. And there was an important date on the calendar. On August 3, the members of the Commission would meet for their inaugural session. They would assemble in the small conference room opposite the sacristy of the chapel, in the same place where only a few weeks earlier Francis had urged Zahra and the auditors of the Prefecture to be brave, and report wrongdoing for the sake of change.

The Saints' Factory

The first meeting of the Commission was convened at noon. It was also attended by the Pope, who remained for fifty minutes, taking the floor several times to express his firm will and his encouragement to the participants. I have the minutes of that meeting in my possession. They document the Pope's absolute clarity. (Note below that Francis is speaking—he refers to himself in the third person.)

We at the Curia need an approach that is different, fresher than our traditional way of doing things. At the root of our problems is a
nouveau riche
attitude that allows money to be spent indiscriminately. In the meantime, we lose sight of the reasons for what we are doing—our goal is that the money go to help the poor and to people living in misery. The current problems are culture and a lack of responsibility. The Pope is confident that the Commission will introduce these reforms, but he realizes that we have to be cautious when we [address questions that might involve] jobs and means of subsistence for the laypeople who work at the Vatican. He insists that the Commission be courageous in making its recommendations and not look back. He will always consult the Commission before making changes, but it has no collegial authority. If the Pope disagrees with our proposals, he will discuss them with us and he will make the decision.
11

Without reforms, the pontificate would fail. So as soon as Francis left the meeting, the members of COSEA established their program of work, with six priorities:

1. APSA: especially the special section—the need for a strategic review and a microanalysis of its operations, including Real Estate;

2. The management of the accounts of the postulants who work for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints;

3. Commercial activities (supermarket, pharmacy, etc.) within the Vatican walls;

4. Management of the hospitals;

5. The assessment of artworks;

6. Pensions.

To help achieve their objectives, the Commission also turned to external advisors from the world of business consultation: giants like KPMG, McKinsey & Company, Ernst & Young, and Promontory Financial Group. A task force of seventy experts from outside companies who would work with the Vatican was set up.

At the request for documentation, many offices replied immediately, sending their papers and offering every possible collaboration. But not everyone complied. The most disappointing response came from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints: “The Congregation”—so read the seraphic response of the department led by Cardinal Amato—“has nothing to do with the management of postulators and is not in possession of the requested documentation.”

No documents. No justification and bookkeeping for an activity involving tens of millions of euros, at least not in the possession of the Congregation. Yet these are huge sums of money for which Vatican regulations demand proper bookkeeping. To simply open a cause for beatification costs 50,000 euros, supplemented by the 15,000 euros in actual operating costs. This amount covers the rights of the Holy See and the hefty compensation of the expert theologians, physicians, and bishops who examine the cause. After adding the costs of the researchers' time, the drafting of the candidate's
positio
—a kind of résumé of all his or her works—and finally, the work of the postulator, the amount skyrockets. The average price tag comes to about 500,000 euros. We then have to consider the costs of all the thank-you gifts required for the prelates who are invited to festivities and celebrations held at crucial moments in the process, to say a few words about the acts and miracles of the future saint or blessed. Record spending on these causes has reached as high as 750,000 euros, such as the process that led to the beatification in 2007 of Antonio Rosmini.

Under John Paul II the “saints' factory” anointed 1,338 blesseds in 147 rites of beatification and 482 saints in 51 celebrations—astronomical figures that far surpass any previous levels in Church history. Numbers that had led Pope John Paul II, as far back as 1983, to order that the funds for these causes be managed by the postulators, who were assigned the “duty to keep regularly-updated ledgers on the capital, value, interests, and money in the coffers for every single cause.”
12
The postulators conduct a delegated activity that requires oversight. Apparently no one had ever bothered to check on them.

The Commission Freezes the Bank Accounts

Amato's response from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints was baffling. He was implicitly acknowledging that the financial activities involved in these causes were unregulated. The Commission's reaction was swift and severe. On August 3, at the very first meeting, Zahra, after obtaining the Pope's assent, made an unprecedented decision—he asked Versaldi to freeze all the bank accounts linked to the postulators and their cases at APSA and the IOR.

It is clear that the activity of the postulators is not autonomous but rather “delegated” by a superior authority, to which they must report and be accountable. Since once “a cause has been transmitted to the Holy See the task of oversight is up to the holy Congregation,” and since the task of oversight is equivalent to that of a bishop in the diocesan phase of the cause, it is deemed necessary to evaluate in concert with this Prefecture the taking of possible precautionary measures, in order to enable the competent Congregation to do whatever is necessary to perform the task assigned to it. The following is hereby requested: to order, with immediate effect, the temporary freezing of the accounts of the postulators and of the individual causes at the IOR or APSA, whoever the account holder may be.

Zahra also revealed the clue that set off the alarm, which concerns the poor. In fact, Vatican regulations provide that

for every cause that is brought before the Holy Congregation, the postulators shall deposit a contribution to the Fund for the Causes of the Poor [a fund created to finance beatification causes submitted by the poorest dioceses]. After the beatification of a servant of God, and once all the expenses required for the cause have been settled, 20% of the remaining amounts of the offerings from the faithful collected for that cause [must be] devolved to the Fund for the Causes of the Poor. After canonization, it is up to the Holy See to dispose of the remaining amounts of the offerings collected, one part of which, to be established on a case-by-case basis, will be assigned to the Fund for the Causes of the Poor. From the examination of the books relative to the Fund for the Causes of the Poor presented by the Congregation for recent years, it would appear that these obligations have not been fulfilled. In fact, the above-mentioned Fund has grown in a very limited manner.

In other words, the Fund for the Causes of the Poor—indispensable to assuring the processing of applications from dioceses with fewer resources—was not growing. This raised the Commission's suspicions. Zahra requested the freezing of accounts and demanded full documentation for each and every postulator and cause. In the first six months of its investigation, COSEA was shocked to find that considerable sums of cash arrived in the offices of the postulators for which there was no proper accounting, and concluded that there was “insufficient oversight of the cash-flow for canonizations.”
13

Attention was focused in particular on “two lay postulators (Andrea Ambrosi and Silvia Correale) who managed various cases and commanded high rates. Each of them was responsible for 90 causes out of a total of 2,500 divided among 450 postulators.”
14
Since each postulator manages an average of five to six cases, this means that two people together control a disproportionate number: 180, constituting a kind of monopoly. Among the most significant examples emerging from COSEA's investigation:

•
From 2008 to 2013, 43,000 euros were spent on a canonization that seems to show no progress and no proper budget or financial statements on how the funds were used;