In the space of a week, Pope Francis reduced the responsibilities of Cardinal George Pell and rebuffed an initiative by Cardinal Robert Sarah. …
Pope Francis [also] did a pretty good number on Australian Cardinal George Pell by once more drastically reducing his powers as prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy (SFE).
The pope issued a new “motu proprio” last Saturday that essentially reverses a 2014 law that had given Pell’s office managing control over the Holy See’s real estate and investments portfolios.
The new decree returns this control to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA) – headed by Italian Cardinal Domenico Calcagno – in order to ensure an “unequivocal and full separation” between the office that manages the Vatican’s assets (APSA) and the one that exercises vigilance over (or monitors) that management (SFE).
“I intend to confirm the fundamental line that it is necessary to separate the direct management of assets from the tasks of control and vigilance over management activities,” the pope says in the new decree.
“To that end, it is of the utmost importance that bodies responsible for vigilance are separated from those that are being overseen,” he writes.
In essence this means the only area of Vatican finances that will be directly controlled by Pell’s office are human resources and payroll. APSA resumes full control of asset management, purchasing and contracts, as well as support services such as information technology.
Many in the Vatican are shaking their heads because, after spending millions of dollars on big-name, international consultancy companies to help reform the Holy See’s financial management, it seems like everything has returned to the way things were before Pope Francis even began the costly reforms.
It seems as if the new Secretariat for the Economy has merely been given a more beefed-up role of oversight – and with some real teeth – than that which the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See (now in institutional limbo) was originally intended to have.
I am not surprised. Continue reading
- Robert Mickens writes Letters from Rome each week for Global Pulse. See link: globalpulsemagazine.com