Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican's secretary for the economy, told cardinals last week that $0.5 billion in assets had been purposefully excluded from a 2013 overall balance sheet.

And US$1billion should have been included in that report but wasn't.

These omissions were not because of illegal activity, Cardinal Pell told Crux's John Allen.

Rather, they were because of an overly compartmentalised and unwieldy Vatican reporting system that allowed significant pockets of assets to go undetected.

The $US1.5billion figure is several times larger than an estimate in December.

Cardinals were also told the Vatican's real estate holdings may be undervalued by a factor of four.

But the Vatican's pension fund is looking at a projected deficit of nearly US$1billion, although the fund is secure for the next 10-15 years.

Cardinal Pell said elderly cardinals were assured "their pensions are secure", but warned the shortfall could be even higher due to interest rate trends.

He said the latest financial reports presented to cardinals is the first time "we've had a comprehensive and, we believe, accurate picture about what's going on economically".

But even now he's not sure that all assets are yet fully accounted for.

Cardinal Pell said the "clean-up effort" on the Vatican's finances initially drew "enthusiastic opposition", especially from some of the Vatican's other traditional centres of power such as the Secretariat of State.

But that opposition dimmed after Pope Francis approved a new set of procedures for money management last October, he said.

"We have to make it terribly difficult to return to waste and inefficiency and some measure of corruption," Cardinal Pell said.

An independent auditor general reporting directly to the Pope is another reform on the horizon.

Cardinal Pell promised that later this year "for the first time ever in Vatican history", the various departments will be providing quarterly reports comparing expenditures to budgets.

American Cardinal Daniel DiNardo said a move to have one consolidated budget for the entire Vatican is encountering significant resistance from forces which feel threatened by reform.

Sources

• Crux
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Australian Women's Weekly

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, also told Crux in a wide-ranging interview on Saturday that he's skeptical about proposals to allow divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive Communion.

That's especially significant since DiNardo, vice president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, was recently elected by US bishops as one of four US delegates to an October Synod of Bishops at the Vatican, where that issue is expected to be debated.

On the subject of Vatican reform, DiNardo was reacting to a presentation given to all the cardinals of the world on Thursday by the pope's council of nine cardinal advisors, which featured the idea of creating two new "super-departments," one for justice and peace and the other for the laity and the family, by combining a number of smaller offices.

"But how are they going to do that, to find a way to put together a number of Vatican congregations?" he asked. "If you do that, the structure has to be different. And that I did not hear," he said.

Other suggestions for reform, such as including lay people at the highest level of Church governance, will face resistance, he said.

"It's fine by me," he said of including laypeople generally. "The problem is, to bring anybody in as a head, there's a question the canonists raise, can [a layperson] be head if they have delegated power [from the pope]?"

He said it isn't possible to have laypeople lead major Vatican departments, such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

"You're dealing with issues relative to theology and the very dimension of the faith. I think the pope wants somebody there who's at least a bishop," he said. Continue reading

Article and Image:

• Crux