Ex-jailbird Pell: Vatican Has Swept Out ‘most, If Not All Of Its Crooks’

CARDINAL George Pell, above, who spent 400 days in an Australian prison before having his conviction for sexual abuse quashed, has been ruminating on, among other things, the state of the Vatican’s finances.

According to Religion News Service, he revealed they are not in great shape, but:

It’s a little bit graphic to say the Vatican is going broke. It isn’t. But they can’t keep losing money at the rate they are forever …

He said it has been the case for some time that the Vatican loses money every year. In 2018, the Holy See had a budget deficit of €70-million €300-million budget.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation all the worse, Pell noted. In particular, the Vatican Museums have suffered a steep decline in revenue from the lack of visitors.

Referring the still-unfolding saga of financial scandal at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, involving, inter alia, a dodgy deal to buy a struggling hospital in Italy, and another to invest in a luxury apartment complex in London, Pell, 79, said:

Inefficiency and corruption have hurt the Vatican for years.

He cited the recent London property scandal as an example of a situation that typifies both.

The Church is not a business, he stressed; those in leadership roles in the Church must be very strong and vigilant against corruption.

Still, he expressed some optimism that the Vatican’s Council for the Economy – to which Pope Francis appointed 13 new members, including six women, in April – will be successful in rooting out corruption by taking:

A firm stand on the basic issues. Most if not all of the crooks are out of the system.

Pell has a special interest in Vatican finances. He was appointed by Pope Francis as the first head of the Prefecture for the Economy in the Vatican and charged with overseeing and reforming Vatican finances.

He went on to become the highest-ranking Catholic cleric ever to be convicted of sexual abuse charges.

Pell’s acquittal of the charges of molesting two 13-year-old boys in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in 1996 does not mean he’s innocent. He was freed after seven High Court judges pointed to egregious mistakes in the police investigation, and legal errors in the decisions of previous courts. Australia’s High Court can’t declare guilt or innocence; it issues decisions based only on the rules of evidence, and in the case of Pell, it found insufficient evidence to support the guilty verdict.

As Jeremy Gans, a professor at Melbourne Law School, noted:

The High Court’s key ruling—that there is a ‘significant possibility’ that Pell is innocent of the charges against him – isn’t a conclusion that he is innocent; it is a conclusion that the prosecution failed to prove that he isn’t.

RNS said that Pell still faces a canonical investigation at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, though after his conviction was overturned, several canonical experts said it was unlikely he would actually face a Church trial.

Pell used his time behind bars to write a journal, soon to become a book. Next spring Ignatius Press plans to publish either an abridged version of the journal, which runs to 1,000 pages, or the first volume of the full text.