In the fourth part of his interview with Phil Pullela of the Archyde.com news agency, Pope Francis talked about reforms in the financial affairs of the Vatican.
C. Roubini CTC, Vatican News
In response to questions from the Archyde.com news agency, Pope said he believed there would be no repeat of the financial scandals that have made headlines in recent years.
Specifically, the Pope was referring to the purchase and sale of a building on Sloane Avenue in London, which is now being analyzed by a Vatican court. The pope said he believed so in response to a question about whether there were enough regulations in place to prevent incidents like this from happening again. Papa then explained the procedures adopted.
Speaking about the creation of the financial official office by incorporating technical experts who could not be stuck in the hands of “friends and benefactors”, the Pope said that this new dicastery handles all financial transactions, which is a real security for the administration and that there were many confusions in the previous administration. Papa also gave an example.
The priest, who is not an expert in finance and is the head of the finance department of the Vatican Secretariat of State, asks his friends for help in good faith. But sometimes these friends are not like God’s servant Imelda. (The 11-year-old Imelda was a 14th-century Italian maid of honor known for her purity.) And so it happened. So the fault, the Pope reiterated, lay with an unaccountable system that was not mature enough to handle wealth. Pope Francis concluded by saying that it was Cardinal Pell who put forward the idea of an office for finance and that he was a genius.