Pell named head of new ‘finance ministry’

By setting up a new office with wide-sweeping authority over all the financial and administrative activities of the Holy See and Vatican City, Pope Francis has made the most radical structural change to the Roman Curia in nearly 50 years. And in an effort to give it extra muscle, he has chosen the blunt-­speaking and no-nonsense Australian – Cardinal George Pell of Sydney – to be prefect of the new Secretariat for the Economy.

Just before the conclave that elected Francis, Cardinal Pell had spoken of the need for a Pope with strong administrative ability. “We need somebody who is a strategist, a decision-maker, a planner … so that he can take a grip of the situation [in the Vatican] and take the Church forward,” Cardinal Pell told the Vatican Insider website last February. “It is clear that significant reforms are needed within the Vatican bureaucracy.”

The Pope issued a motu proprio on Monday to formally establish the new office along with a “Council for the Economy”, a second body that will be composed of eight cardinals/bishops and seven lay financial experts from around the world. The new secretariat will “implement policies” determined by the 15-member council. And, unlike other Vatican offices, it will report directly to the Pope rather than to the Secretariat of State.

Pope Francis established the economic ­secretariat and council on the recommendation of the financial advisory commission he formed last summer. According to a Vatican press release, the goal is to “simplify and consolidate existing management structures and improve coordination and oversight” at the Vatican. “The changes will enable more formal involvement of senior and experienced experts in financial administration, planning and reporting; and ... better use of resources, improving support for various programmes – particularly our works with the poor and marginalised,” the communiqué said. 

Cardinal Pell is to step down as Archbishop of Sydney at the end of March and take up residence permanently in Rome.

Mgr Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, a 52-year-old Spaniard and secretary of the Pope’s above-mentioned financial advisory commission, told journalists he had been named the office’s secretary general, or number two. The Opus Dei-affiliated priest has also been secretary of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See since 2011. A still-to-be-named auditor general will hold the third most senior position at the new secretariat.

This is the most significant change in the Vatican’s operational structures since 1967 when Pope Paul VI carried out a major ­reorganisation of the Roman Curia after the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II implemented further, less radical reforms in 1988.

Some have described the new secretariat as a sort of exchequer and The Tablet reported several months ago that the idea for its establishment and the choice of Cardinal Pell had been in the air for some time (see Letter from Rome, 2 November 2013).

The Vatican communiqué said that the ­secretariat’s authority extended over APSA, an office that manages the Holy See’s properties, investments and personnel, which it defined as the “Vatican’s central bank”. However, it made no mention of the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR). Presumably that, too, would come under the jurisdiction of Cardinal Pell’s new office.

On his return to Munich after the ­consistory, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who along with Cardinal Pell is a member of the Council of Cardinals (C8), that advises the Pope, said that for the Holy See to establish its own ministry of finance in the Curia was a “deep caesura” in its history. Financial transactions would in future be more transparent and would comply with international stand­ards. Although financial questions were “not the most important issues in the world”, it was essential to solve them so that “we can get on with other important issues”, Cardinal Marx said, adding that the Pope was aware that the Church’s credibility depended on clearing up the financial problems.

n Cardinal George Pell’s protégé, Bishop Anthony Fisher of Parramatta, is the apparent front-runner to succeed him as Archbishop of Sydney, writes Mark Brolly. Bishop Fisher,  53, is an Oxford-educated Dominican who would be the first member of a religious order to lead the Church in Australia’s most ­populous city since the English Benedictine Roger Bede Vaughan (1877-83), brother of the nineteenth-century Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Herbert Vaughan.