Pope names new all-male Council for the Economy

Eight cardinals and seven laymen have been named by Pope Francis as members of the newly created Council for the Economy, a body that will have authority to set policy for the financial and management structures of Vatican City and the Holy See, writes Robert Mickens.
All but four of the 15 men he has appointed – there are no women – have been working up to this point on committees or commissions dealing with Vatican finances.

The council will collaborate closely with the Secretariat for the Economy, led by Australian Cardinal George Pell. The Pope established both bodies on 24 February, initiating the biggest structural change in the Roman Curia in nearly half a century. He named Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Germany to be the coordinator of the new council.

The Maltese economist and financial consultant Joseph Zahra is to be the deputy coordinator. He has been heading the ad hoc pontifical commission Pope Francis set up in July to suggest ways to reform the Vatican’s economic and administrative structures.

Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, director of the Holy See press office, said the new council was not “merely an advisory organ” of the Secretariat of the Economy, but would be “a body with its own authority for policy decisions”. However, Cardinal Pell is charged with drawing up its statutes.

Pell and six of the eight cardinals appointed to the new body have been serving up to now on the 15-member Council [of cardinals]  for the Study of Organisational and Economic Problems of the Holy See, which now has been dissolved. The six include Cardinals Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne (Peru), Wilfrid Napier (South Africa), Jean-Pierre Ricard (France), Norberto Rivera Carrera (Mexico), John Tong Hon (Hong Kong) and Agostino Vallini (Italy). The other two members, without experience on the now-disbanded council, are Marx and Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, a former Vatican official from the United States.

All but two of the seven lay members of the new council also have been working up to the present for the Vatican on the pontifical commission headed by Mr Zahra, the deputy coordinator. They include Jean-Baptiste de Franssu (France), a financial consultant and former CEO of Invesco Europe; Enrique Llano Cueto (Spain), an economist who worked for many years with Deloitte Haskins and Sells, as well as KPMG; Jochen Messemer (Germany), a health-care management expert and former partner of McKinsey & Company; and George Yeo (Singapore), a former long-serving government minister and currently chairman of the Kerry Logistics Network. The other two lay members of the Council are John Kyle, a US-Canadian dual national and former vice president of Imperial Oil (ExxonMobil); and Francesco Vermiglio, a professor of business administration and former board member of the Banco di Sicilia and the Bank of Valletta (Malta).