Call for greater financial transparency

Pope Francis has called on the Church’s religious orders to exercise greater transparency in their administration of finances, reminding them that they are called to be prophetic witnesses of a Christian poverty and simple lifestyle that takes the side of the world’s poor and suffering, writes Robert Mickens.

“This heartfelt poverty is solidarity – sharing and charity; it expresses itself through sobriety, the search for justice and in the joy of essentials, in order to be on guard against material idols that overshadow the authentic sense of life,” the Pope says in a letter published last Saturday for an international symposium on religious orders and financial management.

Some 500 finance officers and treasurers from religious orders around the world met this past weekend for a two-day meeting that the Pope asked the Congregation for Religious to organise. The purpose was to help the orders better manage their temporal goods in conformity with their vow of poverty.

Religious orders must take the lead in showing that “the principle of gratuity and the logic of gift find their place in economic activity,” the Pope says in his message to the Congregation’s Prefect, Cardinal João Bráz de Aviz. He calls on religious orders to make sure that their material goods are managed with transparency and that their finances are in harmony with the “charismatic-spiritual dimension” of their communities.