![]() |
Pope Francis |
Courtesy: Associated Press
In his first public comments on the latest scandal rocking
the Vatican, Pope Francis told followers in St. Peter's Square on Sunday that
the theft of documents describing financial malfeasance inside the Holy See was
a "crime" but pledged to continue reforms of its administration.
The pope said that publishing the documents in two books
released last week "was a deplorable act that doesn't help." The
books, "Merchants in the Temple" by Gianluigi Nuzzi and
"Avarice" by Emiliano Fittipaldi, detail mismanagement and alleged
greed in the Vatican, and are seen as part of a bitter internal struggle
between reformers and the old guard.
"This sad fact will certainly not divert me from the
reform work that we are pursuing with my collaborators and with the support of
all of you," the pope said to cheers from the crowd.
Among the disclosures in "Merchants in the
Temple," Nuzzi writes that the cost of sainthood can run up to half a
million dollars and tells the tale of a monsignor who allegedly broke down the
wall of his neighbor, an ailing priest, to expand his apartment.
Fittipaldi, meanwhile, claimed that a children's hospital
foundation had paid 200,000 euros ($215,000) toward the renovation of the
apartment of the Vatican's No. 2 at the time, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and
that nearly 400,000 euros donated by parishioners worldwide to help the poor
was funneled to pay for Vatican administration.
The pope underlined that the leaked documents were the
result of the reform course that he began and that measures had already been
taken to address problems, "with some visible results."
Pope Francis has made it a top priority to reform the
Vatican bureaucracy known as the Curia, a hive of intrigue and gossip. He
appointed a commission of eight experts in 2013 to gather information and make
recommendations after an earlier expose helped drive his predecessor, Pope
Benedict XVI, to a historic resignation. Two former members of that commission
have been arrested as part of an investigation into the stolen documents.
Last week the Vatican described the books as "fruit of
a grave betrayal of the trust given by the pope, and, as far as the authors go,
of an operation to take advantage of a gravely illicit act of handing over
confidential documentation." It added that the publication did not help
"in any way to establish clarity and truth, but rather generate confusion
and partial and tendentious conclusions."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please restrict your comment to the subject matter.