IN a global recession crafted by Wall Street, with declining donations and shrinking revenues from church properties, and a budget deficit of $27 million, plagued by financial scandals invented by the Western press because after the P2 (Propaganda Due) Masonic Lodge pillage of a Vatican bank none followed or preceded it, the Vatican is finally imposing strict auditing rules on the finances of a church whose finances are governed by the principle of subsidiarity, to use a silly term prominent in the Bangsamoro deal. $27 million! Que horror, and it calls itself the Church of God.
The cesspool of capitalism, the Wall Street banks, were bailed out by the US government to the tune of a third of a trillion dollars so they could give themselves bonuses for fraud. There is a difference that explains the differential reaction.
The church’s shortfalls happened unwittingly, the likely result of dividing accounting and spending authority among all its bishops equally, not to mention the near impossibility of balancing the books on small income with large demands of charity. Wall Street’s shortfalls were well crafted with malice aforethought.
The Vatican is now centralizing finances. For that purpose it is mandatory for churchmen to master a 1494 book on double-entry bookkeeping called The Method of Venice; something like the merchant thereof but Catholic, not Jewish; involving not a pound of flesh but a nail clipping by comparison. But really? A 500-year-old accounting book? Yes. It is time tested. The tiny city state of Venice ruled the Mediterranean for centuries. It paid for the biggest fleet. That navy defeated the Turks at Lepanto which is the only reason the West still exists. It held mortgages on all the kingdoms of Europe. It was dissolved only by a Napoleon and shortly after, swallowed by a new Italian state.
Now its head is barely above canal water. Vatican reforms grounded in the Venetian method were sure to work, but the Vatican also asked the big four accounting firms in the West to help it. That’s asking the Mafia to do, which is to say, to cook the books for your olive-oil business. The prophecy may come true: Francis will be the last pontiff who could afford to sleep with a roof over his head.