Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [9]
In 1984 the Vatican Bank agreed to pay $242 million to three creditor banks as compensation for its role in assisting the money-laundering scheme of Roberto Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed under $1.2 billion in debts. The Vatican Bank is traditionally “off the books,” a black hole in the Holy See financial statements. The Holy See’s true net worth is invisible. Subtract liabilities from understated assets and you have an illusory bottom line. Nevertheless, the Holy See’s 2007 balance sheet valued its total assets at 1.4 billion euros, or about 2.05 billion U.S. dollars. The statement showed the bulk of the Holy See’s income from rental properties in Europe. “The net worth is small for a national government,” comments Jack Ruhl. “But this is a gross understatement because they’re listing the value of St. Peter’s Basilica and other historic buildings at 1 euro each ($1.47).”
One asset stood out from the report: gold. “The Holy See owns almost a [metric] tonne of gold which in today’s volatile market would be worth some £15 million,” wrote Robert Mickens, Rome correspondent for The Tablet, England’s independent Catholic magazine, in 2008.36 “I have never seen gold as a separate line item on any financial statement,” comments Ruhl. “People tend to speculate, rather than invest, in gold, because the gold market is a yo-yo. Still, given the undervalued assets, we can’t tell how much the Holy See is worth.” The Vatican city-state and Apostolic Patrimony appear to be comfortably secured, but the secret profits from the Vatican Bank obscure any real “transparency” by the Holy See.
Meanwhile, eight American dioceses, and the Northwestern province of the Society of Jesus, which includes Alaska, have tried bankruptcy filings to reduce what they would have to pay in lawsuits to abuse victims. As the reports on bankruptcy filings and the impact of civil litigation roll across the media screens, people wonder how a church so powerful could lose nearly $4 billion (embezzlements included) since 1965. The same bishops who recycled sex offenders have avoided a binding policy to secure Sunday collections. Church apologists say the huge settlements are unfair, but the Vatican’s failure to regulate bishops stems from a flawed system of justice.
Corruption in the church is a reality as the wheel of history turns. Democracy has its history of nightmares too. The resilience of the church as a spiritual reality has produced a continuing force of pastoral care, relief work, and vital forms of assistance to the truly needy. “Look at what the church has done for direct services to AIDS victims in Africa, and disaster relief in Haiti and many countries as a first responder,” explains Sister Christine Schenk, a nurse-midwife with a long history of social activism in Cleveland. A pivotal figure in the latter part of this book, Sister Schenk continues: “The church is one of the few transnational entities that connects religious people to something that’s not about making a profit—helping the poor, educating and feeding people, healing the sick through health services by missionaries. You don’t see much about this on the nightly news, but these are daily acts of witness in Christ’s name. The church has a communications network to reach many of the world’s dispossessed, people on the outer edge. This is not like Microsoft. It is going where Jesus calls. As crazy as the Vatican monarchical system can be with its top-down political model, the Catholic network of genuine service providers has a global reach to the needy, a real record of doing good in the world.”
The sacramental imagination, and an ethos of responsibility to those on the outer edge, gives many of us who are appalled by the scandals of church officialdom some cause to keep faith. Saint Augustine called justice a virtue that gives every one his due. Internal justice is what the church severely needs.
Render unto Rome follows a line of reporting I began in Lead Us Not into Temptation (1992), a book that took seven years of research and exposed the contours of a