On Friday
(June 28), Italian police arrested the Rev. Nunzio Scarano, a senior
prelate working in the Vatican treasury, officially known as the
Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See.
Scarano stands
accused of trying to smuggle some 20 million euros from Switzerland to
Italy on behalf of a financier.
According to prosecutors, Scarano and
his associates concocted a plan that seems to come straight out of a spy
movie, involving a rented plane and help from contacts within the
Italian secret service.
While it is
not clear whom the money belonged to, the investigation stemmed from
prosecutors’ years-long probe into alleged money laundering at the
Vatican Bank.
Prosecutors
say they have no indication that the latest scandal involves the Vatican
Bank itself, even though Scarano holds several accounts at the
Institute for the Works of Religion, as the bank is formally known.
With its
checkered history marked by allegations of shady deals and its tradition
of utter secrecy, the Vatican Bank has become a focal point in
criticism over mismanagement — if not outright corruption — within the
Curia, the church’s central bureaucracy.
Francis, who
was elected with a clear mandate to reform the Curia, called for a
simpler, poorer church. To him, the Vatican’s scandals are a powerful
countermessage to the church’s mission of preaching the gospel.
This latest
case certainly won’t help improve the Vatican’s already tarnished image.
But what is significant is that Francis moved to act even before the
new crisis erupted — signaling his resolve to tackle a persistent source
of scandal that his predecessors were unwilling or unable to put down.
Clouds had
been gathering around Scarano for several days; earlier this month, the
Vatican suspended the senior prelate from his job for another
investigation by magistrates in Salerno.
His actions in
that case involved taking 560,000 euros in cash out of his account in
the Vatican Bank and dividing it up into smaller sums given to several
friends, allegedly in order to avoid raising suspicions. The friends
then gave him back the money in donation checks.
Because
there’s no indication that the Vatican Bank or treasury are involved,
the case could amount to just another unscrupulous, and possibly
criminal, prelate.
But unlike his predecessors, Francis has shown he
wants to address the root of the problem, rather than try to patch
things up when a scandal explodes.
On Wednesday,
when early indicators of the Salerno investigation first started to
emerge, Francis announced a review commission with full powers to access
all of the Vatican Bank’s documents and data. The commission will
report directly and frequently to the pope.
One Vatican
source said the move could reflect the fact that the Argentine pope
doesn’t fully trust the bank’s management to give him the full picture
of what is buried in its 18,900 accounts, some of them dating back
decades.
As the Scarano
stories grew, Francis decided to quicken his pace after spending the
first months of his pontificate mostly listening and consulting. A
telling detail from the so-called Vatileaks scandal that rocked the
Vatican in 2012 marks the difference of this approach.
When Francis’
predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, authorized new legislation to bring the
Vatican in line with international financial standards, a dispute broke
out among Vatican officials over whether the new norms would be
retroactive. By all indications, factions calling for wider controls
lost.
Benedict’s
efforts toward transparency were praised by a European watchdog for
updating the Vatican’s financial practices, saying it has come “a long
way in a very short period of time.”
But Francis’
new commission will instead have full powers to access even older data.
And rather than reacting to crises, as was the custom in the past, he
seems keen on preventing them from emerging from one of the darkest and
most secretive corners of the Vatican.