WORKS FOR ME!
Posted on 05/11/2025 11:19:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Can Elon Musk repair the Vatican's woeful fiscal state?
I'll save my opinion on the selection of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as our new pontiff for another column, although his anti-Trump social media posts, his slams of Catholic Vice President JD Vance, and his stance favoring illegal aliens flooding the US. At the same time, the Vatican is safely protected by the Swiss Guard, which does not fill me with hope.
The cardinals did not read an earlier column I wrote advocating for either Cardinals Raymond Burke or Robert Sarah for the top job. (Okay, my own kids don't read my columns, so why should I expect more from high-falutin' clerics in my church?) To say my preferences for selecting conservative Cardinals Burke or Sarah by a College of Cardinals, 80 percent of whose voting members were chosen by Francis, were longshots is quite the understatement.
But I hope that Pope Leo XIV does read this column. It offers sincere, if unconventional, advice.
After reading about the Catholic Church's sorry state of financial affairs in a recent Wall Street Journal article, I offer the following solution to our new pontiff: Bring Elon Musk to head up DOCE - the Department of Church Efficiency.
The Journal's long article was presumably written with the assistance of and informed by people inside the Vatican with an agenda. Nonetheless, if accurate, it paints a bleak picture of the Mother Church's financial affairs.
It really is a remarkable piece of journalism, both in its details and its timing. It appeared on the morning of the conclave before the College of Cardinals chose the new pope.
The article "Next Pope Faces Financial Mess Francis Struggled to Clean Up" reads like something out of a Dan Brown novel. It details the terrible financial struggles the church is currently facing, with the church's budget deficit tripling in Pope Francis's 12-year tenure and its pension fund facing up to two billion euros in unfunded liabilities.
Perhaps more disturbing are the intrigues the article discusses surrounding the alleged fraud involving Cardinal Giovanni Becciu, formerly a top Vatican official in the church's powerful Secretariat of State.
"Unusual" financial practices were discovered in 2015. For example, an official in a department called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith withdrew $500,000 in funds from a Vatican Bank account and stored some of the cash in a shopping bag. Other funds were reportedly transferred from one Vatican Bank account to another to conceal the funds from a senior Vatican auditing official, Cardinal George Pell. Money laundering using the Vatican Bank had become rampant, to the point where a European financial crime watchdog was threatening to blacklist the bank.
Finally, Pope Francis brought in an outside consultant from Deloitte to investigate all the shenanigans. He discovered that $500,000 was missing from the doctrinal office accounts. Someone broke into the consultant's office and unscrewed the base of his computer, apparently not reattaching it and leaving a spring missing.
Two years after Pope Francis promoted Archbishop Becciu to Cardinal Becciu, it was discovered that Cardinal Becciu had embezzled more than $100,000 through a nonprofit group run by his brother. Church magistrates also accused Becciu of being negligent in overseeing a $400 million church investment in an office building in London, which Becciu denied.
Cardinal Becciu was convicted in 2023 of fraud and embezzlement, which he is appealing. Although stripped of his official duties, he is still a cardinal (albeit non-voting) in the Church.
The article notes that a “power play” occurred between the Deloitte auditor, Libero Milone, and a church office called the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (or APSA), which acts as the Vatican’s Central Bank and clears its financial transactions. Milone began questioning APSA’s accounting practices, which in turn caused APSA to begin scrutinizing Milone’s expense reports. Eventually, Cardinal Becciu forced Milone out of the job, claiming that Pope Francis had “lost faith” in him.
The intrigue continued, including the hiring of private investigators to look for wiretaps. The article is something to behold.
This is to say that I think the Vatican's bureaucratic and financial mess is a job for Elon Musk. Surely, Elon Musk can reconstitute his Department of Government Efficiency as the Department of Church Efficiency and help get the church sorted. One would imagine that the Vatican's finances would be a piece of cake compared to the bureaucracy of the US federal government.
The intrigues within the Church bureaucracy sound strikingly similar to many of the revelations that DOGE was exposing within the US federal government. So why not bring the DOGE skillsets and technology to the Vatican?
And would not helping save the 2,000-year-old august Catholic Church, founded by Jesus Christ himself, be as worthy a cause as that rendered by Musk to the US government?
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 38 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has contributed to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News' 48 Hours Mysteries and NBC News' Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)
He can save his comments forever. It’s a done deal, what’s the point other than blogging for clicks?
According to the Wall Street Journal, in an investigative piece, see here:
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/vatican-pope-finances-5d3a9bbd
[EXCERPT]
Twelve years ago, the new Bishop of Rome was Francis, a pontiff elected with a mandate to fix the Vatican’s finances. But the first pope from the New World wasn’t prepared for the degree of resistance at the Curia, as the Vatican bureaucracy is known, his close advisers and allies said. He hired a professional auditor to modernize the finances—leading clergy to move Vatican funds to an account under a cardinal’s name and stockpile cash in a shopping bag.
The auditor was mystified that nuns kept account ledgers in pencil and paper. At one point intruders broke into his office and tampered with his computer. Eventually the Gendarmerie Corps of Vatican City State—its police service—got involved.
Professional accountants, encouraged by Francis, ran training workshops for clergy who balked at the rules like obtaining multiple signoffs for expenses. Prelates tried to hide funds from scrutiny, citing national security concerns for the secret ledgers of funding missionaries in countries where proselytizing is a crime. Other departments shrugged off the modern-day challenge of balancing the budget of a papal state whose origins stretch back more than a millennium. The pope himself shifted focus to other topics.
Meanwhile, the pension fund kept falling farther behind. Scandals over a $400 million real-estate investment ended with a cardinal being convicted of embezzlement and fraud in 2023.
[END EXCERPT]
The report gets into details about just what a shambles the Vatican’s finances are, dating from the past couple decades, and no doubt, getting really bad at this point. They tried to put Pope Francis on it, a man with a reputation for honesty even if some of his politics were wrong, but the job was too big for him.
According to the WSJ:
For over a decade, Francis had struggled to bring some transparency to the Vatican’s shadowy balance sheet. Now, in the final weeks of his life, advisers were filtering in and out of his austere reception room, presenting the details of a microstate awash in priceless treasures but tumbling deeper into debt. The budget deficit had tripled since the Argentine took office, and the pension fund faced up to 2 billion euros in liabilities it wouldn’t be able to fund.
The first Jesuit Pope was exhorting clergy to live frugally—but pinching pennies alone would not relieve the financial crisis facing the seat of the Church. The Vatican was increasingly relying on museum ticket sales to fund its civil service, its worldwide network of embassies and the Papal Swiss Guard, a small army paid in Swiss franc pensions. The city-state serves seven million visitors a year and a global flock, without collecting taxes.
After more than a month of discussion, Francis settled on one solution: Ask the faithful for more money.
On Feb. 11, he signed a chirografo, or papal directive, to boost donations. Three days later, he was hospitalized with double pneumonia. On April 21, he died, leaving his soon-to-be-chosen successor with a similar economic puzzle to the one Francis himself had inherited.
I wonder where the tens of billions of dollars the church has received in refugee resettlement went?
WORKS FOR ME!
The Vatican has billions and billions of dollars of art(some of it stolen) and books. Sell it, and part of the financial problem is partially solved. As for the rampant corruption, that issue is so ingrained with the Church that it will never be resolved.
“The Vatican Needs Elon Musk”
No, the Vatican needs religion rather than politics.
RE: No, the Vatican needs religion rather than politics.
That goes without saying, but their finances are still in shambles.
I’m not sure if religion can fix that.
Elon has his own businesses to run. The Vatican has enough $ to hire their own financial advisors.
“That goes without saying, but their finances are still in shambles.
I’m not sure if religion can fix that.”
Upending the religion got them here so yes, religion can fix that. Collections are way down due to anger over ‘religious changes’ and coverups of sexual predation on the young. Kick out the predators, consult with the laity and listen to them. Think about saving souls rather than saving the world.
One year later, great treasures are in the hands of amoral billionaire collectors, the church is broke once again, and the church no longer has an income source. Your advice is like telling a McDonald’s franchisee to sell off its kitchen equipment.
Thank you for being the reasonable person here.
No it isn’t. If the Church sells off some of its extensive art and book collections, it can still function. If McDonald’s sold off its kitchen equipment, it could no longer function as a restaurant chain.
The Vatican needs to serve God, not the Deep State.
Collections may be down from parishioners, but do you have any idea how much taxpayer money the Catholic Church gets from governments worldwide, including ours...?
Who needs parishioners.
We’re talking finances. If the church sells off its art, books (and to get to “billions and billions” you have to include real estate. Sell off the museums, etc., and you have less means of making more money. By making the problem better in one year, you’ve destroyed your money-making capacity for every subsequent year.
You don’t have to sell real estate to sell books or framed paintings.
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