God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Can’t Touch Me

Despite its pretensions to the contrary, the Catholic Church is a typical, in fact the prototypical, large-scale corporate organisation: complicated, more than occasionally corrupt, and intensely resistant to reform of any sort. The Vatican is where organisational policy not just religious doctrine is made and enforced.

Sexual scandal makes better press, but it is in finance that the system of ecclesial government is most dramatically out of control. Posner's analysis shows that this condition is neither temporary or superficial but a result of the fundamental ethos of secrecy and the complete absence of even the most basic procedures for ensuring the integrity of accounts or the disposition of resources.

It might be supposed that the centralised power of the papacy would be sufficient to impose reform, at least within its direct reach inside the Vatican walls. Alas, dictatorship of any variety, including the religious, has some strange politics. Virtually any financial crime can be justified by anyone in the clerical hierarchy on the basis of protecting Mother Church's wealth, reputation, or the hierarchy itself.

It turns out that there is little agreement about the true economic interests of the Church not just among senior officials but within the bowels of the organisation. Consequently any attempt to implement procedures or controls on the movement of money, or even the recording of where it might be, is resisted as a matter of conscience and principle.

What Posner shows without explicit statement is that for at least the last two centuries, it has been in no one's interest to fix the situation. Large-scale money-laundering, currency manipulation, fraud by Individual clerics and their secular accomplices are all functional traits of an organisation intent on avoiding any external influences whatsoever.

In short, laxity in matters financial means freedom of action. The situation is not accidental or even incidental; it is purposeful and reflects what is really desired by the folk in charge. Although some token changes have been made - the employment of professional non-clerical managers, the belated association with international financial control organisations, the partial adoption of audited accounts - these are unlikely to have any lasting effect within an organisation that considers itself, as a matter of religious doctrine, to be beyond all rules.

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