Archbishop Aquila: Catholic Democrats should take  responsibility, not weaponize the Eucharist

Vatican City flag waiving over St. Peter’s dome – Bohumil Petrik / CNA

Rome Newsroom, May 20, 2021 / 05:30 am (CNA).

The Vatican’s Council for the Economy faces a “huge task” in its efforts to quickly bring up the Holy See’s accounting and financial transparency to international standards, according to one of its lay members.

“We are very much focused on getting those basic standards in place and making sure the information that is in front of the pope when he makes decisions is thorough, complete, and fair. And we’re not in that situation yet,” Council for the Economy member Ruth Kelly told EWTN News.

Kelly, who was Education Secretary under British Prime Minister Tony Blair and later worked for HSBC Global Asset Management, is one of seven lay people on the Vatican council overseeing the administrative and financial structures and activities of the Roman Curia, institutions of the Holy See, and Vatican City State.

The lay members work together with eight cardinals to set the budget for the Holy See’s entities and raise the level of financial transparency — something which Kelly said can pose unique challenges.

“For example, the historic legacy is very, very difficult to tackle if you take the example of, say … a place of residence through tradition in a particular part of the Vatican, or Rome, or somewhere in the world. It may be the case that no one has ever had it valued, or really thought about who legally owned it, because through customs and tradition it was obvious to what use it should be put,” she said.

“The Holy See cannot yet account for all of the investment properties that it owns specifically around Rome and in Italy. And there’s a huge task to go through to make sure it identifies properly the ownership of each — whether it’s owned by a diocese, whether it’s owned by the Vatican, whether it’s owned by a parish, or somebody else — and then to valuate it to make sure that it’s properly accounted for in the balance sheets.”

“So that’s one real area where the Holy See needs to be moved quickly up to date.”

The Council for the Economy is also currently implementing an investment policy for the Vatican and “a huge training program” in financial standards for those who work in its departments and dicasteries, according to Kelly.

“I’m actually very encouraged by the steps that I’ve seen, even though there’s so much to do and so far to go,” she said.

Pope Francis established the Council for the Economy in 2014 as part of his program of financial reform. Kelly was appointed to the council for a six-year term last August along with five other women with backgrounds in banking, finance, asset management, and international law.

“There’s a real recognition that it’s now very important at the heart of the Church to have lay experts involved in overseeing the Vatican accounts and policies and so forth. And that is important, not just in its own sake, but also for the credibility of the process,” Kelly said.

“The ambition is to have international accounting standards applied in full across the Holy See,” she said. “That’s not a position which we have arrived at yet, but it is one to which we aspire.”

Kelly spoke at the webinar series, “Inspiring Trust: Church Communications and Organizational Vulnerability,” offered by the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. The university is entrusted to Opus Dei, with which Kelly is associated.

“To be brutally honest about it, from my perspective of the council’s perspectives … it’s not clear how funds have been flowing and how they’ve been managed because the transparency hasn’t been there,” she said.

Kelly is adamant that “once that transparency is there, and international standards are applied, then you can start talking altogether differently about the Vatican’s role and its responsibility and how it manages money, and so forth.”

“If someone’s going to put money into the Peter’s Pence account, they need to know that that money is being well spent. And at the moment, you can’t say definitely that we can show that, but we’re well on the way I think to be able to do that before too long,” she said.

The Council of the Economy was very focused on cost restraint in setting this year’s budget, asking Vatican departments to come up with reductions in their spending, Kelly explained.

The Vatican’s budget, which already operated on a deficit, took another hit in 2020 and the beginning of 2021, when the Vatican Museums, a major source of income, was forced to close for months.

For the Holy See, the coronavirus crisis also meant collapsing market investments, uncertain income from real estate investments, and diminished contributions from the Church around the world.

“The Holy See suffered, along with every other organization, or many other organizations, in the pandemic, and that’s not surprising. And the question really for the council is how much of that is temporary and how much of that will bounce back,” she said.

“And it is the case that fundraising has been severely dented through the COVID crisis, not surprisingly, as it has been felt right throughout the Church,” she said.

“So, you know, it is one of the areas in our minds, as we think about how to restore the reputation and how to create a strong reputation for how the Holy See manages finances.”

Kelly is confident that there is a strong willingness among both the lay members and the cardinals on the council to “make an impact quickly.”

“We do expect results, very significant results, before the six years run out at the end of the council’s current term,” she said.

German Cardinal Reinhard Marx has overseen the council since its creation in 2014. Other cardinals currently on the council include Joseph Tobin of Newark; Anders Arborelius of Stockholm; Péter Erdő of Esztergom-Budapest; Odilo Scherer of São Paulo; Gérald Lacroix of Quebec; Giuseppe Petrocchi of L’Aquila; and Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston.

Among the lay members are German law professor Charlotte Kreuter-Kirchhof; Maria Kolak, president of the National Association of German Cooperative Banks; Alberto Minali, the former chief investment officer of the asset management group Eurizon; Leslie Ferrar, who was treasurer to Britain’s Prince Charles; elevator manufacturer Zardoya Otis; and Eva Castillo Sanz, who sits on the board of directors of the Spanish bank Bankia.

Kelly said: “One of the things that’s on my mind to really explore as we go forward is how the whole whistleblowing setup works in the Vatican. Because I think part of an open culture is not only financial transparency but the ability of people to raise issues in private, perhaps without being identified or only identified if they so wish.”

“Now I do know that whistleblowing happens, but I’m not yet sure that that works well enough within the Holy See, and the Vatican.”

“There is a huge way to go, but I do think the will is there at the very top to see change happen,” she said.

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St. Louis, Mo., Sep 19, 2017 / 04:55 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Archbishop of St. Louis led an interfaith group of religious leaders in prayer for peace and justice on Tuesday, after protests over the weekend turned violent.

“It is in this humble … […]

Washington D.C., Aug 4, 2020 / 04:15 pm (CNA).- EWTN News Nightly’s lead anchor Tracy Sabol conducted a White House interview with President Donald Trump Aug. 4. Below is a transcript of that interview provided by EWTN News Nightly.

EWTN News Nightly said it has also reached out for an interview to Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

Catholic News Agency is a service of EWTN News.

Tracy Sabol: Thank you so much, Mr. President, for speaking with us today. We appreciate it.

President Trump: Thank you.

Tracy Sabol: We have a lot to get to. But I first want to talk about the economy. Where we are right now, of course, we’re starting with another round of stimulus. Can you talk about that and what’s needed for Republicans and Democrats to meet in the middle?

President Trump: So we had the greatest economy in the history of the world, not only in our country, in every country. We were beating China, beating everybody. They were having the worst economy they’ve had in over 67 years. So we were doing with the tariffs and all the things that I was doing. And then we had to close it up. It came from China. They should have stopped it. They could have stopped it, but they didn’t. They stopped it from going into their country, but they didn’t stop it from here, Europe, or the rest of the world. And we had to close it up and we did that. And now we’re coming back and we’re doing stimulus. We’ve already done it, as you know, very successfully. And we’ll probably have something worked out. We’ll see what happens. The problem with the Democrats, as you know, they want bailout money for their states and cities that have done so poorly under Democrat leadership. And I’m not happy with that. It’s not appropriate. This is having to do with the corona, I call it the “China-virus.” And so I think we’re doing very well. We had the best job numbers we’ve ever had, percentage-wise. You take a look at what happened, [indiscernible] close to seven million jobs over the last two months. New numbers are going to be coming out very soon. We’re back. We’re doing very well. I think next year is going to be one of the best years we’ve ever had. And it looks very, very strong.

Tracy Sabol: Looking forward to the third quarter: How do you anticipate that looking?

President Trump: I think the third quarter is going to be good. I think it’s going to be good. I think the fourth quarter is going to be very, very good. But we’re just coming out of something that we had no choice. We saved millions of lives by closing. If we didn’t close it up, you would have lost millions of lives. And by closing it, I mean, we’ve done a really good job. The ban on China was very important. We banned people coming in, highly infected, and we banned people from coming in from China and then from Europe. We did the ban on Europe, very important. It really, I think, is going to be, I think we’re going to have a very special economy in about…for next year. But I think third quarter actually is going to be very good.

Tracy Sabol: A lot of things shut down, including churches. Let’s talk about that and the importance of reopening churches. I know you’ve talked about that.

President Trump: I think they should open the churches. It’s up to the governors. But, I think, and I’m recommending it, you open the churches. They’ll spread, they’ll be socially spread, they’ll have masks and they’ll do what they have to do, you know, the hygiene and everything else that we know. It’s a very simple list, but I think it’s very unfair that they have– I saw Jim Jordan the other day talking about it very well, that they have 50,000 people protesting and they’re standing on top of each other practically, and yet you’re not allowed to go to church. You don’t go to schools. We want to open our churches. We want to open our schools. And everybody wants to be safe. They know what to do. They’ll stay away. And, you know, we’ll be the same way. Maybe you’ll have an extra service or two or three. But they have to let the churches open. They want to put, the Democrats want to put them out of business. They want to put the churches out of business. And it’s very unfair. So they don’t complain about the protests, which are horrible in many cases. You look at Portland, it’s a disaster, but they don’t want the churches open, they don’t want the schools open, they don’t want offices open. So it’s a very, very unfair situation to a lot of people.

Tracy Sabol: Mr. President, is there a way to deem churches as essential businesses? How can we do that?

President Trump: I am looking at that because I think it’s enough already. You have some states, I think they never want them open. They don’t want churches open. Look, the Democrats, frankly, if you look at the radical left, Democrats, which are radical left now, they’ve gone radical left. Whether you’re talking about life or whether you’re talking about almost anything, they’re not liking it. They’re not liking it.

Tracy Sabol: I know that you’ve heard about the vandalism, the horrific vandalism. Many, many churches have been vandalized over the past recent weeks. When you heard about that, what did you think?

President Trump: I think it’s a disgrace. And I think it’s partially because they’re not allowed to function, they’re not allowed to really function. And I think it’s disgraceful that it can happen. And, you know, they want to defund the police. They want to stop the police. They want to have them at least to a minimum. And we’re just the opposite. I just got endorsed by Texas law enforcement, by Florida, all of the sheriffs and the law enforcement. I think, I can’t imagine them ever, I can’t imagine law enforcement ever endorsing Biden. He’s got a hard time in a lot of ways, let’s face it, but I can’t imagine that ever happening. So we just about have everybody endorsing us in terms of law enforcement. And, you know, with the churches, you need some law enforcement to help you out also. But it’s the fact that they’re closed and they you know, bad things happen when they’re closed. It’s a very terrible situation, what they’re doing to churches and these are governors that are radical left or Democrat, it’s almost becoming the same thing. And I don’t think they want churches open.

Tracy Sabol: What can be done to stop this vandalism? What do you think?

President Trump: Well, what you need is you need the law enforcement. It’s areas usually run by radical left Democrats. I mean, where you have Republican leadership, where you have Republican governors and mayors, you don’t have this problem. You have this problem where you have radical left Democrats in virtually every instance. So what you have to do is elect Republicans. And if you had a Republican, as an example, if Biden got in, you’d have Portland all over our country. It would be like Portland. These people are agitators. They’re anarchists. You’d have that all over our country. You know, we stopped it, we stepped in and a lot of people said we were early. Well, let us let us be early. Better early than late. But we did a good job there. We did a great job in Seattle that would have been burned to the ground, frankly. But with Portland, and we didn’t do our big job, we did a much smaller job. We had to protect our building, and our buildings, actually, a number of buildings. But the courthouse would have been burned down. The courthouse would have been destroyed if we didn’t step in. People said, “Oh, we went early.” Well, if we didn’t go then, the courthouse would have been destroyed because Seattle was not protecting it. So you would have that situation all over the United States. And that’s unacceptable.

Tracy Sabol: And, Mr. President, on top of mind for a lot of parents, including myself: the reopening of schools. I know you just tweeted about that. Can you talk about that?

President Trump: I want the schools open. First of all, children are unbelievably strong, right? Their immune system. Something’s going on because out of thousands of deaths in New Jersey, thousands, because I just saw the statistics, many thousands of people died, one person under the age of 18. And that was a person I believe had diabetes on top of everything. So children just are, I guess I heard one doctor say, virtually they’re immune from it. They have a strong, they have a very strong something, and they are not affected. And we have to open our schools. You know, there’s a big danger to keeping people locked in. And they’re also finding it’s wonderful to use computers, but it’s not a great way of learning. They now know that it’s much better to be with a teacher on campus or in a school, that’s much better than looking at a computer all day long. So we have to get our schools open. We have to get them open soon.

Tracy Sabol: And if there was one message you wanted to say to our viewers, what would it be right now?

President Trump: Well, I think anybody having to do with, frankly, religion, but certainly the Catholic Church, you have to be with President Trump when it comes to pro-life, when it comes to all of the things, these people are going to take all of your rights away, including Second Amendment, because, you know, Catholics like their Second Amendment. So I saved the Second Amendment. If I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t have a Second Amendment. And pro-life is your big thing and you won’t be on that side of the issue, I guarantee, if the radical left, because they’re going to take over, they’re going to push him around like he was nothing.

Tracy Sabol: Well, thank you so much, Mr. President, for the time today.

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