Vatican City, Apr 27, 2018 / 06:20 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Vatican’s annual financial report this year showed that monitoring systems put into place nearly five years ago continue to be effective, however, there is still room to grow in terms of prosecution for questionable activities.
In comments to journalists during a May 27 press briefing, Rene Bruelhart, president of the Vatican’s Financial Intelligence Authority (AIF), said the report for 2017 shows “a clear commitment from our side to continue to report in the most transparent way possible on our activities.”
Two keywords that can sum up the AIF activities for 2017, he said, are “consolidation and normalization,” particularly in terms of implementing a sustainable regulatory and reporting system, as well as growing relations with domestic and international bodies.
Bruelhart, a Swiss lawyer, was tapped to head the AIF after it was established by Benedict XVI in 2010 to supervise the Vatican’s financial activity and prevent and counter money laundering.
Carried forward under Francis, the AIF works alongside other financial entities in the Vatican, such as the Secretariat for the Economy and the Council for the Economy, both of which were established by Pope Francis as part of his ongoing reform of the Roman Curia.
With full autonomy the AIF also monitors and reviews actions carried out by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), which oversees the Vatican’s real estate, and the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), more often referred to as the “Vatican bank.”
Bruelhart was present alongside AIF director Tommaso Di Ruzza at a May 27 press briefing on the AIF’s 6th annual report, which covered 2017 and summed up their continued efforts to build relationships with other states and crack down on suspicious financial activity within the Vatican.
Most notably, the report detailed that it was the AIF which first flagged the diversion of significant funds from the Vatican’s Bambino Gesu Children’s hospital to renovate Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone’s apartment in Rome.
The case exploded in the media, and in October 2017 the former president of the hospital, Giuseppe Profiti, and former treasurer, Massimo Spina, were been charged with the illicit use of hospital funds in the amount of 422,005.16 euros ($480,600.58) to refurbish the flat.
In total for 2017, 150 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) were filed with the AIF, compared to last year’s 207. The reason for the decrease, according to AIF Director Tommaso Di Ruzza, is that the quality of the entity’s reporting system has improved, “showing a growing awareness and strengthening of the control functions of the reporting subjects.”
Of the 150 flagged transactions, 8 were submitted by the AIF to the Vatican Office of the Promoter of Justice during 2017, of which nearly all involved potential financial crimes with foreign individuals or entities either within or in connection with a foreign jurisdiction.
The potential crimes flagged include international fraud, including fiscal fraud and market abuse.
In only one case did the Vatican tribunal freeze an account after a questionable cross-border transaction amounting to roughly 1,757 euro, or $2,122, which took place in 2016, which the AIF said it had flagged and submitted in 2015.
According to the report, none of the activities or transactions reported in 2017 were related to terrorism.
Since 2015, the AIF has presented some 54 reports to the Promoter of Justice. When asked why there has not been a higher number of cases prosecuted in the Vatican courts, which in the past has been identified as an area of weakness, Bruelhart said it will take time to adequately develop the system put into place, and is up to the Promoter of Justice to determine how to act on reports submitted by the AIF.
It is unclear how many of the 54 transactions flagged and sent to the Promoter of Justice have been looked into or investigated. However, “it’s important to remember where we’re coming form,” Bruelhart said, noting that the current system has been built only within the past 5-6 years, and new entities have been established, including the secretariat and council for the economy.
“It has been a new world” for the Promoter of Justice, he said, adding that in his view, the chain of activities that has taken place “has moved in the right direction” and “a lot of progress” has been made.
Noting how the first conviction took place just last year, he said “work is ongoing” in this area, and he expects to see more progress in the future.
“There is a very good dialogue with the office of the promoter of justice,” he said, adding that “it’s about building a dialogue together,” but ultimately the office is the only one responsible for what they decide to do.
Responding to criticism that the Vatican’s financial reform has made little progress, Bruelhart pointed to all the steps that have been taken so far in the past six years, saying if each of them are broken down, one can see that “a lot has been done in a very very short amount of time.”
Change, he said, takes time and at times one needs to take a step back to fully appreciate the progress and continue to go forward. “Its a process, but there is life in this process,” he said.
In addition, the AIF in 2017 also cracked down on transparency and accountability for donations made for institutional and charitable purposes, as well as interactions with what they have dubbed “high risk states” which do not have proper monitoring systems in place.
The crack down on transactions for charity and donations comes after a law was introduced Nov. 22, 2017, on the “Registration and Supervision of Non-Profit Organizations.”
The AIF also signed an additional 19 Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with foreign counterparts, bringing the bringing the number to 57, and exchanged information in some 282 cases.
In an April 27 press release on the AIF report, Di Ruzza stressed the importance of these relations, saying that “considering the potential risks linked to the universal projection of the Holy See, international cooperation is pivotal.”
These type of cross-border agreements are designed to crack down on money laundering and tax evasion, ensuring that the IOR does not become a tax haven.
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“O’Connell said he saw the discussion of denial of Communion to certain public figures as focusing too heavily on abortion, to the detriment of other issues.”
Yet another apostate bishop for the US Church. What a shame. Albany deserves better. Before Scharfenburger, there was Bishop Hubbard who got married in a civil ceremony. Perhaps someday the Church will return to the Catholic faith.
Well suited to follow the Francis I, Cdl Cupich, Leo XIV lineage. Where will accommodation take us if not the devaluation of the very reason we’re called to priesthood. To witness to what Christ and the Apostles taught.
The disappointment is confirmed with every passing day.
Bishop O’Connell is a highly intelligent man who works well with people. His canon law background and personal humility will be important in the very difficult work awaiting him in Albany. I am a bit surprised that he accepted the nomination. He’s a very self-effacing fellow. To brand him an apostate is ludicrous and beyond uncharitable.
Very simply: He insufficiently appreciates the gravity of abortion and the sanctity of the Eucharist. Who cares that he has a degree in Canon Law?
At a time when dioceses everywhere are being distilled into fewer parishes (Boston losing one third of its 126 parishes), what better time to teach the Eucharistic nature of the Catholic Church? As contrasted with the Lutheran redefinition as a confederation of “communities” with local leaders and rooted only in gospel values (while the Gospels witness, instead, directly to Jesus Christ as the Incarnation).
But, Pope Benedict clarified two different and concurrent abuses of the Eucharist:
FIRST: “In fact, the terminological shift from ‘Church’ to ‘community’ reveals more convincingly, perhaps, than is revealed anywhere else the inner process of the Reformation’s transposition of the structure of faith. For Luther, Church means community, whereas the Church as ‘successio,’ as the unity of binding tradition in a sacramental and personal form, loses for him here theological content. At best, she becomes an instrument, and organization […]; the organized and sacrally clothed obstacle to the ‘gospel’ (by which he means, not the four Gospels or the Bible as such, but the message of justification as the central concept of Holy Scripture).”
[In contrast with some literature from the Orthodox Churches, Benedict retained both a Eucharistic and a juridical Church. Yes, in each celebration of the Eucharist, the local assembly] “has the whole Lord; in the sacrament, it thus has also the whole Church and IS the whole Church. The Church is wholly present in the eucharistic assembly, that is, in every local assembly; to this, the ‘universal Church’ can add nothing more, for there is nothing ‘more’ than the eucharistic assembly.”
But SECOND: “To celebrate the Eucharist means to enter into union with the universal Church [!]—that is, with the one Lord and his one Body […] The outward sign that one cannot manipulate the Eucharist at will and that it belongs to the universal Church is the ‘successio apostolica’ [Apostolic Succession]: it means that no group can constitute itself a church but ‘becomes’ a church only by being received as such by the universal Church [….] Catholicity…is a central inner dimension of the very mystery of the Eucharist” (“Catholicity as the Formal Principle of Christianity” in “Principles of Catholic Theology”, Ignatius, 1987).
Reorganized parishes must not become community lifeboats. Might it be that rather than a Francis II, Pope Leo XIV is navigating doubly troubled waters? Yes, catastrophic moral issues (pro-abortion politicians presenting themselves for Communion), but also the risk of disrupted local parishes (not communities) drifting further from the Apostolic Succession—without which we have no universal Eucharist. Local pastors are, firstly, extensions of their bishops.
SUMMARY: About the Church within the Eucharist, and the Eucharist within the Church—as a canon lawyer, is Leo intent on maintaining unity instead of the “mess” inherited from Francis? The Albany appointment is also a canon lawyer.
Wishing Bishop the Reverend Mark O’Connell and his flock divine blessings.