Pope Francis listens attentively at the front of the packed lecture hall, a one-man island of white amid a sea of cardinals in black cassocks and scarlet zucchettos, or skullcaps. The pope and these “princes” of the Roman Catholic Church have gathered in Vatican City’s Synod Hall, a modern glass and steel building steps from the Renaissance-era St. Peter’s Basilica, to get an update on the financial health of the Holy See.
In any other setting, the scene would have been unremarkable: PowerPoint presentations, charts, graphs. But the Vatican has until recently regarded its finances as so sensitive that its full accounts were known only to the pope and his closest aides. The Feb. 13 briefing, says Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi, was the first time the Consistory of Cardinals had ever received such a detailed look at the books. Equally groundbreaking, the presenters included lay experts, not just clergy. And some of them spoke in English, the language of commerce, not in one of the Vatican’s two recognized tongues: Italian and Latin.
