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Over the years, the Institute for the Works of Religion, better known as the Vatican Bank, has been linked to swindlers, crooked politicians, assorted mafiosi and the occasional suspicious death. Pope Francis has made a heroic effort to crack down on such iniquities, as Bloomberg Markets reports this month. He still has a ways to go.
The bank was founded, in 1942, to manage money for charities and religious works. But it was also a convenient way to evade Allied restrictions on asset flows during World War II. From the beginning, it shunned outside audits and regularly destroyed its records. Its address and phone number went unlisted. It published no annual reports, paid no taxes and answered to no one but the pope.
In banking, as in life, such secrecy corrodes the soul. And in the decades that followed, plenty of crooks took advantage of the institute’s opacity. Add to the mix a Byzantine record- keeping system, bureaucratic infighting and generalized institutional chaos, and the Vatican became the kind of place where a billion dollars sometimes got misplaced.
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