The new Council had four important appointments on the calendar for 2014: the first was on May 2 in the Sala Bologna of the Apostolic Palace, then there were others in July, September, and December. The seating arrangements for these first meetings already gave a sense of the change under way. Religious and laypersons would alternate, a visual demonstration of how power is distributed. But unfortunately that didn’t happen. The community chosen by Francis, made up of strong personalities from different cultures and backgrounds, was riddled with venom, malicious gossip, and traps. And month after month, its initial ambitious project would be downsized.

  The Rise of Pell, Survivor of the Pedophile Scandals

  Pell had been promoted to cardinal in 2003 by John Paul II. His controversial past deserves the appropriate attention. In 2010 Benedict XVI had mentioned him as a possible prefect of the powerful Congregation for Bishops, to succeed Giovanni Battista Re, who had reached the age of retirement. But when Francis arrived at the Vatican he didn’t know Pell, or at least they weren’t friends, although they had met in 2012 when the Australian was appointed Father of the XIII Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.

  At the Vatican, immediately after the election of Francis, Pell became one of the Councilors on the C15. The Council is a venerable body but without great power. Yet by increasing its functions through an internal audit, it had the capability of becoming the operative arm of the Pope’s soft revolution.

  In the spring of 2013, Pell was trying to envision the pathway to change and to identify the councilors closest to the Pope. He guessed correctly the new climate that the Pope wanted to bring into the Curia, and he wanted to play a central role in the project of restructuring the Vatican. In particular, he started to spend time with Cardinal Santos Abril y Castelló, Francis’s good friend and the next President of the IOR. He also approached Monsignor Vallejo Balda, the Secretary of the Prefecture and later the Coordinator of COSEA. (Vallejo Balda was the prelate who had immediately reported many critical flaws to the Pontiff, starting with the embezzlement he had discovered at the St. Mary Major Basilica.) Finally, the Australian Cardinal developed a solid relationship with Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and the coordinator of the then C8.

  Pell’s detractors claimed that the Cardinal had a single objective in those weeks: to obtain for himself a post in the Apostolic Palace and leave Sydney behind, thereby fleeing the aggressive investigation being conducted by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. There had been many reported cases of pedophilia in the diocese of Melbourne from 1996 to 2001, when Pell was Archbishop. It was suspected that the new Prefect had not cooperated with the investigators and had concealed the dramatic stories of minors who had been abused by priests in his diocese.

  There was also the time, in October 2012, that Pell himself had been cleared of accusations that he had abused a twelve-year-old catechism student at a camp for altar boys in 1961. Or the accusations against him by a former altar boy, John Ellis, shortly after his appointment as Prefect. Ellis named the Church responsible for the violence he had suffered between 1974 and 1979, when he was abused by a priest who has since died. The former altar boy lost the first lawsuit in 2007. During the investigation his physical scars verified the abuse but the diocese was not found legally responsible for the appalling incidents.

  Pell was left legally unscathed by these various accusations, which he had always rejected, but they did land him in the headlines of newspapers throughout the world. His biggest accuser was Peter Saunders, a victim of abuse during his childhood in Wimbledon and as of December 2014, handpicked by Bergoglio to be a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Saunders had repeatedly demanded that Pell be fired. During an episode of the Australian edition of 60 Minutes, Saunders accused Pell of dodging the work and the questions of the Australian Commission of Inquest. “He is making a mockery of the child victims of sexual abuse. He is a dangerous individual, almost sociopathic. He acted with callousness and cold-heartedness.”

  Nor should we forget the criticisms of the “Melbourne Response,” the 1996 protocol approved by Pell that provided for modest damages to the victims of pedophile priests. The document put a cap on damages of $50,000, whereas in court the victims were being awarded even six times that amount. The Cardinal had a ready response: “Many of the people we helped through the compensation panel would have received nothing or very little if they had gone through the courts.” But the findings of the Australian Royal Commission in its preliminary report were truly negative:

  The high prelate did not act fairly from a Christian point of view. The archdiocese over which he presided preferred to safeguard and protect its own resources rather than provide justice.

  Pell was also famous for some of his particularly unfortunate public statements, starting with his remarks about Islam being “an essentially bellicose religion, the Koran is studded with invocations to violence.” Another incident was on August 22, 2014, when, during a hearing of the Royal Commission on videoconference, Pell argued that “pedophile priests are like truck drivers who molest hitchhikers: neither the Church nor the trucking company can be held responsible,” sparking outrage in the courthouse and in public opinion. Yet it should also be mentioned that during his testimony, the Cardinal confessed that his archdiocese had not “acted fairly.”

  The Commission’s Costs

  But nothing seemed to slow down the career of this cardinal, who now had an agenda filled with appointments, for the purpose of rationalizing the Curia’s accounts once and for all. The action would be planned and developed over a three year period, from 2014–2016. The roadmap would create conflicts and enemies but it could also count on sizable resources.

  The Secretariat had a surprisingly large budget: 4.2 million euros. To understand how it was used, let’s take a look at its ledgers. First, there were the expenses of COSEA, which cost 2.5 million euros. Much of this amount went to consultants’ fees, since the Commission’s members all worked pro bono.

  Thanks to my access to the documentation, I am the first who can specify who was paid what. Promontory received 980,000 euros for its audit of APSA, McKinsey 420,000 for the Vatican Media Center, Oliver Wyman 270,000 for its analysis of the pension funds, Ernst & Young 230,000 for its inspections of the Governorate, and KPMG 110,000 for accounting procedures. Although the official amounts would never be released by the small circle of the Pope’s loyalists, the consultancy fees were the basis for one of the first attacks on Francis: how could the Holy Father balance the budget if he was spending such large amounts of money on a new round of consultants?

  The Secretariat for the Economy would not become operative until March 2015, when its rules and regulations were approved. But in 2014, according to the reconstructions of newspapers, more than 500,000 euros were spent on travel, computers, clothing, and consultancies. Danny Casey, an economist and longtime friend of Pell, reportedly received 15,000 euros a month for his services:

  For Casey the Secretariat of the Economy even rented an apartment for 2,900 euros a month on Via dei Coronari and paid for top-quality office and home furnishings: under the item “wallpaper” the table indicates 7,292 euros; more than 47,000 for “furniture and cabinets,” including a kitchen-sink cabinet for 4,600 euros, in addition to various jobs for 33,000 euros. The Cardinal added in a handwritten note expenses also for purchases at Gammarelli’s, the historic tailor shop that since 1798 has dressed the Curia of the eternal city: in general the cardinals pay out of pocket for their cassock and cap, but this time the Secretariat received a bill directly of 2,508 euros for clothing.3

  Despite his controversial past and expensive tastes, especially at a time of budget cuts and austerity, Pell was a frightening figure, and for many in the Curia this was the main reason behind the attacks on him. Cardinal Maradiaga would brand these reports as “slander: it’s like Marxism that attacked the person since it couldn’t attack the idea. Pell is a frugal man and he does not like luxury.”

  Poisonous Rumors

  From the day of his installation at the Secretariat of the Economy, poisonous rumors had been spread about Pell in an effort to isolate, discredit, and exhaust him. The consolidation of all the economic departments under a superdicastery was behind schedule. For months there was no movement on the transfer of competencies, such as placing the Secretariat of State’s personnel office under a single unit directed by Pell. Key staff members had still not been appointed. All of this left the situation of the economic dicasteries exactly as it had been before: apart from public announcements, nothing had changed. For example, although there was an announcement of the transfer to Pell’s jurisdiction of APSA’s ordinary section—which handles the real estate—nothing was done.

  Although the Prefecture was supposed to be closed as early as possible, it was still open for business throughout the summer of 2015. The position of auditor general had been authorized in February 2014, but there would not be an appointment until sixteen months later, on June 5, 2015. The man selected was Libero Milone, a professional with thirty-two years of experience at Deloitte, a consultancy company in which he had also served as CEO (for Italy). Into the summer of 2015, there was still friction between the Secretariat for the Economy and APSA over who should keep the archives, since they shared jurisdiction over real estate: one handled management, the other supervision.

  Vatican managers opposed and obstructed Pell and Bergoglio’s plans, in the conviction that they could stop innovation and discredit the Pope through a war of attrition. “They used to say,” a cardinal confided in me, “that the Church is two thousand years old and will survive even the priests. Today they might regret to admit that some bad apples in the Curia will survive even the pontiffs of change.”

  The Cleaning Crew

  To accelerate the reform and disempower the opposition, on both the theological and financial fronts, Francis began to replace en masse the members of the old guard still in command at many of the offices that controlled the activities of the small state. But first he equipped himself with the means to make it easier. In the fall of 2014 he enacted regulations that would set the retirement age at 75 for directors of dicasteries. He also introduced a measure allowing him to request early retirement for members, “after having made known the reasons for the request” to the person affected in the context of a “fraternal dialogue”—as can be read in the document signed by Parolin on November 5, 2014.

  In this manner many cardinals in the Curia were shown the door. And at the same time as he was drafting the new regulations for Pell, the Holy Father removed the American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke from his position as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Segnatura. Burke became patron of the Sovereign Order of Malta, a largely honorary post. This conservative cardinal, once described as “a harpsichord playing in the desert” by some of Francis’s loyalists, was one of the most vociferous opponents of the Pontiff. “Many of the faithful”—he stated after the Synod—“are feeling a bit seasick because they feel the church’s ship has lost its way.”

  In March 2015 another member of the Curia, Cardinal Versaldi, President of the Prefecture, was transferred to the Congregation for Catholic Education. Monsignor Mariano Crociata was demoted, from the powerful Secretary General of the Italian Bishops’ Conference to Bishop of the small diocese of Latina. Crociata was famous for his gaffe on the day of Bergoglio’s election, when the Italian Bishops’ Conference that he headed issued a press release welcoming the elevation to Peter’s Throne of Cardinal Angelo Scola. He was replaced by Monsignor Nuncio Galantino, who in August 2015 openly attacked Italian politics as “a harem of cronies and con artists: the people are not just a flock of sheep to be guided and sheered.” He also took aim at the hardline anti-immigration policies of the Northern League: “Do not seek votes on the backs of others.”4

  Jessica and the Others

  For months Francis was in a silent tug of war with the Dean of Papal Protocol, the powerful Francesco Camaldo, who had been demoted to Canon of the Vatican basilica. Camaldo is the prelate who, on the evening of March 13, 2013, after the white smoke, could be seen in the second row to the left of the Pope on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square. This picture went around the world and was a source of no small embarrassment for Francis.

  For many years Camaldo had been the Secretary of the former Vicar of Rome, Cardinal Ugo Poletti. The names of both men appeared in an investigation into the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the teenage daughter of a clerk at the Prefecture of the Pontifical house, who on June 22, 1983, after her classes at a music school in Rome, was never seen again. The Italian prosecutors had long connected her disappearance with the odd burial place of Renatino De Pedis. The alleged cashier of the Magliana gang—an organized crime group that controlled the capital’s drug market in the 1980s—De Pedis had for mysterious reasons been laid to rest in the crypt of the Sant’Appolinaire Basilica. This strange burial had been authorized by Cardinal Poletti while the investigators believed that the practical details had been left to his travel secretary, Camaldo.

  Francis might also have received word of the nickname by which Camaldo was known in certain corners of the capital as emerged during the prosecutor’s investigations: Jessica. It was hardly fitting for a man of the cloth, especially one so close to the Pope. He was not the only prelate or cardinal with such a unique sobriquet. There was also “Mother Superior,” a Sicilian monsignor with a penchant for champagne and novices; “Peacock,” a vain cardinal from northern Italy who enjoyed being “pampered” by a handsome young entrepreneur who did business with the Vatican; “Monica Lewinsky,” and many more. The associates of the so-called gay lobby had nicknames that identified them by their origins or sexual proclivities. They would allegedly procure the services of laymen with criminal records who at night, after work, would cruise the Roman bars and nightclubs in search of young boys to satisfy the vices of the senior prelates who protected them. As compensation, the panderers would apparently receive tips, protected careers in Vatican offices, or government jobs, and higher pay than normally accorded a person with their job description or skill set.

  I should specify, however, that Francis did not find a “gay lobby” in the Vatican. That is to say, there is no structured homosexual organization that determines appointments, assigns contracts, or controls dicasteries, money and people’s lives and careers. But the reality is actually worse. In the clergy being gay is experienced as a secret, an unspeakable weakness, a broken taboo, and an easy target for blackmail. “Many cardinals cultivate a secret vice”—explains a banker, a Vatican consultant who preferred to remain anonymous—“some like boys, some like models, some are passionate about food and wine, some are greedy for money. If a con artist is looking for a mark, once he’s pinpointed a cardinal’s weakness he’s on easy street. He satisfies the cardinal’s itch and he’ll be compensated handsomely.” But doesn’t this happen in every bureaucracy of the world? “No, at the Vatican they live with the hypocritical fear of causing a scandal, which conditions their choices, their reactions, and is unequaled in other parts of the world. They worry that the truth will alienate believers from the faith, which is why they keep everything hidden. At a very high cost. It’s a shame that all these secrets foster pressure and blackmail. Francis is trying to end this situation but he is running into strong resistance.”

  The consultant then related the story of a monsignor who had been tailed on his visits to gay massage parlors on Via Merulana and in the Parioli district. A few choice photographs and the priest was a goner. Anyone who doesn’t want to end up being blackmailed has to search for friendships and hookups on special gay websites that guarantee absolute anonymity. But sometimes these encounters lead to tragedies, like the case of a cardinal’s young lover who years ago jumped off the building in Rome where he worked, tired of the pressures and the blackmail to which his beloved cardinal was being subjected.

  Immediately after his election, Francis read the notes left for him by Benedict XVI, the report on the leaked documents, and he realized that the situation—also in terms of the morality and habits of his collaborators—was out of control. He asked for the files of the stipends and monthly salaries of the main advisors, where he discovered that there were secretaries being paid as much as 15,000 euros a month. “These sums”—as one of Bergoglio’s collaborators commented—“are proof of friendship for sexual purposes.” The reaction of the Pontiff is not known, but he is certainly aware that on this front, from the times of Benedict XVI to today, the situation shows no sign of improving.

  Epilogue: Will Francis Resign, Too?

  An Incomplete Revolution

  I have described how Francis, upon his election, found the Curia in disarray, characterized by inertia, scandals, thefts, wrongdoing, and opaque interests. An unreliable Curia had led Benedict XVI to resign and alienated many of the Church’s faithful. To change that dynamic Francis had invested the best minds in the Vatican and spent millions of euros on consultants, hiring lay professionals from outside the walls and inviting them to comb through the accounts of the Holy See. This was an unusual gesture of trust but also a necessary path. Only in this way could the Pope defeat the old power centers that had taken root during the Cold War and grown in the shadows for decades. Only in this way could he restore full credibility and a future to a Church suffering from a chronic crisis in vocations, followers, and offerings.