Cardinal Pell: ‘hundreds of millions of euros’ were hidden away in the Vatican

Cardinal George Pell, the Australian prelate charged by Pope Francis with cleaning up the Vatican’s murky finances, has decided to speak bluntly about the appalling corrupt mess he found when he started work this year.

Writing in the first issue of the Catholic Herald weekly magazine, out tomorrow, the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy – an entirely new post – says he was recently asked by a member of a British parliamentary delegation: ‘Why did the authorities allow the situation to lurch along, disregarding modern accounting standards, for so many decades?’

His response repays close examination. My emphases in bold.

I began by remarking that this question was one of the first that would come to our minds as English-speakers (lumped together by the rest of the world as ‘Anglos’) but one that might be lower on the list for people in the another culture, such as the Italians.

Those in the Curia were following long-established patterns.