In a religion where the first woman in history is said to have caused all kinds of problems, the Roman Catholic Church should have perhaps been able to see what was coming with Francesca Chaouqui.
Francesca Chaouqui was hired in 2013 for the Pope’s Commission for Reference on the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See.Photo: Getty Images
Her hiring in 2013 to be part of COSEA, the Pope’s Commission for Reference on the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See, was an eyebrow-raiser for Vatican watchers and Italian tabloids alike.
She was, at 30, the youngest member on the influential eight-member panel by more than two decades. She was also the only female.
Her professional background was in public relations. And on a board whose mission was to help Pope Francis implement much-needed financial reforms on the Curia, the bureaucracy that governs the church, she was the only one without significant budgeting and accounting experience.
As far as anyone could tell, she was only brought on because of her relationship with Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, a Spanish priest from the ultraconservative Opus Dei order who was serving as a liaison between the laypeople on the commission and the clergy.
The Italian press immediately pounced on some of her questionable social-media activity, like a tweet about Pope Benedict XVI having leukemia or another tweet about a cardinal being corrupt — posts Chaouqui explained away by saying her account had been hacked.
Or there were the photos of her on the Internet that hardly seemed churchly, ranging from the merely saucy (glamour shots better suited for a department-store ad) to the outright racy (semi-nude photos of herself and her then-boyfriend, now husband).
Then came the cocktail reception she hosted during the canonization mass for John XXIII and John Paul II, serving champagne and passed hors d’oeuvres to VIPs on a rooftop patio while the masses teemed below in St. Peter’s Square.
All of which served as prelude to last week, when Chaouqui was arrested, along with Balda, for illegally leaking confidential documents to a pair of Italian journalists writing tell-all books about fiscal chicanery at the Vatican.
Among the howl of headlines in the Italian media was this one from the weekly newsmagazine Panorama: “Una bomba sexy che imbarazza il Vaticano.”
If nothing else, this month’s arrests signify a new strategy from the Church with regards to public relations.
Whereas in the past, the Holy See has been a passive deflector of the leaks that seem to forever pour out of the Apostolic Palace, this time it came out punching. The arrests were widely viewed as a preemptory strikes against the two books, “Merchants in the Temple,” by Gianluigi Nuzzi, which released in the US last week; and “Avaricia,” by Emiliano Fittipaldi, which is only available in Italian.
“With regard to the books announced for coming days, it must be clearly said that this time, as in the past, they’re the fruit of a grave betrayal of the trust shown by the pope,” read a Vatican press release.
“Publications of this kind do not contribute in any way to establish clarity and truth, but rather to create confusion and partial and tendentious interpretations,” it continued. “We must certainly avoid the mistake of thinking that this is a way to help the mission of the pope.”
The books immediately surged to the top of Italian bestseller lists. Together, they document COSEA’s attempts to get to the bottom of the Curia’s lax accounting practices, no-bid contracts, shadowy slush funds, shell bank accounts, embezzlement, cronyism and a generally pervasive air of corruption that seems to envelope everything from the Church’s massive real-estate holdings to the museum shops in Vatican City.
They also disclose how COSEA, which was formed with a papal mandate that all clergy and laypeople within the Holy See should cooperate with its requests, instead withstood attempts at intimidation, stonewalling from top Church officials and even a break-in at its supposedly secure offices, which were just one floor away from the pope’s personal apartment.
Both books delved further into details about some of the high-profile improprieties that had already been reported: like Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the former No. 2 man at the Vatican, who used nearly $200,000 from a fund for sick children to redecorate his personal quarters; or Cardinal George Pell, who ran up $500,000 in personal expenses in just six months and always flew business class or better.
But there were also no shortage of new details and hard numbers to support what had previously only been rumored. Taken collectively, the books make the power struggle between the pope and the entrenched interests at the Vatican sound less like squabbling among priests and more like machine-style politics in New Jersey.
There is a popular Italian saying around the Vatican that roughly translates, “The pope comes and goes. The cardinals stay.” Budgetary reform has been the stated goal of every pope going back at least four decades. It has, so far, stymied every one of them.
But leave it to the Vatican to make the mundane seem salacious. In one of the opening scenes of “Merchants in the Temple,” Pope Francis is secretly recorded without his knowledge as he addresses the cardinals.
The meeting took place July 28, 2013, just four months after the conclave that resulted in Francis’ installation. In it, the spiritual leader of a billion people comes off more like a stressed out CEO.
“We have to better clarify the finances of the Holy See and make them more transparent,” he says. “Cardinal [Domenico] Calcagno told me that in the past five years there has been a 30% increase in employee expenses. Something isn’t right!”
He continues to rail against expenditures for which no clear procedures were followed, moneys being disbursed for unbudgeted jobs, invoices that were being padded.
“One of the department heads told me: they come to me with the invoice so we have to pay,” the pope says. “No, we don’t. If a job was done without an estimate, without authorization, we don’t pay . . . God help us but we don’t pay!”
He goes on to repeat the phrase “we don’t pay” seven times.
“I am reminded of an elderly parish priest in Buenos Aires, a wise man who was very careful with money,” Francis concludes. “He said, ‘If we don’t know how to look after money, which you can see, how can we look after the souls of the faithful, which you can’t see?’” From New York Post.