The truth and fiction about Vatican wealth
The Catholic Register, 10 February 2021
The Vatican considers itself less the owner of its artistic heritage, and more a custodian for works that belong to the patrimony of the entire human race.
It was, evident to everyone who knows anything about Vatican finances, a monstrous lie from the beginning. Or at least a monstrous mistake. But that it was believed by many is an indication that what a great number think they know about the Vatican is not true.
The story was eye-catching. In December 2020, the Australian financial crime agency AUSTRAC (Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre) reported that between 2014 and 2020, $2.3 billion (AU) had been transferred from the Vatican to Australia in some 40,000 transactions.
Had the Aussies stumbled upon a massive criminal scheme, with nefarious Vatican officials in cahoots with the shadowy Down Under underworld?
Of course not. In January, AUSTRAC reported that —whoops! — it had bollixed up its computer coding. So much so that the actual figures were 362 transfers for $9.5 million (AU) over seven years. And that money was well-accounted for, mostly related to capital and operating costs of the apostolic nunciature and other Vatican projects.
AUSTRAC had overestimated the amounts by a factor of nearly 250. Yet before the correction was announced, credible outlets reported the “news,” even though it was manifestly false.
Why? Because the Vatican doesn’t have that much money. Its total assets are around 1 billion euro, and its annual budget is about 300 million euro. It couldn’t have transferred all that money to Australia if it wanted to.
Those are publicly-available figures. For comparison, the annual budget of the City of Toronto in 2020 was $13.5 billion. If it was reported that Toronto has transferred some $60 billion over seven years to Australia, would it not have been declared immediately an impossibility? It simply could not have been done.
Even if stealthy cartels or mafia figures had managed to use transfers to launder their money, could it really have been done to that magnitude?
The original AUSTRAC report alleged an average of 15 transactions per day for seven years. By its own standards, would AUSTRAC not have wondered about such a high volume of transactions coming from the tiny Vatican City micro-state?
Perhaps it was all an innocent mistake, cleared up too late. But there are a few warnings here for digesting media reporting on the Vatican.
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