VATICAN CITY — The Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy announced yesterday that it will centralize and overhaul the Catholic city-state’s investment strategy, and that it will impose a policy prohibiting investing the Church’s funds in financial products that may be linked to “pornography, weapons and gambling.”
The decision was the result of a recent financial deal that lost the Church millions of Euros, and it follows “a decade of efforts, first by Pope Benedict XVI and then Pope Francis, to try to clean up the Vatican’s murky finances and its reputation as an off-shore tax haven,” the Associated Press reported yesterday.
The Pope’s Secretary for the Economy announced a ban on “speculative investments, short selling and investing in highly leveraged or complex financial products or in countries vulnerable to money laundering and terrorist financing.”
The order contained an ultimatum compelling Vatican officers to come up with “a divestment strategy within a year if any of [its] investments fall under prohibited categories.”
The decision was one of the results of an embarrassing probe launched by Vatican prosecutors in 2019 where the secretariat’s 350 million euro investment in a London property “lost the Holy See tens of millions in fees and commissions to brokers and other losses.”
A cardinal, Italian brokers, former Vatican officials and several others “have been on trial for a year on a range of alleged financial crimes,” the AP reported.
The probe also revealed that the Vatican’s reps had invested in the funding of the Elton John biopic “Rocketman.”
The new order, effective Sept. 1, demands Vatican investments must “be aligned” with Catholic Church doctrine, and never be used for financial products which may “contradict fundamental principles, such as the sanctity of life or the dignity of the human being or the common good.”
“Investing in one place and not in another, in one productive sector and not in another, is always a moral and cultural choice,” those responsible for the management of the Vatican’s wealth stated in the order.