Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi Read Free Book Online

created to finance beatification causes submitted by the poorest dioceses]. After the beatification of a servant of God, and once all the expenses required for the cause have been settled, 20% of the remaining amounts of the offerings from the faithful collected for that cause [must be] devolved to the Fund for the Causes of the Poor. After canonization, it is up to the Holy See to dispose of the remaining amounts of the offerings collected, one part of which, to be established on a case-by-case basis, will be assigned to the Fund for the Causes of the Poor. From the examination of the books relative to the Fund for the Causes of the Poor presented by the Congregation for recent years, it would appear that these obligations have not been fulfilled. In fact, the above-mentioned Fund has grown in a very limited manner.
    In other words, the Fund for the Causes of the Poor—indispensable to assuring the processing of applications from dioceses with fewer resources—was not growing. This raised the Commission’s suspicions. Zahra requested the freezing of accounts and demanded full documentation for each and every postulator and cause. In the first six months of its investigation, COSEA was shocked to find that considerable sums of cash arrived in the offices of the postulators for which there was no proper accounting, and concluded that there was “insufficient oversight of the cash-flow for canonizations.” 13
    Attention was focused in particular on “two lay postulators (Andrea Ambrosi and Silvia Correale) who managed various cases and commanded high rates. Each of them was responsible for 90 causes out of a total of 2,500 divided among 450 postulators.” 14 Since each postulator manages an average of five to six cases, this means that two people together control a disproportionate number: 180, constituting a kind of monopoly. Among the most significant examples emerging from COSEA’s investigation:
    â€¢ From 2008 to 2013, 43,000 euros were spent on a canonization that seems to show no progress and no proper budget or financial statements on how the funds were used;
    â€¢ One lay postulator offered to conduct an investigation even before opening a canonization process, on the condition that he receive an initial payment of 40,000 euros;
    â€¢ The printing press associated with one of the postulators listed above [Andrea Ambrosi] appears as one of the three print shops that the Congregation recommends to postulators. 15
    Another one of COSEA’s files concerns “expenses for a Spanish canonization managed by a professional postulator between 2008 and 2013.” 16 The compensation for the postulator was “28,000 euros, another 16,000 for his collaborator, one thousand euros for printing the material and the same amount for various expenses that bloated the costs to 46,000 euros,” as indicated in February 2014 to the cardinals on the Council and the Pope. 17
    On Monday, August 5, 2013, at the explicit request of Zahra, and after the Congregation for the Causes of Saints had failed to provide any documentation, Cardinal Versaldi sent four letters containing instructions to freeze accounts at the IOR and APSA. The recipients of the letters were Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, President of APSA, and the lawyer Ernst von Freyberg, the head of the IOR. Versaldi also copied Cardinal Raffaele Farina, the Chair of the Pontifical Commission for Reference on the IOR, established by Francis in June, and its coordinator, Monsignor Juan Ignacio Arrieta.
    Over at the IOR, at 10:11 A.M. on the same day, the unusual freezing order issued by von Freyberg became operative, to the consternation of various employees. It would take the whole day to block the huge number of accounts: there were more than four hundred bank accounts in all. This was an operation whose dimensions were unprecedented in recent bank history. By six o’clock that day, not a single euro could be withdrawn from any account