From hospital, Pope creates commission to aid cash-strapped Vatican

ROME – Despite his ongoing stay at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital and his precarious health status, Pope Francis has established a commission aimed at boosting donations to the Vatican as it faces a crippling deficit, including a looming crisis in its pension system.

In a papal chirograph dated Feb. 11, three days prior to his admission to the Gemelli Hospital, but issued on Feb. 26, the pope established the Commissio de donationibus pro Sancta Sede, which is a new commission aimed at promoting financial donations to the Vatican and the Roman Curia.

Led by Monsignor Roberto Campisi, Assessor for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, the commission’s main task is to promote fundraising campaigns among Catholic faithful, bishops’ conferences, and other potential benefactors.

The emphasis is on providing financial assistance to the Church’s missionary and charitable work.

To this end, the commission, composed of five members, with a maximum of six, will seek to court willing donors for specific projects that are proposed to them by the institutions of the Roman Curia and the Governorate of Vatican City.

However, the chirograph also stipulates that the commission, while proposing specific projects of the curia and governorate, will respect both the independence and responsibility of each curial body in accord with existing regulations.

As of March 1, the Governorate will be led by Italian Sister Raffaella Petrini, who will take over from Spanish Cardinal Fernando Vergéz Alzaga, whose appointment was also announced during Pope Francis’s hospital stay, and whose new role makes her the most powerful woman in the Vatican.

Other members of the commission include Archbishop Flavio Pace, Secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity; Sister Alessandra Smerilli, an economist and Secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development; Sister Silvana Piro, Undersecretary of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See; and Italian lawyer Giuseppe Puglisi-Alibrandi, Deputy Secretary General of the Governorate of Vatican City.

There are open rumors that Smerilli will soon succeed Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny as head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Integral Human Development, making her another woman tapped by the pope to lead a Vatican department.

As part of their work, the donations commission will serve as a coordinating both for other formal and informal fundraising initiatives, such as the contributions made through the annual Peter’s Pence collection and those given under Canon 1271, which are the annual contributions made to the Vatican by national bishops’ conferences around the world.

Canon 1271 stipulates that, “by reason of the bond of unity and charity and according to the resources of their dioceses, bishops are to assist in procuring those means which the Apostolic See needs, according to the conditions of the times, so that it is able to offer service properly to the universal Church.”

The chirograph states that the commission will coordinate the procurement of these funds while ensuring the specific intention and character of each, a provision likely made in a bid to ensure the funds are allocated to the purposes for which they are given.

This is an especially relevant provision given the fact that in the Vatican’s recent megatrial on financial crimes related to a shady real estate deal in London in which the Vatican lost 200 million euros ($209 million).

In suspect deals struck with dubious Italian financiers, money from the Vatican’s Peter’s Pence fund, an annual parish collection taken up to support the works of the pope and pitched as supporting works of charity, was used to procure a high-priced property in a swanky London neighborhood that then resulted in significant losses for the Vatican.

When faithful found out that money from the Peter’s Pence fund had not, in fact, gone to support charitable works and missionary endeavors in the church, but it had instead been used in misguided Vatican investments, there was a broad outcry followed by a drop in donations to the annual fund.

The Commissio de donationibus pro Sancta Sede, then, will have the task of fundraising and ginning up new donations amid fresh mistrust of the Vatican at the financial level, and as the Holy See itself faces a glaring deficit and a swelling crisis over its practically non-existent pension fund, meaning that in short order, it will not be able to meet pension obligations for its retiring workforce.

Every year the commission is tasked with outlining the various fundraising and awareness campaigns to be launched, and with defining their scope and strategy.

It will also oversee the planning and implementation of these initiatives and can also delegate specific tasks to individual members.

As part of its mandate, the commission will also identify and evaluate projects that require financial support, and outline finding priorities. If no projects are submitted by Vatican institutions, the commission will have the ability to reserve funds to be allocated to future initiatives.

Members of the commission have three months to finalize an plan of implementation of their strategy and course of action.

Pope Francis has made several moves in recent years to tackle the Vatican’s deficit, including pay cuts for cardinals and top-ranking curial officials, and a hiring freeze, but critics says these moves have been applied with inconsistency.

In September he penned a letter to cardinals asking them to tighten their belts in a bid to help the Vatican seek new resources and exhibit an ethos of generosity, all towards the goal of a “zero deficit” in its annual budget.

This comes at the latest move in the pope’s overhaul of Vatican finances and his bid to help the Holy See recover from significant losses in recent years.

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