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Vatican City, Nov 19, 2020 / 07:30 am (CNA).- A Vatican bishop said this week that a committee of outside professionals is being created to help keep Holy See investments both ethical and profitable.

Bishop Nunzio Galantino, president of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), said Nov. 19 that statutes for a new “Investment Committee” were waiting to be approved. 

The committee of “high-profile external professionals” will work with the Council for the Economy and the Secretariat for the Economy to “guarantee the ethical nature of investments, inspired by the social doctrine of the Church, and at the same time, their profitability,” Galantino told the Italian magazine Famiglia Cristiana.

Earlier this month, Pope Francis asked that investment funds be moved out of the Secretariat of State and into APSA, Galantino’s office.

APSA, which functions as the Holy See’s treasury and sovereign wealth manager, administers payroll and operating expenses for Vatican City. It also oversees its own investments. It is now in the process of taking over the financial funds and real estate assets which were, until now, administered by the Secretariat of State. 

The 72-year-old Galantino said in the interview that the Vatican’s new law on the awarding of contracts was “an important step forward, then. But that is not all.”

“Transparency, fairness and oversight stop being meaningless words or reassuring proclamations only when they walk on the legs of honest, capable women and men who truly love the Church,” he said.

Galantino has led APSA since 2018. In October this year, he was forced to deny claims that the Holy See was heading for financial “collapse.”

“There is no threat of collapse or default here. There is only the need for a spending review. And that is what we’re doing. I can prove it to you with numbers,” he said, after a book alleged that the Vatican might soon be unable to meet its ordinary operating expenses.

In an Oct. 31 interview with the Italian newsaper Avvenire, Galantino said that the Holy See did not use money from Peter’s Pence or the pope’s discretionary fund to cover its losses in the controversial purchase of a London building, but that the sum came from the Secretariat of State’s reserves.

No “plundering” of accounts intended for charitable purposes had taken place, he insisted.

Galantino said that “independent estimates” put the losses at 66-150 million pounds ($85-194 million) and he acknowledged that “errors” had contributed to the Vatican’s losses. 

“It will be up to the [Vatican] court to decide whether it was a matter of errors, imprudence, fraudulent actions, or something else. And it will be for the same court to tell us if and how much can be recovered,” he said.

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Pope Francis speaks during his Angelus address on Sept. 17, 2023. / Vatican Media

Vatican City, Sep 17, 2023 / 07:41 am (CNA).
Think of someone who has hurt you and ask God for the strength to forgive that person, Pope Francis told the crowd ga… […]

Munich, Germany, Feb 3, 2018 / 09:31 am (CNA).- The president of the German Bishops’ Conference has declared that, in his view, Catholic priests can conduct blessing ceremonies for homosexual couples.

Cardinal Reinhard Marx told the Bavarian State Broadcasting’s radio service that “there can be no rules” about this question. Rather, the decision of whether a homosexual union should receive the Church’s blessing should be up to “a priest or pastoral worker” and made in each individual case, the German prelate stated.

Speaking on Feb. 3, on the occasion of his 10th anniversary as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Cardinal Marx was asked why “the Church does not always move forward when it comes to demands from some Catholics about, for instance, the ordination of female deacons, the blessing of homosexual couples, or the abolition of compulsory [priestly] celibacy.”

Marx said that, for him, the important question to be asked regards how “the Church can meet the challenges posed by the new circumstances of life today – but also by new insights, of course,” particularly concerning pastoral care.

Describing this as a “fundamental orientation” emphasized by Pope Francis, Marx called for the Church to take “the situation of the individual, … their life-story, their biography, … their relationships” more seriously and accompany them, as individuals accordingly.

Marx has recently called for an individualized approach to pastoral care, which, he has said, is neither subject to general regulations nor is it relativism.

Such “closer pastoral care” must also apply to homosexuals, Cardinal Marx told the Bavarian State Broadcaster: “And one must also encourage priests and pastoral workers to give people in concrete situations encouragement. I do not really see any problems there.”

The specific liturgical form such blessings – or other forms of “encouragement” – should take is a quite different question, the Munich archbishop continued, and one that requires further careful consideration.

Asked whether he really was saying that he “could imagine a way to bless homosexual couples in the Catholic Church,” Marx answered, “yes” – adding however, that there could be “no general solutions.”

“It’s about pastoral care for individual cases, and that applies in other areas as well, which we can not regulate, where we have no sets of rules.”

The decision should be made by “the pastor on the ground, and the individual under pastoral care” said Marx, reiterating that, in his view, “there are things that can not be regulated.”

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