Cardinal Wuerl visits Institute for Works of Religion
The Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC, Donald W. Wuerl is in Rome this week at
the head of a delegation from the Papal Foundation – a US lay organization that supports
the charitable works of the Holy Father. As part of their visit to Rome this week,
Cardinal Wuerl and several delegates from the Foundation toured the Institute for
the Works of Religion – the IOR. Philippa Hitchen asked Cardinal Wuerl about the reasons
for his visit and especially to discuss the ongoing efforts to ensure transparency
in line with international banking norms and procedures.
Below is a transciption
of Cardinal Wuerl's interview with Philippa Hitchen.
CW “Well we
were invited to come and learn first hand directly from the people responsible for
the Institute, how it functions and how it carries out its activities. And so, we
were very pleased to have the board of the Papal Foundation have this experience and
we spent two hours this morning reviewing with the leadership of the Institute what
it does and how it does it. It was clearly an effort to be as transparent as possible
with how this Institute that cares for funds to carry out the works of religion actually
goes about its business. I found it to be a very reassuring thing as did the members
of our, our board who were there, manyof whom are people who are deeply engaged in
finance, they know the world of finance, they know the world of accountability and
book keeping and they told me they were quite impressed with the whole procedure.”
PHSo what kind of assurances did you receive that the IOR (aka Vatican Bank) is
really is committed to compliance with international norms because as you know there
have been accusations of a lack of transparency in the past?
CW “One
of the things that struck me as most convincing was the fact that they have outside
auditors, they have just like we in the Church in the United States use outside auditing
firms to come in and take a look at what we’re doing and then report on how well it
complies with the regulations. Well, they do the same thing at the Institute, they’ve
had on the level of just book keeping analysis and on the level of procedural analysis,
they’ve had outside firms come in examine them and say you’re in complete compliance.
They’ve also asked the entities that have the oversight on the part of governments
(international institutions) to do the same thing and they were pointing out to us
today that they have gotten a clean bill of the health every time they’ve asked for
outside auditing.”
PH The bank as you know has struggled for a long
time with this image of a very secret organization with a very dark past. What else
do you think it can do then to perhaps try and shake off this view?
CW
“I think that’s a very very good question and one of the reasons I think they invited
us was to say, and they said, “bring anybody from your board you want, being anybody
you want to come to this meeting”, but in the course of the meeting they also told
us, they’re doing the same thing for governing bodies in the European Union. They’re
doing the same thing for people who are involved in financial institutions around
Europe, around the world. It seems to me they’re doing everything they can to open
their doors and say, “come in and take a look at us”. That was very impressive.”
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