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 prohibit investing the Church’s funds in financial products that may be linked to “pornography, weapons and gambling.”
The order gives Vatican officers a year to come up with a divestment strategy for any investments that fall under “prohibited categories,” which also include “speculative investments, short selling and investing in highly leveraged or complex financial products or in countries vulnerable to money laundering and terrorist financing.”
The decision was a result of an embarrassing probe launched by Vatican prosecutors in 2019, after 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,” the Associated Press reported yesterday. The move also 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.”
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, requires Vatican investments to be “aligned” with Catholic Church doctrine, and never 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,” the order stated.