The Vatican is losing money rapidly because of bad management, dodgy contracts and dipping donations, and risks defaulting by 2023, a book has claimed.
Drawing on 3,000 confidential documents, Gianluigi Nuzzi writes in Universal Judgment that the Vatican lost nearly €44 million last year as its huge and shadowy property portfolio went into the red for the first time.
“Pope Francis’s reforms of the Vatican’s finances are failing, like a plaster placed on a haemorrhage,” Nuzzi told The Times. In his book, which is released today, he writes that “every reform is anaesthetised, blocked, sabotaged” by insiders.
Nuzzi was a central figure in the Vatican leaks scandal that revealed alleged corruption. He published documents leaked by Pope Benedict’s butler in 2012, and later wrote