Pope Leo XIV on Monday loosened the Vatican’s rules on financial investments, rolling back a reform introduced by his predecessor Francis.
In a “Motu Proprio”, or legal change, the US pope repealed Francis’s 2022 order that the Institute for Religious Works (IOR) — the so-called Vatican Bank — should have exclusive competence over managing the Holy See’s financial and liquid assets.
The late Argentine pontiff ordered the change after a series of financial scandals rocked the tiny city state, including a disastrous London property deal.
The new document states financial investments must be in compliance with Vatican investment policy.
And it said the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), the Vatican’s de-facto sovereign wealth fund, should generally use the Vatican Bank.
But there is now an exception — where competent bodies “deem it more efficient or convenient to use financial intermediaries established in other countries”.
The Vatican did not give a reason for the change, but Pope Leo previously said the city state’s finances were not in as bad a state as many believed.
In an interview for “Pope Leo XIV: Global Citizen, Missionary of the 21st Century”, published last month, he said the issue did not keep him awake a night.
“People make a lot of statements about the financial situation of the Vatican. It is not the crisis that people have been led to believe,” he said.
He said that “things have certainly improved from what they were like ten years ago” helped by Francis’s reforms.
“Pope Leo seems to be saying with this Motu Proprio, one, that there isn’t an acute liquidity shortage in the Holy See,” commented Vatican specialist Ed Condon, editor of the Catholic news site The Pillar.
And secondly, Leo “seems to have some measure of confidence in various Vatican departments to manage their own investment portfolios again, in line with how things used to be”, he told AFP.
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