Pope Francis, grappling with a collapsing system

President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down the US Agency for International Development – USAID – or at least freeze it pending thorough scrutiny and reassessment has created great panic among many of the world’s NGOs counting on it.

According to a logic that began after the Second World War – remember the Marshall Plan? – the United States created an agency that could distribute aid on behalf of the American people, and was also an expression of soft power.

Over time, as often happens, the system has also become a way of expressing oneself politically. Depending on the administration, USAID has supported projects that, at other times, would not have received it. More concerning to Trump and his gang of reformers, however, is the spending USAID has directed on its own, without much in the way of discipline or oversight.

A good bit of USAID money has gone to projects that perhaps were not truly lifesaving, and to activities that had a primarily – even solely – socio-political purpose.

It is fair to say that this is not always the case. In fact, it is rarely the case. Among the beneficiaries of US Aid are many Catholic NGOs, whose work on the ground is unquestionable, and among these also Caritas Internationalis, the Confederation of all the Catholic Caritas worldwide, which – not by chance – issued a harsh statement last week, underlining how the Trump administration’s decision puts the lives of millions of people in danger.

The statement of Caritas Internationalis is true in a factual sense. However, a broader reflection touching on Pope Francis’s pontificate is needed.

Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has always worked to ensure its independence from any state aid. The Church has created its sovereignty with a State, a diplomatic corps, and an organization that starts from the deaconries of the city of Rome – today remembered in the structure of the cardinal deacons – and that becomes the Roman Curia, pontifical foundations, the financial autonomy of Propaganda Fide so the missions can be helped independently. The Vatican even has an autonomous economic system with a quasi-bank (the Institute for the Works of Religion) set up to be able to transfer money safely.

This system has had its ups and downs.

When Italy invaded the Papal States, the entire state apparatus that allowed for an equal distribution of wealth was lost. Peter’s Pence then became how Catholics worldwide supported the Church, even in its organizational structure, so it would not end the work of charity and unity that had always distinguished it.

When the Holy See achieved reconciliation with Italy in 1929 and had territory again, it used the compensation money to restart the economic system. At that time, the IOR was established, foundations and companies were created abroad to buy and invest in real estate, and real estate assets were reorganized.

It all served two purposes: to allow those who worked in the Vatican to live with dignity, with affordable rents and cheaper supermarkets; and to allow the Holy See to make profits, supporting the structure that allowed all this and distributing part of the profits in aid to the poor.

The Internationalis in Caritas Internationalis, as desired by Benedict XVI, was meant to be read in this sense, as well. Faced with a Caritas that seemed to be increasingly turning into a Western fundraising organization, so much so that there was a risk of even accepting pro-abortion outfits into the Confederation, Benedict XVI placed the Confederation under the tutelage of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum. He gave precise guidelines on how aid should be managed and created a new governance that was first and foremost Catholic, and then practical.

In short, there was a new philosophy to follow.

Those who came from the previous management and had remained in Caritas did not agree, nor were they happy. The transition work was long. And then it happened that, at the moment in which the members of the Confederation from the Third World countries resisted the pressure of the members of the First World and expressed a general secretary, this discontent exploded.

It would take a long time to tell the reasons for the internal debate at Caritas without harming anyone. In the end, Pope Francis decided on a receivership – operated by the same commissioner who restructured Justice and Peace – and then created new statutes, which gave rise to new governance that put the purely economic issue back at the center.

Caritas Internationalis seems to have become a sort of great humanitarian enterprise, in philosophical terms, and the idea of a managerial approach, however necessary, has become more potent than the idea of the Catholic approach.

This is the great risk of worldliness, which Benedict XVI highlighted very clearly in his meeting with Catholic associations in Germany in 2012. This seemed to be an extraordinary point of contact between Pope Francis’s pontificate and Benedict XVI’s.

Beyond the words and the notion of a poor Church for the poor, we have witnessed two opposing trends in recent years.

On the one hand, dismantling the structures that created wealth to distribute money to people experiencing poverty started with the controversial trial against two top managers of the IOR, whose management brought in €86.6 million in profits, a figure never reached again.

On the other hand, the evaluation of increasingly speculative policies, with the disposal of old investments, has led the Holy See to take on exceptionally high risks.

And it is these errors, born more from a desire to change the system than from a real strategy, have led the Holy See to lose its independence. There is a middle way between the idea of Vatican Asset Management, launched by Cardinal Pell and never brought to fruition, and the total divestment of the structures and their “contracting” to external companies.

There is an internal way to outsourcing, which has also characterized this entire pontificate: at the beginning, it was the commissions; then, it was the expensive consultancy; today, it is the consultancy to resolve the damages of the consultancy.

On the one hand, Pope Francis is continuing along the path started by his predecessors: he is revising the financial law, launching the law on procurement required by the Merida Convention, and opening an anti-corruption office and an office for reserved matters. On the other hand, however, he is putting his own laws at risk with an approach that is sometimes too rigid and sometimes too personalistic.

Finally, the Pope implemented a hiring freeze at the beginning of his pontificate. Now, there is talk of a possible freeze on the pension fund. In the meantime, he asked the cardinals to find personal donations and accepted that the large Vatican financial structure be outsourced.

And this is where we come across the USAID problem.

As long as the Church structures have to rely entirely on a sovereign fund of another State, the sovereignty of the Church will be put at risk. Solid NGOs have been able to relocate staff while waiting for the night to pass and have taken alternative routes to carry out projects. The problem is that the Holy See is not involved in this aid. The Holy See is not the subject but the object of aid.

Thus, this situation jeopardizes the Holy See’s independence. The USAID case, however brutal, has highlighted the system’s flaws. Pope Francis has allowed the system to find itself in this situation. In recent years, He accepted the risks. He trusted those who promised speculation and aid. He behaved, in essence, like the CEO of a large company.

Today, what has this behavior led to?

The Holy See is no longer financially independent; there is even a Vatican department whose salaries are paid entirely by external donations. How long until this affects the interventions of the Pope himself?

How does it not amount to blackmail?