Can Elon Musk repair the Vatican's woeful fiscal state?
I'll save my opinion on the selection of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as our new pontiff for another column, although his anti-Trump social media posts, his slams of Catholic Vice President JD Vance, and his stance favoring illegal aliens flooding the US. At the same time, the Vatican is safely protected by the Swiss Guard, which does not fill me with hope.
The cardinals did not read an earlier column I wrote advocating for either Cardinals Raymond Burke or Robert Sarah for the top job. (Okay, my own kids don't read my columns, so why should I expect more from high-falutin' clerics in my church?) To say my preferences for selecting conservative Cardinals Burke or Sarah by a College of Cardinals, 80 percent of whose voting members were chosen by Francis, were longshots is quite the understatement.
But I hope that Pope Leo XIV does read this column. It offers sincere, if unconventional, advice.
After reading about the Catholic Church's sorry state of financial affairs in a recent Wall Street Journal article, I offer the following solution to our new pontiff: Bring Elon Musk to head up DOCE - the Department of Church Efficiency.
The Journal's long article was presumably written with the assistance of and informed by people inside the Vatican with an agenda. Nonetheless, if accurate, it paints a bleak picture of the Mother Church's financial affairs.
It really is a remarkable piece of journalism, both in its details and its timing. It appeared on the morning of the conclave before the College of Cardinals chose the new pope.
The article "Next Pope Faces Financial Mess Francis Struggled to Clean Up" reads like something out of a Dan Brown novel. It details the terrible financial struggles the church is currently facing, with the church's budget deficit tripling in Pope Francis's 12-year tenure and its pension fund facing up to two billion euros in unfunded liabilities.
Perhaps more disturbing are the intrigues the article discusses surrounding the alleged fraud involving Cardinal Giovanni Becciu, formerly a top Vatican official in the church's powerful Secretariat of State.
"Unusual" financial practices were discovered in 2015. For example, an official in a department called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith withdrew $500,000 in funds from a Vatican Bank account and stored some of the cash in a shopping bag. Other funds were reportedly transferred from one Vatican Bank account to another to conceal the funds from a senior Vatican auditing official, Cardinal George Pell. Money laundering using the Vatican Bank had become rampant, to the point where a European financial crime watchdog was threatening to blacklist the bank.
Finally, Pope Francis brought in an outside consultant from Deloitte to investigate all the shenanigans. He discovered that $500,000 was missing from the doctrinal office accounts. Someone broke into the consultant's office and unscrewed the base of his computer, apparently not reattaching it and leaving a spring missing.
Two years after Pope Francis promoted Archbishop Becciu to Cardinal Becciu, it was discovered that Cardinal Becciu had embezzled more than $100,000 through a nonprofit group run by his brother. Church magistrates also accused Becciu of being negligent in overseeing a $400 million church investment in an office building in London, which Becciu denied.
Cardinal Becciu was convicted in 2023 of fraud and embezzlement, which he is appealing. Although stripped of his official duties, he is still a cardinal (albeit non-voting) in the Church.
The article notes that a “power play” occurred between the Deloitte auditor, Libero Milone, and a church office called the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (or APSA), which acts as the Vatican’s Central Bank and clears its financial transactions. Milone began questioning APSA’s accounting practices, which in turn caused APSA to begin scrutinizing Milone’s expense reports. Eventually, Cardinal Becciu forced Milone out of the job, claiming that Pope Francis had “lost faith” in him.
The intrigue continued, including the hiring of private investigators to look for wiretaps. The article is something to behold.
This is to say that I think the Vatican's bureaucratic and financial mess is a job for Elon Musk. Surely, Elon Musk can reconstitute his Department of Government Efficiency as the Department of Church Efficiency and help get the church sorted. One would imagine that the Vatican's finances would be a piece of cake compared to the bureaucracy of the US federal government.
The intrigues within the Church bureaucracy sound strikingly similar to many of the revelations that DOGE was exposing within the US federal government. So why not bring the DOGE skillsets and technology to the Vatican?
And would not helping save the 2,000-year-old august Catholic Church, founded by Jesus Christ himself, be as worthy a cause as that rendered by Musk to the US government?
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 38 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has contributed to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News' 48 Hours Mysteries and NBC News' Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)
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