Pope Francis has announced a reorganisation of the oversight and administration of the Vatican’s financial affairs, a move that appears to have reduced the power of his financial tsar, Cardinal George Pell.
In a new law announced on Saturday, Pope Francis reversed a 2014 law that had transferred the main operational section of the patrimony office to the cardinal’s Secretariat for the Economy.
Pope Francis said he was restoring these administrative functions to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (Apsa) because he realised there needed to be an “unequivocal and full separation” between those in charge of overseeing expenditures (the economy secretariat) and those who did the spending (Apsa).
