Cardinal Edmund Szoka was a one-time governor of Vatican City whose eagle eye for financial sloppiness reversed, in dramatic fashion, the declining bank balance of the Holy See.
On Szoka’s watch, for the first time in 23 years, Vatican accounts went from the red into the black, and Szoka, a Polish-American, boldly challenged tales of the Vatican’s fabled wealth, saying: “The Holy See ran a deficit from 1970 until 1993. It operates on a very thin budget. There are no perks. No one’s getting big bonuses.”
Instead, he insisted on transparency, bringing — via a grant from America — the first computers into the offices of the Vatican’s accountants, as well as extra auditors who produced the first chart to show the expenditure of every Vatican entity apart from the Vatican Bank, which Szoka could not touch, and Peter’s Pence, a papal charity. For the first time every Catholic bishop in the world received annual financial statements showing in detail the expenditure of both the Vatican City state and the Holy See.
Yet this zeal was not universally welcome: some even complained that Cardinal Szoka was pushy and sometimes his plans for reform verged on the naive — such as a proposal to cut Vatican radio services to Eastern Europe under the Polish Pope John Paul II. Equally unpopular was his ban on the sale of cigarettes in the Vatican City shop.
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However, when Szoka left Rome in 2006, the Holy See’s accounts quickly slipped beneath the radar, with no awkward questions asked about budgets, until the recent reforms introduced by Pope Francis, who this year appointed the Archbishop of Sydney, the tough-talking Cardinal George Pell, to control the Vatican Bank and economy.
Edmund Casimir Szoka was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1927, the son of impoverished immigrants from Poland. As a boy he played at saying Mass in the family backyard. Later he took summer jobs in construction and as a truck delivery driver to pay for his studies for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1954 and in 1971 became the first bishop of the diocese of Gaylord, an amalgam of 21 counties in north Michigan. The diocese was new, so lacking an office Szoka was forced to run the local church from a Catholic high school, sharing an office with the PE teacher. Undeterred, he managed to raise $1.5 million to pay for a cathedral for the diocese.
In 1988, Szoka was made a cardinal by John Paul II, and then, at the age of 70, he was asked by Pope John Paul II to become president of the prefecture of the economic affairs of the Holy See. Subsequently the Vatican’s financial audit statements began to appear a mere five months after the close of the financial year (previously they had often appeared 16 months late). However, Szoka’s biggest reform — which pushed the Vatican’s bank balances into the black — was to remind the world’s Catholic bishops that under canon law they had a responsibility to pay for the operating costs of the Vatican. Many had not known this, but the measure ensured that contributions from dioceses to the Vatican had more than tripled by 2000.
In 1997 Szoka was appointed governor of Vatican City, which had a budget at the time of around $130 million and 1,300 employees working in the Vatican’s museums, shop, post office, mint and police force. Responsible for the running costs of the Vatican’s buildings, Szoka found American donors for the restoration of the Sistine Chapel. His habits of financial transparency were honed in Michigan, where on becoming archbishop in 1981 he asked each parish to produce a financial statement every year.
Often he was a guest at the Pope’s table at Christmas and Easter. Pope John Paul II relied on Szoka, an able linguist, to represent him at international events. At one stage he spent four months learning Japanese so he could say a Mass in Kagoshima, Japan, including the homily. A regular jogger through the parks of Rome, Szoka said he missed Detroit, and in 2006 resigned from his role governing Vatican City.
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Cardinal Edmund Szoka, governor of Vatican City, 1997-2006, was born on September 14, 1927. He died on August 20, 2014, aged 86