News U. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Newsletters Coupons. Follow Us. Bishops Enjoy Italian Luxury. From the Vatileaks of dilettante cardinals to those of professional consultants; prelude to a battle of the titans that has jeopardized and shaken a bi-millennial building to its core.
By JD Flynn. A first round of indictments in a Vatican City state court is expected to be handed down soon. Red-hatted princes of the church may eventually be implicated. But when Pope Francis was elected in , it was with a mandate to clean up finances. His efforts began well: The pope regularized accounting procedures, committed to European anti-corruption standards, and by , the Vatican had contracted the global accounting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers to conduct the first serious external audit in its history.
The Vatican employee sex scandal was an incident in March in which two part-time employees of the Holy See , a consultant who also served as a lay attendant of the pope [1] and another who was a professional member of the Saint Peter's Choir , [2] were reported in the press to be part of a homosexual male prostitution ring. The Catholic Church considers prostitution and homosexual acts to be gravely sinful offenses [3] and the Vatican severed its connections with both men, one of whom had been arrested. Italian engineering executive Angelo Balducci, a Papal Gentleman since , who had served as senior adviser to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples , responsible for the management of the Roman Catholic church's missionary activities around the globe, [2] was reportedly involved with pimping a Nigerian Cappella Giulia member, Ghinedu Ehiem, for the services of male prostitutes, as part of a local prostitution ring. In March , this escalated into a national scandal in Italy when wiretaps and police documents were published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica which indicated that Ehiem had been in regular contact with Balducci, and that the main subject of their conversation was "gay sex".
Pope's decision to abolish 'pontifical secret' is a 'massive change', France 24's Seema Gupta says. Pope abolishes 'pontifical secrecy' in clergy sexual abuse investigations. Vatican lifts French archbishop's immunity in groping inquiry. Sex abuse in the Catholic Church: Poland's moment of reckoning? Church sex abuse new order from the pope analysed by Josephine McKenna.