Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Holy Finances and a Financial Hole: the Money Trail of the Vatican
12 May 2025
Today, Nicole is pulling back the curtain on a financial institution you probably didn’t expect to see on this show: Vatican City. In this episode, Nicole dives into the financial story of the Catholic Church under Pope Francis: the scandals, the reforms, the setbacks—and what this means for Pope Leo and the future of the church.
Full Episode
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Today, I'm going to pull back the curtain on a financial institution you probably didn't expect to hear on the show, Vatican City, with the new pope, the Sistine Chapel, the Swiss guards, and a surprisingly tangled financial web. Now, you might think of the Vatican as this holy place, and it absolutely is.
But it's also a sovereign city-state with a bank, real estate assets, a pension fund, and a history of financial scandal that would make Wall Street blush. Today, we're going to dive into the financial story of the Catholic Church under Pope Francis, the scandals, the reforms, the setbacks, and what all of this means for the new pope, Pope Leo XIV. Let's rewind back to 2012.
This is the year before Pope Francis became pope, and the Vatican was already in the middle of a full-blown credibility crisis. Not just spiritually, but financially. That year, a European financial watchdog known as Moneyball did a first-of-its-kind audit of the Vatican Bank, formerly known as the Institute for the Works of Religion, or IOR for short. and it didn't go that well.
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