How much is that halo Pope Francis clears air on ‘graft’

Pope Francis on Thursday made key changes to the complex and often opaque financial procedures involved in the making of Roman Catholic saints.

A decree calls for new controls on the costs of making saints, which can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the gathering of evidence and lawyers’ fees. The process can take decades.

Accusations have sometimes been made of mismanagement and corruption and that the system favours candidates for sainthood from wealthy countries.

In his 2015 book Merchants in the Temple, Italian author Gianluigi Nuzzi wrote that a commission looking into Vatican finances found that the Church’s saint-making office had little or no documentation of funds used by postulators, the chief promoters of candidatures.

Mr Nuzzi, who is now on trial in the Vatican for publishing leaked documents, wrote that about a million euros ($1.1 million) in suspect funds held by a postulator in the Vatican bank was frozen in 2014.

The new decree stipulates that contributions from the faithful and groups must go into an account and be managed by an administrator. The administrator must “scrupulously respect the intentions” of contributors and keep detailed documentation.