Vatican bank admits widows fell victim to glitch
VATICAN CITY (AP): DOZENS AND perhaps hundreds of widows and Vatican pensioners recently came in for a rude surprise: The Vatican bank told them they had to close their accounts or risk losing access to their money – all in the name of Pope Francis’ reform efforts, The Associated Press has learned.
The bank now says it was all a “technical error” and that the widows and pensioners are being kept on as clients, amid the bank’s highly publicised plan to close so- called “lay accounts” as it tries to mend relations with Italian authorities who have suspected that Italians were using the bank as a tax haven.
It all comes as a big embarrassment for an institution that is trying to fend off accusations of mismanagement and corruption.
“In some cases, old ladies got nasty letters,” Max Hohenberg, spokesman for the Institute for Religious Works – or IOR – told The AP. “The fact that a few dozen people were categorised in the wrong way and hence got a letter which was incorrect is a mistake which we have apologised for.”
INTERNAL DISPOSITIONS
Bank President Ernst Von Freyberg penned a terse letter to clients on September 19, telling them to come to the bank before November 30 to transfer their money out because they no longer fit the criteria of account holders set by the board. He warned somewhat ominously that if they didn’t meet the deadline, their money would become subject to the “internal dispositions” of the bank, according to a copy of the letter obtained by AP. He didn’t say what those “internal dispositions” were.
But, somehow, some former Vatican employees and their widows got caught up in the sweep, apparently because of the way their accounts were classified by the bank internally. Their accounts have now been reclassified after they pleaded their cases to the bank.