The vatican bank

As many things that I dislike about religion, the bank has been a closed institution without open information of what business it does, how profitable it is, how many assets it has so on and so forth. The problem is, as an institution much like the "holy" see, it has remained untouched by criticism. While going over the changes initiated by pope Francis, I think this is the most ominous of things to come, and here's why.

Though he did say the church "should focus less on homosexual marriage and contraception" he never said contraception or homosexual relationships were no longer sinful. He happens to be good at diplomacy. Since I myself struggled (and oftentimes still do) to abandon the prejudices instilled through my catholic upringing (more on that on a later post), I can imagine catholics rebelling against a more open statement, specially priests. Still, without an outright statement it has only moderate significance.

Yes, he has also called a group of archbishops to reform the church. Many of them not european. This is a sign of absolutely nothing though, priests will be priests, and there's a reason why change has been slow to come to any religious institution. The actual reforms might or might not bring about change, and though the calling of this particular council is a good sign, it is only a sign of a council being called, and not equivalent to reform.

Opening a church owned institution to public scrutiny, that is momentous. One of the biggest problems we atheists have with organized religion is not whether people should believe in god or not, but rather that belief in god and the institutions it supports should be as open to criticism as any other idea out ther. Specially institutions supported by believers should be accountable for their actions.

They have seldom been, as previous scandals about child abuse shows, decades can go by without anyone actually attacking the church despite the crimes being commited. Very important though, the same is also true of other religions so my addressing the catholics here is because change is happening there. Now we can all read the financial report of the bank, which has assets of  approx. 5 billion euros and an income of 81 million euros for 2012.

Pope Francis has made me optimistic that the overall influence of the catholic church on the world might improve, and being more transparent about their business is the best sign yet.