John Kyle is one of seven lay people named to the council along with eight cardinals. Exactly how the council will work and where priorities lay will be explained at an initial meeting in May.
For now Kyle has taken the job on trust.
“All I know is I have been appointed,” said the retired vice president and treasurer of Imperial Oil.
The council “is a key step toward the consolidation of the current management structures of the Holy See, with the aim of improving co-ordination and oversight of economic and administrative matters,” said Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman.
Kyle was first asked to help with Vatican financial matters in 2005 as one of a number of international auditors. His insider’s view of the books has taught him to discount tales of Vatican wealth.
“The Vatican is certainly nowhere near as rich as everybody seems to think it is,” Kyle said. “More often than not it has been running at a loss. Everybody has said this can’t continue.”
Kyle believes the tales of money laundering and personal favours at the Vatican Bank aren’t the big issue for the new council. A separate commission has been struck to oversee the Vatican Bank and Toronto’s Cardinal Thomas Collins is one of the cardinals serving on that body. The Council for the Economy will be in charge of creating economic policy which will then be carried out by a new Secretariat for the Economy under Australian Cardinal George Pell.
“Presumably they want to restructure things so that it’s not steadily bleeding money,” said Kyle.
In addition to his work for the Vatican’s international audit committee, Kyle spent a dozen years in Toronto on the archdiocesan finance council and helped out auditing the Catholic Cemeteries board. He was a director of Toronto’s St. Joseph Health Centre and has served on the board of the St. Joseph’s Health Centre Foundation. He is on the board of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute.
Kyle retired from Imperial Oil in 2008. He had an earlier career teaching economics at New York University and Northwestern University. These days the retired executive splits his time between Naples, Florida, and a boat in Sydney, British Columbia, but also frequently visits family in Toronto.
Other lay members of the Council for the Economy are Joseph Zahra, former director of the Central Bank of Malta and a business consultant; Jean- Baptiste de Franssu, a French specialist in business administration and asset management; Enrique Llano Cueto, a Spanish economist; Jochen Messemer, a German veteran of the health care, insurance and financial services industries who has also served as an international auditor of the Vatican’s budget management office; Francesco Vermiglio, an Italian corporate finance expert; and George Yeo, a former finance minister in Singapore.
Cardinals serving on the council include: Wilfrid Napier of Durban, South Africa; Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City; Juan Cipriani Thorne of Lima, Peru; Jean-Pierre Ricard of Bordeaux, France; John Tong Hon of Hong Kong; and Agostino Vallini, papal vicar for Rome.
The council will be chaired by German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who is also a member of Pope Francis’ council of eight cardinal advisors.
Each member of the new council is appointed to a five-year term.