Cardinal Pell has been somewhat of a "sore" on the Australian religious landscape for quite a while... I know some devoted religious geezers (nuns, priests) who have defied him many times on many issues from global warming to Aboriginal issues — and on solving the blight of pedophila by some priests in the Catholic Church... Cardinal Pell is an arch-conservative, a friend of rat-bag Tony Abbott, who to some extend has the same views on religion/politics and global warming scepticism. Have a nice trip.

Pope Francis sacked the five-man board of the Vatican's financial watchdog on Thursday - all Italians - in the latest move to break with an old guard associated with a murky past under his predecessor.

All five outgoing members were Italians who had been expected to serve five-year terms ending in 2016 and were laymen associated with the Vatican's discredited financial old guard.

Reformers inside the Vatican had been pushing for the pope, who already has taken a series of steps to clean up Vatican finances, to appoint professionals with an international background to work with Rene Bruelhart, a Swiss lawyer who heads the AIF and who has been pushing for change.

Vatican sources said Bruelhart, Liechtenstein's former top anti-money laundering expert, was chafing under the old board and wanted Francis to appoint global professionals like him.

“Bruelhart wanted a board he could work with and it seems the pope has come down on his side and sent the old boy network packing,” said a Vatican source familiar with the situation.

The new board of the AIF includes Marc Odendall, who administers and advises philanthropic organisations in Switzerland, and Juan C. Zarate, a Harvard law professor and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington D.C.

The other two board members are Joseph Yuvaraj Pillay, former managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and senior advisor to that country's president, and Maria Bianca Farina, the head of two Italian insurance companies.

Francis, who was elected in March 2013 after the resignation of former Pope Benedict, in February set up a new Secretariat for the Economy reporting directly to him and appointed an outsider, Australian Cardinal George Pell, to head it.

In January he removed Cardinal Attilio Nicora, a prelate who played a senior role in Vatican finances for more than a decade, as president of the AIF and replaced him with an archbishop with a track record of reform within the Vatican bureaucracy.

He also replaced four of the five cardinals in the commission that supervises the Vatican's troubled bank, known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR).

Since the arrival of Bruelhart in 2012, the AIF has been spearheading reforms to bring the Vatican in line with international standards on financial transparency and money laundering. But Vatican sources say he has encountered resistance from an old, entrenched guard.

read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis-sacks-entire-board-of-vaticans-financial-watchdog-9494834.html

Vatican: A gathering of world Catholic bishops has been thrown into confusion with the leak of a letter from conservative cardinals to Pope Francis bitterly complaining that the meeting is stacked against them. 

Australian cardinal George Pell gave the Pope the letter accusing him of stacking the cards against conservatives in an ongoing battle over issues including the church's approach to gays and to divorced and remarried Catholics.

L'Espresso newsweekly, which published the English-language letter in full, said 13 cardinals signed the letter and one of them delivered it by hand to the Pope last week.