VATICAN CITY — Cardinal Szoka had served at the Vatican for 16 years: seven as president of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, the Vatican’s budget management office, and nine years as head of the governor’s office.
“When I was in the seminary, my only ambition was to be a parish priest,” he said upon his retirement from the Vatican in 2006. “But a priest is obedient. I did not go asking for these jobs.”
At the same time, Cardinal Szoka is proud of how he has served the pope and the church by overseeing extremely worldly Vatican concerns from budget deficits to parking problems.
“(Vatican City State) is a sovereign country, but it is not like any other sovereign country in the world,” he said. “The sovereign is the pope, and he appoints someone to run the state.”
The Vatican post office, museums, gardeners, police, garbage collectors, fire department, and water, telephone and electrical systems were all under Cardinal Szoka’s watchful eye.
When he first came to Rome from Detroit, the Vatican had a 20-year string of budget deficits.
By the end of his third year at the Vatican, the ship was righted and the state’s finances were back in the black.
The cardinal helped find ways to increase income, cut expenses and overhaul the budgeting process with the help of outside experts. Cardinal Szoka is also known for standardizing the accounting procedures in all the departments reporting to the governor’s office, a process he began when he oversaw the budget office.
If correcting the Vatican’s finances wasn’t enough, Cardinal Szoka did something unheard of in the reserved halls of the Vatican: He held press conferences twice a year to explain the budget forecast and detail the final balances.
He said he wanted to address “a lot of curiosity and a lot of mythology” about the Vatican’s finances, and bring about, instead, a culture of transparency.
No small feat, either, a new entrance to the Vatican Museums was completed and two underground parking garages were opened under Cardinal Szoka’s governance.
The renovation put an end to the Vatican City State – which is a small, 109 acres — being clogged with parked cars.
Cardinal Szoka dealt, too, with the types of situations that any state has to consider — including concerns with potential terrorism, economic downturns and energy shortages. He oversaw the Vatican police force, and gave the state’s security system a much-needed upgrade with surveillance cameras. He even oversaw wiring of the Vatican with fiber optic cables and the modernization of record keeping with computer databases.
In addition to the hefty responsibilities, Cardinal Szoka’s Vatican jobs gave him a chance to be close to Pope John Paul II in the last 15 years of his life, sharing Christmas and Easter dinner with him almost every year.
He said he also had a lot of working lunches with Pope John Paul, but the pope was such a good listener that Cardinal Szoka often would go home having eaten almost nothing.
