For many, it was believed that the Vatican's conclave of cardinals would never pick an American to serve as its pontiff.

After all, the U.S. was big and powerful, the wisdom went, they already had the U.S. president. No way would they give "the Americans" the pope, too.

But they did, electing Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost the new Vicar of Christ.

There could be many reasons, but three of them leap out.

One, they held four voting sessions and on the first ones they could probably see that they were divided pretty sharply on the lines of left and right, meaning, if they were going to come to any type of two-thirds majority necessary for electing a pope, they'd need to start moving to the center ... closer, closer, without each side compromising on all that they wanted. That could easily have led to Prevost, whose statements seem to be pretty noncontroversial and middle-of-the-road for the most part.

That could tell us why they picked this particular American, but not quite why they picked an American at all.

One theory as to why the cardinals might have decided that having an American in St. Peter's chair was just what was needed is that way over in America, there was a president there whom many of them didn't like, one who was a threat to their NGO funding, one whose quest for rule of law at a lawless border drove them bonkers.

A huge number of them, appointed by Pope Francis, really dislike President Trump. They hate his star power, and they hate his unwavering quest for rule of law on the matters of illegal immigration and NGO funding. They could yell all they liked as the eurotrash do, but if they put an American in the Chair, who understood the mood of America better than they did, then who better to counter him? He would have automatic star power of his own, even if he were dull as dishwater, and he wouldn't be afraid to cross him.

It's possible this is true, but the even more likely reason is that they have to be practical.

The most specifically "American" reason for picking Cardinal Prevost, which might cast insight on why they picked him is the state of the Vatican's finances, which a source told the Wall Street Journal, were "a five-alarm fire."

According to the Journal, in an investigative piece published three days ago:

Twelve years ago, the new Bishop of Rome was Francis, a pontiff elected with a mandate to fix the Vatican’s finances. But the first pope from the New World wasn’t prepared for the degree of resistance at the Curia, as the Vatican bureaucracy is known, his close advisers and allies said. He hired a professional auditor to modernize the finances—leading clergy to move Vatican funds to an account under a cardinal’s name and stockpile cash in a shopping bag. The auditor was mystified that nuns kept account ledgers in pencil and paper. At one point intruders broke into his office and tampered with his computer. Eventually the Gendarmerie Corps of Vatican City State—its police service—got involved.

Professional accountants, encouraged by Francis, ran training workshops for clergy who balked at the rules like obtaining multiple signoffs for expenses. Prelates tried to hide funds from scrutiny, citing national security concerns for the secret ledgers of funding missionaries in countries where proselytizing is a crime. Other departments shrugged off the modern-day challenge of balancing the budget of a papal state whose origins stretch back more than a millennium. The pope himself shifted focus to other topics. Meanwhile, the pension fund kept falling farther behind. Scandals over a $400 million real-estate investment ended with a cardinal being convicted of embezzlement and fraud in 2023.

The report gets into details about just what a shambles the Vatican's finances are, dating from the past couple decades, and no doubt, getting really bad at this point. They tried to put Pope Francis on it, a man with a reputation for honesty even if some of his politics were wrong, but the job was too big for him.

According to the Wall Street Journal's news story:

For over a decade, Francis had struggled to bring some transparency to the Vatican’s shadowy balance sheet. Now, in the final weeks of his life, advisers were filtering in and out of his austere reception room, presenting the details of a microstate awash in priceless treasures but tumbling deeper into debt. The budget deficit had tripled since the Argentine took office, and the pension fund faced up to 2 billion euros in liabilities it wouldn’t be able to fund.

The first Jesuit Pope was exhorting clergy to live frugally—but pinching pennies alone would not relieve the financial crisis facing the seat of the Church. The Vatican was increasingly relying on museum ticket sales to fund its civil service, its worldwide network of embassies and the Papal Swiss Guard, a small army paid in Swiss franc pensions. The city-state serves seven million visitors a year and a global flock, without collecting taxes.

After more than a month of discussion, Francis settled on one solution: Ask the faithful for more money.

On Feb. 11, he signed a chirografo, or papal directive, to boost donations. Three days later, he was hospitalized with double pneumonia. On April 21, he died, leaving his soon-to-be-chosen successor with a similar economic puzzle to the one Francis himself had inherited.

Now they needed American fiscal prowess.

About 10 or 15 years ago, I was at a church potluck dinner in some place at or near Pentwater, Michigan on the western shore of the state. My cousin-in-law is a Catholic deacon, and he introduced me to a priest who had been called in by the Vatican to clean up their finances. He went for a short period, surveyed the place, and said it was an Augean stable. I recall his recounting of the very vivid experience of no double-entry bookkeeping, no recognition of bank accounts not being bottomless, no idea about budgets, a belief by some that God would provide, so no need to keep books in order, no expertise in proper accounting, no records at all. Italy has many fine money managers, but none of them were to be found at the Vatican. He said it was a complete mess.

But they called him in because of his fiscal background, and more specifically, because he was American, because they actually believed it took an American to clean the finances up.

The two largest money donors to the Church, the Americans and Germans, reportedly raised the alarm about the finances, too, according to the Wall Street Journal:

The problems will now fall to Francis’ successor, who will be elected by cardinals from 70 different countries and territories in the Sistine Chapel starting Wednesday. Cardinals from the U.S. and Germany—the countries with the biggest donor bases—have given lengthy presentations to their brethren on the fragile state of the Vatican’s finances and efforts to repair them. Others view the financial strains as earthly concerns that are secondary to the Church’s main mission of saving souls.

According to Google AI, the Vatican's most recent budget shortfall is 83 million euros ($94.22 million) as of mid-2024, and a pension deficit of $631 million euros, which would be more than $1 billion.

The Americans contribute about 30% of the Church's finances, according to Alateia, by far the largest income. For that alone, it would make sense to bring in an American, who might be in a position to raise money. As Glenn Beaton points out, the Americans were the most generous donors in the global campaign to rebuild Notre Dame after its horrific fire in 2019.

Pope Francis tried. Now it's Pope Leo XIV's turn. In their minds, they are calling in the big guns, the U.S. American, and one can only hope that Pope Leo, who has a background in mathematics and has run administrative posts many times over the course of his career, is going to know what to do, going to know who to call, will be able to be on it like a duck on a junebug.

Perhaps instead of fighting with President Trump, the new pope could ask President Trump to help him out, finding him an accounting team that could restore order to the Vatican's finances. Trump has worked with teams on just this money level with his own fiscal empire, and probably could help him find the right people. He could even dispatch DOGE as a favor if they really wanted to get to the bottom of it. That would be a lot better than fighting with Trump over U.S. internal policies that are really none of the Vatican's business. It would be an intriguing partnership, as Trump is clearly fascinated with Catholicism and the Vatican, and one can only watch and hope for such a deal to emerge.

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