VATICAN CITY — From the cheerful ease with which the newly minted president of the Vatican Bank fielded questions on a recent morning, it could be easy to forget how the bank has long been a mystery wrapped in an enigma, tangled up in some of the most opaque scandals in Italy.

“Our mission is to serve and shine,” the bank’s president, Ernst von Freyberg, said with a smile. “Our first pillar is transparency.” He spoke from an office in the medieval tower that houses the bank inside the Vatican, beneath a painting depicting a Gospel lesson, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God, what is God’s.”

Appointed in February by Pope Benedict XVI in one of his last acts before retiring, Mr. von Freyberg, 54, a German aristocrat, industrialist and Roman Catholic with a friendly manner and a subtle sense of self-irony, will have a lot of shining to do.

After the ouster of the previous president of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, in a boardroom coup last year, Mr. von Freyberg was brought in with the help of an outside headhunting firm — revolutionary by the standards of the insular Vatican — and is the bank’s first non-Italian president since its founding in 1942.