Pope Francis has warned the Roman Catholic church against hypocrisy on the issue of poverty, saying it was impossible to speak about the poor and the homeless and yet lead the “life of a pharaoh”.

The comments were made in an interview with Straatnieuws, a Dutch newspaper published by homeless people. The Vatican has been forced on the defensive after the publication of two books exposing greed and financial mismanagement at the heart of the church. The remarks appear to be a not-so-subtle jibe by Francis directed at his cardinals.

“The church must speak with the truth and also with testimony, the testimony of the poor. If a believer speaks about poverty or about the homeless, and leads the life of a pharaoh, this can’t be done,” he told the newspaper.

A separate report by Andrea Tornielli, a veteran Vatican reporter at the Italian newspaper La Stampa, who is working on a book with the pope to be released next year, said Francis was ready to take on the management of Vatican real estate, including apartments that have allegedly been undervalued by the agency that manages the properties.

“It will change,” an unnamed source told Tornielli, signalling what could prove to be a messy new fight within the Vatican.

In his interview with the Dutch newspaper, Francis said in response to a question about the church’s approach to poverty that Jesus had come into the world “homeless and poor”, and that the church believed every person had the right to three things: work, a home and land.



But just how much land, and what kind of house, seems to be up for interpretation within the church. While Francis has eschewed some of the perks offered to the spiritual leader of the Catholic church – he lives in a modest apartment in the Vatican residence – many of his cardinals have opted for lavish homes in the heart of Vatican City.

According to two books published this week that examine cardinals’ lifestyles, many live in apartments that are much larger than Francis’s 50 sq metre home. Those enjoying the largest abodes – paid for by the Vatican – include the American cardinals Raymond Burke (417 sq metres) and William Joseph Levada (524 sq metres).

The Vatican has not denied any of the more explosive details contained in the books by the Italian journalists by Emiliano Fittipaldi and Gianluigi Nuzzi, including one about a monsignor who in 2012 allegedly decided to knock down a wall separating his flat from his elderly neighbour’s while the neighbour was ill and in hospital. Monsignor Giuseppe Sciacca, who was a senior Vatican City administrator at the time and was later demoted by Francis, even had his neighbour’s belongings packed into boxes.

Nuzzi’s book reveals that there was so much concern about financial irregularities within the office that investigates candidates for sainthood that it had itsbank accounts temporarily frozen.

The cost of investigating a possible saint is about €500,000 (£360,000), according to Nuzzi’s book, due to the allegedly painstaking work done by theologians and researchers who examine a candidate’s life and miracles required for sainthood. But when a watchdog committee created by Francis asked the sainthood office to report detailed financial statements of its expenses, the office allegedly came up empty-handed despite spending tens of millions of euros.

Two members of the pope’s financial watchdog committee were arrested by Vatican authorities this week, days before the two books were released, on charges that they leaked secret documents to the authors of the exposés. According to Tornielli, the pope has said he feels bitter about the alleged betrayal by the two former employees, but does not believe they were acting in a conspiracy against him.

“I am a believer and I know that sin is always within us. And there is always human greed, the lack of solidarity, selfishness, which create poverty. For this reason, it seems to me a little difficult to imagine a world without poverty ... But we must always struggle, always, always,” Francis told Straatnieuws.

