Credit Card Ban at the Vatican

Millions of tourists who visit the Vatican every year to admire priceless art treasures including Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes may be hit by a ban on the use of foreign credit cards in the Holy See.

The Creation of Man; Sistine Chapel Detail

The Bank of Italy made the decision to impose the ban at the start of 2013; stating via its website which appeared on January 10, that

            “the presence of an effective anti money laundering regime has still not been proved”.

This all happened in spite of the favourable findings of a recent financial evaluation by the Moneyval Committee*, which showed that Vatican bank procedures conformed to 9 out of 16 core recommendations.  Financial Authority Director at the Vatican, Rene Brulhart, said he was surprised at the sanction, and insisted that adequate measures, in compliance with EU requirements, had been put in place to combat money-laundering.

Mr Brulhard says that in some cases the Holy See’s money-laundering controls were actually stricter than the standards requested by the Council of Europe’s Moneyval evaluators.

According to the Italian central bank, credit and debit card machines were installed in the Vatican by Deutsche Bank without the appropriate permission from the Italian authorities, after an agreement with another bank had expired.

Until the row is sorted out, visitors to the Holy See will have to pay cash for admission and any purchases from the Vatican’s museums and gift shops. That is bad news for the Catholic Church, as this is one of its major income streams, with over 91 million Euros earned from 5 million visitors in 2011.

* Moneyval is a Council of Europe committee of experts which assesses its members’ compliance  with all relevant international standards in the legal, financial and law enforcement sectors through a peer review process of mutual evaluations