VATICAN CITY, Rome — For now the issue at hand is who will succeed God's Shepherd on Earth now that Pope Francis has passed away—leaving the decision on who should be elected his successor by the Conclave of more than 250 Cardinal electors.

But unbeknownst to some, the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church may be considered as one of the world's most influential leaders with more than 1.4 billion followers but he will be inheriting a financial mess that Argentine Pope spent much of his reign trying to fix.

Even on his deathbed, the Pope didn’t pause from pursuing a dogged campaign that distinguished his reign—that of reforming the Vatican’s infamously troubled finances. Whilst on his hospital bed, on the
13th day of hospitalization at Rome’s Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli (Gemelli University Hospital), and suffering from exhaustion and bronchitis, Francis unveiled the formation of a high-level commission assigned to raise donations for helping plug chronic budget deficits.

He launched the fund-raising enterprise as a gambit aimed at blunting demands by top officials in the Curia, his vast administrative arm. Church bureaucrats bristled at the Pope’s draconian moves, which included slashing the salaries for the Church’s 250-odd cardinals three times from 2018. Then five years later, he nixed the rich housing subsidies for elite staff, and in September last year, for the first time in decades, he demanded that the Vatican set a rigorous timeline for achieving a 'zero deficit' regime.

His brave campaign made big strides, but this has now been cut short of the promised land with his death at age 88.

When Francis took office, just about everything that involved how the Vatican handled money needed fixing: the huge and ever-rising gap between revenues and expenses, the leadership dominated by clergy lacking expertise in accounting and investing and a scandal-scarred reputation. The stain of corruption, or at least incompetence, lingered from the Banco Ambrosiano affair of the early 1980s, when financier Roberto Calvin scammed the Istituto per le Opere di Religion (IOR), a.k.a. Vatican Bank, which manages the financial assets of the Holy See, US$250 million and emptied a big portion of its reserves.

Days after the institution collapsed, Calvi’s body was found hanging under London’s Blackfriars Bridge; the British courts couldn’t determine whether the cause of death was suicide or murder. The financier’s schemes duped his so-called 'buddy' who headed the IOR, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. The six-foot-eight, chain-smoking Marcinkus, dubbed the Gorilla, had risen in the Vatican from a power base as Pope Paul VI's bodyguard. He often pontificated about how the IOR was the Vatican’s biggest moneymaker courtesy of pocketing the 'spread' between the tiny interest it paid the Jesuits and other religious orders for their deposits, and the much higher rates it garnered re-channeling those funds to European banks.

Going back to Pope Francis’ sweeping reforms, it may have cleaned up some of the mess at the scandal-plagued Vatican Bank, but his management also left its coffers severely depleted. Thus, choosing a successor comes at a critical time for the Catholic Church. There are the obvious hot-button theological divisions—including whether priests should be allowed to marry as well as the church’s views on gay rights and divorce—but Vatican insiders report that religious issues will not be the only ones debated by the 135 cardinals gathering for the upcoming Papal Conclave. Some are also concerned with management expertise and who might make a good Vatican chief-executive-officer (CEO).

This may come as a surprise to those who think of the Holy See only as the home for the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, and the Vatican City is a sovereign nation with diplomatic missions in 183 countries. So while the next Pope needs to be a religious scholar and good communicator, having the skill set of a top CEO might be more necessary now than at any time in the church’s nearly 2000-year history. Or in simple terms, what is needed is Jesus Christ with a degree in Master of Business Administration (MBA).