Vatican City Quotes

Dr. Jacobus, I am walking out your doors right now. I need clothes. I am going to Vatican City. One does not go to Vatican City with ones ass hanging out. Do I make myself clear?

I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

One does not go to Vatican City with one's ass hanging out.

Simone: I finally found Daisy in this grand, massive hotel room overlooking Vatican City in Rome. In Rome! I had to fly halfway around the world and back to find her. And when I did, she was completely bombed, naked except for a pair of underwear. And she had chopped her hair off into this shaggy bob. Daisy: That was a great haircut. Simone: It was a really good haircut. Daisy: I've always said, 'The Italians know hair.

Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised. This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which presents itself as the world's only true religion. Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims. At last count there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews. Mormonism is considered in some sober academic circles to be well on its way to becoming a major world religion--the first such faith to emerge since Islam.

I don't get why men feel insecure when they meet a confident woman! As for me, I'd feel much more secure if every city, every state, every nation in the world is run by women than men.

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man! Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.

I have just removed a dozen of my best men from Vatican City on the eve of conclave. And I have done this to stake out the Pantheon based on the testimony of some American I have never met who has just interpreted a four hundred-year-old poem.

With pain in his voice, the camerlengo spoke of his late Pope... the victim of an Illuminati poisoning. And finally, his words almost a whisper, he spoke of a deadly new technology, antimatter, which in less than two hours threatened to destroy all of Vatican City.

Vatican city is an independent state created by the Lateran treaty of 11th Feb 1929 which was signed by Pope Pius XI, the holy see and the Italian government.  It covers an area of 108 acres on the hill west of the Tiber river. It is separated from the rest of Rome by high walls on all sides except at the Piazza of St Peter. 

361I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

Sexual taboos are man’s invention. Sexual repression and misogyny are the result of a paternalistic society with a fundamental disconnect from its own basic nature. From angry, gynophobic mullahs hell-bent on covering women up to their eyeballs, to the denizens of Vatican City, who look and dress like a bunch of drag queens, some truly perverted individuals have been allowed to make the sex rules for everyone else. Marriage

Men speak of God’s love for man… but if providence does not come in this hour, where is He then? My conclusion is simple. The Semitic texts from Bronze Age Palestine of which Christianity is comprised still fit uncomfortably well with contemporary life. The Old Testament depicts a God capricious and cruel; blood sacrifice, vengeance, genocide; death and destruction et al. Would He not approve of Herr Hitler and the brutal, tribalistic crusade against Hebrews and non-Christian ‘untermensch?’ One thing is inarguable. His church on Earth has produced some of the most vigorous and violent contribution to the European fascist cause. It is synergy. Man Created God, even if God Created Man; it all exists in the hubris and apotheosis of the narcissistic soul, and alas, all too many of the human herd are willing to follow the beastly trait of leadership. The idea of self-emancipation and advancement, with Europe under the jackboot of fascism, would be Quixotic to the point of mirthless lunacy.

The pilgrimage of Italy, which I now accomplished, had long been the object of my curious devotion. The passage of Mount Cenis, the regular streets of Turin, the Gothic cathedral of Milan, the scenery of the Boromean Islands, the marble palaces of Genoa, the beauties of Florence, the wonders of Rome, the curiosities of Naples, the galleries of Bologna, the singular aspect of Venice, the amphitheatre of Verona, and the Palladian architecture of Vicenza, are still present to my imagination. I read the Tuscan writers on the banks of the Arno; but my conversation was with the dead rather than the living, and the whole college of Cardinals was of less value in my eyes than the transfiguration of Raphael, the Apollo of the Vatican, or the massy greatness of the Coliseum. It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind. After Rome has kindled and satisfied the enthusiasm of the Classic pilgrim, his curiosity for all meaner objects insensibly subsides.

The Archons use 'mind control' techniques. This is known as psychological warfare, but Archontic manipulation far surpasses anything the United States, Russia, Vatican City, Israel, or the United Kingdom has, of yet, invented. The Archons are the ultimate brainwashers. The Archons keep people distracted with pornography and drugs, with sports and alcohol, with material possessions, exotic vacations, artificial reality, addiction to various pleasures, along with dreams of the artificial technological paradise of: radical life-extension, transhumanism, nootropics and Brain Computer Interfaces. The Archons do this so that humanity does not have the time or opportunity to observe what is really happening in the world. Humanity is under siege. The Archons want you to be as uneducated and uninformed as possible. They destroy your passion for learning, and infiltrate and sabotage the educational system. Ultimately, they want to destroy all that makes you human, your hopes, your dreams, your joys, especially they want to destroy your spirituality.

Capitalism isn’t merely amoral, it is actively immoral, and it has to conceal its immortality via the simulation of morality. Morality is not part of capitalism. Capitalism is all about serving the self-interest of the individual, and there’s nothing moral about that unless, like Ayn Rand, you insanely proclaim, “Selfishness is virtuous.” Morality is always external to capitalism, something alien to capitalism. Capitalism addresses morality through simulation. It even reifies morality and turns it into commodities. The Vatican sells religious trinkets to the credulous masses. Evangelical Christianity in America is a vast money-making machine. Disneyland and Hollywood simulate a moral order where the good are rewarded and the wicked punished (the opposite of what actually happens in capitalism).

In exchange for some wide-ranging modifications demanded by the socialist government to the church’s 1929 concordat, Italy agreed to underwrite the remainder of the $406 million settlement.53 The changes to the concordat would have once been unthinkable. The church dropped its insistence that Roman Catholicism be the state religion. Moving forward, the state had to confirm church-annulled marriages. Parents were given the right to opt their children out of formerly mandatory religious education classes. And Rome was no longer considered a “sacred city,” a classification that had allowed the Vatican to keep out strip clubs and the porn industry. Italy even managed to get the church to relinquish control of the Jewish catacombs. “The new concordat is another example of the diminishing hold of the Roman Catholic church in civil life in Italy,” noted The New York Times.54 In return, Italy instituted an“eight-per-thousand” tax, in which 0.8 percent of the income tax paid by ordinary Italians was distributed to one of twelve religious organizations recognized by the state. During its early years, nearly 90 percent of the tax went to the Catholic Church (by 2010, the church received less than 50 percent as the tax was more equitably distributed). Not only did the tax relieve Italy of its responsibility for the $135 million annual subsidy it paid for the country’s 35,000 priests, it meant the church had a steady and reliable source of much needed income.55

VATICAN CITY -Pope Francis is making good on his insistence that the Catholic Church welcome all faithful-not just those who obey church teaching perfectly. He'll marry 20 couples this weekend, including some who already live together and those with children, a sin in the eyes of the church.

Unlike many of her sister goddesses, Cybele did not lose her power to the gods of an invading people. Her vanquisher was already within the city walls. In the shadow of her temples, a new Eastern mystery cult gained strength. It stemmed from a monotheistic patriarchal tradition and rejected the notion of female deities, female prophets, female equality. Its devotees were bound to the exclusive worship of one male god. With the ascendancy of Christianity, Cybele’s great temple in Rome was destroyed. On the exact spot where the Phyrgianum once stood, Christians built the basilica of the Vatican. This was the beginning of the end of the ancient tradition of spiritually powerful women drummers.

December 19, 2:02 A.M. CET Crypts below Vatican City   Rhun lurched up and away. His head smashed against smooth stone. The blow opened a wound on his temple and knocked him back into the scalding bath of wine with a splash. He had awakened like this many times, trapped inside a stone sarcophagus,

Ottomans invaded the Italian peninsula itself, seizing the city of Otranto on the southeastern coast, slaughtering the archbishop and many priests in the cathedral, forcibly converting the townspeople, beheading eight hundred who refused to convert, and sawing the bishop in half.

The Mystery Becoming a Modern Reality On February 11th, 1929, the Lateran Accords were signed, and for the first time in history the Vatican City was declared a sovereign city-state, so that it is now both a city and a country, with a ruler over it, the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. It is the smallest[250] independent state that is internationally recognized in the world. It is called a sacerdotal-monarchical state, because it is both a religious body and it has a single ruler over it. From that time on, people have gone to, or been welcomed to, the Vatican to have a “private audience” with the pope. What people did in various forms for centuries has finally in the modern world become a political reality. Rome has ambassadors to other countries, and most of the nations of the world have their ambassadors to Rome. God told us in the mystery of that woman. She was not any ordinary city. “And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” (Revelation 17:18)

We bring this lamentable recital to a close. There can be no doubt that John's remarkable vision had come to pass: A city on seven hills sated with wealth, which claimed a special relationship to God and Christ, literally ruled over the kings of the earth. As with the other identifying criteria John provides, there is only one city in history (and only one today) which passes this test. Peter de Rosa reminds us of what must have shocked John:       Jesus renounced possessions. He constantly taught: "Go, sell all thou hast and give to the poor, then come and follow me." He preached doom to the rich and powerful. . . . Christ's Vicar lives surrounded by treasures, some of pagan origin. Any suggestion that the pope should sell all he has and give to the poor is greeted with derision as impractical. The rich young man in the gospel reacted in the same way.       Throughout his life, Jesus lived simply; he died naked, offering the sacrifice of his life on the cross.       When the pope renews that sacrifice at pontifical high mass, no greater contrast could be imagined. Without any sense of irony, Christ's Vicar is clad in gold and the costliest silks.       . . . the pope has a dozen glorious titles, including State Sovereign. The pope's aides also have titles somewhat unexpected in the light of the Sermon on the Mount: Excellency, Eminence, Your Grace, My Lord, Illustrious One, Most Reverend, and so on. . . .       Peter, always penniless, would be intrigued to know that according to canon 1518. . .his successor is "the supreme administrator and manager of all church properties." Also that the Vatican has its own bank. . . .30

The Vatican City has a much higher crime rate than any other world capital. In 2006, there were more crimes reported than there are citizens; this is of course due to the huge number of tourists visiting the Holy See, and the majority of the crimes are of course not committed by its inhabitants.

Many believe that the Vatican withheld important parts of the Third Secret, perhaps because its contents were too dangerous to reveal...

The Palace of Whitehall was a city unto itself. It surpassed the Vatican and Versailles in sheer size and pomp and it was no small task to navigate among 1,500 rooms. To find one’s destination required prior knowledge or the good graces of a friendly gentleman or lady to take you by the hand and lead you through the labyrinth of offices and private residences.

If one were to opine that the Daughter of Babylon is, in reality, in our times, a reference to a restored city on the site of ancient Babylon, concluding then that those restored mud and brick buildings are really what Jeremiah meant when he described the “hammer of the whole earth”, that would not be a currently defensible position. Neither the Vatican nor any other Christian denomination has a military budget. No Church or Christian denomination could conceivably be described today as “the hammer of the whole earth”.

Carlyle, somewhere in his writings, says, that though the Vatican is great, it is but the chip of an eggshell compared to the star-fretted dome where Arcturus and Orion glance for ever; and I say that, though the grove of Central Park, New York, is grand compared to the thin groves seen in other great cities, that though the Windsor and the New Forests may be very fine and noble in England, yet they are but fagots of sticks compared to these eternal forests of Unyamwezi.

Pope Francis has publicly commended Luther and even issued a Vatican City stamp in his honor.

His new policies turned a negative U.S. $10.5 million deficit for Vatican City into a surplus of U.S. $44 million in just one year.

The US Capital has been called the “Mirror Vatican” due to the strikingly similar layout and design of its primary buildings and streets. This is no accident. In fact, America’s forefathers first named the capital city “Rome.” But the parallelism between Washington

There are many reasons why girls should not travel alone, and I won’t list them, because none of them are original reasons. Besides, there are more reasons why girls should. I have the utmost respect for girls who travel alone, because it’s hard work sometimes. But girls, we just want adventures. We want international best friends and hold-your-breath vistas out of crappy hostel windows. We want to discover moving works of art, sometimes in museums and sometimes in side-street graffiti. We want to hear soul-restoring jam sessions at beach bonfires and to watch celestial dawns spill over villages that haven’t changed since the Middle Ages. We want to fall in love with boys with say-that-again accents. We want sore feet from stay-up-all-night dance parties at just-one-more-drink bars. We want to be on our own even as we sketch and photograph the Piazza San Marco covered in pigeons and beautiful Italian lovers intertwined so that we’ll never forget what it feels like to be twenty-three and absolutely purposeless and single, but in love with every city we visit next. We want to be struck dumb by the baritone echoes of church bells in Vatican City and the rich, heaven-bound calls to prayer in Istanbul and to know that no matter what, there just has to be some greater power or holy magic responsible for all this bursting, delirious, overwhelming beauty in the great, wide, sprawling world. I tucked my passport into my bag. Girls, we don’t just want to have fun; we want a whole lot more out of life than that.

In an attempt to prematurely eject Gregory from his coveted papal throne, Bernabo partnered with the leaders of Florence in July of 1375 to form an 8-person committee called the “Otto della Guerra” (“8 Men of War”). Together, the group orchestrated a chain of revolts across Italian cities in the name of their cause, eventually turning the whole of the Roman Vatican against Gregory. This riotous period became known as the “War of the 8 Saints.” That

Italy – Venice, Rome, Vatican City.

The Vatican preached that because the Jews had killed Jesus and rejected his teachings they were punished with the loss of their Holy Temple and the city of Jerusalem, as well as their homeland. In addition, they were damned to wander the earth forever as a divine warning to anyone who might refuse to obey the Church. (It is important to note that this teaching was categorically rejected and forbidden by the Second Vatican Council in 1962.) Baccio Pontelli, on the other hand, was not

Whoever’s idea it was, the new Palatine Chapel was designed to replace the ancient Jewish Temple as the New Holy Temple of the New World Order in the New Jerusalem, which would from this time forward be the city of Rome, the capital of Christendom.

In a crypt beneath the ground-floor level of the church are the tombs of Saints James and Philip, two of the apostles going back to the life of Jesus. Deeper still, if we were allowed to dig beneath the crypt, we would soon come upon remains of ancient Imperial Rome, beneath that, Republican Rome, and finally, perhaps some of Bronze Age Rome. This makes the church a metaphor for the entire Eternal City: a place of layer upon layer of history, of accumulations of countless cultures, of confrontations between the sacred and the profane, the holy and the pagan—and of multiple hidden secrets. To understand Rome is to recognize that it is a city swarming with secrets—more than three millennia of mysteries. And nowhere in Rome are there more secrets than in the Vatican.

THE VATICAN The very name Vatican comes from a surprising source. It is neither Latin nor Greek, nor is it of biblical origin. In fact, the word we associate with the Church has a pagan origin. More than twenty-eight centuries ago, even before the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, there was a people called the Etruscans. Much of what we think of as Roman culture and civilization actually comes from the Etruscans. Even though we are still trying to master their very difficult language, we already know a great deal about them. We know that, like the Hebrews and the Romans, the Etruscans did not bury their dead inside the walls of their cities. For that reason, on a hillside slope outside the confines of their ancient city in the area that was destined to become Rome, the Etruscans established a very large cemetery. The name of the pagan Etruscan goddess who guarded this necropolis, or city of the dead, was Vatika.

The Florentine public didn’t care. When the full-sized preparatory cartoons were displayed, the entire city went into ecstasy over both works. This was the sign that the repressive days of Savonarola were really and truly gone for good, that Art and Beauty had come back home at last. Now came the part that Buonarroti had been dreading—actually having to paint the fresco. He knew that he was out of his element. He had never executed a fresco painting in his entire life, and now he was up against the top painter in the world.

In early 1506 a peasant had been fixing up his vineyard near the Colosseum when he accidentally opened up a hole in the ground. There, he discovered a large statue of humans being slaughtered by giant serpents. Word reached the Vatican almost immediately. Experts were sent for, including Michelangelo. The statue was identified as the long-lost Laocoön, the most beloved statue in pagan Rome, thought destroyed by the barbarian hordes in the fifth century. It was originally commissioned by the victorious Greeks after they destroyed Troy. It shows the moment of death of Laocoön, the high priest of Troy, being killed by supernatural snakes sent by the Greek gods to prevent him and his sons from warning the Trojans not to bring the famous Trojan horse inside the city walls. Laocoön is best known for his warning: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” After the serpents killed him and his sons, the Trojans did indeed bring the giant wooden horse into their city. When the hidden Greek soldiers came out of its hollow belly that night, it spelled the end of both Troy and the Trojans. Later, when the victorious Roman legions brought a close to the Greek Empire, they brought home the Laocoön as one of their favorite war trophies.

The ambitious pope had already discussed the Sistine ceiling with Michelangelo in 1506, probably while they were together in Bologna. No doubt Julius, an art lover, had heard of the huge success of the twin cartoons for the city hall frescoes in Florence. It is very likely that his summons to Michelangelo was also a way for the jealous Roman pontiff to sabotage the Florentine fresco project. We do know that Michelangelo never went back to that job.

Why one of the later, lesser-known Jewish prophets over the front door of the Sistine? Michelangelo must have selected Zechariah for a variety of reasons—again, there are multiple layers of meaning, so integral to Talmudic and Kabbalistic thought, and so dear to Michelangelo. First of all, Zechariah warned the corrupt priesthood of the Second Holy Temple: “Open your doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour your cedars” (Zechariah 11:1). This was a prophecy that if the priesthood did not cease its corrupt, unspiritual behavior, the doors of the sanctuary would be broken open by attacking foes and the Temple, built partly of cedarwood from Lebanon, would be burned down. And here is the author of that warning, right over the doors of Pope Julius’s sanctuary. Zechariah is also the prophet of consolation and redemption. He is the one who urges the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem and the Holy Temple: “Thus says the Lord of hosts; My cities shall again overflow with prosperity; and the Lord shall yet comfort Zion, and shall yet choose Jerusalem” (Zechariah 1:

At the end of the avenue, a large villa was set back from the road with a surrounding fence covered in hessian. This was ‘The Vatican’, the secret headquarters of the Department of National Security and Order – ZAPU’s spy agency. It made for a more discreet location for a rendezvous than Zimbabwe House, ZAPU’s headquarters in the city, which was believed to be under constant surveillance by the Zambian authorities and perhaps others. The Vatican was an anonymous-looking four-bedroom villa, but several sentries were positioned just behind the wrought-iron front gates. As the car drew in, one of the guards called through their arrival on a radio set.

Father Morelli was also a well-known and respected church archaeologist who lived and worked in Vatican City. He was one of those veridical scholars who were always researching something, haunting the Vatican archives in an effort to uncover some small and seemingly insignificant piece of information that would lead him to his next archaeological discovery.

What offer could I possibly refuse from a kidnapper and a murderer?’ ‘Ah, sarcasm, the easiest form of humor and the trait of an ordinary mind. Your predictability never ceases to amuse me, Dulac. Classifications aside, I’ve arranged for us to meet in Belize City, tomorrow evening. I’ve reserved a ticket in your name for the morning flight to New York. The connecting flight to Belize City gets in at 4 p.m.’ ‘Why in hell’s name would I go anywhere to meet you?’ ‘Because I have something here that you want.’ ‘If you’re talking about the diary—’ ‘Dulac, trust me. I guarantee you will accept my offer. Oh, and don’t bother calling Roquebrun. I’m told he’s enjoying the Vatican’s money in a five star brothel in Kuala Lumpur.’ ‘Bastard. Out of curiosity, who ratted? Garcia?’ ‘Must be, although that’s also irrelevant now.’ ‘Not to me. If you didn’t, Garcia must have ordered the contract to whack me.’ ‘Why don’t you ask him? By the way, I booked your room at the Hotel Mirador and I’ve deposited $10,000 USD in your Paris bank account, for incidentals. You’re probably thinking you’ll need company. Shall we meet in the hotel restaurant, say at 7 p.m.? Oh, and Dulac, time is pressing. Don’t disappoint me.’ The line went dead. ‘Go for it,’ said Karen over the phone. ‘What have you got to lose?’ ‘Try two miserable days flying half way round the planet on a quack call from a murdering psychopath.’ ‘Like it or not, in one way or another, he’s always kept his promise.’ ‘That’s a strange way of looking at it,’ said Dulac. ‘At first, I thought he wanted to sell me the diary, but why go through all that trouble? He can send it directly to the Vatican. There’s something else, but why me?’ ‘Bizarre as it may seem, you’re probably the only one he can trust.’ ‘I’ve checked the reservations and they’re confirmed and paid for. And I received ten grand in my account. I suppose if he wanted me dead, he would just hire another hit man.’ Dulac took a drag from his Gitane. First, I’ve got to call Gina again. Then I have some unfinished business in Belize.’ ‘If you don’t mind, this time I won’t go with you. But do be careful, Thierry.’ ‘Don’t worry, I’ll have professional backup.’ Chapter

The Vatican is less of a religious institution and more of a headquarter of inhumanity.

the United States was one of only five nations not party to the agreement. The other four, in no particular order: Andorra and Vatican City (both of which were so tiny, with a combined population of about eighty thousand, that they were granted “observer” status rather than asked to join); Taiwan (which would have been happy to participate but couldn’t because its status as an independent nation was still contested by the Chinese); and Afghanistan (which had the reasonable excuse of having been shattered by thirty years of occupation and a bloody civil war).

Vatican, City, Rome. What a wonder.

Gordon wrote to Mayor Ritsema: “On September 17, 1944 I participated in the large airborne operation which was conducted to liberate your country. As a member of company E, 506th PIR, I landed near the small town of Son. The following day we moved south and liberated Eindhoven. While carrying out our assignment, we suffered casualties. That is war talk for bleeding. We occupied various defense positions for over two months. Like animals, we lived in holes, barns, and as best we could. The weather was cold and wet. In spite of the adverse conditions, we held the ground we had fought so hard to capture. “The citizens of Holland at that time did not share your aversion to bloodshed when the blood being shed was that of the German occupiers of your city. How soon we forget. History has proven more than once that Holland could again be conquered if your neighbor, the Germans, are having a dull weekend and the golf links are crowded. “Please don’t allow your country to be swallowed up by Liechtenstein or the Vatican as I don’t plan to return. As of now, you are on your own.

(Today the pope rules only the tiny sovereign state of Vatican City,

Kat had already passed for a Franciscan nun during a particularly difficult job in Vatican City).

Which is how it came to pass that in 2009, a year after the Kyoto Protocol finally went into full effect, the United States was one of only five nations not party to the agreement. The other four, in no particular order: Andorra and Vatican City (both of which were so tiny, with a combined population of about eighty thousand, that they were granted “observer” status rather than asked to join); Taiwan (which would have been happy to participate but couldn’t because its status as an independent nation was still contested by the Chinese); and Afghanistan (which had the reasonable excuse of having been shattered by thirty years of occupation and a bloody civil war).

The one nice thing about temporarily moving to the Vatican was that everyone had finally stopped calling me a saint. Instead, they called me a wonder-worker. Which I suppose is an improvement.

The Vatican is a fortress because the Catholic Church holds half of its equity inside its walls—rare paintings, sculpture, devalued jewels, priceless books . . . then there is the gold bullion and the real estate deeds inside the Vatican Bank vaults. Inside estimates put the raw value of Vatican City at 48.5 billion dollars. Quite a nest egg you’re sitting on. Tomorrow it will be ash. Liquidated assets as it were. You will be bankrupt. Not even men of cloth can work for nothing.

The Roman Catholic Church remains headquartered at Vatican City in Rome, a few blocks from the ruins of the colosseum where ancient Roman authorities once fed Christians to the lions.

At least two facts may be deduced from these verses: The merchants of the world would require a deep water port in which to bring the world’s goods for purchase and consumption by the residents of this great nation. Neither Iraq nor Vatican City have deep water ports. A restored Iraq cannot be the nation contemplated in these prophetic scriptures, nor the Catholic Church, but the description is quite apt when applied to port-heavy America.

History never lies. Books that record it can relate what they understand: truths, lies, half-truths equivalent to lies, speculation, eulogies, historic acts that never happened. Glorious acts last because someone was paid to extol them. There’s no better example than Rome, the Eternal City, the glory of God on eart, where he chose to dwell, without doubt.

In Vatican City, women do not have the right to vote.

The city of Rome is called the "city of seven hills" and the Vatican is located within its confinement.  These are the hills: Palatine, Capitoline, Quirinal, Aventine, Esquiline, Viminal, and Caelian.