Vatican Money Quotes

In a historic 1933 accord, the Vatican was the first sovereign state to sign a bilateral treaty with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The Nazis promised to protect Catholics inside Germany in return for the church endorsing Hitler’s government.

Eventually 400,000 Germans were sterilized, and the Vatican did not issue a Pastoral Letter against it for another decade, only after the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Nazis).23,I

A report that studied death certificates from the mid-1980s concluded that “The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population.

Mussolini’s insistence on public morality, belief in the inferior role of women, and the ban on contraception and abortion made the fascists palatable to the church.85

The same year as the Perón visit, American counterintelligence concluded that the Vatican as an institution—not merely as a group of scattered, rogue clerics—was helping high-ranking Nazis escape justice.94

John Paul was a bystander as the American church quietly approved an aggressive new legal strategy that included, as The Washington Post uncovered, “hiring high-powered law firms and private detectives to examine the personal lives of the church’s accusers, fighting to keep documents secret and engaging in new tactics to minimize settlements.”65

Benedict’s resignation was a selfless act since he had come to realize he was not capable of leading the modern church and making the tough decisions that were needed. “It wasn’t one thing, but a whole combination of them,” concluded Paolo Rodari, Il Foglio’s veteran Vatican reporter. Vatileaks, said Rodari, “was a constant drumbeat on the Pope.”33

And a popular priest, Father Dyonisy Juricev, wrote in a leading newspaper that it was no longer a sin to kill Serbs or Jews so long as they were at least seven years old.

It is not the practice of the Holy See to disclose information on the religious discipline of members of the clergy or religious according to canon law.

Play, don’t pray” was the mantra for some, who according to the insiders included dinner parties of clerics and male prostitutes that ended in nights of drugs and sex.

In return, the Vatican gave Hitler the formal endorsement he wanted. Article 16 of the Reichskonkordat required German bishops and cardinals to swear an oath of loyalty to the Third Reich.

A supplementary 180-page U.S. government report issued that spring (June 2, 1998) provided more evidence that neutral countries, including the Vatican, had profited by hiding Nazi gold in their central banks.50

Everyone left London just shaking their heads in disbelief,” recalled Elan Steinberg, the World Jewish Congress’s representative. “Two hundred tons of gold from the pro-Nazi Croatian government found its way to the Vatican. Here they were, one of the world’s great moral institutions, and they refused to tell us what their view was, much less to lift a finger to help recover any looted assets. It was terribly disappointing.”44

God’s Bankers cuts through the masses of misinformation to present an unvarnished account of the quest for money and power in the Roman Catholic Church. No embellishment is needed. That real tale is shocking enough.

In World War II, Pius XII’s silence helped protect a complex web of interlocking business interests with the Third Reich, relationships that yielded significant profits for the Vatican. In some cases they are dealings the Church has denied to this day.

Two days after he had appointed the special oversight commission, sixty-one-year-old Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, an APSA senior accountant, was arrested. Prosecutors charged he was the mastermind in helping friends avoid taxes on $26.2 million, some of it cash flown to Italy on a private jet from Switzerland.

the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne published the results of an extensive study of international money laundering.9 The authors compared the banking systems of two hundred countries. The Vatican ranked in the top ten money laundering havens, behind Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Liechtenstein, but ahead of Singapore.

Berry’s investigation was a searing indictment of how church officials in Louisiana buried reports of sexual abuse of minors and did their best to pay off victims to keep them silent. By the time his story ran, the tiny Lafayette diocese in which Gauthe had committed his crimes was deeply in the red from $4.2 million in confidential settlements to the families of nine victims, and $114 million in pending claims in another eleven lawsuits.

When Ali Agca, a Turk, shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, both the target and the would-be killer were well within Vatican territory,” wrote George Armstrong, the respected Rome correspondent for London’s Guardian. “The Vatican was happy to have him arrested, tried and sentenced in Italy, and under Italian law, and his life sentence will be at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. The Vatican becomes another country only when it chooses to be.

The small group of Benedict supporters gathered that night were not simply upset at money matters gone awry. There was, as they discussed that evening, something that made most of them squirm. They had seen the proof of what one called a “gay lobby.” The common bond for the gay clerics at the highest positions of the Curia was that they had abandoned their celibacy vows. The problem, the small group agreed, was that they often used sex as a carrot for advancement to ambitious up-and-coming clerics. It was deplorable, they concluded, that a fast career track was within reach for any cleric willing to submit to the Vatican’s equivalent of a casting couch.2,II

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

If the claims of the papacy cannot be proven from what we know of the historical Peter, there are, on the other hand, several undoubted facts in the real history of Peter which bear heavily upon those claims, namely: 1. That Peter was married, Matt. 8:14, took his wife with him on his missionary tours, 1 Cor. 9:5, and, according to a possible interpretation of the "coëlect" (sister), mentions her in 1 Pet. 5:13. Patristic tradition ascribes to him children, or at least a daughter (Petronilla). His wife is said to have suffered martyrdom in Rome before him. What right have the popes, in view of this example, to forbid clerical marriage?  We pass by the equally striking contrast between the poverty of Peter, who had no silver nor gold (Acts 3:6) and the gorgeous display of the triple-crowned papacy in the middle ages and down to the recent collapse of the temporal power. 2. That in the Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–11), Peter appears simply as the first speaker and debater, not as president and judge (James presided), and assumes no special prerogative, least of all an infallibility of judgment. According to the Vatican theory the whole question of circumcision ought to have been submitted to Peter rather than to a Council, and the decision ought to have gone out from him rather than from "the apostles and elders, brethren" (or "the elder brethren," 15:23). 3. That Peter was openly rebuked for inconsistency by a younger apostle at Antioch (Gal. 2:11–14). Peter’s conduct on that occasion is irreconcilable with his infallibility as to discipline; Paul’s conduct is irreconcilable with Peter’s alleged supremacy; and the whole scene, though perfectly plain, is so inconvenient to Roman and Romanizing views, that it has been variously distorted by patristic and Jesuit commentators, even into a theatrical farce gotten up by the apostles for the more effectual refutation of the Judaizers! 4. That, while the greatest of popes, from Leo I. down to Leo XIII. never cease to speak of their authority over all the bishops and all the churches, Peter, in his speeches in the Acts, never does so. And his Epistles, far from assuming any superiority over his "fellow-elders" and over "the clergy" (by which he means the Christian people), breathe the spirit of the sincerest humility and contain a prophetic warning against the besetting sins of the papacy, filthy avarice and lordly ambition (1 Pet. 5:1–3). Love of money and love of power are twin-sisters, and either of them is "a root of all evil." It is certainly very significant that the weaknesses even more than the virtues of the natural Peter—his boldness and presumption, his dread of the cross, his love for secular glory, his carnal zeal, his use of the sword, his sleepiness in Gethsemane—are faithfully reproduced in the history of the papacy; while the addresses and epistles of the converted and inspired Peter contain the most emphatic protest against the hierarchical pretensions and worldly vices of the papacy, and enjoin truly evangelical principles—the general priesthood and royalty of believers, apostolic poverty before the rich temple, obedience to God rather than man, yet with proper regard for the civil authorities, honorable marriage, condemnation of mental reservation in Ananias and Sapphira, and of simony in Simon Magus, liberal appreciation of heathen piety in Cornelius, opposition to the yoke of legal bondage, salvation in no other name but that of Jesus Christ.

Vatican palace has been the official residence of the Popes since 1377. The original building was built in AD 319 by the Roman emperor Constantine who built a basilica over the tomb of St Peter himself, the first bishop of Rome. In the fifteenth century the building looked as if it would collapse and in 1452 the reconstruction was begun. The whole project soon ran out of money though and it was abandoned for over 50 years until 1506 when Pope Julius II gave instructions for the entire area of buildings to be demolished and the new St Peter’s to be built.

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I can tell you that I have taken all the names I have found in the newspapers and looked them up myself. I didn’t find a single one of these names. This Mafia boss, this politician, Osama bin Laden. None of them have accounts here, nor are they delegates to accounts.

Political observers point out that our country has a long, raucous history of witch hunts. “In times of economic distress, people tend to be more susceptible to charlatans and demagogues telling them who to blame and who to fear,” Matthew Duss, former national security editor at the Center for American Progress, once told me for a magazine article that I once wrote on this topic. “America has been through this sort of thing before with various minority groups, but we’ve always come through it stronger in the end…. Hopefully within a few years, the idea that all American Muslims want to turn America into an Islamic state will seem as stupid as the idea that a Catholic president would take orders from the Vatican.” But in the meantime, America must sweat through a raging fever, a blaze of intolerance that puts many Muslim citizens at risk of losing their rights and, in some cases, their lives. Fear and ignorance, of course, fuel this anti-Muslim hysteria. But so does money. Because there is political capital in scapegoating Muslims.

Charging interest on loans was thus defined as the ‘sin of usury’, and widely condemned in principle while pretty much ignored in actual practice. In fact, as already noted, by late in the ninth century some of the great religious houses ventured into banking and bishops were second only to the nobility in their reliance on borrowed money. In addition to borrowing from monastic orders, many bishops secured loans from private Italian banks that enjoyed the full approval of the Vatican.

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 fact that the Vatican has its own banking system proves that money is not the root of all evil.

I participated in several other meetings with my brother bishops and I asked several of them, once the documents were approved, “Have you read the final document?” And some of them answered me, “Sincerely, no.” One of these meetings lasted one week and produced a document, which, at least in our region, no one has read. Later we got the financial report for this meeting. The meeting cost $250,000 from church funds. Imagine! Basically, it was $250,000 thrown to the wind. Really, to the wind. We had minimal time for prayer. Is this the “Church of the poor,” which was so stressed during the Second Vatican Council and afterwards? The continuous meetings and assemblies of bishops: they are spending so much money, it’s incredible. If we would reduce drastically the frequency of these meetings, we could give millions of dollars every year to the poor around the world. To me, this is a sin that churchmen are committing today.

Cabot continued. “But so far as I can ascertain [the] record now is, despite our commitments and moral obligations: (1) we have failed to take effective action [to repatriate accused Yugoslav war criminals], (2) we have prevented [the] British from taking effective action, (3) we have not insisted that Italy take effective action, (4) we are apparently conniving with the Vatican and Argentina to get guilty people to haven in the latter country. I sincerely hope I am mistaken, particularly regarding [this] latter point. How can we defend this record?…

Nevertheless, by the time the Ustashi collapse came, the Croatian Catholic hierarchy had blood on its vestments from years of tacit cooperation with genocide in the Balkans.26 Worse, the Vatican compounded its blunder by indiscriminately assisting thousands of Ustashi criminals to escape to Italy and South America; many of these men were, by any standard, among the most heinous criminals of the war.

The contents included a lengthy interview with Monsignor Corrado Balducci. Two things became obvious from the clergyman’s answers to Paola’s questions. He was well versed in the subject; and although he was speaking as an individual, and not as an official Vatican spokesman, his superiors were well aware that he was speaking with their full knowledge, at least, if not their unofficial blessing.

Paola Harris: Is it a grave mistake to think that you are the official voice of the Vatican? Monsignor Balducci: ‘These ideas are mine, and I do not represent the Vatican. However, I am told that the Holy Father, John Paul II, has seen me on Italian TV several times and follows my radio homilies. If there were some objection, I’m sure I would know. I believe there to be no problem here.

Bordoni and his wife fled to Venezuela, where he used some of the stolen money to buy a $3 million home and citizenship.103

Castillo Lara believed it might not be possible to demolish the parallel IOR without making the Vatican Bank crash in on itself. At every turn, he adeptly blocked Caloia’s efforts to make the bank more transparent.66 Some reformers meanwhile suspected that the cardinal was more than just an obstacle to reform. They thought the powerful APSA boss was the source of press leaks that made it appear that it was Caloia’s team that had failed to rein in the bank’s questionable activities.67

A Catholic family had hidden a Jewish boy from the Nazis, and had learned that the Germans had murdered the child’s parents. They brought the youngster to Wojtyla and asked him to baptize the child. In contrast to Pope Pius IX and his abductions and forced baptisms of two Jewish boys, Wojtyla refused. The boy should be raised Jewish in the tradition of his parents, Wojtyla told the parents.

Late that autumn a Venezuelan attorney, Alberto Jaime Berti, cooperated with Italian magistrates in return for immunity from prosecution on charges that the IOR was at the center of laundering several hundred million dollars through Swiss and Panamanian banks on behalf of a handful of senior Opus Dei officials.72 The Italian media reported that Berti fingered De Bonis as his Vatican Bank connection and produced dozens of documents with the monsignor’s signature. Prosecutors believed that De Bonis had the key to a safe deposit box at Geneva’s Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. It was in that box, said Berti, that a cache of documents laid out exactly how the IOR laundered the money. De Bonis, cloaked by immunity in his Knights of Malta position, denied even knowing Berti.73 The prosecutors, unable to move against him, had to stand down.

Italian reporters uncovered evidence that the Vatican had invested in Istituto Farmacologico Serono, a pharmaceutical company that made birth control pills, as well as Udine, a military weapons manufacturer (there were also unconfirmed newspaper reports of church money in gunmaker Beretta, a Monte Carlo casino, and a printing firm that published pornographic magazines).

Ratzinger was afraid to intervene on a deadlocked Roman Curia, with reformers on one side, and the money changers on the other,” wrote author Gianluigi Nuzzi. “So he decided to create a clean slate by bowing out and paving the way for the election of a strong Pope.”34

It took the OSS nearly two years after the IOR’s formation before it stumbled across intelligence that Hitler’s Reichsbank was transferring money to the Vatican and disguising its origin by using a Swiss bank as an intermediary.62

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had authorized the study.92 It concluded that 95 percent of American dioceses had at least one complaint of a sexual assault by a priest against a minor (the authors did not count incidents before 1950).93 During the five-plus decades, 4,392 priests had been accused of abusing 10,667 children, a figure that in some years was as high as 10 percent of all priests.94 At least 143 were serial molesters who carried out their attacks in multiple dioceses.95 Four out of five victims were minor boys.96

In 2009, Benedict faced a firestorm after he lifted the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a British bishop based in Buenos Aires.61 Bertone, who oversaw Williamson’s vetting, had apparently not even Googled him. If he had, he would have discovered an interview the bishop gave only three days before to Swedish television, in which he said about the Holocaust: “I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. I believe there were no gas chambers.

The result was a remarkable December 30 decree that gave the Vatican its first ever anti–money laundering law, set to go into effect the following April 1.27 “The Prevention and Countering of Illegal Activities in the Area of Monetary and Financial Dealings” was issued as a motu proprio, a document historically signed personally by the Pope. Benedict took full responsibility for the decision.

Gianluigi Nuzzi, the author of the 2009 book that precipitated the string of events from Caloia’s exit to the motu proprio, expressed the feelings of many Vaticanologists: “A few years ago, an anti-money-laundering law in the Vatican and the Holy See would have been unthinkable. They used to say, ‘We’re a sovereign state; these are our affairs.’ The important thing is that they created an anti-money-laundering law and an authority to enforce it. Without that, the Vatican Bank will remain an offshore bank.

Cardinal Schuster and Monsignor Bicchierai had long been among the most prominent clerical supporters of fascism in Italy, according to SS Colonel Eugen Dollmann, who handled negotiations with the Vatican for the SS during the last days of the war.

Nevertheless, by the time the Ustashi collapse came, the Croatian Catholic hierarchy had blood on its vestments from years of tacit cooperation with genocide in the Balkans.26 Worse, the Vatican compounded its blunder by indiscriminately assisting thousands of Ustashi criminals to escape to Italy and South America; many of these men were, by any standard, among the most heinous criminals of the war.27

But so far as I can ascertain [the] record now is, despite our commitments and moral obligations: (1) we have failed to take effective action [to repatriate accused Yugoslav war criminals], (2) we have prevented [the] British from taking effective action, (3) we have not insisted that Italy take effective action, (4) we are apparently conniving with the Vatican and Argentina to get guilty people to haven in the latter country. I sincerely hope I am mistaken, particularly regarding [this] latter point. How can we defend this record?…”31

God doesn’t care how much money you have when you die. God does care what you did with the money you had when you were alive.