The New Testament is pretty clear on the incompatibility of earthly riches and the Kingdom of Heaven. But if Gerald Posner is right, a lot of people involved with Vatican finances over the years have skipped those passages.

Posner - lawyer, journalist, and Pulitzer-winning author of 11 books  - reviews the church's long, complicated history with money, but his main focus is modern times.

His primary aim is the Institute for the Works of Religion, known as the Vatican Bank or IOR, its Italian acronym. Founded in 1942, IOR is supposed to serve the religious mission of the church, but in Posner's telling, it has also served as an offshore bank, tainted by association with shady characters whose list of sins includes money laundering, tax evasion, fraud, even murder.

Pope Pius XII created IOR at the suggestion of the Vatican's financial consultant, Bernardino Nogara, whose investment wizardry carried the Vatican through the Great Depression. Posner spends a lot of time on Pius XII, who was criticized for not taking a stronger stand against Nazi atrocities. "In World War II, Pius XII's silence helped protect a complex web of interlocking business interests with the Third Reich that yielded significant profits for the Vatican," Posner writes. He uses the word likely to describe this scenario. One hopes he is wrong.

Later on, the bank was tarred by association with rogue financiers Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona and compromised by the ineptitude of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, a high-ranking American official at the Vatican. In Posner's telling, Marcinkus, who ran IOR from 1971 to 1989, got the job because Pope Paul VI liked him, and kept it thanks to the gratitude of Pope John Paul II, after Marcinkus sent $5 million in 1978 to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to help clean up a scandal at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa near Doylestown.

Calvi and Sindona came to bad ends after involving the Vatican Bank in their financial shenanigans. Calvi, head of Milan's Banco Ambrosiano, bankrupted that institution and was convicted of illegally exporting currency. He was found murdered in London in June 1982, hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge. The Vatican agreed to pay Ambrosiano creditors $244 million for its "moral involvement" in the bank's failure. Sindona, convicted in 1986 of murder, was sentenced to life in prison, where he committed suicide.

After these scandals, the Vatican began trying to reform its bank, but with only modest success. Now there's a new sheriff in town, Pope Francis, and he has made significant progress. Posner's compelling book provides a benchmark for measuring his success.