"God's Bankers" by Gerald Posner

By Trine Tsouderos
Chicago Tribune
March 5, 2015

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-gods-bankers-vatican-gerald-posner-20150305-story.html

Soon after coming into office, Pope Francis began reforming the church's secretive yet powerful institution, the Institute for the Works of Religion, also known as the Vatican Bank. He issued decrees speeding reviews and improving transparency. He created a commission to do a thorough review of its operations. He replaced much of its leadership with experts from the global banking industry, charging them with overhauling the institution.

Francis' reforms included revising the mission of the bank too. The institution would leave its investment banking days behind to become a payment service and financial adviser to employees and other parts of the Catholic Church. As the prefect of the Vatican's Secretariat for the Economy, Cardinal George Pell, said, "The ambition is to be boringly successful, to get off the gossip pages."

Why all this reform? Wall Street-lawyer-turned-author Gerald Posner lays it out in his deeply researched, passionately argued book, "God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican." Posner, whose previous books include the best-seller, "Why America Slept," about the U.S. government's failure to prevent 9/11, is a merciless pitbull of an investigator, marshaling mountains of evidence to make his arguments.

Posner began researching "God's Bankers" after working on "Mengele," the 1986 biography he wrote with author John Ware on notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Posner and Ware obtained access to 5,000 pages of Mengele's personal writings and photos, using this trove to paint a portrait of a monster. During his research, Posner writes that he repeatedly unearthed evidence pointing to church involvement with the Nazis.

While the book traces the history of the Vatican's ongoing efforts to fund itself and its network, from sales of "indulgences" in the Middle Ages to the creation of the Vatican Bank to Pope Francis' reforms after decades of scandal, the heart of "God's Bankers" lies in chapters devoted to the church's actions during and immediately after World War II. In these chapters, Posner dissects the church's actions with the eye of a prosecutor.