ROME
Irish Examiner
By TP O’Mahony
Saturday, June 23, 2012
THE firing on May 24 of Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the president of the Vatican Bank, because of a failure to “promote transparency”, must have sent a frisson of fear through the upper echelons of the Roman Curia, coming as it did three decades after another scandal involving the same institution.
The fall-out from the tragic events of 1982 still reverberate, and the police file on the death of Roberto Calvi, head of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan, is still open. It was that bank’s close links with the Vatican and its involvement in money laundering that led to a huge scandal.
To experienced Vatican watchers — mindful that in March this year the US State Department, for the first time, included the Vatican in the list of states deemed to be “vulnerable” to money laundering operations— it was surely a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Just before the sacking of the head of the Vatican Bank, an Italian journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, published His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI. The book, based on leaked documents from the papal apartments — the so-called “Vatileaks” controversy — contains a mixture of revelations, including some about clashes over the management of the Vatican Bank.
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