VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
The Open Tabernacle
December 30, 2023
By Betty Clermont
“Wealth doesn’t just beget more wealth – it begets more power.” Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and Professor.
When Pope John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger appeared to be his most likely successor according to reports at the time. Karol Wojtyla had reigned for 27 years. He had appointed Ratzinger prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the most powerful Vatican position at the time – on November 25, 1981. For 24 years, Ratzinger was one of the pope’s closest advisers, supporting Wojtyla’s ecclesial and political ideologies.
“In the Vatican, the Opus Dei cardinal most active in view of the conclave is Julian Herranz … Ratzinger’s leap to the top of the list of candidates for the papacy is due to him; it took shape at the suppers for cardinals that Herranz organized at Opus Dei’s heavily guarded villa in the Roman countryside,” the respected Vatican reporter, Sandro Magister, stated.
Ratzinger was elected to the Chair of St. Peter on April 19, 2005, the second day of the conclave. German papers declared “We Are the Pope” and “the country is aflutter in national pride,” reported Der Spiegel. However, that publication noted that “for many, the choice of the 78-year-old veteran is a sour disappointment and signal that the Catholic Church has no real vision for its future and is therefore sticking close to the legacy of the beloved John Paul II.”
Presciently, Der Spiegel also wrote: “In truth, Ratzinger, likely won’t be pope longer than 10 years. [He] is a place holder until the Church decides who its next long-time leader will be….It doesn’t help that he is known for his cold, bookish and often calculating manner or that many have nicknamed him ‘God’s Rottweiler’”.
Benedict immediately named the 49-year-old Monsignor Georg Gänswein as his personal secretary, “an extravagantly handsome man” according to The Guardian. Gänswein was a professor of canon law at Opus Dei’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. Cardinal Ratzinger had asked him to join his staff in 1996 and to be his secretary in 2003.
“Some Vatican-watchers are already muttering about Gänswein’s influence over Pope Benedict,” The Guardian reported four months after Ratzinger’s election. “Gänswein is, like the man he serves, extremely conservative …. I think he is very dangerous,” Daniel Deckers, the author of a biography of Germany’s leading liberal cardinal, Karl Lehmann, said. “He’s part of a small but very powerful group within the Catholic Church.” Also, “he is the pope’s gatekeeper. This makes him a very powerful man,” Deckers stated as quoted by The Guardian.
PROTECTING THE VATICAN’S FINANCES
Like his predecessor, Ratzinger’s job No. 1 was to protect the Vatican’s secret finances.
Much of the Vatican’s current assets were originally provided by the 1929 Lateran Treaty between the Holy See, the name of the government of both the Vatican City State and the worldwide Church. and the Italian government signed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. The treaty recognized the Vatican City as an independent city/state.
The Vatican, in turn, recognized the legitimacy of a fascist government. The Italian government agreed to give the Vatican financial compensation for the loss of the Papal States to the Italian government in 1870 during the war for unification.
In 1929, Pope Pius XI hired a layman, financial genius Bernardino Nogara, to manage the compensation, more than a billion dollars in today’s money according to some estimates. In his book, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850-1950, historian John F. Pollard quotes J. Gollin as stating that Nogara agreed to take the position on two conditions:
1. That he not be restricted by religious or doctrinal considerations in his investment-making.
2. That he be free to invest funds anywhere in the world.
“The papacy was now financially secure. It would never be poor again,” is the oft-quoted statement by Pollard. Having obtained a copy of Nogara’s diary, Pollard wrote, “From June 1929 onwards, the investments of the Vatican, following the strategy of Bernardino Nogara, moved into the financial markets of the world.” The Vatican was now part of the international plutocracy with no allegiance to any cause except increasing their own wealth.
THE PRIZE – FINANCIAL HEGEMONY
Vatican officials’ access to global financial markets is facilitated by its status as a sovereign city/state, The Catholic Church is the only religion headquartered in an autonomous country that provides criminal and civil immunity from any other authority to its residents and officials.
For example, the Vatican’s immunity was upheld on Aug. 14, 2023, when “the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota dismissed a lawsuit brought by four plaintiffs who were sexually abused by Roman Catholic priests when they were children. In Keenan v. Holy See State of Vatican City the court found that the Holy See has sovereign immunity,” according the minnlawyer.com website.
Nogara’s creation, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA; Italian: Amministrazione del Patrimonio della Sede Apostolica), controls the lion’s share of the Vatican’s secret investment and property portfolios. (“Patrimony” refers to the initial payment made under the Lateran Treaty.)
APSA’s investments are “hidden behind layer after layer of false fronts and holding companies,” noted Pollard in Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy (p 149).
APSA is the Vatican’s central bank. “APSA has accounts and deposits of its own in central banks all over the world: the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank for International Settlements, and others,” noted Vatican reporter Sandro Magister, quoting from a report by Moneyval, the Council of Europe’s financial monitors.
APSA is also the Vatican’s treasury. It deals in currencies, gold bullion and gold coins reported the Italian journalist, Emiliano Fittipaldi.
The Vatican Bank, formerly the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR; Italian: Istituto per le Opere di Religione), was founded in June 1942 by Pope Pius XII. It is reportedly a repository of Nazi gold.
Alperin v. Vatican Bank was an unsuccessful class action suit by Holocaust survivors brought against the IOR filed in San Francisco, California, on November 15, 1999. The case was dismissed in 2007 on the basis of the Vatican’s sovereign immunity.
The facts as presented in the suit are that the Ustaše, the Nazi-puppet dictators ruling Croatia during World War II, brought a large amount of looted gold with them when they escaped to Rome at the end of the war. The gold was deposited in the Vatican Bank. According to the suit and Michael Phayer in his book, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War (p.209), “top Vatican personnel would have known the whereabouts of the gold.”
The IOR “has financial relations with more than a hundred countries,” stated Vatican attorney Jeffrey Lena. A Moneyval report confirmed that there are “more than forty banks in Europe, in the United States, in Australia, and in Japan [having] relationships of ‘correspondence’ with the Vatican Bank, permitting it to operate all over the world through them,” Sandro Magister reported.
The Vatican is also said to have financial institutions in the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos according to the Concordat Watch website (see “Vatican Bank (Institute for Religious Works) (2014)”) Both locations are known as havens for off-shore banking secrecy.
IMMENSE WEALTH
Fortunately, some excellent reporters have provided us with partial information regarding the depth and breadth of the Vatican’s hidden financial empire and, as such, another vital insight as to what’s at stake in the next conclave.
If all the departments are added to the 46 foundations and nonprofit organizations with offices at the Vatican, they would total close to 80. Each has its own assets. For example, in 2010 the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (formerly Propaganda Fide) reportedly held real estate worth 9 billion euro.
Two Vatican Swiss bank accounts hold “as much as €7 billion,” reported Edward Pentin in July 2019. These bank accounts are managed by the APSA which has “large amounts of unregistered cash in offshore accounts,” according to Pentin. “Sources say only a few officials within APSA know the true extent of the Vatican’s foreign real estate portfolio, which is held largely ‘off the books.’” Pentin wrote.
Per Emilio Fittipaldi, “APSA has 187 million euro in currencies, 32,232 ounces in bullion and 3,122 ounces of gold coins (worth 30.8 million euro) in Switzerland and England.” It also controls companies such as Sirea Leonina which has over 16 million euro in assets
ACCESS TO INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMANY
Being embedded in the Vatican also gives Opus Dei access to confidential diplomacy. The secrets available to diplomats and embassies around the world would be beneficial to any international financial enterprise.
“In 1978 the Vatican had full diplomatic ties with only 85 states. When John Paul II died, the number had risen to 174, including the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union,” as reported in the article “God’s Ambassadors” (The Economist July 19, 2007).
As of a January 2022 Vatican press release, the Holy See has diplomatic relations with 183 other states. A nunciature [equivalent to an embassy] is located in 116 of those states according to the embassypages.com website including a nunciature in Washington D.C. The rest have diplomatic missions.
Not only do the embassies and diplomatic missions provide vital information on world affairs but also “the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961), which most countries have ratified, offers diplomats acting as officials of state almost total protection from subjection to criminal, administrative, and civil laws belonging to the country in which the diplomatic mission is located,” the Legal Information Institute states.
“The Holy See is especially active in international organizations. It has permanent observer status at the United Nations in New York [and] the Office of the United Nations in Geneva,” noted the U.S. State Department. “It maintains permanent observers at the Organization of American States in Washington, DC, and the Council of Europe. In addition, the Holy See has diplomatic relations with the European Union in Brussels. In 1997 the Holy See became a member of the World Trade Organization,” the State Department wrote. “The Holy See also is an observer to a number of international organizations of which the United States is a member including the Organization of American States.”
The Holy See is a member of numerous international groups such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, according to Wikipedia. Also listed is the Holy See’s permanent observer status in 19 organizations such as the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and the Organisation of African Unity.
The Vatican has used its international diplomatic access to deny women’s access to healthcare. “They have their eyes on the prize, which is getting reproductive health off the global agenda,” said Alex Marshall, chief of UNFPA’s Services Branch, about his experience with the Holy See’s representatives. “They never stop, and they never give up,” he observed.
“The Holy See’s modus operandi has been to impose its conservative social ideology at the UN via relentless pressure – evident ever since it gained semi-official standing there in 1964 …. They have the right to speak, reply and circulate documents in the General Assembly, as well as take part in international conferences with all the privileges of a state, including the right to vote,” former Washington Post reporter and editor Joanne Omang wrote in her article, “Playing Hardball Against Women’s Rights: The Holy See at the UN.” “That means real power. Other religions or nongovernmental organizations must collar delegates in hallways and restrooms to make their points,” she wrote.
Additionally, the Catholic Church is the only religion that can make treaties with other sovereign states called concordats. These agreements can protect the financial interests of the Church such as the ownership of real estate and maintaining the secrecy of investments and bank accounts in countries where these rights don’t already exist, the Concordat Watch group explained. However, even without a concordat, in some countries like the U.S. religions are guaranteed financial secrecy and tax exemptions. “In terms of their finances, religious institutions can function as unregulated on-shore tax havens subsidized by taxpayers” noted Concordat Watch.
Sometimes there is push-back. In October 2019, the Movement for a Secular Croatia, the Protagoras NGO and the Atheists and Agnostics of Croatia demanded an end to the “unacceptable” and “corrupt” concordat with the Vatican. “At the heart of the protest was anger over the opaque allocation of public money to Church institutions and organizations, as well as the contravention of the principle of State secularism,” reported NOVENA news.
RATZINGER MAINTAINED FINANCIAL SECRECY
Pope Benedict XVI protected the secrecy needed to maintain the Vatican’s lawless finances.
Following 9/11, the international financial community agreed to police itself in order to stop terrorists from transferring funds. An international framework of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) standards was adopted.
Those familiar with the early 1980’s Banco Ambrosiano scandal already know that Pope John Paul II allowed the Vatican Bank to be used to benefit criminals, rightwing terrorists, Latin American military dictators, tax evaders and the world’s oligarchs and plutocrats because he wanted the IOR to remain available for clandestine funding of Poland’s Solidarity movement. “The issue is that once you start doing opaque transactions in an institution, people don’t know where to draw a line and to stop. What started in effect with moving money to Poland got out of control. There were no rules,” a senior European banker told the Financial Times.
The IOR’s “correspondent” banking partners, however, wanted the bank to conform to the international standards adopted after 9/11. “If a state is perceived to be at risk for money laundering, its financial institutions – in this case, the Vatican Bank in particular – usually pay a price. Worried about possible seizures of assets, depositors may take their business elsewhere, while banks in other countries may impose higher transaction costs to cover more aggressive ‘due diligence’ measures. In general, a state’s ability to play the global financial game is impeded,” explained John L. Allen Jr., an experienced Vatican reporter.
In a process known as “name and shame,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) began to “publicly identify countries that were deficient in the anti-money laundering laws and international cooperation” based on the degree of transparency demanded by the country’s banking regulations and practices.
As of September 2010, “the Vatican has not taken the first step toward transparency,” said Jeffrey Owens, head of the OECD’s Center for Tax Policy and Administration.” As reported by bloomberg.com, “Owens made his statement one week after Italian magistrates opened a probe into its bank for alleged violations of money-laundering laws.”
On September 21, Italian magistrates seized €23 million ($30 million) from the IOR. “Court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws ‘with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital.’ The documents also reveal investigators’ suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia,” as reported by the Associated Press.
In March 2012, under pressure from the U.S. Treasury Department, JP Morgan Chase notified the Vatican that it closed their IOR account in its Milan branch because the IOR was “unable to respond” to requests for information about the provenance of the deposits. JP Morgan Chase reported €1.8 billion ($2,200,000,000) had been deposited by the Vatican in that account within the last 18 months, as reported by The Economist.
“The €23 million seized by Italian authorities was released after the IOR promised to pass measures to come into full compliance with the international standards on money laundering and terrorism financing.” Avi Jorish wrote in his article “The Vatican Bank: The Most Secret Bank in the World” published in Forbes on June 26, 2012. The Vatican has never disclosed the source of the money.
While the IOR, under pressure from international financial institutions, finally began publishing annual financial statements in 2013, where it invests its money has never been disclosed.
Ratzinger maintained financial secrecy in other areas.
In 2009, when the Vatican wanted to convert from using the lira to the euro as its official currency and mint its own euro coins, Pope Benedict XVI had to sign a Monetary Agreement in with the European Union. Under its provisions, the Vatican was required to implement EU legal acts and rules as regards “prevention of money laundering, prevention of fraud” and “statistical reporting requirements” among other actions.
On December 30, 2010, the last day it would be possible to ratify the agreement signed a year earlier, Ratzinger announced the establishment of Vatican law no. 127 “concerning the prevention and countering of the laundering of proceeds from criminal activities.” As required by the EU, he created the Autorità di Informazione Finanziaria (AIF) to oversee Vatican compliance with its new law and report statistics of their activities. (To this day, Vatican prosecutors have never convicted anyone of financial malfeasance based on AIF oversight.)
To further the appearance of financial regulation, in February 2011 the Vatican requested the Council of Europe MONEYVAL (the Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism) conduct an evaluation of the AIF and other Vatican financial structures. “The aim of MONEYVAL is to ensure that its member states have in place effective systems to counter money laundering and terrorist financing and comply with the relevant international standards in these fields,” per their website.
The Vatican’s “effective systems” have always been evaluated based solely on information provided to MONEYVAL by Vatican officials resulting in the generally favorable reports as expected.
On March 7, 2012, the U.S. State Department named the Vatican as one of 67 nations “of concern” on its list of money-laundering centers. “Officials said the Vatican is on the list because it isn’t clear whether a year-old anti-money laundering regime is effective.”
RATZINGER SUPPORTED THE U.S. PLUTOCRACY
The 2004 election
Jan. 2003: As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger declared that “Catholics are not allowed to support political parties nor politicians who wanted to keep abortion legal.”
June 2004: When the U.S. episcopate met for their semi-annual meeting, they received instructions from Ratzinger, “no communion for John F. Kerry,” the Catholic Democrat candidate for president due to his support for legal abortion. The media dubbed Kerry’s Sunday church attendance during the campaign as the “wafer watch” to see if any priest would deny him communion.
The U.S. prelates began a campaign against Kerry unprecedented in scope, vitriol and direct interference by clergy in politics. They approved a statement on June 18 that politicians who support legal abortion are “cooperating in evil.” The message went out to all Catholics in multi-media format and in technically non-partisan words that voting Democratic would jeopardize one’s immortal soul.
George W. Bush won the popular vote by a little over 3 million. He carried 56% (approx. 7.9 million votes) of Catholics who said they attended Mass at least once a week. Kerry won among less observant Catholics according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Georgetown University.
The 2008 election
Pope Benedict XVI made his only trip to the U.S. April 15-20, 2008, a presidential election year. Perhaps remembering the help Cardinal Ratzinger had given him four years earlier, Pres. George W. Bush drove out to Andrews Air Force Base to greet the pope, the only foreign dignitary ever accorded such an honor by a president.
After an elaborate official arrival ceremony on the South Lawn on April 16, Bush and Ratzinger met in private in the Oval Office, another first for a president.
On his departure back to Rome, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney led the farewell ceremony for Pope Benedict XVI at JFK International Airport.
Richard Moux, president of Fuller Theological Seminary and a supporter of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, wrote of the closeness evangelicals have with the pope. “He was a big hit, not only with grassroots Catholics, but also with the larger American population, even with the non-religious” he opined.
The only sitting president to ever attend a papal funeral when Wojtyla died in 2005, Bush met with Ratzinger after the funeral. Bush also met with Pope Benedict in the Vatican on June 9, 2007, and on June 13, 2008, his sixth meeting with a pope.
John McCain won the Republican nomination and the Wojtyla/Ratzinger-appointed U.S. episcopate launched a full-scale attack against Sen. Barack Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden. Within hours after the announcement that Biden was running for vice president, a website named “Catholics Against Joe Biden” appeared and Archbishops Charles Chaput and Joseph Naumann announced that Biden should not receive communion.
The bishops labeled Obama as the “most pro-abortion candidate” in the nation’s history.
Nevertheless, Obama was elected. Exit polls showed 52% of white Catholics voted for McCain, but Latinos made the total Catholic vote 54% for Obama. 55% of voters who said they attended church services at least once a week favored McCain.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
“During President Bush’s terms, income inequality grew, a trend since 1980. The Congressional Budget Office reported that the share of after-tax income received by the top 1% rose from 12.3% in 2001 to a peak of 16.7% in 2007, before ending at 14.1% in 2008,” according to “CBO: The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2016” (June 8, 2016) as quoted by Wikipedia.
“Economists Peter Orszag and William Gale described the Bush tax cuts as reverse government redistribution of wealth, ‘[shifting] the burden of taxation away from upper-income, capital-owning households and toward the wage-earning households of the lower and middle classes,’” according to “Gale, G.W. & Orzsag, P.R. (May 4, 2005) The Great Tax Shift” as quoted by Wikipedia.
BISHOPS’ RELENTLESS CAMPAIGN AGAINST OBAMA
Within days after the election, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) “pledged the resources of the Church to mobilize the Catholic community to … reject the abortion extremism of the Freedom of Choice Act,” a bill introduced in 1993 that the bishops falsely attributed to Obama. The bill had failed to pass.
The U.S. bishops launched a campaign against Obama by provoking loathing for the president among their followers without any correction from the Vatican for their mendaciousness and vile, hate-filled rhetoric.
Peoria Bishop Daniel R. Jenky incited his followers by comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin. “Before the awesome judgment seat of Almighty God this is not a war [against Obama] where any believing Catholic may remain neutral,” exhorted Jenky.
“Embracing a totalitarianism which masks itself as the ‘hope,’ the ‘future’ of our nation,” was a thinly-veiled reference to Obama’s campaign by Archbishop Emeritus of St. Louis Cardinal Raymond Burke.
Obama is assuming power “to define what religious faith is and how believers should express their faith commitments,” warned Opus Dei’s Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez.
American bishops used horrific hyperbole such as “apocalyptic,” “messiah,” “despotism,” “truly obscene,” “fundamentally immoral,” “unwilling to hold life as sacred,” and implementing a “culture of death” in referring to the President of the United States.
In 2010, some anti-choice Democrats tried working with the USCCB to make sure the Affordable Care Act repeated the already-existing numerous federal regulations insuring that the government could never fund nor promote abortions. As Rep. Bart Stupak (D – Mich.) said later about his experience: “Ultimately, what stings the most…is that people [like the USCCB] tried to use abortion as a tool to stop health-care reform, even after protections were added.”
The 2012 Presidential Campaign
The Romney campaign released a statement by five former U.S. ambassadors to the Vatican on Jan. 7 pledging their support to Mitt Romney to win the Republican nomination for president. Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard Law School professor and Bush’s ambassador to the Vatican 2008-09, composed the letter.
Glendon had also supported Romney’s 2008 bid for the GOP presidential nomination. In 2009, she refused to accept the University of Notre Dame Laetare Medal, the highest honor in the American Church, because the University had awarded an honorary doctorate on the same occasion to then-President Barrack Obama.
The plutocracy had made their choice. Candidate Romney would have the benefit of the Catholic Church’s media and financial empire.
When a group of American bishops were in Rome in late January, Pope Benedict – who had issued numerous papers against unbridled capitalism and favoring economic justice – launched their 2012 presidential campaign. He warned of the “grave threat” to “religious liberty” in the U.S. “which finds increasing expression in the political [i.e. Democratic Party] sphere.” The pope said he was particularly concerned with “certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion,” an oblique but certain reference to Pres. Obama.
Romney echoed the pope on the campaign trail in railing against the president’s “attack on religious freedom.” After a trip to Poland, Romney issued a new TV ad using an image of, and a quote by, Pope John Paul II to charge Obama with declaring a “war on religion.”
Birth control had never been on the religious right’s radar until the Wojtyla/Ratzinger- appointed bishops decided to oppose Obamacare because the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ had mandated that health insurers provide contraception coverage. The bishops ignored the fact that they had never opposed the same mandate already in effect in 28 states, some for more than a decade.
The U.S. bishops developed a set of church bulletin inserts and a website telling their parishioners that contraception was “intrinsically evil,” just like abortion. In addition, dioceses across the country carried articles in their newspapers and websites reminding Catholics that “the illicitness of contraception is an infallible doctrine” or some similar dire warning.
At great cost to U.S. taxpayers, the media campaign by Catholic bishops against the Affordable Care Act’s mandate of health insurance coverage for contraceptives resulted in two Congressional hearings, legislation introduced in the House with 190 cosponsors and the Senate with 29 and lawsuits by seven state attorneys general.
Romney named the neocon Catholic Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate. Many media outlets reported Ryan’s admiration for Ayn Rand, including this article from the Los Angeles Times: “Back in 2005, an up-and-coming lawmaker named Paul Ryan credited the polemical novelist and libertarian Ayn Rand as a central inspiration for his entry into public life. Unsympathetic to the weak, she encouraged the world’s ‘makers’ to pursue ‘rational self interest’ as ‘the highest moral purpose of [one’s] life,’ while giving little care to the nefarious ‘takers.’”
In 2009, Ryan had stated that Pres. Obama’s healthcare plan “offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will to produce, to achieve, to succeed.” In 2012, Ryan “introduced his austere budget plan calling for an end to Medicare as a mandate and its replacement for many Americans with a system of vouchers,” the LA Times wrote.
The prelate of Wall Street, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, “applauded Ryan calling him “a great public servant” whom he “admires immensely.” Dolan said, “Nobody suffers more from runaway deficits and a poor economy than the poor.”
Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin, also defended Ryan: “The preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government.”
Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver stated: “Claims that Paul Ryan’s plan run deeply counter to Catholic social teaching are unfounded and unreasonable…. Christian stewardship cares for the poor by prudently planning, responsibly spending what is in the realm of the possible, while recognizing the limitations of our resources.”
Obama narrowly defeated Romney in the national popular vote (50% to 48%).
“One-quarter of 2012 voters were Catholics, including 18% who were white Catholics. White Catholics voted for Romney 59% and 40% for Obama,” according to the Pew Research Center. “As in other recent elections, those who attend religious services most often exhibited the strongest support for the Republican presidential candidate.”
VATILEAKS
During the first half of 2012, the Vatileaks scandal disclosed embarrassing confidential documents, some from Pope Benedict’s own office. Several documents focused on Vatican finances, charging corruption and cronyism. The documents
• Styled the IOR as a rogue “offshore bank,” including purportedly “encrypted” and “secret” accounts;
• Raised questions about the Vatican’s willingness to cooperate with international regulators trying to track suspect transactions;
• Exposed internal debates over whether the AIF (Autorità di Informazione Finanziaria) is actually toothless.
The documents had been given to Gianluigi Nuzzi, trusted by some Vatican insiders because of his book, Vatican S.p.A. (Vatican Inc.), published January 1, 2009. Documents obtained by a Vatican employee who didn’t want them published until after his death showed the IOR functioned as an “off-shore” financial institution for rightwing politicians, the Mafia, Italian tax-evaders and other disreputable characters. “The IOR…ensures privileges to be granted in exchange for political backing, legal provisions and business support,” Nuzzi wrote. Vatican S.p.A. “reveals how a sort of ‘private affairs office’ inside the Vatican had worked to straighten or silence the most embarrassing and troubled financial affairs in the years of Karol Wojtyla.”
Nuzzi collected the latest documents into another book, His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Pope Benedict XVI, published in May 2012. According to Nuzzi, one of his informants told him, “The truth emerging in the newspapers and the official discourse within the Holy See was so different, the hypocrisy reigned supreme and the scandals were multiplying. I’m not talking only about the pedophilia and murder cases like the killing of the Swiss Guard and the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, but about money laundering, corruption, and threats.”
“The opportunity for an Opus Dei power-grab presented itself with the Vatileaks scandal when thousands of Vatican documents were given to the press, documents to which only members of the curia had access. During the first half of 2012, one disclosure after another of financial corruption, indifference to the sex abuse of children, petty infighting, backbiting and power-plays were published for the whole word to see. Benedict was stunned by the lack of loyalty from within. It seems natural now the pope would turn to members of a secret society to keep his official secrets, Vatican expert, Sandro Magister, reported in June 2012. “In just a few weeks there has been an increase in the curia of the visible role of Opus Dei.”
“Benedict put Cardinal Julian Herranz in charge of a commission to uncover the sources of the leaks … American Fox News reporter and [Opus Dei] numerary – meaning he has taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – Greg Burke, was hired for the media ‘crisis unit’ and to shape communication strategy. A Secretariat of State official and another member of Opus Dei, Msgr. Peter Brian Wells, handled the legal case [for stealing confidential documents],” Magister stated.
“The curia, already jittery over increased internal spying on their phone and email communications, was informed on Jan. 26 that the priest who headed logistics at the Opus Dei headquarters in Rome was now in charge of the Vatican’s Department of Technical Services. Opus Dei leaders are confident that they can control the next conclave as they did those which chose Cardinals Karol Woytyla and Joseph Ratzinger,” Magister concluded.
Please see “The Opus Dei Popes: Part 1- John Paul II” and “The Opus Dei Popes: Part 3 – Francis.”
Betty Clermont is author of The NeoCatholics – Implementing Christian Nationalism in America.