"The Vatican scandal over shady bank accounts and millions in suspect transfers began shortly before sunrise on June 5 on Via Giuseppe Verdi, a picturesque street in the old part of Piacenza, a town in northeastern Italy. An elderly gentleman in a tailor-made suit had just left his house with a leather briefcase dangling from his right hand. He was on his way to his car.
It was to be an important day for Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who had recently been fired as the head of the Vatican bank -- even if it turned out differently than he'd expected. Tedeschi was planning to go to the Vatican on that morning, but he never got there. The 67-year-old banker missed the high-speed train to Rome, meaning he couldn't, as he had planned, get into a taxi at the Italian capital's central station for the short journey across the Tiber River to the Vatican. There, he had hoped to take the documents out of his briefcase and hand them over to a confidant of the pope.
Instead, Gotti Tedeschi found four men waiting for him in the street -- not a hit squad as he feared at first, but investigators with the Carabinieri, Italy's national military police force. Even before he reached his car, they presented him with a search warrant and escorted him back to his house. For several hours, they searched through his sparsely furnished, cloister-like home office. At the same time, other officers were searching through Gotti Tedeschi's office in Milan. Among the objects they confiscated were two computers, two cabinets' full of binders, a planner and his briefcase.The investigators were pleased. While they made but little headway in their corruption investigation involving a client of a company Gotti Tedeschi had once headed, an Italian subsidiary of the Spanish banking giant Santander, they stumbled upon something else in there search which proved to be spectacular.
The documents confiscated from Gotti Tadeschi, a former confidant of the pope, provided Italian law-enforcement officials insight into the innermost workings of the Vatican bank. The secret dossier includes references to anonymous numbered accounts and questionable transactions as well as written and electronic communications reportedly showing how Church banking officials circumvented European regulations aimed at combating money-laundering.
A Possible Motive
The drama unfolding in the Vatican is now heading toward a climax. First, it was "il corvo," the raven, whose revelations about life in the court of the embattled and exhausted Pope Benedict XVI caused months of unease. Then came the arrest of Paolo Gabriele, the pope's butler, whom the Vatican has fingered as the source of the private papal correspondence that was leaked to the public. And now the scandal surrounding Gotti Tedeschi is providing a possible motive for the Catholic soap opera: money.
The pope had apparently tasked the financial executive with making the Vatican bank more transparent. But by approaching his task with perhaps an excess of zeal Gotti Tedeschi upset powerful forces within the Roman Curia, the Vatican's administrative and judicial apparatus. Several high-ranking officials within the Curia viewed the bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), as something akin to a trust company for clandestine monetary transactions that is not only used by the Church, but allegedly also by the mafia as well as corrupt politicians and companies. In one of the seized Gotti Tedeschi memos, he wrote: "I've seen things in the Vatican that scare me..." ( read full story by hitting the link above)
Bridget Mary's Reflection:
This scares me and should scare everyone especially Catholics who give money to the church!
Money laundering, links to the mafia, what do we have here a crime family or a church devoted to spreading the Gospel of Jesus, which is about sharing and being God's love for all.
This story reads like the Da Vinci Code! Only it is real, and it is about the Roman Catholic Church's Vatican Bank!
The corruption and lack of accountability is mind-boggling! The The U.S. media needs to step up and cover this story as a major newsworthy event that the public needs to know about.
Bridget Mary Meehan, arcwp
www.arcwp.org
1 comment:
This is nothing new. In his book The Power and the Glory - Inside the Dark Heart of John Paul II's Vatican, David Yallop describes in great detail the systematic and very deliberate criminal nature of the banks associated with the vatican.
Such banks were officially recognized by the US State Department as money laundering vehicles for all kinds of criminal enterprises. They were also acted as manager of Ferdinand Marcos's stolen billions, and as a vehicle for laundering the massive wealth that the murderous pyscho-path Ante Pavelic stole from Croatia. Such money was used to set up the RAT RACE whereby thousands of Nazi war criminals were smuggled out of Europe, including ALL of the most famous big names.
Pavelic was of course given much much assistance by the vatican hierarchy including the then pope from day ONE for his very deliberate systematic slaughter of the Serbs and other non-"catholics"
He also describes how via the deliberate strategies of John Paul II and Ratzinger the church has been taken over by right-wing essentially fascist "traditionalist" outfits such as opus dei.
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