39 Gerald Posner Quotes on God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican and Mengele: The Complete Story - Quotes.pub

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To forgive or forget the crimes of Josef Mengele would require the amputation of our conscience and the dismemberment of our memory.

Everyone left London just shaking their heads in disbelief,” recalled Elan Steinberg, the World Jewish Congress’s representative. “Two hundred tons of gold from the pro-Nazi Croatian government found its way to the Vatican. Here they were, one of the world’s great moral institutions, and they refused to tell us what their view was, much less to lift a finger to help recover any looted assets. It was terribly disappointing.”44.

John Paul was a bystander as the American church quietly approved an aggressive new legal strategy that included, as The Washington Post uncovered, “hiring high-powered law firms and private detectives to examine the personal lives of the church’s accusers, fighting to keep documents secret and engaging in new tactics to minimize settlements.”65.

Benedict’s resignation was a selfless act since he had come to realize he was not capable of leading the modern church and making the tough decisions that were needed. “It wasn’t one thing, but a whole combination of them,” concluded Paolo Rodari, Il Foglio’s veteran Vatican reporter. Vatileaks, said Rodari, “was a constant drumbeat on the Pope.”33.

The same year as the Perón visit, American counterintelligence concluded that the Vatican as an institution—not merely as a group of scattered, rogue clerics—was helping high-ranking Nazis escape justice.94

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

A supplementary 180-page U.S. government report issued that spring (June 2, 1998) provided more evidence that neutral countries, including the Vatican, had profited by hiding Nazi gold in their central banks.50

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

Everyone left London just shaking their heads in disbelief,” recalled Elan Steinberg, the World Jewish Congress’s representative. “Two hundred tons of gold from the pro-Nazi Croatian government found its way to the Vatican. Here they were, one of the world’s great moral institutions, and they refused to tell us what their view was, much less to lift a finger to help recover any looted assets. It was terribly disappointing.”44

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

In return, the Vatican gave Hitler the formal endorsement he wanted. Article 16 of the Reichskonkordat required German bishops and cardinals to swear an oath of loyalty to the Third Reich.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

In 2009, Benedict faced a firestorm after he lifted the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a British bishop based in Buenos Aires.61 Bertone, who oversaw Williamson’s vetting, had apparently not even Googled him. If he had, he would have discovered an interview the bishop gave only three days before to Swedish television, in which he said about the Holocaust: “I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. I believe there were no gas chambers.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

A report that studied death certificates from the mid-1980s concluded that “The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had authorized the study.92 It concluded that 95 percent of American dioceses had at least one complaint of a sexual assault by a priest against a minor (the authors did not count incidents before 1950).93 During the five-plus decades, 4,392 priests had been accused of abusing 10,667 children, a figure that in some years was as high as 10 percent of all priests.94 At least 143 were serial molesters who carried out their attacks in multiple dioceses.95 Four out of five victims were minor boys.96

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

John Paul was a bystander as the American church quietly approved an aggressive new legal strategy that included, as The Washington Post uncovered, “hiring high-powered law firms and private detectives to examine the personal lives of the church’s accusers, fighting to keep documents secret and engaging in new tactics to minimize settlements.”65

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

And a popular priest, Father Dyonisy Juricev, wrote in a leading newspaper that it was no longer a sin to kill Serbs or Jews so long as they were at least seven years old.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

Bordoni and his wife fled to Venezuela, where he used some of the stolen money to buy a $3 million home and citizenship.103

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

Italian reporters uncovered evidence that the Vatican had invested in Istituto Farmacologico Serono, a pharmaceutical company that made birth control pills, as well as Udine, a military weapons manufacturer (there were also unconfirmed newspaper reports of church money in gunmaker Beretta, a Monte Carlo casino, and a printing firm that published pornographic magazines).

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

A Catholic family had hidden a Jewish boy from the Nazis, and had learned that the Germans had murdered the child’s parents. They brought the youngster to Wojtyla and asked him to baptize the child. In contrast to Pope Pius IX and his abductions and forced baptisms of two Jewish boys, Wojtyla refused. The boy should be raised Jewish in the tradition of his parents, Wojtyla told the parents.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

When Ali Agca, a Turk, shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, both the target and the would-be killer were well within Vatican territory,” wrote George Armstrong, the respected Rome correspondent for London’s Guardian. “The Vatican was happy to have him arrested, tried and sentenced in Italy, and under Italian law, and his life sentence will be at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. The Vatican becomes another country only when it chooses to be.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

Play, don’t pray” was the mantra for some, who according to the insiders included dinner parties of clerics and male prostitutes that ended in nights of drugs and sex.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

The small group of Benedict supporters gathered that night were not simply upset at money matters gone awry. There was, as they discussed that evening, something that made most of them squirm. They had seen the proof of what one called a “gay lobby.” The common bond for the gay clerics at the highest positions of the Curia was that they had abandoned their celibacy vows. The problem, the small group agreed, was that they often used sex as a carrot for advancement to ambitious up-and-coming clerics. It was deplorable, they concluded, that a fast career track was within reach for any cleric willing to submit to the Vatican’s equivalent of a casting couch.2,II

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

In World War II, Pius XII’s silence helped protect a complex web of interlocking business interests with the Third Reich, relationships that yielded significant profits for the Vatican. In some cases they are dealings the Church has denied to this day.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

It took the OSS nearly two years after the IOR’s formation before it stumbled across intelligence that Hitler’s Reichsbank was transferring money to the Vatican and disguising its origin by using a Swiss bank as an intermediary.62

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

Late that autumn a Venezuelan attorney, Alberto Jaime Berti, cooperated with Italian magistrates in return for immunity from prosecution on charges that the IOR was at the center of laundering several hundred million dollars through Swiss and Panamanian banks on behalf of a handful of senior Opus Dei officials.72 The Italian media reported that Berti fingered De Bonis as his Vatican Bank connection and produced dozens of documents with the monsignor’s signature. Prosecutors believed that De Bonis had the key to a safe deposit box at Geneva’s Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. It was in that box, said Berti, that a cache of documents laid out exactly how the IOR laundered the money. De Bonis, cloaked by immunity in his Knights of Malta position, denied even knowing Berti.73 The prosecutors, unable to move against him, had to stand down.

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Berry’s investigation was a searing indictment of how church officials in Louisiana buried reports of sexual abuse of minors and did their best to pay off victims to keep them silent. By the time his story ran, the tiny Lafayette diocese in which Gauthe had committed his crimes was deeply in the red from $4.2 million in confidential settlements to the families of nine victims, and $114 million in pending claims in another eleven lawsuits.

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Castillo Lara believed it might not be possible to demolish the parallel IOR without making the Vatican Bank crash in on itself. At every turn, he adeptly blocked Caloia’s efforts to make the bank more transparent.66 Some reformers meanwhile suspected that the cardinal was more than just an obstacle to reform. They thought the powerful APSA boss was the source of press leaks that made it appear that it was Caloia’s team that had failed to rein in the bank’s questionable activities.67

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the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne published the results of an extensive study of international money laundering.9 The authors compared the banking systems of two hundred countries. The Vatican ranked in the top ten money laundering havens, behind Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Liechtenstein, but ahead of Singapore.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

Mussolini’s insistence on public morality, belief in the inferior role of women, and the ban on contraception and abortion made the fascists palatable to the church.85

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

In a historic 1933 accord, the Vatican was the first sovereign state to sign a bilateral treaty with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The Nazis promised to protect Catholics inside Germany in return for the church endorsing Hitler’s government.

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Gianluigi Nuzzi, the author of the 2009 book that precipitated the string of events from Caloia’s exit to the motu proprio, expressed the feelings of many Vaticanologists: “A few years ago, an anti-money-laundering law in the Vatican and the Holy See would have been unthinkable. They used to say, ‘We’re a sovereign state; these are our affairs.’ The important thing is that they created an anti-money-laundering law and an authority to enforce it. Without that, the Vatican Bank will remain an offshore bank.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

Thirty-four companies—many of them still household names today, like Krupp, AEG Telefunken, Siemens, Bayer, and IG Farben—made fortunes from the tortured labor of Jews, Russians, Poles, some Allied prisoners of war, and German prisoners of conscience.

Mengele: The Complete Story Quotes

In exchange for some wide-ranging modifications demanded by the socialist government to the church’s 1929 concordat, Italy agreed to underwrite the remainder of the $406 million settlement.53 The changes to the concordat would have once been unthinkable. The church dropped its insistence that Roman Catholicism be the state religion. Moving forward, the state had to confirm church-annulled marriages. Parents were given the right to opt their children out of formerly mandatory religious education classes. And Rome was no longer considered a “sacred city,” a classification that had allowed the Vatican to keep out strip clubs and the porn industry. Italy even managed to get the church to relinquish control of the Jewish catacombs. “The new concordat is another example of the diminishing hold of the Roman Catholic church in civil life in Italy,” noted The New York Times.54 In return, Italy instituted an“eight-per-thousand” tax, in which 0.8 percent of the income tax paid by ordinary Italians was distributed to one of twelve religious organizations recognized by the state. During its early years, nearly 90 percent of the tax went to the Catholic Church (by 2010, the church received less than 50 percent as the tax was more equitably distributed). Not only did the tax relieve Italy of its responsibility for the $135 million annual subsidy it paid for the country’s 35,000 priests, it meant the church had a steady and reliable source of much needed income.55

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Ratzinger was afraid to intervene on a deadlocked Roman Curia, with reformers on one side, and the money changers on the other,” wrote author Gianluigi Nuzzi. “So he decided to create a clean slate by bowing out and paving the way for the election of a strong Pope.”34

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Two days after he had appointed the special oversight commission, sixty-one-year-old Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, an APSA senior accountant, was arrested. Prosecutors charged he was the mastermind in helping friends avoid taxes on $26.2 million, some of it cash flown to Italy on a private jet from Switzerland.

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The result was a remarkable December 30 decree that gave the Vatican its first ever anti–money laundering law, set to go into effect the following April 1.27 “The Prevention and Countering of Illegal Activities in the Area of Monetary and Financial Dealings” was issued as a motu proprio, a document historically signed personally by the Pope. Benedict took full responsibility for the decision.

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I can tell you that I have taken all the names I have found in the newspapers and looked them up myself. I didn’t find a single one of these names. This Mafia boss, this politician, Osama bin Laden. None of them have accounts here, nor are they delegates to accounts.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

Eventually 400,000 Germans were sterilized, and the Vatican did not issue a Pastoral Letter against it for another decade, only after the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Nazis).23,I

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God’s Bankers cuts through the masses of misinformation to present an unvarnished account of the quest for money and power in the Roman Catholic Church. No embellishment is needed. That real tale is shocking enough.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

Benedict’s resignation was a selfless act since he had come to realize he was not capable of leading the modern church and making the tough decisions that were needed. “It wasn’t one thing, but a whole combination of them,” concluded Paolo Rodari, Il Foglio’s veteran Vatican reporter. Vatileaks, said Rodari, “was a constant drumbeat on the Pope.”33

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes

It is not the practice of the Holy See to disclose information on the religious discipline of members of the clergy or religious according to canon law.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Quotes