ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

Cardinal Bertone launches
a 'transparency' operation
for the Vatican bank IOR
Translated from

Sept. 11, 2009


Operation Transparency will soon be under way at the IOR (Istituto per Le Opere di Religione), otherwise known as the Vatican bank.

It is expected that by Friday next week, there will be a meeting of the IOR oversight commission and its executive council to decide how to execute the instructions of the cardinals' commission which in late spring had called for making the operations of the IOR more transparent.

The global financial crisis had its negative consequences on the finances of the Holy See which had significant investments in the worst hit American financial giants. The IOR today needs better coordination but most of all, a unified management.

In recent months, IOR has been the target of renewed criticisms and scrutiny following the July publication of the book Vaticano s.p.a. by Gianluigi Nuzzi, a staff writer for the Panorama weekly magazine.

Nuzzi's book is based mainly on the personal archive of IOR documents collated by the late Mons. Dardozzi, which show questionable financial operations and dubious payments to individuals which went on during the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, even after the departure of the late Archbishop Paul Marcinkus.

Under Marcinkus's management, the IOR became involved in a major financial scandal that involved the bankruptcy of Milan's Banco Ambrosiano, in which the IOR had been a major investor. Marcinkus escaped prosecution in Italy for the bankruptcy because of his immunity as a ranking Vatican official.

The current president of IOR, layman Angelo Caloia, an Opus Dei member, had tried to make the bank operations more transparent but came up against the old guard made up of those who had worked with Marcinkus.

Now, following the request of many cardinals and under the new leadership of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone as chairman of the IOR's oversight commission, Operation Transparency will be launched to avoid further repetition of the questionable practices cited in Nuzzi's book.

The other members of the cardinal's commission are Cardinals Attilio Nicora, president of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA, from its Italian acronym); Jean-Louis Tauran, French; Telesphore Toppo, Indian; and Odilo Scherer, Brazilian.

They will be meeting with Caloia, his vice president, Virgil Dechant, and the three other members of the executive council - Manuel Soto Serrano, Robert Studer and Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz.

Caloia's present appointment ends in 2011. The choice of his successor will be decisive in the execution of Operation Transparency.



Whistleblower exposes
Vatican Bank shenanigans
by Philip Willan



Philip Willan is the author of The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the killing of Roberto Calvi. Willan's article on the IOR may be biased, since Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano at the time it went bankrupt in 1982, for which the Vatican, as majority shareholder, later paid bank customers $224 million in restitution. His gruesome death in London, first thought to be a suicide, was ruled murder through 25 years of investigations, but the accused murderers, all tied to the Mafia, were acquitted for insufficient evidence. The Wikipedia entry on Calvi, brief as it is, is the stuff of stay-awake page-turners.


Rome, July 2 — When John Paul II became Pope in 1978 he inherited a number of relationships that would later prove embarrassing for the Vatican. Entanglement with dubious financiers such as Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, would bring lasting discredit on the Catholic Church.

The choice of such disreputable business partners – both had links to the Mafia and were involved in ruinous bankruptcies – may have seemed justified at the time by the requirements of a clandestine global struggle against atheist communism. Both men were staunch anti-communists and members of Licio Gelli’s right-wing masonic lodge, P2.

Some 30 years on, the memory of the financial scandals associated with the name of Paul Marcinkus, the Lithuanian-American archbishop who ran the Institute for the Works of Religion, the Vatican bank also known by its Italian acronym IOR, is beginning to fade.

[Marcinkus was a trusted aide of John Paul II. He first came in as his primary English translator, then became his chief bodyguard for which he earned the nickname 'The Gorilla' and is credited with saving the Pope's life in the knife attack on him in Fatima. Then he was named pro-president of the Vatican Governatorate as well as president of the IOR. It is said he facilitated providing funds to the Solidarity movement in Poland during its fight against the Communist regime.]

We were led to believe that a new broom, wielded by the lay banker Angelo Caloia, had since swept clean the premises of the IOR, housed in the medieval Bastion of Nicholas V. The Vatican, it was thought, had learned the painful lessons of the Marcinkus era.

That assumption has been called into question by a new book, Vaticano S.p.a. (Vatican Ltd), written by the Panorama reporter Gianluigi Nuzzi.


Archbishop Marcinkus, Giulio Andreotti, and Guzzi.

[NB: It must be remembered that the documents Nuzzi uses only go as far as the 1990s. So all the 'generalizations' in this article have nothing to do with what the IOR may have been and is since Benedict XVI became Pope.

However, Cardinal Sodano, who for almost 15 years headed the cardinal's oversight commision for the IOR, is known to have made a midnight appointment, before his term ended as secretary of state, of a trusted man to a high IOR managerial position in order to keep a foothold in.]

A cavalier attitude to financial ethics continued well into the 1990s, with huge political bribes being laundered through the IOR and funds donated for charitable purposes being casually misappropriated by the bank’s administrators, according to Mr Nuzzi’s reconstruction.

Mr Nuzzi’s allegations are based on internal IOR documents, more than 4,000 in all, that were smuggled out of the Vatican by a disgruntled employee. This unique violation of IOR confidentiality was made possible by an unlikely whistleblower: Monsignor Renato Dardozzi.

An electronic engineer who held a top job at the state telecommunications company, Mgr Dardozzi was ordained priest at the age of 52. He worked in the IOR under Marcinkus [who was IOR president from 1971-1989; he resigned in the wake of the Ambrosiano scandals, and retired back to the US, where he died in Feb, 2006 at the age of 84] participated in the joint Vatican/Italian commission that examined the IOR’s role in the collapse of Mr Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano, and witnessed Mr Caloia’s uphill struggle against the personnel and practices of the Marcinkus era.

The chief exponent of the old guard appears to have been Monsignor Donato De Bonis, who served as secretary general under Marcinkus and perpetuated the latter’s administrative legerdemain under the new regime.

In 1987, according to Mr Nuzzi, Mgr De Bonis set up the Cardinal Francis Spellman Foundation, with its own account at the IOR. Signatories on the account were De Bonis himself and Giulio Andreotti, the veteran Christian Democrat politician.*

[Andreotti, who turned 90 in January, is perhaps emblematic of Italian politicians. He was Prime Minister of Italy three times (in 1989-1992, he was the last Christian Democrat PM before the party dissolved in the wake of the Tangentopoli scandal regarding widespread business bribes to leading CD politicians), twice Defense Minister, twice Minister of the Interior, and Foreign Minister in 1983-1989. All this, while openly in league with the Mafia (though late in his career, he decided to cut off his ties with them) and at the same time, presenting himself as a leading Catholic layman. He has been senator for life since 1991. He also founded and edits the monthly Zatholic magazine 30 GIORNI.]

During its first six years of operation the account received some 50 billion lire (€26 million) and paid out 43 billion.

Though Dardozzi’s documents show that Andreotti and De Bonis were beneficiaries of the Spellman account, the internal IOR correspondence is coy of admitting as much.

The Christian Democrat politician is often referred to cryptically as Omissis, while De Bonis goes under the codename Roma. Ownership of the account was clearly a sensitive matter.

The choice of the virulently anti-communist Spellman as “patron” of the fund is interesting. The well-connected cardinal of New York earned the sobriquet “money-bags” for his fund-raising skills and he earmarked significant sums for Italy’s Christian Democrat Party during the cold war years.

The Spellman fund seems to have been administered by De Bonis with promiscuous generosity. A variety of convents and clerics were to benefit, with payments ranging from the modest 1 million lire paid to five mother superiors, to the $50,000 sent to the auxiliary bishop of Skopje-Prizen, for the Albanian-speaking faithful, and the $1 million delivered to Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves, the archbishop of Sao Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.

There were also payments of a more personal nature: 100 million lire for one of Andreotti’s lawyers, $134,000 for a New York conference on Cicero sponsored by the former prime minister, and even a 60 million lire payment to Severino Citaristi, a former treasurer of the Christian Democrat Party convicted of corruption.

In 1991 the account paid some 54 million lire in six instalments to Gioconda Crivelli, a jewelry and fashion designer who appears to have been a personal friend of Mr Andreotti. And a 5 million lire payment went at the same time to Monsignor Giuseppe Generali, described in an interview by Andreotti’s political colleague Walter Montini as Andreotti’s “spiritual guide”.

“He was so close to Andreotti as to become the protector of his sons during the dark years of terrorism,” Montini said. How a churchman could perform such a function was not explained.

Part of the massive Enimont bribe, paid to politicians to secure their approval for a reorganisation of the chemicals sector, was also bounced through the Spellman fund, according to Mr Nuzzi.

But Mr Caloia and Mgr Dardozzi chose discretion over transparency when questioned about it by prosecutors from Milan. “Despite the full collaboration promised and publicised in the press, they limited themselves to referring only what can no longer be concealed,” Mr Nuzzi writes.

Mgr Dardozzi’s documents reveal how the IOR leadership debated how much it was safe to reveal to the prosecutors. In a note to the cardinals’ oversight committee, Mr Caloia warned of the sensitivity of the issue.

“Any leak would constitute a source of grave harm for the Holy See,” he wrote. “And that is because the document outlines procedures and figures that – not being essential for the Milan prosecutor’s office – have not been transmitted.”

The reserve was motivated, Dardozzi observed wryly in a note to the IOR’s chief lawyer, by the need to avoid “leading (the investigators) into temptation”.

It is interesting to note that Mgr Dardozzi’s motive for turning whistleblower was not unalloyed disapproval of the IOR’s unethical conduct. His decision to smuggle his secret archive out of the Vatican sprang from anger at the institute’s refusal to pay him a commission on the sale of a valuable villa near Florence.

The unusual monsignor wanted to leave the money to his adoptive daughter, whose health condition required expensive hospital treatment.

Whatever the reason, Dardozzi’s archive offers an unprecedented glimpse of the inner workings of one of the world’s most secretive and unaccountable financial institutions.

The idea that a noble end – winning the cold war or funding one’s favourite charity – justifies almost any means, still seems to endure at the Pope’s bank in the Nicholas V Tower.

The topic of the Vatican bank’s financial shenanigans continues to fascinate the Italian public. Despite negligible publicity in the press and on television, Vaticano S.p.a. jumped to third place in the non-fiction rankings within 10 days of publication.


The full IOR story obviously remains to be told. I do not know what Guzzi's book says about the origins of IOR's incredible and unconscionable 'getting into bed' with the Mafia and the Masons - which seems to be acknowledged fact. But it must have begun under Paul VI - how much did he know about it? He already had a great shock about the P2 Masonic lodge that apparently recruited a number of ranking Curia members, including Paul VI's chosen orchestrator of all post Vatican-II liturgical reforms, Mons. Anibale Bugnini (Piero Marini's beloved mentor).

For the sake of Benedict XVI and the reputation of the Church, let us pray that Cardinal Bertone and his oversight commission will indeed bring transparency to IOR.



Just as a matter of interest, the IOR [circled in red, right side of photo)] is housed in the semi-circular Torre San Nicola right next to the Apostolic Palace.


I'd like to believe there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation (or explanations) for the apparent 'shenanigans' at IOR for so many years. Raising money to finance anti-Communist Cold War activities and the Church's charities does not justify partnering in business with the Mafia and the Masons. It's hard to imagine a more hypocritical set-up than that, nor stranger bedfellows for the Catholic Church. And then, all the petty graft of funnelling money to favorites for causes that cannot possibly qualify as 'works of religion' is simply appalling.

In many ways, Dino Boffo's 'sins of omission' and/or possible commission, and even Silvio Berlusconi's philandering, are trivial offenses compared to the apparently massive and shady financial dealings that compromised the Church (and lost it a lot of money, too).