In the continuing absence of a good wrap-up article about the IOR that is not biased one way or the other, I am re-posting these articles from this time last year, to call attention to significant background facts about IOR as well as the questions about its operations that have remained murky to this day... It is also 'instructive' because of Rodari's reference to St. Francis and his attitude towards the Church and money. Less than a year after he wrote this article, Rodari has not brought up this argument at all in his reporting about the new Pontificate!...
June 21, 2012
When I first started to read this article, I was hoping it might provide a helpful primer of sorts to the world of IOR. It is no such thing, primarily because Rodari tends to mix up his categories, but he reveals a couple of facts (I assume they are, because Rodari presents them as facts) that are not generally known about, of all people, Mother Teresa and John Paul II, and their attitude about contributions received by the Church. But I do take issue with Rodari's strange assumption that financial transparency is not compatible with the way the Church operates its good works....
The Vatican and IOR:
Where does the money come from
and how is it being used?
by Paolo Rodari
Translated from
June 18, 2012
What do they know, at the IOR, about where the money comes from that is deposited at the 'Vatican bank'? Little, or nothing at all. Did not Jesus say, "When you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you"
(Mt 6,3)? [Surely, the Gospel citation does not apply to Rodari's first statement! One worries when a secular journalist starts citing Scripture, because his theology may well be deficient or suspect!]
IOR was said to have been ready to spend a lot of money - 200 million euros in cash - to make good the credit of the San Raffaele medical center in Milan and thereby acquire control of it.
[A project of Cardinal Bertone, originally favored by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi who thereafter backed off, and which Benedict XVI himself eventually vetoed].
Euros from the anonymous faithful, for the most part, are meant to 'grow' as a matter of duty. Donations which do not just come from big depositors but from small contributions to the Church which make up quite a sum when put together.
All this money in currency that is not to be ashamed of because this, too, is the Church: offerings which are made often without knowing who they come from. Often but not always, because the so-called Peter's Pence - that part of the offerings collected by the local churches around the world which is sent to the Holy Father for the various social and charitable undertakings of the Church - also comes from other known donors [corporations or organizations].
For instance, on December 21, 2011, the well-known Italian TV anchor Bruno Vespa
[hardly a fan of Benedict XVI] sent the Pope, in the name of his family, a contribution of 10,000 euro (with the P.S. "When could my family and I have a chance to meet the Holy Father and greet him?" in the cover letter sent to the Pope's private secretary, and published in Gianluigi Nuzzi's book
Sua Santita). The common folk just give their offering without thought of identifying themselves. Most give a few euros, and there are also a few who decide to leave their entire patrimony of a lifetime to the Church.
[Somehow, Rodari shifts suddenly to the big-money depositors of IOR, as follows:]
IOR wants transparency in order to be able to join the 'white list' of financially virtuous nations. Fine. But how? How can they tell which of the bags of euros brought in by big depositors, perhaps simply to help clean up their conscience of their own sins, is an offering to the Church and not money that is being laundered?
[Rodari seems to mix up his categories here. Depositors in IOR are bank depositors like they would be anywhere else. Their money is not a direct offering to the Church as the Peter's Pence collections are (though thelatter is necessarily deposited in IOR), but the choice to deposit in IOR means that big-money depositors make funds available to IOR for reinvestment or any other activity meant to make that money grow, and to spend some of the profits in the Church's social and charitable activities around the world.]
Where is the discrimination?
How can they explain that transparency in the ecclesial sector clashes frontally with that secrecy, or discretion, which is an integral part of the life of faith? Of the mysteries of faith, in fact. [Rodari is being near-blasphemous in his sarcasm here. A financial transaction, even if it takes place in a bank that belongs to the Holy See - the Holy See may be 'holy' but the bank is not, even if its ulterior raison d'etre is religious, and therefore, presumably, holy - is a secular activity that has nothing to do with the faith. The transparency required by Moneyval is sheer secular transparency that could not possibly clash in any way with the faith, least of all with the 'mysteries of the faith'. No one in his right mind could possibly interpret the possible failure of IOR to vet its big depositors to find out where their deposited funds came from as having to do with the faith at all! It's plain incompetence, or worse, a 'couldn't-care-less' attitude, the very opposite of any manifestation of the faith!]
The news annals are full of such episodes. The protagonists of the two most outstanding examples are two 'sacred icons' of late 20th century Catholicism - John Paul II and Mother Teresa.
It would be difficult to find a saint that was ever as 'wealthy' as Mother Teresa was. Come again? Didn't she live by begging around the streets of Calcutta like the very poor whom she served? And don't her disciples everywhere do the same? Of course. But few are aware that Mother Teresa had an account in IOR of infinite dimensions.
So many donations, offered by rich and poor alike, captivated by her simplicity and faith. How many persons, many out of a sense of guilt because of their wealth, others out of genuine faith, gave over to her part of their own patrimony? Countless. Money which was brought to the IOR in many ways, and about whose sources no one asked questions, not even she. Because she said, literally: "It doesn't matter where the money comes from, but how it is used".
With it, she built hospitals, leprosaria, and carried out all her works of charity. But her biggest contributors kept their money at the IOR, stored in a subterranean bunker where, it is said, much of the money has been converted into gold ingots. (In 2007, it is said that the Vatican, on good advice and before the current crisis struck, converted many of its assets into gold, other than what was needed to cover current obligations and keep enough cash on hand. And that the IOR treasury is protected by four-meter-thick bomb-proof walls.)
Back to Mother Teresa's account. Karol Wojtyla knew all about it and she had his blessing. Because he, too, had the same policy with his own Peter's Pence. What money, in fact, did the Polish labor union Solidarnosc use to help bring down Communism in Poland? Who bankrolled it? Who sustained it financially?
Recently Lech Walesa himself, who led Solidarnosc at the time, stated that the union received money mostly from the Vatican and its charitable organizations. Asked to identify which, he said he could not remember. In short, he too, received financial aid without asking too many questions, and without moralisms, simply thanking Pope John Paul II and that enterprising American bishop, the late Mons. Paul Casimir Marcinkus, who headed IOR for some time.
Walesa said: "All the financial activity was carried out through the Church which was not controlled by the regime. We at Solidarnosc had to be very careful, we were spied on, the secret services carried on provocations of all kinds, and we tried to keep ourselves away from any suspicious activity", but, he adds, "this did not mean that we were not getting the money. On the contrary".
On October 2008, in Gdansk - the northern Baltic city where Solidarnosc was born - Walesa was questioned by the public prosecutor of Rome, Luca Tescaroli, who was investigating the death of Banco Ambrosiano president Roberto Calvi who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982.
Tescaroli pointed out that in letters from Calvi that surfaced after his death, he wrote that he had financed Solidarnosc in the amount of over one thousand-million dollars [a billion in American terms]. Walesa answered: "The Church gave us money but we never asked where it came from. The Church was helping us - to us, it simply meant it was expressing solidarity".
Solidarity or money-laundering? It all depends on your approach or point of view. It's like it is about sin: For the Church, the secrecy of the confessional is sacred, always, even when it concerns the most horrendous crimes, including pedophilia. But according to the law of most democratic states, it is sacrilege not to disclose such criminal secrets.
What about, for example, the $158 million that was spent by the Knights of Columbus in 2011 alone for charitable work, according to its Supreme Knight, Carl Anderson, who is a member of IOR's lay Advisory Board? Where did all that come from? Was it all just contributions from the faithful? Or were there other sources?
[I think Rodari is singling out the Knights of Columbus for no apparent reason. I hold no brief for Carl Anderson, whose action of releasing the IOR board's internal minutes of the session at which they dismissed Gotti Tedeschi with a no-confidence vote, I found completely gratuitous and un-Christian, But for Rodari to single out the KofC as an example of potentially questionable financing, without citing a single fact to support it, is simply wrong and unethical.]
Going back to John Paul II, it is always useful to understand what the Catholic Church is. In 1996, on the 50th anniversary of his ordination as a priest, the College of Cardinals offered him a significant sum of money to use for whatever intention he chose.
[Hmm, did the cardinals offer anything similar to Benedict XVI when he marked the 60th anniversary of his ordination last year?]
What did Papa Wojtyla do? Did he give it to the poor? No. "I want to use it for the reconstruction and decoration of the Redemptoris Mater chapel in the Apostolic Palace".
So this chapel, one of three major chapels in the Apostolic Palace, along with the Sistine and the Pauline, was renovated and adorned with money which could have been used for philanthropic or charitable purposes.
But the Pope had a definite plan for the chapel. In the background, he wanted a representation of
parousia, the second coming of Christ, The Erchomenos - he who comes - appears in an axis of divinity which seems inaccessible, with an inscrutable depth, but which is made exceptionally near.
Christ, as a priest, descends, showing the wounds of his Passion. Before him, ready for the celestial feast, are Adam and Eve, dressed in red; Philip with a chalice, and Mark with the Gospel. Then there is Moses who blocks the Red Sea from the Egyptians for the Israelites' Passover crossing, and on the other side, Noah and his ark and animals. Then, Jonah and the whale, and on the other side, Joseph of Egypt with his sacks of grain. Earth and sea at the end of times give back the dead to Christ, and the latter emerge dressed in white, the humans who have been saved. And the archangel Michael has his hands on the scales of justice and tips the scale to cast the devil into hell.
Hell, of course, is also present, because otherwise, God would not be Father and Love but a dictator.
[????] But whether any of these dead beings ends up in hell remains an inscrutable mystery of God. That is why Hell is covered by a red veil. And this is what Papa Wojtyla ordered, according to an idea by the late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthazar, who was a friend of the present Pope. Hell is represented but it leaves the question open whether it remains empty.
It is for this reason that the Vatican, with John Paul II in the lead, has always accepted contributions without asking where the money comes from.
[Once again, I find it troubling that Rodari seems to lump everything together - contributions intended as donations to the Church, along with personal or corporate funds that are deposited in IOR as savings or investments. There is a clear distinction. Peter's Pence generally comes to IOR in the form of checks from the various local Churches made out to the Pope or whatever Vatican agency they are told to remit to, but certainly not deposited in their own accounts.]
There are those who give anonymously as a form of expiation, the cost of saving themselves from eternal damnation, and
an expiation accepted without facile moralism [Again, a misrepresentation by Rodari. The Church does not accept any such contributions as 'acts of expiation', for the simple reason that they are not necessarily all carried out in compliance of a penance prescribed in formal confession. It may be that some, if not all offerings to the Church, are made as a token of the contributor's personal hope that such an act may 'insure' him against Hell, but no single act can insure the Christian of that, only a continuing effort to avoid sin, to confess sins which we humans tend to repeat anyway, and to gain absolution every time we do that - the absolution is not forever, it's only good until the next time we commit sin!]
"I'll pay because perhaps it may help me," some say. "If your money serves to do some good, then perhaps God will have mercy on you," some priests usually say, only too happy to receive any contributions. As if to say, there's no harm in trying!
Otherwise, one won't understand why even today, it is possible to request Masses said for the dead. It is thought that paying 10 or 15 euro for a Mass will lighten the pains that the dear departed have to serve in purgatory. An inscription from 1500 says so on an image of Mary in Rome's Piazza del Gesu: By a decree of Pope Pius V [the Pope of the Council of Trent], who was canonized in 1712 by Clement XI, anyone who recites the Marian litany with faith before the image will receive for himself and for the souls in purgatory the equivalent of 100 days of indulgence, which can be increased if one crosses the street to the glorious Church of Gesu, Roman center for the Jesuits, and places an offering in its coffers.
[Rodari would do well to read Spe salvi for what Benedict XVI says about indulgences, to get a genuine and unskeptical view of what they mean for the faithful.]
Money in exchange for salvation, of course.
[NO, that's really misrepresenting the Church! We contribute to the Church primarily because we want to and we can, and only secondarily, because we should. To think that we can buy our way out of any punishment we deserve is a sin in itself. That's the logic of humans, not the logic of God and of his Church.] But with the necessary precautions.
The experts of Moneyval are not all wrong in this. Nor is itg wrong for anyone to buzz IOR insistently on this issue, because in everything, moderation is necessary.
[In effect, IOR should be able to vet its big-money depositors to determine from their financial history if their money is clean, or if it is dirty money which they are trying to launder.]
On the other hand, reform in the Church always starts from within, often with a 'return to poverty'. Money should not frighten
men of the Church, who generally do not moralize about the contributions they get, but poverty is an evangelical precept that cannot be ignored.
Spiritual poverty certainly, but also material poverty.
[The term Rodari uses, 'poverta di spirito', is incorrect. He obviously means 'spiritual humility', for which one needs a richness of spirit!]
St. Francis would not have been who he is if he had not abandoned everything, becoming a beggar when he could have been a rich textile merchant.
Many ask today what St. Francis would say if he entered the Leonine walls into the world of the Vatican. Would he strip himself naked before the bankers of IOR as he did when he decided to give up his patrimony? Probably so.
[And I would ask Rodari to read up on St. Francis who did visit the Pope at the Vatican at least twice - once when he asked Innocent III to approve his new order, and six years later, when he attended the Fourth Lateran Council - and who never denounced the Vatican or the Pope for anything, but was always loyal to the Pope, whoever he was. Besides, Francis did not ask everyone to live in poverty - only the members of his various orders. He may have been mystical, but he was also practical, as it seemed he was, eminently, about the Vatican and what it needed in order to be able to deal with the universal Church! Moreover, Francis, like Mother Teresa, would probably have deposited any funds collected by his order in IOR if there had been an IOR at the time] ]
Because one thing is sure: The Church would not be what it is without the poor, who give 'joyfully' of the little that they have, as St. Paul asked them to.
[But the Church always had figures like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea as well. The virtuous poor are certainly ideal, but they do not have a monopoly of virtue.]
Jesus said it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needled then for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Which is to say: Wealth in itself is not evil, but poverty facilitates a relationship with God, communion with mystery, and therefore eternal salvation.
The poor and the mendicant friars for centuries did their begging in the countryside - the poorest among the poor. Canon law today still recognizes the right of mendicant religious orders to beg alms. Those orders like the Capuchins who do not possess real estate or fixed income from rents are licensed to beg to support themselves.
But there are conditions: The alms-seekers must always do so in pairs; they should always lodge overnight in parish houses or their own religious house;, they must observe their order's religious practices regularly; they must not be gone for more than a month from their convent in their home diocese, or not more than two months outside of their diocese.
[Interesting, but did we really need to know such details?]
Shortly before his last tragic week in Jerusalem, Jesus was in the temple. Mark and Luke narrate that Jesus and his disciples observed how the faithful gave the offerings which the priests would later use to perform ritual sacrifices and to help the poor. These were voluntary contributions, not taxes, that the priests also used to maintain the temple and their own needs.
Jesus and his disciples observed how the rich would toss off their coins ostentatiously. Then came a poor widow, who offered 'two small coins' which Mark said were worth 'a few cents'. For Jesus, it was this widow, not the rich, who was generous, not because she thought of making an offering - when she could have chosen not to do so - or because she gave her two coins to Yahweh and those who may be poorer than she, but because she gave everything she had to give.
The teaching is clear: It is people like her whom we must look to. These are the people who make up the Church. People who give everything, not just what is extra, and who give everything anonymously. Often in poverty.
Finally, this shows that St. Paul's teaching in Corinthians 7 remains valid: "I tell you, brothers, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away".
In other words, we should not fear money. Money can be used, but as Mother Teresa did, almost forgetting that you have it.
This is a concept that was followed by Gotti Tedeschi's predecessor as IOR president, Angelo Caloia. In a lecture to ambassadors from the Middle East and North Africa at the Pontifical Gregorian University in May 2007, Caloia said that the money for Peter's Pence "is directed above all for the material needs of poor dioceses, to religious institutions and communities that are in serious difficulty: the poor, children, older people. the marginalized, victims of war and natural disasters,refugeees".
But, he added, there exists another source of income for the 'Pope's charities', namely, the profits of IOR. So these too are a blessing. Once the profits are made, they can be used in all the right ways, without any need to be scandalized.
[I don't think the Vatican or IOR has ever had to apologize for any legitimate profits they have made out of IOR operations. The issue has always been whether IOR, wittingly or unwittingly, has been accepting deposits from persons or corporations who may be using it to launder dirty money. It's one thing not to know because you don't want to know, but in the new world of financial transparency, IOR has a duty to know, and I suppose that is the whole point of the internal regulations required by Moneyval to insure transparency.]
Every year, the IOR places at the Pope's total disposition the difference between its revenues and its income in the past year. The actual amount of this sum is supposed to be kept secret. But it is thought that it is considerable, at least twice what Peter's Pence brings. [In fact, it turns out to be much more.]
Some figures have leaked in recent years. In 1992, 62 billion Italian lire ($45 million); in 1993, 72.5 billion ($47.4 million); in 1994, 75 billion ($49.1 million); in 1995, 78.3 billion ($51,2 million).
[The 2011 Vatican financial report said that IOR had contributed $55 million in 2010 to the Church's social and charitable activities.]
One cannot compare these figures at all to what the anonymous faithful contribute as represented by Peter's Pence.
[????In fact, in 2011, this was estimated to be about $68 million, down from a peak of about $86 million in 2006. At the same time, however, Rodari omits mentioning the contributions made by the dioceses around the world according to their abilities, which in 2010 amounted to about $32 million. We shall have a clearer picture when the Vatican releases its financial statements for 2011, which will probably be at the beginning of July.]
But what is important is not how much there is, but how this money is used. So the Church teaches.
So I tried to look up any article that might give us a better overview of the IOR and its manifold travails in the past. Strangely, I found it right within this Forum - in a 2009 post in the now-defunct CHURCH&VATICAN thread. Which bears re-posting as is:
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.
Caloia's present appointment ends in 2011. The choice of his successor will be decisive in the execution of Operation Transparency.
P.S. 2013 We now know, of course, that the cardinals named Ettore Gotti Tedeschi to replace Caloia in 2009; that Gotti Tedeschi was not juts one of the technical advisers to Benedict XVI for the social encyclical Caritas in veritate, but also one of the principals who drafter for him the financial transparency law promulgated in December 2010 creating the Agency for Financial Information to oversee the financial operations of all Vatican offices; and that Gotti Tedeschi was thrown out of IOR unceremoniously in May 2012 after he had opposed amendments to the transparency law engineered by Cardinal Bertone to dilute the oversight authority of the AIF by sharing it with the Secretariat of State and the Vatican Governatorate.
Whistleblower exposes
Vatican Bank shenanigans
by Philip Willan
[The article originally appeared in London's Guardian newspaper.]
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, 2009 — 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 commission 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, of 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 Nuzzi'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). .
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. [Thankfully, I have not read of any such shenanigans under Benedict XVI.]
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) back in the 1980s.
A lengthier account of the IOR back story as recounted by Nuzzi came out in the VATICAN INSIDER last August and can be consulted here in an English translation, such as it is:
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/the-vatican/detail/articolo/beatificazione-di-giovanni-paolo-ii-karol-wojtyla-giovanni-paolo-ii-marcinkus-finanza-86/
It's too long for me to re-translate but you get the drift...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/06/2013 03:45]