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Saturday, December 23rd, 2017

The Vatican’s Dirty Money Problem

Author:     BARBIE LATZA NADEAU
Source:     The Daily Beast
Publication Date:     12.12.17 1:06 PM ET
 Link: The Vatican’s Dirty Money Problem
Stephan:   Over the course of my life I have known several high ranking members of the Roman Curia, as well as dozens of men and women who describe themselves as Catholics. Listening to higher ranks and listening to the average Roman Catholic lay person has taught me there is not one church but two. One is the laity, the community of believers who practice the rituals. The other is the hierarchy of the clergy, particularly the upper levels. The village priests are the ones who commit most of the pedophilia. The higher levels of the Church have their own sex issues but, in addition, this component of the Church has been awash in dirty money and power games for centuries. Taken together it is an hermetically sealed system riven by corruption and sexual dysfunction. I've never been quite sure how normal people deal with this, what they tell themselves, but they must say something because so many people are still affiliated.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

ROME—In 2015, the Council of Europe’s financial-evaluation arm Moneyval laid down the law for the Vatican Bank, telling the rather unholy financiers who had been accused of abetting money laundering for years that it isn’t enough to just smoke out suspicious account holders and freeze assets. Instead they said the Vatican Bank, formally known as the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR, needed to start actually prosecuting criminal cases.

Two years later, thousands of accounts have been closed or frozen, but Moneyval still isn’t happy. According to its 209-page December 2017 progress report, the Vatican gets good marks for not funding terrorism and for flagging potential illegal behavior. But the holy bank fails once again to actually hold anyone accountable for what are clearly crimes such as “fraud, including serious tax evasion, misappropriation and corruption,” according to the report.

More curious still, a week before the highly anticipated report was released, the IOR Deputy Director Giulio Mattietti was fired with no advance warning and escorted from his […]

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1 Comment

  1. Mark R on Saturday, December 23, 2017 at 10:35 am

    Excellent article, Stephan. The Catholic church is perhaps the most corrupt and powerful organizations ever to exist on this planet. They have been manipulating humanity, resources and money as well as harboring pedophiles for as long as they have existed…much like many governments…the church simply does not have the problem of borders.