With increasing fear among ordinary people about financial elites and their manipulation of money markets, the Vatican has decided to make matters worse by adding its own bizarre twist to the problem: It has proposed a supranational authority to manage a new global bank. Not only would financial power rest in the hands of a world body like the UN, but the Vatican would like all countries to cede some of their sovereign powers to it.
One of the great ironies of the Vatican concept of a super authority is that it meets the very criteria the Bible warns against in the Book of Revelation, such as the emergence of a world financial system.
None of this troubles the pope, however, perhaps because his Vatican Bank does business worldwide. It is known to have investments scattered across the globe, some of which are hidden behind multilayered shell companies. The Vatican Bank’s ability to move large sums of money in and out of Vatican City and between private banks is legendary. In 2010, it was caught with its hands in the criminal cookie jar when Italy’s economic intelligence investigators discovered it was secretly moving tens of millions of euros into a JPMorgan account in Frankfurt, and between private banks elsewhere.
The best-known example of criminality by the Vatican Bank, formally called the Institute for Religious Works (Istituto per le Opere di Religione), was its 1982 role in the $3.2 billion collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, a private bank in which it held the major stake. Banco Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi was later found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London. Cardinal Paul Marcinkus, a former American football player who was the Vatican’s man at Banco Ambrosiano, was never prosecuted because the Vatican claimed he had diplomatic immunity. Before his 2006 death in Arizona, Marcinkus refused to explain how Banco Ambrosiano became a laundering house for international crime syndicates.
It is unlikely the Vatican Bank will become any more transparent about its inner workings than it has been to date. After all, it still refuses to open its files to those who would like to know what it did with the hundreds of millions of gold coins secretly and illegally moved into its vaults by the Croatian State Treasury at the end of World War II.
