HOW CARDINALS KANGAROO, RAMBO AND GORILLA VAMPED THE VATICAN

To comment, please open your gmail account, use my email address, Facebook, Messenger or Twitter. For private comment, PM me. Scroll down for further comments.



 Now, I'm not asking you to join dots. That's too hard. 

I'm just saying that Cardinal George Pell, currently languishing in solitary confinement in a Melbourne jail, got there after throwing his not inconsiderable weight around the Vatican, specifically around the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA). 

In the Vatican they called him, not without affection, 'the Kangaroo Cardinal'. 

In 2014 Pope Francis had picked him, Australia's highest-ranking prelate, to be one of his nine cardinal advisors and Prefect of a new Secretariat of the Economy, to sort out the financial mess in which the Vatican was widely known to be floundering.

When I say 'widely known' I must make exception for those like the intelligent - and I'd have thought well-informed - Catholic I spoke to the other day who on this subject did a Sergeant Schultz. He knew nothing, and attributed any imputation of financial finagling in Rome to the Devil.

I suspect there are lots of good NO Catholics out there who think that re anything pertaining to the Church more than a kilometer away from the parish pump, ignorance is bliss. And I doubt that many NOs will be enlightened by what's written here. But anyway. 

Anyway: in Rome the Kangaroo Cardinal did not get on famously with everyone. Specially he did not get on with one 'Cardinal Rambo' (Cardinal Domenic Calcagno), APSA’s president from July 2011 until June 2018, so-called because of his penchant for collecting guns.

By October 2016, Cardinal Pell had ferreted out money laundering, dubious ventures in foreign bank accounts, and dopy investments. His dicastery had uncovered 94 million euros in the Secretariat for State and 1 billion euros in other dicasteries which had not been recorded in any financial statement. 

In 2015 APSA had taken it into its collective head to spend €100 million on a prestigious London property. Cardinal 'Rambo' Calcagno reportedly asked Cardinal Pell to rubber-stamp the transaction at the last minute. Cardinal Pell advised against it: there were serious questions, he said, that he wanted answered. 

Cardinal C went to the Pope; he told the Pope that APSA would lose its down payment of $4.9 million if the deal didn't get done. He got his way.

Cardinal P also opposed dipping into the Vatican’s pension fund for half the purchase price. He asked how these flash apartments would fit into the pension fund’s strategy. But the fund’s president was none other than the good Cardinal C, who wrote a letter to himself, from APSA to the fund, giving it the green light.
Meanwhile, back in Savona where he'd been bishop, Cardinal C was under investigation for embezzlement …(and we think our bishops are bad?).

Cardinal P ran into trouble also when he put his signature to a letter to the Pope from 13 cardinals opposing the suggestion, in the infamous Amoris Laetitia, that some Catholics could divorce and 'remarry'. The letter was leaked (by whom?) The Pope was angry. 

But "Jesus was tough about marriage," said Cardinal Pell, "and so am I." 

That also upset Cardinal Reinhard Marx - who heads the organisation that set the guidelines for Cardinal Pell's Secretariat. No surprise then, that Cardinal P got reined in and his plans for pooling the Vatican's assets and spend all profits on the poor stymied. 

Then there was the turf war with the Secretariat of State, which until Pope Francis created the Secretariat of the Economy and ushered in this rude, unmannered Australian to head it, had called all the shots. Cardinal P brought in PricewaterhouseCoopers to run a ruler over the finances but 4 months later Cardinal Paolo Parolin - your typical suave diplomat - very undiplomatically told all Vatican departments to stonewall - and got away with it. 

It had become clear by then that, as a source insisting on anonymity put it to a senior Catholic journalist, "there was a hub of corruption with APSA", and "highly irregular transactions" were transiting through certain banks in Lugano, Switzerland. Another anonymous source reckons APSA regarded real estate as being their own, not the Church's, and anyone who poked their nose in - even the Secretary for the Economy - as an intruder.

When Cardinal P got on to his banker chums in London, who reckoned there could be €100 million held in these foreign accounts by APSA, he asked the Pope for permission to get bank statements to prove it. The Pope said yes. 

But he never got his hands on those bank statements. By July 2017, the Kangaroo Cardinal had gone to ground, preparing to fight sex abuse charges in  Australia. 

The Vatican spokesman, Gregory Burke, announced that Cardinal Pell would be "on leave but he is actually considered outgoing." Cardinal Rambo, a frequent guest of Pope Francis at the Casa Santa Marta, was in charge again.

  
You get the picture? Do you smell something rotten in the state of the Vatican? 

Oh but, you say, those sex abuse charges - which the notoriously corrupt Victorian police had been planning since 2015, when Cardinal Pell first went head-to-head with Cardinal  Calcagno - can't have had anything to do with the Vatican.

No??? Of course, in the Church of Nice in New Zealand, such a thing is inconceivable. 

So what did the Vatican have to do, then, with the death in 1986 of financier Michele Sindona, whose bank had collapsed, leaving the Holy See short by US$30 million, and who died in prison after drinking coffee laced with cyanide? Or with the murder of Roberto Calvi, the collapse of whose Banco Ambrosiana (named for St Ambrose!) would cost the Holy See US$224 million "in recognition of moral involvement"? 

On June 5 1982 Calvi had written to Pope John Paul II warning that his bank's collapse "would provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage". On June 18, Calvi's body was found hanging from Blackfriars' Bridge London, his pockets stuffed with bricks.

And the plot thickens: Calvi was a member of the illegal masonic lodge Propaganda Due. Just before he died, Calvi stayed in the same flat as a small-time drug dealer who was found dead with masonic papers in his pocket, giving the names of the members of Propaganda Due. 

According to his indictment at the ensuing trial of the grand master of the P2 Lodge, Licio Gelli, for Calvi's murder, his motive was to prevent Calvi blackmailing masons in the P2 Lodge or anyone in the Vatican Bank, whose investments he'd managed - some with large amounts of cash from the Cosa Nostra. The Mafia allegedly were keen to stop Gelli revealing that his Banco Abrosiano was used for their money laundering - but Gelli did admit that the killing was commissioned in Poland, because of Calvi's alleged involvement in bankrolling the Solidarity movement, at the request of none other than Pope John Paul II.

In the end, by May 2009 after two trials, one in a specially fortified courtroom in Rome's Rebibbia prison, Gelli and another five accused got off. 

Lack of evidence. The prosecutor could have done with a page out of the playbook of the Victorian police.

Then there were Public Prosecutor Emilio Alessandrini and lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli, whose investigations into scandals linked to the Vatican 'bank' -, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR) - said to have been notorious for money-laundering for decades, came to a sticky end: in 1979 both men were bumped off, Ambrosoli by a Mafia hitman at the instigation of none other than Michele Sindona (yes, we've met him before) who drank that poisoned coffee when banged up for the death of Ambrosoli. 

And guess what? Roberto Calvi's son, Carlo Calvi, suspected that his father's death implicated Cardinal Paul Marcinkus (known, charmingly, as 'The Gorilla'), former head of the Vatican Bank. Italian authorities thought the same, perhaps because almost everyone closely associated with Marcinkus and his financial ploys had wound up dead. 

I suppose the most famous of Marcinkus' alleged victims was Pope John Paul I, who was assisted in his passage to eternity by none other than Marcinkus's first cousin, Columbian gangster Anthony Raimondi. It is Raimondi's own lips what have said it, the motive for his poisoning by cyanide (a Mafia go-to fix-it ?) being John Paul I's declared intention to expose Vatican bank operators for a billion-dollar stock fraud. 

The $1billion lost by IOR had been lent to off-shore companies owned by ... Cardinal Marcinkus. He was referring to the scandal of losing US$224 million when he famously commented, "You can't run the Church on Hail Marys." Nazi gold was the Gorilla's alternative: in 1998 the US State Department confirmed that at least $47 million of Nazi gold was laundered by the IOR under Marcinkus.

Of course it may have been entirely coincidental that an investigative journalist named Mino Pecorelli, who was busying himself with Marcinkus' financial affairs, was also murdered. And how did The Gorilla get away with it? He had sovereign immunity granted to Vatican City by Mussolini, invoked on behalf of Marcinkus by Pope John Paul II.

Pecorelli was a mason, a member of Propaganda Due, who had published a list of masons highly placed in the Catholic Church - which, not all NO Catholics would know, automatically excommunicates masons, the reason being that Freemasonry's raison d'etre is to destroy the Church. 

Pecorelli's list named Paul Marcinkus, codename Marpa, along with Cardinal Jean Villot, Secretary of State for Paul VI, Cardinal Leo Suenens, promoter of Protestant Pentecostalism, Cardinal Ulo Poletti, President of Pontifical Works and - ironically - Preservation of the Faith, Cardinal Augustin Bea, Secretary of State under Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, and Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto, recently a staunch opponent of the 'Dubia' - and Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, architect of the Novus Ordo Mass. 

Are you still with me, people? All I intended was to suggest that a frame-up of Cardinal George Kangaroo Pell was, in the overall scheme of things concerning the Vatican and its sundry villains, not beyond the bounds of possibility. Then I got carried away with the enormity of it all and like a kid at the top of a steep slope who starts running, I couldn't stop till I reached the bottom.

Only, it's not the bottom. Or rather, it's as if what's stopped me at the bottom is a cesspool - of homosexuals living and working in the Vatican, a 'gay lobby' which operated (operates?) in a tight network of corrupt opportunists with criminal connections who trade in and profit from diplomatic privileges, customs immunity and money laundering through the IOR - and all vulnerable to blackmail.

I'm not even going to start on their putative part in a possible frame-up of the Kangaroo Cardinal who came to Rome with a reputation as being "particularly brutal to homosexuals". 

"Homosexual activity," he once remarked, "is a much greater health hazard than smoking".

Anyway. As a man who speaks the truth and lives it, Cardinal George Pell would seem better off in solitary confinement in Melbourne, communing with his Lord and God, than in the Vatican dancing with the devil.

And I'm not suggesting it's because they've read this article (as if!) but this very day, an international group of financial watchdogs announced it has denied the Vatican access to its secure web system where members share information about money laundering, tax fraud and other financial finagling.

In effect, the Egmont Group doesn't trust the Vatican's Financial Information Authority (AIF) with its information - and can we blame them?

Pope Francis has just replaced AIF's president and a member of AIF's board promptly resigned in protest on Monday. 

French German banker Marc Odendall put it this way: "There is no point in staying on the board of an ineffective organization." 

Ineffective??? That's a nice way of putting it.



Matthew Walton says:
          A letter in the current N.Z. Catholic was seeking assurance on Vatican finances; I pen this response via way of your blog.


 Dear Michael (Otto),

                       The news we hear about the Vatican finances is grim but it is credible and real.

           There is a book in the Palmerston North Public Library - a 20th Century history of Vatican finances. (Sorry, I can't remember it's name.) The point though is that the Popes of the early 20th C.  realised that the Vatican finances needed more rigour. Lay experts were appointed and, it seems, they attained too much leeway in the manner of operations,- leading up to the scandals of the 1980s. Vatican finances have, it seems, forever been looked at askance by the Italian government, various European governments, and now the E.E.U.

           When Italy became part of the E.U., there was an inevitable impulse for the Vatican to follow suit and adopt the Euro as its currency (it had been the Lira.)

           Vatican finances have been scandal-plagued since at least the end of WW2.  With so much cash coming in and going out , there is an immense capacity for money-laundering, tax-evasion and avoidance (by European citizens), and for hiding and disbursing large amounts of cash. (Cardinal Pell is reported to have found over 1 billion Euros in unaudited cash.) So when the Vatican currency changed to the Euro, European financial institutions began to require of the Vatican a higher professional standard of financial transparency.

          Nevertheless, as is evident, these standards have not yet been met , either in Christian moral terms, in terms of financial wisdom or even in terms of common sense. Hence, we get the current scandals around property purchase and investment: Peter's Pence disbursements, US$25 million of the Papal Fund used for a bankrupt Italian hospital, Italian financial police raiding a Vatican Secretariat of State office, for example. (The hospital was also being investigated by Italian financial police for money-laundering).

          These scandals are real. They have been reported by credible journalists. It will take a while for it all to straighten out. Now we have a new leader of the Secretariat for the Economy (replacing Cardinal Pell). Let's hope he knows what he is doing.

       One thing to remember, in charity institutions, when money goes awry, God looks at the intentions of those who give, and all things work to good for those who trust Him. We must continue to expect financial regularity. Those institutions rise or fall to the extent that they achieve this or otherwise.

               
Matt Walton.