{"id":6561,"date":"2017-04-27T08:13:40","date_gmt":"2017-04-27T12:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6561"},"modified":"2017-04-27T08:13:40","modified_gmt":"2017-04-27T12:13:40","slug":"gods-bankers-a-history-of-money-and-power-at-the-vatican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6561","title":{"rendered":"****God\u2019s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Vatican,

photo: Nick Fewings, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Gerald Posner, narrated by Tom Parks \u2013 If this troubled history of Vatican financial dealings over the past 150 years were fiction, it would be dismissed as unbelievable, but, alas, it is not. Former Wall Street lawyer Posner has done a remarkable job of in-depth reporting to pull together this story. Although much of the story has come out piecemeal over the years, he\u2019s assembled it in a highly readable, occasionally jaw-dropping narrative.<\/p>\n

Posner helpfully puts the Church\u2019s opaque financial dealings in the context of pressures on it at any given time. His descriptions of the politics around the election of recent popes are likewise fascinating. Few of them had any awareness of\u2014or interest in\u2014the questionable and large-scale financial activities taking place practically under their noses.<\/p>\n

Since 1942, when the Church reorganized many of those activities by forming the Vatican Bank, authorities in Italy, in the United States, and in the international financial world repeatedly pressured the Church to reveal what the Bank was up to, with little success. Bank leaders would claim ignorance of financial matters when it suited them (\u201cwe\u2019re just poor priests here\u201d), and employed a succession of shady financial advisors (\u201ca few bad apples\u201d). Meanwhile the international monetary wheeling and dealing was unstoppable. As Damon Linker<\/a> says in The New York Times<\/em>, \u201cThe result (of the Church\u2019s history) has been a tension\u2014and sometimes a blatant contradiction\u2014between the church\u2019s exalted claims for itself and its behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not all of the Bank\u2019s financial deals were successful and some too much so. Millions and millions of dollars simply disappeared. Many readers may know about the Pope\u2019s barely audible muttering when it came to dealing with Hitler; they may not know that the financial side developed ratlines<\/a> to provide monetary and other aid to Nazi fugitives. Or how its lack of records \u201cmade it an ideal safe haven for money plundered from Jews and other wartime victims,\u201d said Chicago Tribune<\/em> reviewer Trine Tsouderos<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They may not know about the money-laundering for the American mafia or the political slush funds disguised as benevolent sounding charities. Or how the Bank was used to support the anti-Communists in Poland and the right-wing Nicaraguan Contras. Or the Vatican Bank\u2019s role in the demise of Italy\u2019s largest private bank. Or the assassinations. . . . In short, it\u2019s \u201can extraordinarily intricate tale of intrigue, corruption and organized criminality\u2014. . . not widely known among more casual church watchers\u2014from Pius XII down to Benedict XVI,\u201d says Linker.<\/p>\n

Pope Francis is now taking concrete, meaningful steps to reform the Bank and limit its activities. He’s letting the sunshine into an institution that for many years did not operate like a normal financial institution. It did not conduct independent audits, and it had a scanty, periodically destroyed, paper trail.<\/p>\n

Posner\u2019s book was almost 22 hours long, and though Parks\u2019s narration was excellent, there were so many characters, I wish I\u2019d read it instead of listened, so I could flip back through to remind myself who was who (the affiliate link below is to the paperback). Nevertheless, the overall picture resounded clear as a church bell.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Gerald Posner, narrated by Tom Parks \u2013 If this troubled history of Vatican financial dealings over the past 150 years were fiction, it would be dismissed as unbelievable, but, alas, it is not. Former Wall Street lawyer Posner has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****God\u2019s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican - highly readable, occasionally jaw-dropping compilation of financial chicanery","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,266,261,267,126],"tags":[988,989,987,416,84,986],"class_list":["post-6561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-history","category-journalism","category-non-fiction","category-reading-2","tag-gerald-posner","tag-gods-bankers","tag-popes","tag-real-life","tag-true-crime","tag-vatican-bank"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1HP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6561"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6564,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6561\/revisions\/6564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}