God's Banker: Vatican expert Cornwell's latest update

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Snip from "Stranger than Fiction" by John Cornwell,
Sunday Times, 16 January

The Vatican Bank, however, whose euphemistic full title is the Institute for Religious Works, is a highly secretive finance house that has helped the poor and the victims of hunger and disaster since it was founded after the second world war. But in 1982 it was ordered by the Italian government to pay $1/4 billion in compensation for its part in the collapse of the Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano as a result of fraudulent deals done in the mid-1970s. The Vatican had issued "letters of comfort" to creditors, even though the Ambrosiano was in dire trouble. The head of the Vatican Bank at the time, Archbishop Paul Casimir Marcinkus (who, Yallop alleged, was one of the co-conspirators in the death of John Paul I), informed me in an interview in 1987 that he had found the money for the fine by raiding the Vatican's pension fund. The archbishop failed to see that he had done anything wrong.

Marcinkus evaded arrest in Italy by hiding inside the Vatican City for several years in the early 1980s. Magistrates in Milan had issued warrants, hoping to put him on trial for alleged fraud along with the mafia banker Roberto Calvi. In 1982, Calvi was found hanged under London's Blackfriars Bridge. The death was made to look like a Freemasonry execution: his pockets were filled with bricks and he was left suspended, to drown at high tide. Scotland Yard remains baffled as to whether it was suicide or murder.

Marcinkus survived as head of the bank until 1992, working closely with the present pope. John Paul II used his Vatican Bank and secret connections in Poland to give Solidarity, the Polish union, $32m dollars to help in the struggle against the Soviet Union. If Marco Politi and Carl Bernstein, authors of the papal biography His Holiness, are to be believed, John Paul joined in a conspiracy with Ronald Reagan and the CIA to keep track of Soviet troop movements in order to manipulate the peaceful resistance against the regime in the late 1980s.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1429449_3,00.html

"informed me in an interview in 1987 that he had found the money for the fine by raiding the Vatican's pension fund. The archbishop failed to see that he had done anything wrong.":

Must have gone to the same finishing school as Robert Maxwell RIP, who also raided a pension fund - belonging to Daily Mirror employees -and went belly up when he couldn't repay.... Was subsequently found floating in the Mediterranean under his yacht the Ghislaine. Official verdict: Suicide.

As for God's banker Calvi, he was found hanging under Blackfriars Bride, London. Original verdict: Suicide. Overturned last year and a murder trial now under way in Rome.....

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. You repeated the same quotes I would have.

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2. Glad to be in good company!

The rest of the Times article is notable for what is says about Pius XII.