GERALD POSNER
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 732 pages
For an institution which proclaims that it is not possible
to worship both God and Mammon, the Catholic Church has managed to do so just
fine, according to the writer and attorney (and Catholic), Gerald Posner, in God’s Bankers.
The comfortable pomp-filled lifestyle of the ecclesiastical
elite was vastly enhanced from the sixth century with the sale of indulgences
to the lay faithful, which promised freedom from punishment for sin. This monetising of salvation financed the
building of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Cathedral.
With Italian unification in the 19th century, the
Catholic Church lost its vast and wealthy feudal empire in central Italy (the
Papal States), leaving the remnant micro-state of the Vatican teetering on bankruptcy. The bailout came from fleecing the poor through
‘Peter’s Pence’ (morally-coerced donations from the laity) and user-pays
charges for Church services such as weddings and funerals.
Money from ‘Christ-killers’ was also acceptable as the doctrinally
anti-Semitic Catholic Church took out loans from the Jewish Rothschild’s bank,
where it was later joined by money from authentic Jew-killers - the Vatican was
the first state to recognise Nazi Germany which reciprocated by collecting, and
making mandatory, the Church’s tax on German Catholics.
This tax, which alone paid for almost all the Vatican’s
operating expenses, influenced the Church’s complicity in the Holocaust. Despite Hitler’s brutal reign of terror, the
Pope and his most powerful cardinals stood by whilst the Vatican Bank, which
was founded during the war, remained open to Third Reich circumvention of
Allied anti-Nazi economic sanctions.
God’s bank went on to become a covert conduit and repository for Nazi
wartime plunder, including gold coins, rings and dental fillings from death
camp victims smelted down into gold bars emblazoned with swastikas.
In the Vatican’s host country, the anti-communist Catholic Church
had struck a similarly ideological and mercenary deal with Mussolini’s
fascists. In return for granting tax-exempt
status to the Vatican, compensation for the confiscation of the Papal States,
and payment of the salaries of all Italy’s 25,000 parish priests, the fascists,
in the 98% Catholic nation, got Vatican-bestowed political legitimacy and Church-delivered
electoral support.
Financial self-interest also operated, along with anti-socialist
animus, in the Vatican’s reactionary politics after the war. Conservative Italian governments earmarked 1%
of income tax as a direct subsidy to its Cold War religious ally whose
opposition to the Italian Communist Party was in part motivated by fear of a
communist government nationalising major industries and wiping out the Church’s
vast corporate investments.
With exquisite hypocrisy, the morally-stern Catholic bank chased
further dividend returns by investing in casinos, arms manufacturing, printing
firms that published pornographic magazines, and pharmaceutical companies that
made birth control pills.
The Pope-appointed private financiers in charge of the
Vatican Bank were also vectors for a host of financial scandals, including political
bribes fuelled with Church funds, corrupt joint ventures with corporate
criminals, and money laundering for Illegal arms traders, narco-traffickers and
Mafia bosses who took advantage of the Vatican Bank’s no-questions-asked policies
and its opaque audit trail. The Vatican
Bank became one of the world’s ten most popular destinations for dirty money
and offshore tax evasion.
Posner concludes his exhaustively-detailed forensic
indictment of the Vatican Bank and its top moneymen on an optimistic note that
the dismal Papal succession of doddering old reactionaries has ended with Pope
Francis (the “People’s Pope”) and his appointment of the former Autralian
Cardinal, George Pell, as the “uber-cleric of the Vatican’s money” heading a newly-created
Secretariat of the Economy, to cleanse the bank of its financial abuses.
This rosy prognosis, however, seems more prayer
than expectation. Francis’ reformist
zeal is much more about creating an impression of doctrinal modernisation and a
tweaking at the policy margins than actually changing fundamental Church teaching
or institutional culture.
Pell has been reported in L’Espresso as spending lavishly on offices, salaries, business class travel and champagne, quite out of keeping
with Francis’ avowed advocacy of a Church
of the poor, for the poor. His record of
denial and cover-up of clerical sexual abuse of children in Australia, in part driven
by a concern that legal settlement costs would open the Catholic Church in
Australia to massive financial exposure, should also be cautionary.
Francis’ denunciations of ‘the mentality of profit
at any price’ is likely to be just pious rhetoric, given that the aim of Pell’s
new outfit is to generate more income from its assets, swelling the sheer
inertial mass of Church wealth - the Vatican Bank has a $60 billion real state
and share portfolio, whilst, worldwide, the real-estate assets of the Catholic
Church are around $2 trillion dollars, equivalent to the G.D.P. of Russia.
None of this inspires confidence that the
money-changers will be tossed out of the temple any time soon. If the Catholic Church really wants to get a
fix on sin, they’ll find it sitting right under their pecuniary noses, in their
bank’s ledgers, in their Bible of capitalist wealth accumulation, in their God
of Profit.
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