Vatican Goes To Fox News For Media Salvation

In the middle of media disaster after disaster at the Vatican and all the stabbings in the each others' backs and power plays in Benedict XVI’s brief corrupt rule, apparently it’s Timmy Dolan to the rescue with a recommendation from Knight of Malta Rupert Murdock’s FOX NEWS.

Greg Burkes, who has done no real reporting except as the FOX NEWS Vatican correspondent in the past decade, is a member of Opus Dei.  That means he flagellates himself regularly for spirituality and has trouble dealing with the opposite sex.

All in all, your typical well rounded two dimensional cardboard FOX journalist.

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/fox-news-reporter-hired-as-vatican-media-adviser-641893/

ROME -- In an effort to shore up its communications strategy amid a widening leaks scandal in a troubled papacy, the Vatican has hired the Fox News correspondent in Rome as a senior communications adviser. 

The correspondent, Greg Burke, 52, who has covered the Vatican for Fox since 2001, will leave the network to help improve and coordinate the Vatican's various communications operations, Mr. Burke and the Vatican spokesman said. 

Some Vatican watchers called the move a power play by media-savvy Americans -- including Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York and the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops -- inside a Vatican hierarchy run by Italians whose most frequent communications strategy is to accuse their critics of defamation. 

Mr. Burke is a member of the conservative Opus Dei movement, and his hiring underscores the group's role in the Vatican.

As far as I can see he is not a nephew of Cardinal Raymond Burke.  He is more like a temporary consultant like Gotti Tedeschi was at the Vatican Bank.

The insiders in the Vatican will have Greg Burke for lunch. LOL

If anything, all future media press releases supposedly coming from the Vatican will likely originate in Roger Ailes' bunker (he's afraid of colored folks and gays) at 49th Street and Sixth Avenue in New York City, FOX NEWS HQ.

USCCB Approved!

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Vatican Bank IOR Under Investigation as Mafia Front for Money Laundering

http://www.rt.com/news/vatican-mafia-laundering-money-716/ 

The Vatican Bank is under media fire as reports emerge that Italian prosecutors suspect it of laundering Sicilian mafia bosses’ riches. 

The Institute for Works of Religion, commonly known as the Vatican Bank, has so far refused to disclose details of an account held by a priest in connection with a money laundering and fraud investigation. 

Father Ninni Treppiedi was sacked from serving as a priest after a series of church funds transactions made by his parish came to anti-mafia prosecutors’ attention this spring. The dealings, involving millions of euro, date back to 2007-2009. 

Prosecutors suspect Treppiedi was involved in money-laundering operations linked to Matteo Messina Denaro, a Mafia Godfather on the run. The cleric’s former post in Aclamo, near Trapani, is said to be the richest parish in the Mafia stronghold of Sicily. 

Trapani prosecutor Marcello Viola made the request to disclose Treppiedi’s account details over six weeks ago. But the Vatican, though confirming the request has been received, maintains the issue is not mafia-related.…The first reports on the scandal emerged in the Italian media two weeks after the head of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was ousted after receiving a unanimous vote of no-confidence from bank overseers.

The banker is under investigation for another case of alleged money laundering. But there is speculation that the actual reason behind the no-confidence vote is that Tedeschi was aware of possible mafia links and leaked names and accounts details to police.

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Is Lack of Transparency Without Accountability a Moral Question Anymore?

Is Europe Too Corrupt to Save? Can Transparency cure the corruption endemic to the southern tier culture of Europe, a Catholic culture except for the Greeks?  Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy all good Catholic cultures with blind fascist obedience to a Leader or Dictator or a Pope being the historic cultural background.  This is not anti-Catholic where I am taking this but it is part of my background argument.

Can a lack of transparency be the reason why RC bishops protect pedophilia? The Pedo State (Penn State) child rape and child trafficking ring trial is under way in Pennsylvania just as the Monsignor Lynn Child Abuse trial has been sent to the jury, also in Pennsylvania.

I for one am not eager to hear any more adult male penis in child mouth or anus testimony in a secular case as opposed to a religious pedophile trial.  No doubt Bill Donohue at the “Catholic” League will regularly be reporting to us and mentioning to his drinking buddy Cardinal Dolan on the daily jury trial activities of secular Coach Sandusky at Penn State – actually no, Sandusky is a good Catholic adult male and has been recognized as such with awards from the likes of the Knights of Columbus etc. …. (Can’t go there? Librul eastern media? Right?) 

The nuns have shot back across the bough at the anti-female Vatican quest to sack the nuns' American real estate holdings through trumped up liberal, progressive humanist charges with a simple idea within their June one response to the boys in the Vatican:

“The board members raised concerns about both the content of the doctrinal assessment and the process by which it was prepared. Board members concluded that the assessment was based on unsubstantiated accusations and the result of a flawed process that lacked transparency.”

"Transparency".  That’s the word Carl Anderson as board member of the Vatican Bank IOR (Institute for Religious Works) kept tossing around the librul press when their token part time consultant Gotti Tedeschi, President of the Vatican Bank, got sacrificed as a scapegoat(?) in the recent scandal over there.  

No transparency – real transparency – and European banks don’t want to deal with the Vatican Bank without a trustworthy rating regarding money laundering and terrorism funding.

If Carl Anderson ran his Knights of Columbus Insurance business like the Vatican Bank….(Let’s not go there.)

And let’s not forget – Too Big to Fail in America?

I keep running into the “T” word – TRANPARENCY – all over the web.  And the TRANPARENCY word seems not to have a SYNONYM like MORALITY.

TRANSPARENCY  -  just a word without an energy or force - MORALITY and or ACCOUNTABILITY

The secular world has broken away from the traditional superstitious world of religion in the west.  The west invented Christianity or remodeled Jesus stuff under Constantine in the fourth century and church fathers remodeled or plagiarized Aristotle, Plato and other concepts of morality from the pagan world.

Now that Christianity is on life support in the west, the most, best you can get in the public forum is a bunch of women hating closeted homosexuals running the RC church trying to preach morality without transparency or accountability in the day to day operations of the church. That and fundamentalist creationist political hack party evangelicals.

Businesses preach profit without morality and most importantly of all without transparency and definitely without any accountability whatsoever.

Government preaches democracy and law and order, verbal code words for morality, without transparency and or accountability for no-bid Bush Cheney type government contracts etc?

The simple truth is that a lot of corruption in western society lies with the separation of actions, any actions not tied to any transparency and or accountability.

That is why trillions have disappeared on Wall Street and nobody except Madoff is in prison.

Corruption equals Transparency minus Accountability minus Morality – all in the same category or all divorced from each other these days?

The end of western civilization as we have known it for thousands of years?

I give some credit for part of the idea of this article to the below article in Al Jazeera English which as an outsider  news agency of sorts is witnessing the meltdown of the West in mentioning some “Emperor Has No Clothes” observations ignored here in the west regarding the present Eurozone monetary crisis.

          Just how corrupt is Europe?                      

The warning comes in a new report that says poor governance contributed to financial and political scandals in almost every European country during 2011. 

Greece, Italy and Spain are listed as among the most corrupt countries on the continent. 

Political parties, businesses and the public sector are said to be the worst institutions for corruption, while electoral commissions and state auditors performed the best. 

The report named Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – the eurozone's most financially-troubled nations – as having deeply-rooted problems in their public administrations where officials are not accountable for their actions. 

Political lobbying is also seen as a major cause for concern. Out of 25 European countries 19 have no regulations on political lobbying. 

Party funding, with the influence of lobbyists on decision-makers remaining veiled in secrecy, is seen as ripe for abuse by big businesses. The report says Europe's political parties must do more to make funding transparent.

(Like regulations on lobbying could really provide any protection from corruption? – Look at Washington DC as an example.)

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Gotti Tedeschi, Vatican Banker, is a Dead Man Walking? – Institute for Religious Works

Blackfriars Bridge London.  Where all Vatican Bankers eventually go.

If history repeats itself, and it is likely to, the lay man outsider Gotti Tedeschi, former head of the Vatican Bank is an apparent dead man, doomsday dossier or not.

His leaving his sacking meeting at the Vatican Bank before it was finished no doubt gave him a few minutes to escape the Vatican before being arrested by the Swiss Guards.  He is no doubt just another scapegoat for all the corruption at the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), same as Roberto Calvi before him.  Cardinals don’t commit crimes, money launder or go to jail for money laundering. Pity.

The IOR was founded in 1942 by Pius XII to sort through and make profit from all the Nazi gold being funneled through the Vatican Bank from all over Europe, money laundering, before being presented to the rest of the world as legitimate funds through "religious works".

From the Internet 2010:

Vatican City – This is no ordinary bank: The ATMs are in Latin. Priests use a private entrance. A life-size portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hangs on the wall. 

Nevertheless, the Institute for Religious Works is a bank, and it’s under harsh new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize euro23 million ($30 million) in Vatican assets in September. Critics say the case shows that the “Vatican Bank” has never shed its penchant for secrecy and scandal. 

The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a “misunderstanding” and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws “with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital.” The documents also reveal investigators’ suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia. 

The documents pinpoint two transactions that have not been reported: one in 2009 involving the use of a false name, and another in 2010 in which the Vatican Bank withdrew euro650,000 ($860,000) from an Italian bank account but ignored bank requests to disclose where the money was headed. 

The new allegations of financial impropriety could not come at a worse time for the Vatican, already hit by revelations that it sheltered pedophile priests. The corruption probe has given new hope to Holocaust survivors who tried unsuccessfully to sue in the United States, alleging that Nazi loot was stored in the Vatican Bank. 

Yet the scandal is hardly the first for the centuries-old bank. In 1986, a Vatican financial adviser died after drinking cyanide-laced coffee in prison. Another was found dangling from a rope under London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, his pockets stuffed with money and stones. The incidents blackened the bank’s reputation, raised suspicions of ties with the Mafia, and cost the Vatican hundreds of millions of dollars in legal clashes with Italian authorities. 

On Sept. 21, financial police seized assets from a Vatican Bank account at the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano SpA. Investigators said the Vatican had failed to furnish information on the origin or destination of the funds as required by Italian law.
The bulk of the money, euro20 million ($26 million), was destined for JP Morgan in Frankfurt, with the remainder going to Banca del Fucino. 

Prosecutors alleged the Vatican ignored regulations that foreign banks must communicate to Italian financial authorities where their money has come from. All banks have declined to comment. 

In another case, financial police in Sicily said in late October that they uncovered money laundering involving the use of a Vatican Bank account by a priest in Rome whose uncle was convicted of Mafia association. 

Authorities say some euro250,000 euros, illegally obtained from the regional government of Sicily for a fish breeding company, was sent to the priest by his father as a “charitable donation,” then sent back to Sicily from a Vatican Bank account using a series of home banking operations to make it difficult to trace. 

The prosecutors’ office stated in court papers last month that while the bank has expressed a “generic and stated will” to conform to international standards, “there is no sign that the institutions of the Catholic church are moving in that direction.” It said its investigation had found “exactly the opposite.” 

Legal waters are murky because of the Vatican’s special status as an independent state within Italy. This time, Italian investigators were able to move against the Vatican Bank because the Bank of Italy classifies it as a foreign financial institution operating in Italy. However, in one of the 1980s scandals, prosecutors could not arrest then-bank head Paul Marcinkus, an American archbishop, because Italy’s highest court ruled he had immunity. 

Marcinkus, who died in 2006 and always proclaimed his innocence, was the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s character Archbishop Gilday in Godfather III.

The Vatican has pledged to comply with EU financial standards and create a watchdog authority. Gianluigi Nuzzi, author of “Vatican SpA,” a 2009 book outlining the bank’s shady dealings, said it’s possible the Vatican is serious about coming clean, but he isn’t optimistic. 

“I don’t trust them,” he said. “After the previous big scandals, they said ‘we’ll change’ and they didn’t. It’s happened too many times.” 

He said the structure and culture of the institution is such that powerful account-holders can exert pressure on management, and some managers are simply resistant to change. 

The list of account-holders is secret, though bank officials say there are some 40,000-45,000 among religious congregations, clergy, Vatican officials and lay people with Vatican connections. 

The bank chairman is Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, also chairman of Banco Santander’s Italian operations, who was brought in last year to bring the Vatican Bank in line with Italian and international regulations. Gotti Tedeschi has been on a very public speaking tour extolling the benefits of a morality-based financial system. 

“He went to sell the new image … not knowing that inside, the same things were still happening,” Nuzzi said. “They continued to do these transfers without the names, not necessarily in bad faith, but out of habit.” 

It doesn’t help that Gotti Tedeschi himself and the bank’s No. 2 official, Paolo Cipriani, are under investigation for alleged violations of money-laundering laws. They were both questioned by Rome prosecutors on Sept. 30, although no charges have been filed. 

In his testimony, Gotti Tedeschi said he knew next to nothing about the bank’s day-to-day operations, noting that he had been on the job less than a year and only works at the bank two full days a week. 

According to the prosecutors’ interrogation transcripts obtained by AP, Gotti Tedeschi deflected most questions about the suspect transactions to Cipriani. Cipriani in turn said that when the Holy See transferred money without identifying the sender, it was the Vatican’s own money, not a client’s. 

Gotti Tedeschi declined a request for an interview but said by e-mail that he questioned the motivations of prosecutors. In a speech in October, he described a wider plot against the church, decrying “personal attacks on the pope, the facts linked to pedophilia (that) still continue now with the issues that have seen myself involved.” 

As the Vatican proclaims its innocence, the courts are holding firm. An Italian court has rejected a Vatican appeal to lift the order to seize assets. 

The Vatican Bank was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII to manage assets destined for religious or charitable works. The bank, located in the tower of Niccolo V, is not open to the public, but people who use it described the layout to the AP. 

Top prelates have a special entrance manned by security guards. There are about 100 staffers, 10 bank windows, a basement vault for safe deposit boxes, and ATMs that open in Latin but can be accessed in modern languages. In another concession to modern times, the bank recently began issuing credit cards. 

In the scandals two decades ago, Sicilian financier Michele Sindona was appointed by the pope to manage the Vatican’s foreign investments. He also brought in Roberto Calvi, a Catholic banker in northern Italy.

Sindona’s banking empire collapsed in the mid-1970s and his links to the mob were exposed, sending him to prison and his eventual death from poisoned coffee. Calvi then inherited his role. 

Calvi headed the Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982 after the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans made to dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans. 

Calvi was found a short time later hanging from scaffolding on Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets loaded with 11 pounds of bricks and $11,700 in various currencies. After an initial ruling of suicide, murder charges were filed against five people, including a major Mafia figure, but all were acquitted after trial. 

While denying wrongdoing, the Vatican Bank paid $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors.

Both the Calvi and Sindona cases remain unsolved.

 Source: Associated Press, December 2010

Follow the money.

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ODESSA Nazi Connection to the Vatican Bank? – Financing the Fourth Reich?

This Vatican banking scandal has too many loose ends. Former President of the Vatican Bank Gotti Tedeschi has compiled a doomsday dossier in case his body gets found mysteriously hanging from a bridge in London.

Banco Ambrosiano, a Vatican as stock holder controlled bank, went belly up in 1982 made $1.5 billion in phony loans and or legitimate loans to dummy corporations in South America. "God's Banker" Roberto Calvi, President of Banco Ambrosiano, his body was found hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge in London shortly thereafter.  

In the present scandal and coverup of money laundering and corruption in the Vatican Bank, the Vice President Ronaldo Schmitz of the Vatican Bank wanted Tedeschi out.  Ronaldo Schmitz claims to have been born in Brazil.  What did it cost his parents to forge those documents?  Etc. Like the priests and nuns, working under unofficial orders of Pius XII, that forged Vatican visas or issued outright legitimate ones for SS Nazi officers to escape to South America, could not like forge a Brazilian birth certificate as well?

I smell a rat, like the O.D.E.S.S.A. possibly operating here with the Vatican bank in the middle of a second generation of Nazis trying to establish the Fourth Reich with the help of Benedict XVI?  Gotta pay back the players that put that tiara on your head? Right Joe?

Sounds totally plausible for a nonfiction novel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ODESSA

The ODESSA, from the German Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, meaning “Organization of Former SS Members,” is believed to have been an international Nazi network set up toward the end of World War II by a group of SS officers. The purpose of the ODESSA was to establish and facilitate secret escape routes, later known as ratlines, to allow SS members to avoid their capture and prosecution for war crimes. Most of those fleeing out of Germany and Austria were helped to South America and the Middle East.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronaldo_Schmitz (translated from German)

Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz (* October 30 1938 in Porto Alegre , Brazil ) is a German managers. 

After high school in Rio de Janeiro from 1958-1962 Schmitz studied at the University of Cologne Business Administration and Economics. In 1965 he received his doctorate there and earned an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau . 

In the same year appeared in the Schmitz German trust company a year or two later, he joined BASF to Ludwigshafen . In 1980 he was in the Board appointed by BASF. When he is not the successor to the 1989 CEO Hans Albers was, he joined in 1990 as General Manager for Deutsche Bank, with its former spokesman, Alfred Herrhausen he was acquainted. In 1991 he joined the board of the bank one...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iOl4ZyG39rHCadXLb46l0Bwiz1jw?docId=CNG.77d52b238aae4509a56c20582e5ad5b5.761

The board dismissed Ettore Gotti Tedeschi on May 24, a day before Vatican police arrested Pope Benedict XVI's butler for allegedly leaking sensitive papal documents to the press in an apparently unrelated case. 

Ahead of the board meeting, according to letters in the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that could not be independently verified, the bank's vice president Ronaldo Schmitz threatened to resign if Gotti Tedeschi was not dismissed. 

Gotti Tedeschi "does not have the necessary qualities to guide the Institute," Schmitz wrote in the letter, referring to the bank's official name, the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR under its Italian acronym. 

"He has aggravated the situation with his inertia and his lack of loyalty towards staff and lack of transparency to the board," Schmitz said, addressing himself to the Vatican's powerful Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone. 

"I am confident that Your Eminence will immediately end president Gotti's mandate. I do not want to continue to serve with Gotti Tedeschi. I will present my resignation by the end of May 2012 if he is not dismissed," Schmitz wrote. 

His comments were backed up by Carl Anderson, another board member, who said: "I have reached the conclusion, after much prayer and reflection, that Gotti Tedeschi is no longer able to guide the Institute in difficult times.

( I could not write fiction stranger than the real spies, bankers and corruption stuff going on now with the Vatican and the USCCB. )

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Vatican Bank IOR Scandal Continues – Mafia Backlash Feared – Gotti Tedeschi

Old banking habits at Vatican Bank IOR are hard to break. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/9319414/Ex-head-of-Vatican-bank-planned-to-give-dossier-to-Pope.html

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi feared for his life because his efforts to crack down on alleged money laundering and making the bank's operations more transparent had targeted accounts held by mafia godfathers, the Italian media reported. 

The banker was preparing to send a copy of a dossier of letters, emails and other documents that he had compiled to Monsignor Georg Ganswein, one of Benedict XVI's two private secretaries. 

He had also requested a private audience with the Pope a few days before he was ousted by the board of the bank on May 24 after three years at the helm of the institution. 

He left instructions with his secretary to send two other copies to a lawyer and to a prominent Italian journalist, with notes saying that if anything happened to him, the explanation would be found within the documents. 

The secret dossier consisted of 47 binders of documents, including some which related to Mr Gotti Tedeschi's efforts to convince Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state and de facto prime minister, of the need to clean up the bank's activities so that the city state could join an international "white list" of financially transparent countries.

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No Transparency – Carl A. Anderson – Vatican Bank IOR Scandal – Knights of Columbus

Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson of the Knights of Columbus (rumored to be the Catholic Masons), banker to mere popes, has spoken so eloquently on the current Vatican Bank scandal.
(Certainly no bloviating ignoramus like Donald Trump or any other sleazebag GOP operative types.)

No transparency. That’s why we fired Gotti Tedeschi

Carl Anderson measures his words carefully, following years of dealings with the Vatican and prior to that, following his time spent working at the White House with Ronald Reagan. Of the four board members of the IOR, who on Thursday chose to oust their president Ettore Gotti Tedeschi with a no-confidence vote, Anderson, an American with placid manners, was the one who had to break to the volatile economist that his “progressively erratic personal behaviour” was not longer tolerated. Anderson could not even show Gotti Tedeschi the door, because the former president stormed out from the IOR building while his colleagues of IOR governing council were still deliberating  whether to dismiss him.  Thus the reasons for his dismissal, including the “odd behaviour” were written down in a harsh memorandum drafted by Anderson, listing Gotti Tedeschi’s many “failures”…. 

Anderson put the charge into context. He is one of the most famous personalities in the American Catholic world. As Supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, he is the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of the world’s largest Catholic family fraternal service organization, which has more than 1.8 million members and which in the US is a true financial power in the life-insurance field, in 2010 the insurance companies of the Knights earned 7 billion dollars in life-insurance policies.

The Black Tower, K of C HQ, New Haven Connecticut

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