12 April 2019
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI the former pontiff issued a 6,000-word essay on the roots of the crisis; titled “The Church and the Scandal of Sexual Abuse,” the piece was published in Klerusblatt, a monthly journal for German-speaking clergy, instead of through official Vatican channels.
By the late 1960s, in various seminaries homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly, Benedict wrote. Church Militant reported.
Sexual abuse has existed in the Catholic Church since at least as far back as the 11th century.
A survey of the 10 largest U.S. dioceses found 234 priests from a total 25,616 in those dioceses, have had allegations of sexual abuse made against them in the last 50 years. The report does not state how many of these have been proven in court.
The Legion of Christ’s multi-million-dollar offshore holdings were revealed in the Paradise Papers leak in November 2017. The 2012 Vatican leaks scandal described alleged bribes paid to secure an audience with the pope. In the 1980s there was a major scandal involving money laundering for the mafia and other financial controversies going back to the 1960s. Wikipedia reported.
The Roman Curia is the administrative body through which the affairs of the Catholic Church are conducted. It acts in the Pope’s name and with his authority.
Gotti Tedeschi, head of Santander Bank in Italy, was asked by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI to clean up the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), better known as the Vatican Bank. Gotti Tedeschi said that there were forces within the Vatican that could manipulate accounts within IOR at will. He said that since working at the pope’s bank he encountered “spite, traps, threats and intimidation” from the Vatican Curia. He added that only Giulio Mattietti, former director of the IOR, Paolo Cipriani, former director general of IOR and his deputy Massimo Tulli knew who held the accounts. Tulli and Cipriani were found guilty by a Vatican court in February 2018 for financial mismanagement.
Asked whether the curia could commission a murder, Gotti Tedeschi said that he would not be surprised if they did it. Crux now reported.
Tedeschi himself was accused of money laundering, but was acquitted by Roman judges and given credit for his attempts to help the Church.
In 2015, Moneyval, the Council of Europe’s financial-evaluation arm, told the Vatican Bank which had been accused of abetting money laundering for years that it isn’t enough to just smoke out suspicious account holders and freeze assets. Instead they said the Bank should start prosecuting criminal cases.
According to Moneyval’s 209-page December 2017 progress report, the bank failed once again to actually hold anyone accountable for what are clearly crimes such as “fraud, including serious tax evasion, misappropriation and corruption.”
Moneyval report specifically points to a case in which the chairman of the Vatican’s children’s hospital was accused of serious financial crimes using around a half million euros in funds meant for sick children to renovate a penthouse apartment for the former Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. The cardinal was never under investigation.
The Vatican’s prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy, Cardinal George Pell was sent back to his native country, Australia to face child sex-abuse charges in early 2018. Dailybeast.com reported.
Angelo Caloia, 78, who was president of the Vatican Bank, from 1999 and 2009, and lawyer Gabriele Liuzzo, 94, were ordered to stand trial on charges of embezzlement and money laundering. A third person who was originally under investigation, former IOR director general Lelio Scaletti, died several years ago. They were suspected of embezzling money while managing the sale of 29 buildings sold by the Vatican bank to mainly Italian buyers between 2001 and 2008. The men regularly under-represented the proceeds from real estate sales in the Vatican bank’s official books and then allegedly received the difference between the real sale prices and the amount officially recorded separately and often in cash, according to the order. The prosecutor said, that they allegedly siphoned off an estimated 57 million euros from the property sales. Reuters reported.
The Vatican has for the first time opened an investigation into the mysterious disappearance 36 years ago of a teenage girl. Emanuela Orlandi, who was a 15-year-old schoolgirl when she vanished from the streets of Rome in 1983. She was a Vatican citizen and her father was a Vatican employee. Last month, her family had received an anonymous tip-off, claiming that Ms Orlandi’s body was hidden in a 19th century tomb within the Vatican’s Teutonic Cemetery, an area reserved for Germans, Austrians, Dutch and Flemish people. Telegraph.co.uk reported.
