Читать книгу Can We Save the Catholic Church? - Hans Kung - Страница 17

In the recent past, the Vatican has come in for much criticism because certain companies with financial ties to the Vatican have been involved in the armaments industry or in the manufacture and distribution of birth control pills. More serious were the revelations of the shady operations of the Vatican Bank which took place under the presidency of the American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus (1971–1989), a trusted friend of Pope John Paul II, and which continued behind the back of Marcinkus’s successors Angelo Caloia and Ettore Gotti Tedeschi despite their efforts to stop them. The details of these machinations were exposed in the book Vaticano S.p.A. by the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, published in 2009, and on pages 279–280 of this book I will give a fuller account of them. In 2010, the Vatican was again shaken to the core when the news broke that the Italian authorities had confiscated 23 million euros lodged in an account held by the Vatican Bank at the Italian bank Credito Artigiano, and that a suit had been filed against the new president of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, known to have close ties to Opus Dei, and against the bank’s director Paolo Cipriani. In view of the many earlier scandals, all of these separate events probably represent only the tip of the iceberg. Is the Vatican’s ‘national’ independence now under threat, not merely from legal attacks but also financially? And is not the pope himself as the bank’s sole owner legally liable? At least, the new EU guidelines on money laundering now also apply to the Vatican. I will be considering this point in more detail in Chapter 6.