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A deeply reported, New York Times bestselling exposé of the money and the clerics-turned-financiers at the heart of the Vatican—the world’s biggest, most powerful religious institution—from an acclaimed journalist with “exhaustive research techniques” (The New York Times).
From a master chronicler of legal and financial misconduct, a magnificent investigation nine years in the making, God’s Bankers traces the political intrigue of the Catholic Church in “a meticulous work that cracks wide open the Vatican’s legendary, enabling secrecy” (Kirkus Reviews). Decidedly not about faith, belief in God, or religious doctrine, this book is about the church’s accumulation of wealth and its byzantine financial entanglements across the world. Told through 200 years of prelates, bishops, cardinals, and the Popes who oversee it all, Gerald Posner uncovers an eyebrow-raising account of money and power in one of the world’s most influential organizations.
God’s Bankers has it all: a revelatory and astounding saga marked by poisoned business titans, murdered prosecutors, and mysterious deaths written off as suicides; a carnival of characters from Popes and cardinals, financiers and mobsters, kings and prime ministers; and a set of moral and political circumstances that clarify not only the church’s aims and ambitions, but reflect the larger tensions of more recent history. And Posner even looks to the future to surmise if Pope Francis can succeed where all his predecessors failed: to overcome the resistance to change in the Vatican’s Machiavellian inner court and to rein in the excesses of its seemingly uncontrollable financial quagmire. “As exciting as a mystery thriller” (Providence Journal), this book reveals with extraordinary precision how the Vatican has evolved from a foundation of faith to a corporation of extreme wealth and power.
- Sales Rank: #87887 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-15
- Released on: 2015-09-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x 1.80" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 752 pages
Review
"A dogged reporter exhaustively pursues the nefarious enrichment of the Vatican, from the Borgias to Pope Francis.... A meticulous work that cracks wide open the Vatican's legendary, enabling secrecy." (Kirkus)
“A fast-paced read that brings history alive on every page. The book will captivate those who prefer their historical nonfiction spiked with real-life tales of murder, power, and intrigue.” (Booklist)
“Posner uses his superlative investigative skills to craft a fascinating and comprehensive look at the dark side of the Catholic Church…. Accessible and well written, Posner’s is the definitive history of the topic to date.” (Publishers Weekly (starred))
“A highly anticipated book, the result of a nine year investigation by author Gerald Posner. It reads like Robert Ludlow’s fiction [and] paints a picture of murder, double-dealing, and fraud surrounding the bank.” (Michael Smerconish, CNN)
"A stunning exposé by investigative reporter Gerald Posner. As exciting as a mystery thriller." (Providence Journal)
“Expertly shows that theory and conjecture aren’t necessary when the real-life narrative is compelling enough…. Posner’s history of the institution reads like a sprawling novel, full of complex characters and surprising twists….Readers interested in issues involving religion and international finance will find Posner’s work a compelling read.” (Library Journal)
“God’s Bankers is often fascinating reading, full of international intrigue….God’s Bankers is meticulously researched. Almost 200 pages of end notes indicate the care Posner took in nine years spent researching his subject….The book tells a compelling story, but never at the expense of journalistic principles. Posner might speculate, but he is always careful to mark it as such, and to point out the facts and primary sources that support or undermine the speculation….His work pulls together existing scholarship and massive amounts of original research to present the closest thing to a definitive account of the workings of money and finance within the Vatican that could be produced without cooperation from the Vatican itself.” (Washington Independent Review of Books)
“The Vatican began trying to reform its bank, but with only modest success. Now there's a new sheriff in town, Pope Francis, and he has made significant progress. Posner's compelling book provides a benchmark for measuring his success.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)
"An outstanding book" (John L. Allen, journalist for The Boston Globe)
“Why all this reform? Wall Street-lawyer-turned-author Gerald Posner lays it out in his deeply researched, passionately argued book, ‘God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican.’ Posner…is a merciless pitbull of an investigator, marshaling mountains of evidence to make his arguments…. the heart of ‘God's Bankers’ lies in chapters devoted to the church's actions during and immediately after World War II. In these chapters, Posner dissects the church's actions with the eye of a prosecutor.” (Chicago Tribune)
“An exhaustive history of the financial machinations at the center of the church in Rome….Posner weaves an extraordinarily intricate tale of intrigue, corruption and organized criminality….Posner’s gifts as a reporter and storyteller are most vividly displayed in a series of lurid chapters on the American archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the arch-Machiavellian who ran the Vatican Bank from 1971-1989.” (New York Times Book Review)
"The church was with Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War. Even today, the Church is run on blood money. Blood money from where? By whom? Well, the details are in God’s Bankers. It is a must read for all those who love action-packed and suspense-filled real life incidents. God’s Bankers is more thrilling that Mario Puzo’s Godfather." (The Pioneer Agenda)
"God's Bankers should be read by every Catholic truly interested in Church history." (Catholic Insight)
“A book worth the time if a reader is interested in Roman Catholic Church and European history….The book will be appreciated by those involved in finance. It is chock full of tales of investment schemes involving off-shore ghost companies, shell corporations and holding companies set up to hide the movement of money, the use of tax havens, tax laws (and how to avoid them), and financial instruments that caused millions of dollars to disappear….Some may also appreciate reading about the personalities of popes, the power games and the internecine politics of the Roman Curia (the pope’s administrative wing) that make the current political games played in Washington, D.C., seem amateurish by comparison.” (Financial Advisor Magazine)
“This fast-paced, carefully researched exposé of the nefarious enrichment of the Vatican is a real eyebrow-raiser….a spellbinding, intricate tale of corruption, intrigue, and criminality at the heart of the world’s largest religious institution.” (Portsmouth Herald)
About the Author
Gerald Posner was one of the youngest attorneys ever hired by the Wall Street law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He is the author of eleven books, including New York Times bestsellers, and one a finalist for the Pulitzer in History. Posner has written dozens of articles for national magazines and papers and has been a regular contributor to NBC, the History Channel, CNN, FOX News, CBS, and MSNBC. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, author Trisha Posner.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
God’s Bankers 1
Murder in London
London, June 18, 1982, 7:30 a.m. Anthony Huntley, a young postal clerk at the Daily Express, was walking to work along the footpath under Blackfriars Bridge. His daily commute had become so routine that he paid little attention to the bridge’s distinctive pale blue and white wrought iron arches. But a yellowish orange rope tied to a pipe at the far end of the north arch caught his attention. Curious, he leaned over the parapet and froze. A body hung from the rope, a thick knot tied around its neck. The dead man’s eyes were partially open. The river lapped at his feet. Huntley rubbed his eyes in disbelief and then walked to a nearby terrace with an unobstructed view over the Thames: he wanted to confirm what he had seen. The shock of his grisly discovery sank in.1 By the time Huntley made his way to his newspaper office, he was pale and felt ill. He was so distressed that a colleague had to make the emergency call to Scotland Yard.2
In thirty minutes the Thames River Police anchored one of their boats beneath Blackfriars’ Number One arch. There they got a close-up of the dead man. He appeared to be about sixty, average height, slightly overweight, and his receding hair was dyed jet black. His expensive gray suit was lumpy and distorted. After cutting him down, they laid the body on the boat deck. It was then they discovered the reason his suit was so misshapen. He had stones stuffed in his trouser pockets, and half a brick inside his jacket and another half crammed in his pants.3 The River Police thought it a likely suicide. They took no crime scene photos before moving the body to nearby Waterloo Pier, where murder squad detectives were waiting.4
There the first pictures were taken of the corpse and clothing. The stones and brick weighed nearly twelve pounds. The name in his Italian passport was Gian Roberto Calvini.5 He had $13,700 in British, Swiss, and Italian currency. The $15,000 gold Patek Philippe on his wrist had stopped at 1:52 a.m. and a pocket watch was frozen at 5:49 a.m. Sandwiched between the rocks in his pockets were two wallets, a ring, cuff links, some papers, four eyeglasses, three eyeglass cases, a few photographs, and a pencil.6 Among the papers was an address book page with the contact details for a former official at the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro; Italy’s Socialist Finance Minister; a prominent London solicitor; and Monsignor Hilary Franco, who held the honorary title of Prelate of the Pope.7 Police never found the rest of the book.
A city coroner arrived at 9:30, two hours after the body’s discovery, and took it to London’s Milton Court morgue.8 There they stripped the corpse, took his fingerprints, and prepared for an autopsy. Their notes reflect that the dead man oddly wore two pairs of underwear.9
London police quickly learned from the Italian embassy that the passport was a fake. And it took only a day to discover the false name was simply a variation of the dead man’s real one: he was sixty-two-year-old Italian banker Roberto Calvi, chairman and managing director of Milan’s Banco Ambrosiano, one of Italy’s largest private banks. He had been missing for a week. A judge there had issued a fugitive warrant because Calvi had jumped bail pending the appeal of a criminal fraud conviction the previous year.
A Roman magistrate and four Italian detectives flew to London to help British police cobble together a personal dossier.10 Calvi had risen from a middle-class family to become the chief of the Ambrosiano. He had turned a sleepy provincial bank into an aggressive international merchant bank. The magistrate informed his British counterpart that Calvi was no ordinary banker. He was involved with some of Italy’s greatest power brokers in a secret Masonic lodge and he was a confidant of the Vatican’s top moneymen.11
Despite his criminal conviction, the Ambrosiano’s board had allowed him to remain at the helm of the bank. Although Calvi publicly promised to rescue his financial empire and restore its reputation, he knew that the Ambrosiano was near collapse under the weight of enormous debts and bad investments.12 The bank’s board of directors had fired him only the day before his body swung from Blackfriars.13
The police began patching together how Calvi ended up in London. His odyssey had begun a week earlier when he had flown from Rome to Venice. From there he went by car to Trieste, where a fishing trawler took him on the short journey across the Gulf of Trieste to the tiny Yugoslavian fishing village of Muggia.14 The moment he left Italy’s territorial waters he became a fugitive. From Muggia, an Italian smuggler arranged for him to be driven overnight to Austria, where he shuttled between several cities for a few days before boarding a private charter in Innsbruck for a flight to London. He spent the last three days of his life in flat 881, a tiny room at the Chelsea Cloisters, a dreary guesthouse in the capital’s posh South Kensington district.15
The number of unanswered questions grew as the investigation continued. They were not even certain how Calvi got to Blackfriars. It was four and a half miles from his guesthouse. On a walk he would have passed half a dozen other bridges, any of which would have been just as suitable for a flashy suicide. Calvi was well known for his entourage of bodyguards. But British investigators found none. Nor could they locate a black briefcase supposedly crammed with sensitive documents.16 Calvi’s waistcoat was buttoned incorrectly, which friends and family told the police was out of character for the compulsive banker.17 He had shaved his trademark mustache the day before his death, but police interpreted that not as a sign of a suicidal man but evidence that he was altering his appearance to successfully stay on the run.18
Two men had been with Calvi in London. Silvano Vittor, a small-time smuggler, had flown with him on the charter. The other, Flavio Carboni, was a flashy Sardinian with diverse business interests and much rumored mob connections.19 They had fled London before detectives could interview them.
The police had also to cope with a flood of false sightings. Many thought they had seen Calvi in his final days, everywhere from the Tower of London to a sex parlor to a nightclub in the company of a cocaine trafficker.20
Police soon confirmed that Calvi had a $3 million life insurance policy that named his family as the only beneficiaries.21 In his spartan hotel room investigators found a bottle of barbiturates, more than enough for a painless suicide. But toxicology reports revealed no trace of any drug. When police interviewed Calvi’s wife, Clara, she said that in one recent telephone call he told her, “I don’t trust the people I’m with anymore.”22 Anna, Calvi’s daughter, told the inspectors that she had spoken to her father three times the day before he died. He seemed agitated and urged her to leave her Zurich home and join her mother in Washington, D.C. “Something really important is happening, and today and tomorrow all hell is going to break loose.”23
Another complication was that Calvi suffered from mild vertigo. The police calculated that he had to be acrobatic to reach his hanging spot. It required climbing over the parapet, descending a narrow twenty-five-foot ladder attached to the side of the bridge, rolling over a three-foot gap in construction scaffolding, and then tying one end of the rope around a pipe and the other around his throat, all the while balancing himself with twelve pounds of rocks and a brick crammed into his pockets, suit, and crotch. Not likely, thought the lead detective.24 Moreover, the police matched the stones to a construction site some three hundred yards east of the Thames. Calvi would have had to pick up the rocks there and return to Blackfriars before putting them into his clothing. But lab tests found no residue on his hands. Also, since the ladder he would have descended was heavily rusted, police expected some trace on his hands, suit, or polished dress shoes. There was none.
The London coroner, Dr. David Paul, expressed no doubts that the cause of death was suicide. He relied on the opinion of Professor Keith Simpson, the dean of British medical examiners, who had performed the autopsy.25 A month after Calvi’s body was found, an inquest was held in the Coroner’s Court. Paul presented the details of the police investigation and autopsy to a nine-person jury. Simpson testified that in his postmortem exam he found no signs of foul play and “there was no evidence to suggest that the hanging was other than a self-suspension in the absence of marks of violence.”26 Thirty-seven others testified, mostly police officers.27 Calvi’s brother, Lorenzo, surprised the inquest with a written statement that revealed that Roberto had tried killing himself a year earlier. Carboni and Vittor, the duo with Calvi in London, refused to return to England but submitted affidavits. When they last saw Calvi late on the night he died, he was relaxed. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Police would not discover for another decade that Carboni had left London with Calvi’s briefcase packed with important documents.28
Paul admitted that it was difficult for Calvi to kill himself at Blackfriars. But it would have been just as tough for someone to murder him and leave no trace evidence or injuries on the body.29 Paul took ten hours to set forth his case. He allowed only a twenty-minute lunch break. It was Friday evening and the jury seemed restless to go home. But the coroner insisted they start deliberations.
The six men and three women reported back in under an hour. They were having trouble reaching a verdict. Dr. Paul instructed them that their decision did not have to be unanimous. Seven of nine jurors would suffice for a verdict.30 After another hour, at 10 p.m., they returned with a majority finding that Calvi had killed himself.31
The Calvi family instantly rejected the finding.32 Clara told an Italian newspaper that her husband was murdered and his death was connected to “ferocious struggles for power in the Vatican.”33 Some questioned whether she was motivated by money in pushing a murder theory since Calvi’s life insurance was voided if he killed himself.34 But the Calvis were not the only ones skeptical about the suicide ruling. Italian investigators who had assisted the British police believed there was foul play.35 And businessmen and government officials who knew Calvi were startled by the finding. “Why bother to go to London to do that,” a senior bank director said. The British and Italian press were unanimous that the British inquest seemed a surprisingly incompetent rush to judgment.36 That verdict would probably have been greeted with even greater derision had it then been public knowledge that only days before his death Calvi had written a personal letter—part confessional, part a plea for help—to Pope John Paul II.37 In the letter, Calvi declared he had been a strategic front man for the Vatican in fighting Marxism from Eastern Europe to South America.38 And he warned that upcoming events would “provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage.”39 He pleaded for an immediate meeting with the Pontiff so that he could explain everything. He also claimed to have “important documents” for the Pope.40
The catastrophe Calvi wrote about might have been the Ambrosiano’s collapse, which took place within weeks of his death.41 Early news reports said the bank had a debt of $1.8 billion, much of it guaranteed by the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (the Institute for Works of Religion, or more simply, the Vatican Bank).42 Investigators soon learned the Vatican Bank was the Ambrosiano’s largest shareholder. Did the Vatican itself play a role in the Ambrosiano’s failure? British tabloids quickly dubbed Calvi “God’s Banker.”43 A veritable conspiracy industry in “Who killed Calvi?” sprang up, complete with TV documentaries, books, and even walking tours of Blackfriars Bridge.
Nine months after the coroner’s verdict, three Italian forensics experts conducted a second autopsy but could not resolve whether the death was suicide or murder.44 The Calvis pushed for a new inquest.45 A British appellate court ordered one almost a year to the date after the original hearing.46
A different coroner, Dr. Arthur Gordon Davies, impaneled another jury of nine. This time there was no crammed single day of testimony and deliberations. Instead, the “what’s-the-rush” pacing translated into a nearly two-week hearing. When the jurors got the case they deliberated for three hours before settling unanimously on an “open verdict,” a British bureaucratic loophole that essentially means “we don’t know.” The original suicide finding was vacated. The case was reclassified unsolved and there was no official cause of death.47
The Calvis then petitioned Italian prosecutors to get a new investigation of the death.48 The family hired U.S.-based Kroll Security Group—a preeminent private investigative company—to conduct a fresh probe.49 Kroll concluded that both British inquests were “incomplete at best and potentially flawed at worst,” as they had glossed over evidence that indicated Calvi might have been drugged and murdered.50 The following year, the Calvis retained two former Scotland Yard forensic scientists to utilize a laser test not available in 1982 to reexamine the clothing. They discovered water staining on Calvi’s suit and unexplained marks on the back of his jacket. It was “almost inconceivable,” they concluded, that Calvi alone had climbed to the spot on the bridge’s scaffolding from which he was hanged.51
In 1998, sixteen years after his death, the Calvi family convinced a Roman judge to order the body exhumed. Pathologists at Milan’s respected Institute of Forensic Medicine conducted a thorough autopsy.52 They cited suspicious circumstantial evidence, including possible bruises on the banker’s wrist and foot. They also identified traces of another person’s DNA on Calvi’s underwear.53 The team offered a complicated explanation of how water stains on the clothing—read against a table of the tides on the fateful night—suggested it was likely murder. But there still was not enough compelling evidence to move the case forward.
Meanwhile, Italian prosecutors had a problem. Too many people were either confessing to killing Calvi or trying to cut deals on their own criminal cases by asserting they knew who had done it. So many claimed to have “the inside story” that after a while an offer to solve the Calvi case became the quickest way for a plea-bargaining defendant to lose credibility.
In 2002, when movers were packing up the Institute of Forensic Medicine in preparation for a cross-town move, they stumbled across some mislaid evidence—Calvi’s tongue, part of his intestines and neck, and some fabric from his suit and shirt—in the back of a cupboard. Three Roman investigating magistrates ordered the evidence be turned over for yet another examination. Scientists applied the latest forensic techniques, some of which had not existed just a couple of years earlier. If Calvi had climbed into place over the bridge’s scaffolding, reenactments demonstrated that he would have had microscopic iron filings under his nails or on his shoes and socks. There were none. And markings on his upper vertebrae indicated two points of strangulation. Calvi was strangled before the cord was placed around his neck.54
The Calvis cited those findings in demanding the criminal investigation move faster. But prosecutors were in no hurry, hoping to avoid any mistakes in a case already marked by many missteps. It took another three years before they had enough evidence to issue murder indictments against five people, including the former chief of the secret Masonic lodge of which Calvi was a member and also Flavio Carboni, who was with Calvi in London over the fateful days in 1982.55
A high security courtroom in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison was built for the sensational televised trial, which got under way on October 6, 2005.56 The murder case was circumstantial. And the motive was a convoluted one involving embezzlement and blackmail. Still, many legal observers expected a guilty verdict. The jury got the trial after twenty months but deliberated only a day and a half. Almost two years to the date of their arrest, the defendants received the verdict: not guilty on all charges.57
“It [the acquittal] has killed Calvi all over again,” a stunned prosecutor told the press.58 In 2010 and 2011 two Italian appellate courts upheld the acquittals.59
• • •
What did Calvi know that was so important that someone killed him and disguised it as an elaborate public suicide? That cannot be answered without pointing a spotlight on the corridors of power and money inside the Vatican. The underlying tale is how for centuries the clerics in Rome, trusted with guarding the spiritual heritage of the Catholic faithful, have fought an internecine war over who controls the enormous profits and far-flung businesses of the world’s biggest religion. Only by examining the Catholic Church’s often contentious and uneasy history with money is it possible to expose the forces behind Calvi’s death. Ultimately, Calvi’s murder is a prequel to understanding the modern-day scandals from St. Peter’s and fully appreciating the challenges faced by Pope Francis in trying to reform an institution in which money has so often been at the center of its most notorious scandals.
Most helpful customer reviews
76 of 85 people found the following review helpful.
Everything one needs to know about the Vatican Bank
By Dean Graham Ford
This is as much a history of the Vatican as it is its money trail from the shadows of the renaissance all the way up the day it was published.
`God's Bankers' is an easy read; one doesn't have to be a PHD to understand it. This renders its length not the challenge it might otherwise seem to be.
There are literally thousands of footnotes in this book; look for the nitpickers to come out in droves. Yet, this in no way undermines the overall wealth of this work: everything there is to know about the Vatican Bank.
Insofar as it references direct press sources rather than books, `God's Bankers' sheds new light on much of what it has to say. E.g., scores of books have been commissioned by the Vatican to conceal its union with the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany. Read the newspapers of the time and you get an entirely different picture. `God's Bankers' gives you that picture.
The narrative is skillfully knotted with loads of scenes of the times, from little Jewish boys kidnapped by popes, into the shadows of the Vatican alliance with the Third Reich, to Jews loaded onto boxcars under clergy noses, to the politics of conclaves that elect popes, to a pope sitting up dead in bed reading papers held in his hands, to a Mafia type swinging under a bridge in the wake of the `Great Vatican Bank Scandal'.
It cleverly weaves the role of money into most of what it has to say and it sheds new light on those of us who think we know it all. For example,
Most of us know the German Concordant allied the Vatican with Nazi Germany. But, how many of us know, the Third Reich enacted automatic payroll deductions of German Catholics (8-10%); money which flowed to the Vatican treasury?
Most of us know the Sindona manipulation of Long Island's Franklin National Bank resulted in the biggest American bank failure of its time. Most of us know, it was made possible through the intervention of Richard Nixon. But, how many of us know, Sindona contributed $5.2 million ($20 million today's dollars) to Nixon's 1972 campaign?
The author gives credit to the current pope for curbing shady Vatican deals. Yet, warns the framework for manipulation remains. The Vatican Bank continues to operate as a central bank on the edge of Vatican City within Italy. Anyone can walk into the bank and have money transferred anywhere in the world without going through the Bank of Italy. Too, it continues to operate under a single man--the Pope. Change the ethnics of that man? God knows what will happen?
In truth, if one ignores the sensationalism of rumors and sticks with the facts, though the Vatican transferred money out of Italy (bypassing the Bank of Italy) and issued guarantees for commissions in the 60s and 70s (both legal), there is no record of illegal transactions by the Vatican until a week after the election of John Paul II when he and Roberto Calvi (Banco Ambrosiano) began raising hundreds of millions from unsuspecting investors and transferring it to Nicaragua where it disappeared. The swindle, which broke in the press in 1982 as ‘The Great Vatican Bank Scandal,’ gave birth to rumors of ongoing shady deals in the Vatican bank ever since. (In 1985, the Polish Pope paid the courts $241 million for his part in the scam, a tiny fraction of his actual involvement).
I first developed an interest in the Vatican Bank via The Vatican Murders: The Life and Death of John Paul I. Written by a former acquaintance of the 33-day Pope - Lucien Gregoire, it contains the only in depth record of the Great Vatican Bank Scandal (1978-81) ever published and presents compelling proof: The conspiracy that plotted the Great Vatican Bank Scandal was the same conspiracy that plotted the Murder of John Paul I. Gregoire had the last interview Paul Marcinkus (God’s Banker) granted an investigator of John Paul I's death and that ‘chat’ explains why the Vatican refuses to disclose the cause of Marcinkus' sudden death a month later.
40 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
A brilliant exposure of corruption and abuse at the Vatican Bank
By Harmon Spolan
Posner's new book is as thoroughly researched as any of his previous works, with thousands of footnotes, a pages long bibliography, photos, etc., but none of that should get in the way of a fascinating read. Posner says it took 9 years to write the book, and the scholarship is evident. But the writing is compelling, as gripping as a spy novel, yet non-fiction. The telling of the story of the Vatican's finances is a history of deceit, nefarious relations with the worst of the world's aggressors, corruption, and lack of oversight by any governmental agency, since the Vatican is a sovereign state, subject only to its own laws. Much of the book is shocking, but needs to be read and discussed to correct the abuses perpetrated by the bank's operatives.
Posner has opened a festering wound, revealing for the first time much information previously suppressed, clearing the way for Pope Francis to rid the Vatican Bank of its bureaucrats, and hopefully cleansing the bank going forward.
54 of 61 people found the following review helpful.
BOOK REVIEW: 'God's Bankers': Exhaustive Look at Money and Power in Vatican City
By David Kinchen
"You can't run the Church on Hail Marys" --- Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, (1922-2006) former head of the Vatican Bank
Cicero, IL-born Paul Marcinkus, a central figure in Gerald Posner's "God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican" (Simon & Schuster, 752 pages, photographic inserts, notes, bibliography, index, $32.00) practiced what he preached at one of the world's most opaque financial institution, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), also known as the Vatican Bank, from 1971 to 1989.
The 6-foot 3 inch Lithuanian American also doubled as a bodyguard/interpreter for several popes. He certainly stood out among the mostly diminutive denizens of one of the world's smallest countries. Despite having no financial experience he managed to hang on to his job, writes Posner, who spent nine years researching and writing this book. The exhaustive research -- including several details revealed for the first time -- shows, as does the gripping narrative that is stranger than fiction.
Speaking of fiction, Posner describes how some of the events, including the murder of Italian banker Roberto Calvi in London in 1982, were dramatized in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather. Part III" in 1990. (Page 363).
Just about every account I've read about the Vatican Bank and the numerous financial scandals in Italy leads off with the death of Robert Calvi in 1982 at Blackfriars Bridge in London -- and Posner is no exception.
Calvi (April 13, 1920 - June 17, 1982) was an Italian banker, often dubbed "God's Banker" by the press because of his close association with the Holy See. Calvi was Chairman of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan -- named after the city's patron saint, Ambrose -- which collapsed in one of modern Italy's biggest political and financial scandals. His death in London in June 1982 is a source of enduring controversy and was ruled a murder after two coroner's inquests and an independent investigation. In Rome, in June 2007, five people were acquitted of the murder.
Claims have been made that factors in Calvi's death were the Vatican Bank, Banco Ambrosiano's main shareholder; the Mafia, which may have used Banco Ambrosiano for money laundering; and the Propaganda Due or P2 clandestine Masonic Lodge.
Speaking of talking out of both sides of your mouth, the Roman Catholic Church does that in spades regarding Freemasonry. Becoming a mason would normally result in excommunication for any Catholic, especially in Italy. On the other hand, P2 was a "shadow government" that included many prominent Italians, The lodge had among its members prominent journalists, members of parliament, industrialists, and military leaders--including Silvio Berlusconi, who later became Prime Minister of Italy; the Savoy pretender to the Italian throne Victor Emmanuel; and the heads of all three Italian intelligence services (at the time SISDE, SISMI and CESIS).
"God's Bankers" traces the political intrigue and inner workings of the Catholic Church, especially about the church's accumulation of wealth and its byzantine entanglements with financial markets across the world. At one point, the bank was in the top 10 of money laundering institutions.
Posner presents a shocking account of money and power in perhaps the most influential organization in the history of the world.
Don't be intimidated by the size of this book: it contains enough material for a dozen thriller movies. Poisoned business titans; faked kidnappings; murdered prosecutors; mysterious deaths of private investigators, and questionable suicides; a carnival of characters from Popes and cardinals, financiers and mobsters, kings and prime ministers; and a set of moral and political circumstances that clarify not only the church's aims and ambitions, but reflect the larger dilemmas of the world's more recent history. Not the least among the dilemmas facing the Church is the role of the Vatican in financing Nazis moving to South America and the Middle East through the so-called "ratlines."
The scandal over priests molesting children, almost exclusively boys: It's in here, Chapter 31, pages 395 ff. Clueless as to public relations and crisis management, the Church blamed the sexual abuse story on the media, moving priests from diocese to diocese like pieces on a chessboard. Posner tells the story of Jason Berry, writing in a small circulation weekly in Louisiana -- after his story was turned down by larger publications like Rolling Stone -- exposing molestation by priests in Cajun Louisiana. Berry's story, later published in book form, was too explosive to stay hidden.
At the end of the book Posner examines the reforms to the bank, wondering if Pope Francis can succeed where all his predecessors failed: to overcome the resistance to change in the Vatican's Machiavellian inner court and to rein in the excesses of its seemingly uncontrollable financial quagmire. Part thriller, part financial tell-all, this book shows with extraordinary precision how the Vatican has evolved from a foundation of faith to a corporation of extreme wealth and power.
Gold stolen by the Nazis, including from the teeth of Holocaust victims: It's discussed by Posner. Much of the gold, including wedding rings from Gypsies -- Roma -- murdered in the death camps, ended up in the Vatican Bank and at a famous shrine in Portugal.
For those who say Posner is an anti-Catholic writer, he retorts that his mother was Roman Catholic and he was educated by Jesuits.
Regardless of your views about the Catholic Church and the abuses of religion in general, "God's Bankers" should be read by everyone who wants to understand another version of Lord Acton's saying about the corruption of power. "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
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