Tag Archives: Pope Benedict XVI

Cardinal O’Brien Resigns: Church In Crisis

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Before It’s News February 25 2013

This is a shocking crisis for the Church.

Is the credibility of the Scottish Catholic Church in question? One day after facing accusations of sexual abuse, Cardinal Keith O’Brien of Great Britian has announced that he will be stepping down ahead of schedule and will not be participating in the vote for the next pope. From The Telegraph.

Let’s spell this out bluntly. The most senior Catholic cleric in Britain, Cardinal Keith O’Brien of St Andrews and Edinburgh, has been forced to resign ahead of schedule following allegations that he made homosexual advances to younger clergy in his diocese – and isn’t now expected to attend the conclave to elect the next Pope. There will now be no Briton in the Sistine Chapel when voting takes place. O’Brien’s early resignation is believed to have been at the personal insistence of Benedict XVI, in one of his last acts as Pope.

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Josh Voorhees ~ Italian Media Reports Of Secret Gay Network At Vatican

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Slate February 22 2013

Italian media are reporting that Pope Benedict XVI decided to retire the same day he was given the secret dossier

Pope Benedict XVI is a little more than two weeks away from beginning his retirement at the Castel Gandolfo, but his final days as head of the Catholic church don’t look like they’re going to be quiet ones. Unsourced reports coming out of Italy suggest that the pope decided to call it quits not because of his old age but instead to avoid the fallout that could come from a secret 300-page dossier compiled by three cardinals he tapped to look into last year’s leak of confidential papers stolen from his desk.

Those papers, widely known as the “VatiLeaks,” raised questions of financial impropriety and corruption at the Vatican. The investigation that followed, however, may prove even more uncomfortable for church officials.

The secret dossier allegedly details a wide range of infighting among various factions in the Vatican’s governing body, known as the Curia. But the headline-ready takeaway from today’s report from La Repubblica concerns the existence of one faction in particular, a network of gay church officials. Just in case that weren’t enough to pique international interest, the Italian newspaper also reports that some of said officials had been blackmailed by outsiders. According to the report, the pope got his first look at the dossier—”two folders hard-bound in red” with the header “pontifical secret”—on Dec. 17, and decided that same day to retire.

Now’s a good time to take a step back and offer a few disclaimers. For starters, the Vatican has repeatedly dismissed the reports as baseless. The story from La Repubblica that is driving the allegations is unsourced, so it’s difficult to tell how much stock to put into the whole thing. (There’s also the fact that, it being an Italian-language paper, there’s always a chance of some of the details getting lost in translation.) Still, it appears as though at least one other Italian newspaper, the weekly Panorama, has a similar report—although its unnamed sources could very well be the same as La Repubblica’s. A third Italian paper, Corriere della Sera, alluded to the existence of the secret dossier soon after Benedict announced his resignation earlier this month, describing its contents as “disturbing” but providing few details.

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Philip Pullella ~ Pope Will Have Security, Immunity By Remaining In The Vatican

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Reuters February 15 2013 (Thanks, CD)

Vatican City ~ Pope Benedict’s decision to live in the Vatican after he resigns will provide him with security and privacy. It will also offer legal protection from any attempt to prosecute him in connection with sexual abuse cases around the world, Church sources and legal experts say.

“His continued presence in the Vatican is necessary, otherwise he might be defenseless. He wouldn’t have his immunity, his prerogatives, his security, if he is anywhere else,” said one Vatican official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“It is absolutely necessary” that he stays in the Vatican, said the source, adding that Benedict should have a “dignified existence” in his remaining years.

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onplanetliz ~ So Long And Thanks For All The Fish!

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onplanetliz February 18 2013

Are we about to witness the last of the Fishermen? I am referring of course to the Popes as the fishers of men or the Captains of the ‘Bark of St. Peter’ – bark meaning boat and St. Peter was a fisherman as well as the first Pope.

Pope Benedict actually used that expression in his resignation speech

- here is the excerpt:

…”However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”…

The ROMAN Catholic Church is about to get a new captain and according to the Malachy Prophecy this will be the last Pope – number 112.

Ratzinger/Benedict, by the way, fits the 111th prophecy of Malachy – the ‘Glory of the Olive’ having taken the name of the previous Pope Benedict who was known as the Pope of peace during WWI. The olive plant is a symbol of peace.

Only 3 popes have been to Jerusalem since Israel became a state. It seems that Benedict XVI is the only one of those popes to give a mass at the Mount of Olives.  A custom made altar, complete with a red throne was erected specially for the event near where the Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives was supposed to be. It was certainly erected to ‘Glorify his Oliveness’!

According to Drunvalo Melchizedek in the ‘Serpent of Light’ page 88, a triple 1 (prophecy #111) signifies Energy flow. Whenever one consciously clocks the triple 1,  it means energy moving location or shifting into something new. Ironically, Ratzinger is an Aries – the number 1 in the zodiac.

Perhaps the next and supposedly last Pope #112 may signify where the energy goes.

Here is what Malachy prophecied about him:

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Carol Ann Ciocco ~ The Pope Resigns

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3Moon Ocean February 15 2013

Hi everyone, some have written to me after my email the other day to ask what I thought about Pope Benedict resigning on February 11 (http://reut.rs/VVXrQy) especially since I didn’t mention it. I wanted to avoid talking about it because of my negative view of this Pope, but I decided to weigh in anyway.

This resignation truly is a monumental occurrence – the last time a Pope resigned was in 1415, nearly 600 years ago. I was completely shocked – as many were. I didn’t see it coming, especially astrologically.

From my perspective, the real fireworks of this year will begin in April/May with a triple eclipse season and the third of seven Uranus/Pluto squares. Eclipse effects can emerge several months before the actual eclipse, it’s true, but I don’t feel that’s what was at work here. On the day the announcement was made, we were immersed in a sea of Piscean energy – the energy of Love, Oneness and Bliss. When something shocking like this happens, I immediately suspect Uranus and Pluto, but nothing on that day was glaring in that regard for me.

I believe that the astrology of this Pope’s resignation has more to do with the general revolutionary energy of our times, i.e. with Pluto in Capricorn bringing down ancient corrupt structures and leaders. A close study of the natal chart of the Vatican would be interesting but that’s not the type of astrology I do. Anyway, I feel that this resignation has more to do with powerful effects in the Pope’s natal chart (Pluto and Uranus making serious aspects to his natal Moon-Pluto). It is personal to him and has rippled out to affect us – a global example of the nature of the beast at the turn of the 21st century.

This is a very significant event in terms of the hand-writing on the wall of the radical and stunning changes happening now, and yet to come. Consider the character of this Pope:

In 1981, as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict was named Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the organization which until 1965 had been called the Holy Office of the Inquisition, making him successor to the Grand Inquisitor.

“The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) (Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei), previously known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (wherefrom arose the names Roman Inquisition or Holy Inquisition popularly used in reference to the 16th century tribunals against witchcraft and heresy), and after 1904 called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, is the oldest of the ninecongregations of the Roman Curia. Among the most active of the congregations, it oversees Catholic Churchdoctrine. Its offices are housed at the Palace of the Holy Office at the Vatican.” -wiki

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Richard Gleaves ~ A Trail Of Breadcrumbs: The Resignation Of Pope Benedict And The Great Financial Collapse

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Uncommon Sense February 15 2013 (Thanks, A.L.)

On Tuesday, February 12th, Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world and his congregation with news that he was resigning the papacy; this is entirely unprecedented in the modern age. The last pope to resign, Gregory XII, did so only to solve a dilemma of leadership in the church. That was 600 years ago, and it hasn’t happened since. Every pope in 600 years has died in the arms of the church.

But not this pope. Regardless of what you believe, it is hard to fathom how, within the Catholic framework, he can justify rejecting the papacy theologically or practically. Despite the advantages of medical care and luxury, despite the prospect of remaining servant of God and meeting his creator as pope, he is rejecting his position in relation to God and walking away.

When something extraordinary happens, one must look for extraordinary circumstances. I think I can explain this sudden resignation, if the reader is prepared to follow a trail of breadcrumbs, link after link in a chain that connects five men. This is not a chain of five conspirators, necessarily, but is intended to show the links between our politics, our financial gurus, and our religious leaders.

First, Barack Obama. The president is bent on running the national debt to its limit. He is pushing to eliminate the debt ceiling, and calling for chump-change revenue while the government wastes trillions pouring cash down sinkhole after sinkhole of boondoggles, swindles and schemes. Every move he makes promises a parabolic curve of rising debt. Why? There are three opinions. Firstly, it is possible that he believes increased spending is the way to save the economy; perhaps his advisors have told him that the depressionary forces of the market must be countered by an inflationary monetary policy or else the economy will collapse. The second possibility is that he knows a collapse is inevitable and is buying time, either for noble motives (sparing Americans the pain in the hope that some last minute save appears) or venal (a shopping spree of spending while the reserve status makes it possible, to secure his constituency and reward his cronies). The third opinion is more sinister. Could Obama be running up the debt to cause the collapse? Who would stand to benefit? And what would happen afterwards? It is difficult to believe that this is the case. How would the man look in the mirror?

Simon Tomlinson ~ Lightning Hits St Peter’s Hours After Pope Resignation

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Govt Slaves February 11 2013

The Catholic church was thrown into turmoil today after Pope Benedict XVI made the shock decision to quit the papacy because of his deteriorating health.

In a decision that has surprised even his closest aides, the 85-year-old Pontiff said his strength was ‘no longer adequate to continue in office due to his advanced age’.

He announced his resignation in Latin to a meeting of Vatican cardinals this morning, saying he did not have the ‘strength of mind and body’ to continue leading more than a billion Roman Catholics worldwide.

The decision is unprecedented. He is the first Pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415 and no Pontiff in history has stepped down on health grounds.

The move allows the Vatican to hold a conclave before Easter to elect a new pope, since the traditional mourning time that would follow the death of a Pontiff does not have to be observed.

There are several papal contenders, including Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson who is a front-runner to become the first black Pope.

Although officials said there had been no pressure for Benedict to resign, the internet is already awash with speculation that there was a more sinister reason behind his decision.

Speaking in one of the Vatican’s state rooms, the Pope today told cardinals: ‘After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths due to an advanced age are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

‘I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only by words and deeds but no less with prayer and suffering.

‘However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the barque of St. Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary – strengths which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.’

Benedict, who at 78 became the oldest Pope in 300 years when he was elected in 2005, said he was making the decision in ‘full freedom’ but was ‘fully aware of the gravity of this gesture’.

Several cardinals did not even understand what Benedict had said during the consistory, said the Reverend Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman.

Others who did were stunned.

A cardinal who was at the meeting said: ‘We listened with a sense of incredulity as His Holiness told us of his decision to step down from the church that he so loves.’

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Vatican Confirms ~ Pope Benedict Resigns

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SkyNews February 11 2013

He will be the first head of the Roman Catholic Church to resign in almost 600 years, with his departure expected to leave the post vacant for around three weeks.

The 85-year-old German’s resignation letter said: “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

“I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering.

“However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognise my incapacity to adequately fulfil the ministry entrusted to me.”

He will step down after almost eight years in the post, having been elected in April 2005.

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Andrew Puhanic ~ Vatican Calls For World Government And A New World Order

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Activist Post | December 10 2012

The leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI, has called for the establishment of World Government and a New World Order.

In a speech made at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace on Monday December 3 2012, the Pope called for the “construction of a world community, with a corresponding authority,” to serve the “common good of the human family”.

As a means of defending global peace and justice, the pope’s vision for the establishment of World Government and a New World Order is supposedly not to create a new superpower, but a new governing body that offers to those (politicians) who are responsible for making decisions, criteria for judgment and practical guidelines.

The Pope was quoted as saying:

The proposed body (World Government) would not be a superpower, concentrated in the hands of a few, which would dominate all peoples, exploiting the weakest.

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Alexander Stille ~ Can The Vatican Survive The Age Of Digital Media?

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The Atlantic | September 28 2012 | Thanks, Ann B

Strange things have been happening at the Vatican this year. Beginning in January, documents written by high-level figures in the Catholic Church began finding their way into the Italian press, many of the letters to the pope denouncing instances of corruption and complaining about the direction and management of the Church.

When a book full of leaked documents, Sua Santità (His Holiness), was published in late May, the Vatican took the extraordinary step of arresting the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, a humble but trusted member of the papal household, and announced that officials had found numerous papal documents at Gabriele’s apartment within the Vatican. At the same time, the Vatican Bank, under investigation for money laundering (charges the Vatican denies), fired its president, a respected Catholic banker, listing among the reasons for his dismissal allegations that sounded a lot like leaking: “Failure to provide any formal explanation for the dissemination of documents last known to be in the President’s possession.” Immediately after his firing, the former bank president hired his own bodyguard service and wrote a private memorandum to the pope, which he wished to disseminate “in case something should happen to him.”

Power struggles and scandal are nothing new in the Vatican. Pope Alexander VI, for one, was accused of poisoning his enemies and sleeping with his daughter, the infamous Lucrezia Borgia. But until now the pope had been able to count on the loyalty and discretion of his inner circle and a hermetically sealed culture of silence, discretion, and secrecy that has often been compared with that of the Kremlin at the height of Soviet power. Now the last and most ancient of the world’s absolute monarchies is suddenly in the fishbowl culture of the 21st century, where the most-trivial and the most-important details alike become transparent.

The job of managing this transition from secrecy to openness has fallen to Father Federico Lombardi, the pope’s official spokesman, a Jesuit priest who wears a uniform of simple black pants and a black shirt with a white collar. When I met him this summer in Rome at the end of another long day at Vatican Radio, he had the deeply exhausted look of a man bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. A thoughtful and kindly-looking man who trained as a mathematician, Lombardi now finds himself in the much messier world of media, in which appearance and reality, rumor and fact can all get mixed up in an impossible tangle.

For an organization famous historically for keeping its internal business as private as possible, the Vatican has gone out of its way since the scandal broke this spring to be as open and accountable as possible. Having been embarrassed by constant leaking, the Vatican has clearly decided to go on the counteroffensive, releasing information in anticipation of events so that it is not constantly caught off guard by embarrassing revelations. Lombardi has been giving nonstop press briefings since Paolo Gabriele was arrested on May 24; at an August briefing, he even took the extraordinary step of making public the indictment papers against Gabriele. The Vatican promised that his trial, set to begin September 29, would be made public (immediately after the May arrest, all the pretrial documents were posted on the Vatican press office’s Web site). Also indicted but on lesser charges was a computer technician, Claudio Sciarpelletti, who is seen as a minor accomplice in the misappropriation of documents.

Suddenly, the word transparency, which was hardly pronounced during the first two millennia of the Catholic Church’s history, is on everyone’s lips at the Vatican, in what amounts to a kind of Copernican revolution — an attempt on the part of an essentially medieval institution to join the Internet age. One medieval pope described himself as “the judge of all men who can be judged by none.” The current Vatican has begun in recent years to accept, painfully, that this is no longer the case. If it does not want to be defined by others, the Church must respond to and even court public opinion, using modern media to shape its message.

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Kevin D. Annett ~ Breaking News Report: Catholic Prelate William Lynn Is Found Guilty

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itccs | June 23 2012

But what about those that ordered him? Placing the Pope and Crimen Sollicitationis on Trial

How the mighty are falling.

Watching William Lynn go to jail is immensely pleasurable, partly because it reminds me of the rapid collapse of the Richard Nixon administration years ago, as the conviction of successive Presidential flunkies eventually led prosecutors right to the door of the Executive office.

Being students of history, the Vatican mob must be nervous today, regardless of their success in nullifying their main concern in the Lynn case, which was the charge of criminal conspiracy against him. For such a conviction would have connected Lynn’s protection of child rapists in his charge to the Vatican policy that shielded him for so long – namely, Crimen Solicitationas – and to Pope Benedict himself, who has personally authorized the policy.

Crimen Solicitationas is the law in the Roman Catholic church that orders every priest and Bishop in the world to protect child raping clergy or face excommunication. It is a clear command to obstruct justice and conspire in an enormous, global assault on the innocent, and it implicates the Catholic hierarchy as a whole in a crime against humanity.

The historic conviction of William Lynn, as the first member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America to go to jail for aiding and abetting clerical child rapists, is no small feat, considering the political weight of the papacy and its strange ally in the Obama administration, which did its utmost to derail the Lynn case. But where Lynn’s conviction will lead is uncertain, since the entire matter of whom and what allowed him to help terrorize and destroy generations of children was ignored by the court’s decision.

This fact is odd, considering how early on in the court proceedings it was established that Lynn was not acting alone, but clearly was following the instructions of Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, the boss of Lynn’s Philadelphia Diocese who Lynn served as an aide. Last January, Bevilacqua suffered a convenient and sudden death the day after he was declared fit to stand trial in the Lynn case.

Vatican machinations aside, if William Lynn’s conviction is to have the long-term significance that many survivors of church terror hope it will, it must be followed by a legal assault on the Vatican and its policy of Crimen, which is the executive order that authorized William Lynn to do what he did in the first place. Any failure to do so will be analogous to convicting an Auschwitz S.S. guard for mass murder while ignoring the Wannsee Protocol, or the orders from his superiors in Berlin.

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Richard Cottrell ~ Scandalo Vaticano! What Exactly Did The Butler See?

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End The Lie | May 28 2012

The Holiest of Holies is anciently accustomed to red hot scandals – just think the Borgias – but by any standards the one that is rocking the sold marble pillars of St. Peter’s right now is not only unique, but might quite possibly mark the funeral rites of Pope Benedict’s disastrous papacy.

End-The-Lie Editor’s note: In other Catholic news, a Catholic priest accused of molesting multiple children has been discovered to be working as a supervisor with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

At first sight, the arrest of the pope’s personal butler on charges of stealing confidential correspondence to and from to Benedict XVI looks like a passing spat at the kitchen sink.

Even the fact that Paolo Gabriele leaked some of the sensitive material, dealing with the gross financial incompetence of the Vatican authorities, to the media really only serves to confirm what was always public knowledge anyway.

Namely, the Lateran State is an institutionally corrupt racket and always has been.

The arrest comes a month after the Vatican gave an investigative team led by the Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, a member of Opus Dei – a cult-like body acting as a sort of Catholic purity squad doubling as a large scale Moonie-style industrial fund raiser – a full “pontifical mandate” to join Vatican police rooting out the perpetrators of what the Italian media has gleefully dubbed ‘Vatileaks.’

Now Herranz is not just any old cardinal. He is the nearest thing there is to a deputy pope, or the chief pope selection officer. He is above all a master schemer and plotter, the veritable Machiavelli of the Vatican.

During the fading days of Pope John Paul II, he swanned around organizing secret congregations of key members of the conclave in a quiet suburb of Rome, specifically to rig the election of the next pope.

It is widely accepted that Benedict, the former Herr Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, was Herranz’s personal pick for St. Peter’s Throne, thus bringing to St. Peter’s the first German pope (who as we know donned the arm band of the Hitler Youth).

The miniature Vatican state increasingly resembles the old Soviet Union and the crooked politics and in-fighting of the Moscow Politburo with each passing day.

It is an open secret in Rome that Benedict is, shall we say, past his prime. The verb in Italian is rimbambimento, or approaching senility, a rather harder take on the English meaning ‘dotage’. In polite language, he finds at 85 that the cares of the papacy are bearing down and begins to prepare for the succession before his own heavenly ascendancy.

He has just ordained another twenty-two very old men as cardinals, which strongly suggests that he considers his earthly tenancy is drifting to an end. Put another way, he is pre-decease gerrymandering the Vatican Politburo.

Once the Vatileaks storm broke, the story goes that Ratzinger called in Herranz, the J. Edgar Hoover of the Vatican, to sniff out the ill-doer.

There is a lot that is significantly unbelievable with this account.

The Vatican, which covers an area not much bigger than Grand Central Station, is really one large village where the principal industries are gossiping and papal politics. Oiling the cash register and industrial money-laundering comes third and supposedly the chief line of business, that of praising the Lord, a way-back distant fourth.

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Kevin D. Annett ~ Why We Are Still In The Middle Ages (The Vatican Inquisition Strikes Back)

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ITCCS.ORG | May 28 2012

Don’t you just love the name of the Vatican Bank? ~ Don’t know it? It’s Institute for Works of Religion ~G

It’s a church! No, it’s a state! Stop! You’re both right!

Vatican "Human Rights" Council

Paolo Gabriele is languishing in a secret church prison tonight in Vatican City after being arrested by church police for having some of the Pope’s private papers in his possession.

The Pope’s former butler and a father of three children is threatened with thirty years in a papal jail for having uncovered some of Joseph Ratzinger’s dirty secrets.
Paolo might as well not be an Italian citizen, since his civil rights vanished once he crossed the Vatican. The law of the church supersedes that of any nation, it seems, since clearly the Pope can arrest and jail anyone he doesn’t like.

It’s quite abominable. How many corporations get to arrest and put on trial in their own private courts one of their employees who’s found with internal company documents?
How often does the CEO of such a company get to shelter and exonerate child rapists in his firm, hide the crime from the police, and silence those who know about it all?

Does the company itself get to launder money, finance wars, conduct genocide and crimes against humanity, and depose governments, and never answer for these crimes?
The Vatican Incorporated is the one company in the world that can do all this. And what’s more, they even get massive financial subsidies from taxpayers in over a hundred countries to do so!

That said, it’s a sign of the degree of institutional rot and panic erupting in Rome these days that members of the papal inner circle are breaking ranks and squealing on their boss. Paolo’s arrest follows hot on the heels of the forced resignation of the chief of the Vatican Bank, Gotti Tedeschi, who allegedly had blown the whistle on shady transactions by the bank.

It’s small wonder the papacy is crushing a lone employee like Paolo so rapidly. Some of the documents held by the butler suggest that the Pope personally accepted bribes to award Vatican contracts to friends and supporters of his, and that he engineered a cover up of the whole thing, including by expelling Vatican City governor Archbishop Carlo Vigano last year when he asked the Pope to come clean.

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