The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia (30 page)

Jesus turned and said to Peter: "Get behind me, Satan!
You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in
mind the things of God, but the things of men." Then
Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after
me, he must take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses
his life for me will find it. Whatgood will it be for a
man if hegains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?"

Matt. 16:23-26

n 1982 Roberto Calvi placed the worth of the Vatican Bank, in
isolation from the other accounts of the Roman Catholic
Church, to be in excess of $10 billion.' Few men knew the inner
workings of the Vatican institution that had been created by Pope
Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara better than the Mafia figure who
came to be known as "God's banker." The worth of the Vatican Bank today remains anyone's guess. Several financial experts have figured
that the value of the Vatican's holdings must have tripled or quadrupled during the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s. But this remains
mere conjecture. When one attempts to combine the assets of the
Vatican Bank with the other accounts and assets of the Roman
Catholic Church, one enters a financial stratosphere where calculations become surreal. There are no paper trails leading to and from
the Vatican Bank. No audits by outside agencies are conducted. All
internal and external financial statements of Holy Mother Church
exempt the Vatican Bank from consideration or ruling. Inevitably,
one who scrutinizes these statements will come upon such phrases as
"leaving intact the special character of the IOR [Vatican Bank]," "not
including the IOR," or "with full respect for the judicial holdings of
the IOR."2 The Vatican Bank remains a corporate entity-separate
and distinct from all other entities and offices within the Holy See.

The union of God and Mammon in the creation of Vatican, Inc.
served to give rise to moral decay and spiritual corruption. At the
start of the new millennium Holy Mother Church witnessed the most
sordid scandal of a different kind: a plague of pedophilia among its
prelates that gave rise to hundreds of sex abuse cases.

The problem first arose in 1985, when Fr. Gilbert Gauthe of
Lafayette, Louisiana, confessed to molesting eleven boys and later
admitted to sexually assaulting dozens more.' He was sentenced to
twenty years in prison and out-of-court settlements were reached
with the victims. But Father Gauthe's case was far from isolated. The
press attention surrounding the priest's arrest and conviction served
to pry open the floodgates. Within the same diocese of Louisiana,
nineteen additional priests were accused of abuse within the next two
years, with millions doled out by the bishop to silence these matters.
But money cannot put out a fire. It burns and, like a prairie fire, the
scandal continued to spread.

In 1985, the same year Father Gauthe was sent to prison, Fr.
Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer for the Vatican in Washington, D.C.,
wrote a confidential memo to U.S. bishops citing thirty cases with
one hundred victims and projecting a cost to the American Catholic
4
Church of over $1 billion within the next ten years.

In 1989 Bishop Joseph Ferrario of Hawaii became the first
member of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States to be accused
of child molestation. A court dismissed the case, not for lack of evidence, but rather because of a technicality: the plaintiffs had filed too
late. Bishop Ferrario, who denied the charges, retired early in 1993.5

The situation worsened. In 1990 Fr. Bruce Ritter, celebrated
leader of the Covenant House for runaway teenagers in New York
City, stepped down amidst allegations that he had fondled a young
boy in his care. Father Ritter denied the accusation, but a bevy of
other boys stepped forward to support the charge. To still the uproar,
Ritter's Franciscan superiors transferred him to India.6

By 1992 more than 400 American priests were accused of child
molestation and more than $400 million had been spent to settle the
claims of the victims. The priests involved in such cases were neither
defrocked nor dispatched to psychological treatment facilities.
Instead they were reassigned to other parishes in different dioceses.
In this way the cancer within the Church metastasized, spreading
from one location to another in an unchecked manner.

A Dallas jury heard charges from eleven victims of Fr. Rudy Kos
and returned a $120 million verdict, in 1997. The award was later
reduced to $30 million, but the dioceses, nevertheless, was forced to
take out mortgages and sell property to cover the judgment.

Two years later Bishop J. Keith Symons of Palm Beach, Florida,
became the first U.S. bishop to resign after admitting to charges of
child molestation. Symons was replaced by Bishop Anthony O'Connell. Within the year, O'Connell, too, was forced to resign after the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch discovered that he had molested a student at a
seminary in Missouri in 1975.The student who had been molested
was paid $125,000 in hush money by the diocese in Missouri. The
extent of the problem within the Church was now becoming
apparent. The bishop who had been assigned to heal the diocese
because of the sexual sins of his predecessor turned out to be a sexual
predator himself.7

In 2002 Fr. John Geoghan was convicted of sexually abusing 130
children while serving as a priest in the Archdiocese of Boston. He was
sentenced to ten years in prison. Cardinal Bernard Law came under widespread attack by the press when it was learned that he never sought
to dismiss Geoghan from his priestly duties but rather kept moving him
from parish to parish, where he would commit new sexual crimes.

By the time Pope John Paul II summoned the U.S. cardinals to
the Vatican in 2002 to discuss the scandal, over 600 priests had been
charged with the sexual molestation of children. The pope's refusal
to demand the dismissal of priests from holy office who had been
found guilty of child molestation provoked widespread criticism.8 His
silence in this matter was likened to the silence of Pius XII during the
Nazi Holocaust. Church officials said that the Vatican opted to keep
its distance from the scandal because it viewed sexual abuse as an
American problem.

But the problem was not restricted to the United States. It was
truly "catholic" in scope and spread to nearly every diocese in the
"civilized" world. In John Paul's native Poland, Archbishop Juliusz
Paetz of Poznan was accused of molesting young seminarians. The
charges became public in January 2002. Paetz, age sixty-seven, who
had been appointed to his position by the pope, denied the charges
but remained at the center of widening reports of other abuse cases
in his diocese.9

In Austria public pressure forced the retirement of Cardinal Hans
Hermann Groer, Archbishop of Vienna, who was charged with the
fondling of young men and boys in a seminary. Cardinal Groer
denied the accusations, but his replacement, Cardinal Christoph
Schonborn, said they were true and apologized on behalf of Holy
Mother Church.10

In Ireland the Roman Catholic hierarchy agreed to pay more
than $110 million in damages to compensate the thousands of victims of sexual molestation by priests and nuns in Church-run schools
and child-care centers over the course of the past fifty years.

By September 2002 more than thirty French priests had been
convicted of the sexual molestation of children and eleven had been
sent to prison. Bishop Pierre Pican of the Diocese of Bayeux-Lisieux
received a three-month suspended sentence for failing to report
pedophile priests to civilian authorities. He, like his American counterparts, simply reassigned them to other parishes."

Many U.S. lawyers who accepted such cases inevitably looked at
the Holy See with its vast wealth as an easy target-a cash cow from
which they could milk millions for their clients. This presumption was
verified by the way in which local dioceses were willing to make payments to contain the matter and to ward off public concern. By 2002
the U.S. Catholic Church had shelled out more than $1 billion since
the first major sex abuse case had surfaced in Louisiana in 1985. Such
payments, according to Roderick MacLeish Jr., a Boston lawyer who
has handled more than a hundred of these cases, "are just the tip of
the iceberg and it will be a multibillion problem before it ends."12
Few could question the accuracy of MacLeish's projections. In May
2002 the Archdiocese of Boston backed out of a settlement with
eighty-six victims of one priest, claiming that the massive payment
would prevent them from making restitution to the scores of plaintiffs who were waiting in line for cash restitution. In Los Angeles one
lawyer, who won a $5.2 million settlement from the Church in 2001,
signed up more than one hundred new clients within six weeks.13

The litigation posed an enormous threat to the good works of the
Roman Catholic Church with its network of schools, colleges, hospitals,
and charities. By 2002 dioceses throughout the country were suffering
massive hemorrhages of red ink: the Boston Archdiocese displayed a
deficit of $5 million; the Archdiocese of New York-$20 million.

But the Vatican remains impervious to such actions. Its bank
accounts are out of reach of altar boys who were sexually abused by
their parish priests. As a sovereign state, it cannot be sued. Its billions
in assets will continue to produce millions in revenues, even if the
contributions of the faithful are cut back to a trickle.

The bishops who preside over the 194 dioceses throughout the
United States receive their authority from the pope. They are bound to
him in the same manner that a medieval vassal was bound to a feudal
lord. They owe him complete obedience and fealty. Fealty consists not
only of undying loyalty but also a payment of a tithe of all their holdings. The pope, as the sovereign ruler of Holy Mother Church, possesses the right to collect this payment upon demand. He also maintains the right to confiscate all the holdings of any diocese, if he so
desires. All the assets of Holy Mother Church remain at his disposal.14

In practice, the Holy Father permits the bishops to rule over their
dioceses with little or no interference, provided, of course, that they
pay their fair share of support to the Holy See. Since the flow of
money always flows to the Vatican and never in the opposite direction, the 3,000 parishes in the United States must raise money to pay
for their operations, including the expenses of the parish schools.
They represent the serfs in this medieval system. The parishes are
obliged to give a portion of their income-from 10 to 20 percentto the diocese.

The dioceses use this money to support the "chancery" (the
name for the clerical bureaucracy under the bishop), along with
Catholic hospitals, hospices, soup kitchens, seminaries, nursing-care
facilities, and other social services. The revenue from the parishes is
augmented by fund-raising campaigns, earnings on endowments and
investments, and gifts from benefactors. Some dioceses are very
wealthy, some extremely poor. Some issue detailed financial statements; some provide no financial disclosure. But all the dioceses must
make a financial report to the Holy Father every five years.