Michel Chossudovsky - March 16, 2013

The Vatican conclave has elected Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis I

Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?

In 1973, he had been appointed “Provincial” of Argentina for the Society of Jesus.

In this capacity, Bergoglio was the highest ranking Jesuit in Argentina during the military dictatorship led by General Jorge Videla (1976-1983).

He later became bishop and archbishop of Buenos Aires. Pope John Paul II elevated him to the title of cardinal in 2001

When the military junta relinquished power in 1983, the duly elected president Raúl Alfonsín set up a Truth Commission pertaining to the crimes underlying the “Dirty War” (La Guerra Sucia).

The military junta had been supported covertly by Washington.

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Mail.com - 2013 02 06 (Red Ice)

ROME (AP) — Matthew Festing — aka His Most Eminent Highness The Prince and Grand Master of the Knights of Malta — bounds into the sitting room of his magnificent Renaissance palazzo sweaty and somewhat disheveled, and asks an aide if he should take off his sweater to be photographed.

Garrulous and self-effacing, Festing embodies some of the paradoxes of a fabled Catholic religious order that dates from the medieval Crusades: Steeped in European nobility and mystique, the order’s mission is humility and charity — running hospitals, ambulance services and old folks’ homes around the globe. It has many trappings of a country, printing its own stamps, coins, license plates and passports, and yet — a stateless state — it rules over no territory.

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NICOLE WINFIELD and VICTOR L. SIMPSON - Dec 11, 2010

VATICAN CITY (AP) — This is no ordinary bank: The ATMs are in Latin. Priests use a private entrance. A life-size portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hangs on the wall.

Nevertheless, the Institute for Religious Works is a bank, and it’s under harsh new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize euro23 million ($30 million) in Vatican assets in September. Critics say the case shows that the “Vatican Bank” has never shed its penchant for secrecy and scandal.

The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a “misunderstanding” and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws “with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital.” The documents also reveal investigators’ suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia.

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RACHEL DONADIO, July 21, 2010

[...] As a heretic he could not be given a proper church burial. But for years after his death, his followers in the circle of the grand dukes of Tuscany pushed to give him an honorable resting place.

Nearly a century later, in 1737, members of Florence’s cultural and scientific elite unearthed the scientist’s remains in a peculiar Masonic rite. Freemasonry was growing as a counterweight to church power in those years and even today looms large in the Italian popular imagination as an anticlerical force.

According to a notary who recorded the strange proceedings, the historian and naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti used a knife to slice off several fingers, a tooth and a vertebra from Galileo’s body as souvenirs but refrained, it appears, from taking his brain. The scientist was then reburied in a ceremony, “symmetrical to a beatification,” said Mr. Galluzzi.

After taking their macabre souvenirs, the group placed Galileo’s remains in an elegant marble tomb in Florence’s Santa Croce church, a pointed statement from Tuscany’s powers that they were outside the Vatican’s control. The church has long been a shrine to humanism as much as to religion, and Galileo’s permanent neighbors include Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Rossini.

After centuries of being kept under lock and key, the Vatican has started opening its Secret Archives to outsiders in a bid to dispel the myths and mystique created by works of fiction such as Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons.

Nick Squires - 27 May 2010

The archives, until now jealously guarded from prying eyes, provide one of the key settings in Brown’s thriller, in which Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon, played in the 2009 film by Tom Hanks, races against time to stop a secret religious order, the Illuminati, from destroying Vatican City.

In the movie, the Secret Archives are portrayed as a hi-tech cross between the Pentagon and the lair of a James Bond baddy, complete with bullet proof glass and swish steel elevators.

In reality, the archives rely on disarmingly old-fashioned technology, with a creaking metal lift connecting different floors and millions of documents catalogued in 1,300 parchment-bound inventories dating back centuries.

They have been open to carefully vetted academic researchers for more than 100 years, but in the last few months the Vatican has granted tours to select groups of journalists and members of the public, allowing a glimpse into one of its inner most sanctums.

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The campaign to arrest the pope is the product of an increasingly desperate secularism, which can only find meaning through ridiculing the religious.

Brendan O’Neill, 13 April 2010

The New Atheist campaign to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested when he visits Britain later this year exposes the deeply disturbing, authoritarian and even Inquisitorial side to today’s campaigning secularism. There is nothing remotely positive in the demand that British cops lock up the pope and then drag him to some international court on charges of ‘crimes against humanity’. Instead it springs from an increasingly desperate and discombobulated secularism, one which, unable to assert itself positively through Enlightening society and celebrating the achievements of mankind, asserts itself negatively, even repressively, through ridiculing the religious.

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Sander Hicks - April 6, 2010

Excerpt:

The thing for Pope Benedict to do now is to redeem his sins. Turn back and fight the evil in our society. And here’s a way how: there are underground pedophilia cults operating today in America. Exposing them is an object lesson in American power.

Author Nick Bryant’s new book, The Franklin Scandal, sheds light on a specific abusive cult with links to the GOP, the CIA, the Catholic Church, and various DC politicians. The scandal reared its ugly demonic head in 1989, when it was splashed across the pages of the Washington Times. According to the documentary Conspiracy of Silence, the story involved a Nebraska Catholic orphanage called Boys Town, which acted as a source of boys for a pedophile network.

Lawrence E. King, director of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union and a rising black star in the GOP, was in business in the late 80s with Craig Spence, the “pimp” of the operation. Spence and his boy-toys took midnight tours of the White House, thanks to military, intelligence, and Bush White House ties. Spence died a mysterious death in a hotel room just 10 weeks after the first story broke in the Washington Times. Conspiracy of Silence was later pulled from the Discovery Channel, and the Washington Post went out of its way to attack the Washington Times for covering the story. Two Grand Jury investigations in Nebraska convicted no perpetrators, and instead indicted two victims for “perjury,” one of whom received the exorbitant sentence of 9 to 15 years.

Instead of Catholic services on Good Friday, I spent time with Nick Bryant. Writing The Franklin Scandal, Bryant endured police searches, harassment, a death threat, and a media blackout. But last week, the sunshine was pure and life-giving as we met up in Washington Square Park. With cool breezes, people’s laughter, and live bluegrass in the air, it became easier to talk about darkest evil. I asked Nick if he saw similarities between the Vatican’s current cover-up and what happened with Franklin.

“It’s exactly the same,” he said. “Their M.O. is deny, deny, deny. If any victims come forward, slam them. That formula has been used forever.”

Legal immunity cannot hold. The Vatican should feel the full weight of international law

Geoffrey Robertson - 2 April 2010

Well may the pope defy “the petty gossip of dominant opinion”. But the Holy See can no longer ignore international law, which now counts the widespread or systematic sexual abuse of children as a crime against humanity. The anomalous claim of the Vatican to be a state – and of the pope to be a head of state and hence immune from legal action – cannot stand up to scrutiny.

The truly shocking finding of Judge Murphy’s commission in Ireland was not merely that sexual abuse was “endemic” in boys’ institutions but that the church hierarchy protected the perpetrators and, despite knowledge of their propensity to reoffend, allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their victims had been sworn to secrecy.

This conduct, of course, amounted to the criminal offence of aiding and abetting sex with minors. In legal actions against Catholic archdioceses in the US it has been alleged that the same conduct reflected Vatican policy as approved by Cardinal Ratzinger (as the pope then was) as late as November 2002. Sexual assaults were regarded as sins that were subject to church tribunals, and guilty priests were sent on a “pious pilgrimage” while oaths of confidentiality were extracted from their victims.

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Rome, Italy, Mar 3, 2010 / 04:20 pm (CNA).- A renowned exorcist in Rome recently released a book of memoirs in which he declares to know of the existence of Satanic sects in the Vatican where participation reaches all the way to the College of Cardinals. A second demonologist, also residing in Rome, entered the debate this week, clarifying the origins of the information and defending the Vatican’s clergy as an “edifying and virtuous” collection of prelates.

In a book of memoirs released in February, the noted Italian exorcist Fr. Gabriele Amorth affirmed that “Yes, also in the Vatican there are members of Satanic sects.” When asked if members of the clergy are involved or if this is within the lay community, he responded, “There are priests, monsignors and also cardinals!”

The book, “Father Amorth. Memoirs of an Exorcist. My life fighting against Satan.” was written by Marco Tosatti, who compiled it from interviews with the priest.

Fr. Amorth was asked by Tosatti how he knows Vatican clergy are involved. He answered, “I know from those who have been able to relate it to me because they had a way of knowing directly. And it’s something ‘confessed’ most times by the very demon under obedience during the exorcisms.”

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Nicolaas van Rijn - January 03, 2010

It’s as pretty a description of Ontario as ever was writ, inscribed on birch bark and sent more than 100 years ago to Pope Leo XIII in the Vatican.

Dated “where there is much grass, in the month of the flowers” – another way of saying “Grassy Lake, May 21,” the letter written by the Ojibway Indians in 1887 thanks the head of the Roman Catholic church, “the Grand Master of Prayer,” for providing Ojibways of the Espanola area in northern Ontario with a “custodian of prayer,” as they described the bishop sent to preach to them.

That piece of birch bark now rests deep beneath the streets of Rome, one of the hundreds of thousands of historical gems housed along the 84 kilometres of shelving that comprise the Vatican’s Secret Archives, a treasure trove of correspondence between the great and the infamous of the past 1,200 years.

And now that Ojibway letter has been plucked from the obscurity of history and comparative secrecy of the archives to join 104 other timeless treasures that helped shape and form the world we live in, published for the first time in The Vatican Secret Archives, a 252-page book lavishly illustrated with 344 colour photos and modern interpretations.

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Vatican reveals Secret Archives

Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit - November 2, 2009

45 years ago Life magazine did a twelve page spread on the Jesuits in the United States. Which you can see from the first page (here).

The Life piece features closed Jesuit Novitiates; of Shadowbrook in Lenox, Massachusetts, Sacred Heart Novitiate at Los Gatos near San Jose, California and Woodstock College in Maryland. You will also find interesting comments about the Societies anti-communist work.

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Richard Owen - October 22, 2009

Karl Marx, who famously described religion as “the opium of the people”, has joined Galileo, Charles Darwin and Oscar Wilde on a growing list of historical figures to have undergone an unlikely reappraisal by the Roman Catholic Church.

L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said yesterday that Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making.

Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, wrote in an article that Marx’s work remained especially relevant today as mankind was seeking “a new harmony” between its needs and the natural environment. He also said that Marx’s theories may help to explain the enduring issue of income inequality within capitalist societies.

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It’s a good start. Take it to the next level, Mr. Kincaid.

April 13, 2009 | From theTrumpet.com

There’s something sinister about the linkage between the Vatican, certain German elites and the regulatory power that Anglo-Americans have yielded up to the EU-controlled Financial Stability Board.

Certain actions by Vatican loyalists and German corporatists involved in the European and global banking community have recently consummated in establishing a regulatory power that will oversee all major corporate, financial and banking decisions around the globe. That institution is the Financial Stability Board (fsb), headed by Italian banking guru Mario Draghi.

Draghi, a committed Europhile and dedicated Roman Catholic with connections that run deep within the global banking and finance community, and having historic Vatican Bank and European Central Bank connections, has suddenly become the most powerful regulator of banking, finance and commerce in the world. His overnight elevation to international prominence came in the wake of the 20 most powerful economies in the world signing over their individual sovereign powers regulating their economies to the fsb at the recent G-20 conference in London.

Perhaps Mr. Draghi would have escaped our notice if it were not for the intriguing history that he possesses connecting him with the Vatican, Vatican banking, major financial enterprises that have strong connections with German banking and commercial interests, and both the Italian and the European central banks, and the fact of his Jesuit training. That all amounts to an extremely interesting package when one is considering the CV of the individual who now heads up the most powerful regulatory body within the global economy.

Richard Owen - April 6, 2009

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.

The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.

The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.

Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.

However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

Dr Frale said that among other alleged offences such as sodomy, the Knights Templar had been accused of worshipping idols, in particular a “bearded figure”. In reality however the object they had secretly venerated was the Shroud.

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