Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [202]
Monetary wire transfers is a serious issue for central banks of various countries in trying to thwart terrorist groups and organized crime. In September 2010, Italian authorities impounded $30 million in IOR assets on suspicion of money laundering and ordered an investigation of the IOR chairman Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and his chief deputy. It was a bitter pill for Tedeschi, an economics scholar, daily communicant, and Opus Dei member with an image of rectitude. Italy’s central bank flagged transfers from an IOR account in Credito Artigiano to JP Morgan Frankfurt for $26 million, and to Banca del Funcino for $4 million, for insufficient documentation under European Union laws. The Holy See stated it was “perplexed and astonished” that that information was available to Italy’s central bank. Tedeschi voluntarily spoke with prosecutors and pledged to work with the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to put the IOR in full compliance.6
For all of its religious clients, and the funds it provides the Holy Father for his charitable uses, IOR had “an unknown number of private Italian account holders who use the Vatican as a tax haven,” according to the Financial Times. A month after the $30 million impoundment, Guy Dinmore reported that police in Sicily made six arrests linked to
Father Orazio Bonaccorsi allegedly using an account in the name of the Vatican bank to help his father launder €250,000 ($350,000) he had obtained from European Union funding for an allegedly non-existent fish farm project.
After passing through the account as a “charity” donation in 2006, the money allegedly returned to Sicily to be withdrawn by an uncle previously convicted for mafia association …
“IOR cannot work like this any more,” an Italian official said. “People have used IOR as a screen,” he added. “What is behind the screen? That is the mechanism we are trying to dismantle,” he told the Financial Times.7
The $30 million was in a state of banking limbo when the Holy See issued a statement by Pope Benedict on December 30, 2010, promulgating a law for the Vatican city-state “concerning the prevention and countering of the laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and the financing of terrorism.” The pope created a Financial Information Authority to ensure that IOR and all Vatican departments adhered to European regulations on money laundering. He named Cardinal Attilo Nicora, who administers the Vatican real estate and financial holdings, as its chairman. The Vatican appointed a four-member board of prominent academics in relevant fields to sit in Rome.
A POPE OF IRONIES
As the years of prosecuting theologians sink into his past, Benedict XVI stands as the pope of ironies. The cardinal whose tactics drove Hans Küng to compare him to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (“he fears nothing more than freedom”) must, as pope, balance the agenda of moral absolutes with the politics of restraint.8 In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky uses the inquisitor’s cameo to condemn the church for abandoning Christ: Jesus appears in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition. The sinister monk who has been burning heretics puts Jesus in a cell and lays on a cynical lecture about power and why the fearful masses must be subdued. Jesus stands silent. Then, in a sublime gesture of forgiveness, Jesus kisses the inquisitor and leaves. For Dostoyevsky, the Church of Rome will betray the conscience of Christ anew.
Ratzinger-as-prosecutor peers over Benedict’s shoulder, repulsed by the structural