Quotes About Vatican

his argument might have involved a threat of excommunication and quite possibly her being unfriended and permanently blocked from the Vatican's Facebook page.

And then there were the readers, Gawd bless them. We must have signed hundreds of thousands of copies for them by now. The books are often well read to the point of physical disintegration; if we run across a shiny new copy, it's usually because the owner's previous five have been stolen by friends, struck by lightning or eaten by giant termites in Sumatra. You have been warned. Oh, and we understand there's a copy in the Vatican library. It'd be nice to think so.

There's no Martin Luther here," he said, "and whether the Vatican pays attention, who knows?" It wouldn't be easy. "We're dealing with a medieval organization, an organization that represented authority to my grandparents and other immigrants. It was an organization that was respected because it educated them, it gave them a place in the New World, it gave them an identity.

But after Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Laity, told the New York Times that he expected celibacy to be discussed at the gathering of U.S. cardinals in Rome, the Pope quickly shot down that possibility. "The value of celibacy as a complete gift of self to the Lord and his Church must be carefully safeguarded," the Pope told a group of visiting Nigerian bishops.

Samhain had its origins, like many modern holidays or celebrations, in pagan times. As the sidhe-seers had been inclined to erect churches and abbeys on their sacred sites, the Vatican had been wont to "Christianize" ancient, pagan celebrations in an if-you-can't-beat-them-and-don't-wantto- join-them-rename-it-and-pretend-it-was-yours-all-along campaign.

An anonymous informant stated to Barbara Honegger that George Bush was elected an honorary (i.e. non-Italian) member of the Italian Masonic (and CIA and Mafia and Vatican-supported) cabal Propaganda Due ("P2") in 1976. His induction coincided with his appointment as director of the CIA.

it is the most Catholic country in the world—more Catholic than Ireland, and certainly much more so than the Vatican.

Even the most radical Islamic terrorist would not want to see the revered holy city of Medina go up. It would be like losing the Vatican in Rome.

He habitually contrasted the beaten, penniless, half-naked King of the Jews screaming betrayal on a cross with the bejeweled, glamorously dressed pope whispering homilies above the Vatican's vault.

His followers are scarcer than Jews in the Vatican.

The Vatican was decent about that sort of thing. Protecting Jews not from oppression, but from too much oppression. Condemn the Jews to degradation, to censure as deicides, well-poisoners, child-killers, yet try to prevent them from being slaughtered entirely.

Eventually 400,000 Germans were sterilized, and the Vatican did not issue a Pastoral Letter against it for another decade, only after the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Nazis).23,I

In a historic 1933 accord, the Vatican was the first sovereign state to sign a bilateral treaty with Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. The Nazis promised to protect Catholics inside Germany in return for the church endorsing Hitler's government.

Everyone left London just shaking their heads in disbelief," recalled Elan Steinberg, the World Jewish Congress's representative. "Two hundred tons of gold from the pro-Nazi Croatian government found its way to the Vatican. Here they were, one of the world's great moral institutions, and they refused to tell us what their view was, much less to lift a finger to help recover any looted assets. It was terribly disappointing."44

The same year as the Perón visit, American counterintelligence concluded that the Vatican as an institution—not merely as a group of scattered, rogue clerics—was helping high-ranking Nazis escape justice.94

the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne published the results of an extensive study of international money laundering.9 The authors compared the banking systems of two hundred countries. The Vatican ranked in the top ten money laundering havens, behind Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Liechtenstein, but ahead of Singapore.

In World War II, Pius XII's silence helped protect a complex web of interlocking business interests with the Third Reich, relationships that yielded significant profits for the Vatican. In some cases they are dealings the Church has denied to this day.

When Ali Agca, a Turk, shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, both the target and the would-be killer were well within Vatican territory," wrote George Armstrong, the respected Rome correspondent for London's Guardian. "The Vatican was happy to have him arrested, tried and sentenced in Italy, and under Italian law, and his life sentence will be at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. The Vatican becomes another country only when it chooses to be.

In return, the Vatican gave Hitler the formal endorsement he wanted. Article 16 of the Reichskonkordat required German bishops and cardinals to swear an oath of loyalty to the Third Reich.

A supplementary 180-page U.S. government report issued that spring (June 2, 1998) provided more evidence that neutral countries, including the Vatican, had profited by hiding Nazi gold in their central banks.50

The result was a remarkable December 30 decree that gave the Vatican its first ever anti–money laundering law, set to go into effect the following April 1.27 "The Prevention and Countering of Illegal Activities in the Area of Monetary and Financial Dealings" was issued as a motu proprio, a document historically signed personally by the Pope. Benedict took full responsibility for the decision.

It took the OSS nearly two years after the IOR's formation before it stumbled across intelligence that Hitler's Reichsbank was transferring money to the Vatican and disguising its origin by using a Swiss bank as an intermediary.62

But such was not the case. In considered statements, the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief sephardic rabbi of Israel all took a stand in sympathy with—the ayatollah. So did the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. While they usually managed a few words in which to deplore the resort to violence, all these men stated that the main problem raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy.

Cardinal Schuster and Monsignor Bicchierai had long been among the most prominent clerical supporters of fascism in Italy, according to SS Colonel Eugen Dollmann, who handled negotiations with the Vatican for the SS during the last days of the war.