Pope Resigns: Did he fear the Perfect Storm over uncovering of Vatican Bank’s Scandal and Money Laundering

The Pope at the Catholic Church has resigned.  Pope Benedict XVI will step down on February 28th.  The reason that is being given is that the Pope’s health is down and his age advancing.  Well, this is the first time in 600 years that a Pope has resigned – health or no health.

It seems that the Catholic Journalist Antonio Socci foresaw Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation back in 2011.  The Pope wanted to see calmer waters and not a Church in a storm.

On September 25, 2011, I heard the news from several different sources,independent from each other. When he analytically considered the possibility of his resignation in his book interview with Peter Seevald, he explained that it would not have been comprehensible while the Church was in the middle of a storm. A month later, Vatileaks exploded.

He probably didn’t feel it was right to quit then. It would have seemed like he was running away. His decision to quit was put on hold. Then, a month ago, his butler Gabriele was pardoned.

Well, it seems THE greatest storm may actually come after his departure!

Over the years Vatican has basically acted as a Tax Haven for Blood money and Mafia bribes.  Vatican Bank is basically a big tool for money laundering.  Until now, Vatican has ruthlessly made sure that nothing comes out, even if the connected people are killed off wherever they are.  Its instinct will be to continue doing that.  Maybe this is a ploy to get a Pope who is strong enough to put the hammer down on such storms that can actually wipe the Church clean IF justice – through media and judiciary is done to its fullest!  Read this story.

The Vatican has yet to divulge the business practices its bank has been using for decades. “There is fear that, owing to the transparency necessary today, one will find something in the past that one doesn’t want to,” says Marco Politi, a Rome-based Vatican expert.

Such things could include a complex system of ghost accounts and shell companies like the bank had when Archbishop Paul Casimir Marcinkus was its head in the 1980s. At the time, the bank did business involving foreign currency and weapons with the Milanese banker Robert Calvi and the mafia financier Michele Sidona — and helped launder illegal proceeds the mafia earned from drug-trafficking as well as bribes paid to Christian-conservative Italian politicians.

In the end, Calvi was found dangling beneath London’s Blackfriars Bridge and his private secretary fell to her death from the window of his Banco Ambrosiano. Four years later, in 1986, Sidona would die in prison after drinking a morning espresso laced with cyanide.

Under Monsignor Angelo Caloia, Marcinkus’ successor as head of the bank, the Vatican consistently expanded its money-laundering activities. While he was in charge, there were secret accounts such as that for Giulio Andreotti, the controversial former Italian prime minister. On an almost weekly basis, Caloia would bring suitcases into the Vatican full of donations from Italian companies in the form of cash and securities. There, the origin of the money would be obscured using accounts such as the one with the number 001-3-14772-C owned by the nonexistent “Cardinal Spellman Foundation.” Likewise, relief organizations were founded with nice-sounding names masking the identity of their true beneficiaries.

It wasn’t until about three years ago, when evidence of such dealings came to light, that Pope Benedict XVI ousted Caloia. What prompted his change of heart were the more than 4,000 documents that Vatican financial expert Renato Dardozzi had assembled and hidden before his death in 2003. In his will, Dardozzi had written: “These documents should be published so that everyone can learn what has happened here.”

The story later on goes on into how the Vatican bank used fake accounts, sweep accounts in JPMorgan to create a wide web of money laundering infrastructure.