Vatican monsignor arrested for money laundering
Source: AP-Excite
By NICOLE WINFIELD
VATICAN CITY (AP) - A Vatican monsignor already on trial for allegedly plotting to smuggle 20 million euros ($26 million) from Switzerland to Italy was arrested Tuesday in a separate case for allegedly using his Vatican bank accounts to launder money.
Financial police in the southern Italian city of Salerno said Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, dubbed "Monsignor 500" for his purported favored banknotes, had transferred millions of euros in fictitious donations from offshore companies through his accounts at the Vatican's Institute for Religious Works.
Police said they seized 6.5 million euros in real estate and bank accounts Tuesday, including Scarano's luxurious Salerno apartment, filled with gilt-framed oil paintings, ceramic vases and other fancy antiques.
A local priest was also placed under house arrest and a notary public was suspended for alleged involvement in the money-laundering plot. Police said in all, 52 people were under investigation.
FULL story at link.
Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20140121/DABF73DO0.html
An undated photo of Monsignor Nunzio Scarano in Salerno, Italy. A Vatican monsignor already on trial for allegedly plotting to smuggle 20 million euros ($26 million) from Switzerland to Italy was ordered arrested in a separate case on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2014 for allegedly using his Vatican bank accounts to launder money. The financial police in the southern city of Salerno said Monsignor Nunzio Scarano's Vatican bank accounts had been used to transfer millions of euros (dollars) in fictitious donations from offshore companies. Police said millions in euros had been seized and that other arrest warrants were issued. Scarano's lawyer, Silverio Sica, said his client merely took donations from people he thought were acting in good faith to fund a home for the terminally ill. He conceded that the money ended up being used to pay off Scarano's mortgage, however. (AP Photo/Francesco Pecoraro)
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Pope Francis seems to be addressing--and allowing civil authorities to address--the enormous corruption involving Vatican and other Catholic-connected finances.
I'm certainly glad to see this, but much more serious reform is needed--has been needed for, oh, 1,500 years--i.e., the abandonment of the pope/vatican as a monarchy. It has NEVER BEEN ENOUGH for a monarch to be a "good monarch," because--duh!--a bad monarch can easily follow and start robbing, torturing and oppressing people all over again.
The pope is a FAKE "hereditary monarch," with a fictitious "lineage" allegedly "back to St. Peter," that avoids the need for wombs altogether and claims to be appointed/anointed by a trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Thus, we get this 1,500 year old "boys club" with its "top dog" selected by its dukes, barons and counts, that lords it over peoples' minds and souls, positively demeans women (and worse, burns them at the stake; and even today, EVEN TODAY, is conducting an "inquisition" of American nuns who mostly serve the poor and don't go along with "boys club"
; that accumulates and protects MONEY, and that parades itself as a "iineage" that somehow "sanctifies" its profound self-worship.
This STRUCTURE--of power and of thought--which got cemented with the power of THE STATE in the 5th-6th centuries A.D.--desperately needs to be de-constructed, and the Catholic Church rebuilt according to the teachings of Jesus, who never excluded anyone, who never imagined this utterly corrupt institution, this "boys' club" with swishy robes and gold rings; who lived a very simple and very DEMOCRATIC life and said, time and again, in every way he could, "love thy neighbor." That is the ONLY thing he ever really said. NOT, be the king. NOT, exclude and persecute women. NOT, hate pagans. NOT, amass vast properties. NOT, play dress up. (Gawd.) NOT, burn other gospels. NOT, ban birth control. NOT, make war on the Infidels. Love. Thy. Neighbor.
This is the problem--not the temporary and solvable problems of corruption, opportunism, greed, abuse of authority and crime--but the CONCEPT of monarchy. It must go.
It may be that Pope Francis is thinking along these lines, but believes that he needs to "clean house" first. Maybe. But there is also the probability that "cleaning house" is a merely cosmetic process that never addresses WHY such abuse of power was POSSIBLE. He hasn't given a hint that he understands or will address WHY. WHY is this concept of monarchy itself; and, in the case of Catholicism, ABSOLUTE monarchy, ordained "by God."
I grant the ancient and mystical attraction of monarchy, and perhaps the need for some such notion--a king or queen as symbols of "the land." This is, after all, where we have obtained our notion of "the sovereignty of the people." Sovereign essentially means sacred (which essentially means fertility--the literal link of the "king" with the fertility of the land, and thus prosperity of the people). The founders of our own country fought a battle a couple of hundred years ago, to REPLACE the "king" with "the people." But that hasn't gone too well, in recent times anyway. The notion of monarchy has continued, and is very persistent. We don't have a president, really; we have a monarch--and, behind the monarch, shadowy entities--as always. And those shadowy entities have encouraged the notion that we need kings to rule over us--whether it's the barons of industry or the NSA (or, of course, both combined in the "military-industrial complex" , with the "front" people that we see, as our "leaders." However, the vast corruption of democracy that we are seeing now may distract us from an essential human need: identification with "the land" as a sacred, sacrosanct, inviolable, life-giving Mother, that we are all collectively part of.
I'm struggling with something here that is hard to express. WHY has the concept of monarchy persisted in the Catholic Church--in wild disagreement with Jesus himself--and why has it persisted (or been recouped by evildoers) in our democracy? Why are people so vulnerable to this notion, that we need to be ruled, rather than rule ourselves? I think the problem goes deeper than the exploitation of monarchical ideas by the greedy and the power-mad. I think there's something in it, something we've lost. And perhaps it is exactly that: the Mother. The exclusive male club that is the Catholic hierarchy is absolutely OBSESSIVE about "the Father and the Son." They've been stomping on the Mother God's head for well over a thousand years, to this day. A mad obsession, truly. Father, Son and "Holy Ghost." No mother. No daughter.
I'm not saying we need to go all the way in the other direction, for balance--to worship "the Mother" for the next thousand years (or worship anybody, or anything)--but we need to ask--Catholic needs to ask, and democrats with a small d need to ask: What ARE we worshiping, and how can we construct human systems that fulfill all human needs in harmony with the Mother's natural world?
We are dichotomized, alienated critters on this planet that "we" (our corporate robber barons) are trashing. We may not have much time to figure this out--how to live in harmony, and how to organize ourselves so that no one is permitted to destroy our only home. Some sneer at the Catholic Church, as a corrupt, ossified institution, that would best go away. But I think it provides a lesson--it is, for one thing, the model for transglobal corporations--and may well be important as an example of reform. It certainly influences LOTS of people--and is a huge social force in Latin America, which is undergoing the most amazing democratic revolution on earth. Yes, the Church is torn there, between the fascists and the Liberation theologists, but South America's people and its governments, in particular, have taken Jesus' message of compassion to heart, with results in vastly reduced poverty, improved educational opportunity, improved health care, and more. (--not to mention, overall prosperity--higher wages, better job conditions, more jobs, rising middle class).
They are also seeing a huge new environmental movement, led by the Indigenous and by campesinos (peasant farmers)--a movement that is sometimes in conflict with leftist leaders, whose first priority is jobs/prosperity, but that has nevertheless grown out of the rise of democracy, is ascendant in a country like Bolivia (led by an Indigenous), and is quite important in every country for the assertion of sovereignty against transglobal corporate resource looters. The movement is based on reverence for Mother Earth and respect for ancient wisdom, for instance, with regard to organic farming, saving seeds and other vital, earth-saving practices.
What is sovereignty? Is it a pope or king dictating to all, regardless of how stupid, greedy, arbitrary and bought-and-paid for he may be? A pope or king who, if good, can and will be replaced with someone worse? Or is it our COLLECTIVE understanding of ourselves as the FAMILY of Earth--who rule ourselves with wisdom and compassion, who care for the weak and the young, who revere human life and all life on earth, and who curtail evildoing and love even the evildoers (believe they are capable of redemption)?
There is something ancient and maybe redeemable in the Catholic Church's weird hierarchy and even weirder theology. It is not obvious. But there is something there, and maybe, if this Church were to reverse itself, and become democratic, and acknowledge the Mother Goddess (with pope, cardinals, bishops and priests all donning "sackcloth and ashes" by way of repentance), it could influence the rest of the world toward a more general redemption, that is, saving the Earth itself, which is in great peril, and creating a decent, harmonious life for all of Earth's inhabitants.
We need new ideas. God, do we! And we do need leaders, as well as concepts of our own sovereignty, sacredness and fertility. We are, in essence, no different from the earliest humans, who expressed these needs in various ways--starting with Goddess worship, and including, eventually, monarchy, a strange vestige of which we see in the Vatican. We may boast of our rationalism and our science--we may believe in these progressive developments, sometimes with near religious zeal--but people obviously, deeply, need something else, something more--something more collective, something more sacred, something more whole, something more harmonious, with Mother (compassion) and Father (reason) in accord, and all the extended Family of Earth working together for the good of all.
Catholic theologians should stop wasting their time on utter bullshit--lo these thousands of years--(most of them)--and start developing a theology and an institution that truly reveres life on earth, and is worthy of respect.
End the monarchy.
End the male-archy.
End the malarkey.
Try to help humanity figure this thing out: harmonious life on earth.
