Gerald Posner > Quotes

“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.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“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”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“A report that studied death certificates from the mid-1980s concluded that “The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“Mussolini’s insistence on public morality, belief in the inferior role of women, and the ban on contraception and abortion made the fascists palatable to the church.85”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“To forgive or forget the crimes of Josef Mengele would require the amputation of our conscience and the dismemberment of our memory.”
― Gerald Posner, Mengele: The Complete Story

“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”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“Benedict’s resignation was a selfless act since he had come to realize he was not capable of leading the modern church and making the tough decisions that were needed. “It wasn’t one thing, but a whole combination of them,” concluded Paolo Rodari, Il Foglio’s veteran Vatican reporter. Vatileaks, said Rodari, “was a constant drumbeat on the Pope.”33”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“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”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“John Paul was a bystander as the American church quietly approved an aggressive new legal strategy that included, as The Washington Post uncovered, “hiring high-powered law firms and private detectives to examine the personal lives of the church’s accusers, fighting to keep documents secret and engaging in new tactics to minimize settlements.”65”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“God’s Bankers cuts through the masses of misinformation to present an unvarnished account of the quest for money and power in the Roman Catholic Church. No embellishment is needed. That real tale is shocking enough.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“It is not the practice of the Holy See to disclose information on the religious discipline of members of the clergy or religious according to canon law.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“In exchange for some wide-ranging modifications demanded by the socialist government to the church’s 1929 concordat, Italy agreed to underwrite the remainder of the $406 million settlement.53 The changes to the concordat would have once been unthinkable. The church dropped its insistence that Roman Catholicism be the state religion. Moving forward, the state had to confirm church-annulled marriages. Parents were given the right to opt their children out of formerly mandatory religious education classes. And Rome was no longer considered a “sacred city,” a classification that had allowed the Vatican to keep out strip clubs and the porn industry. Italy even managed to get the church to relinquish control of the Jewish catacombs. “The new concordat is another example of the diminishing hold of the Roman Catholic church in civil life in Italy,” noted The New York Times.54 In return, Italy instituted an“eight-per-thousand” tax, in which 0.8 percent of the income tax paid by ordinary Italians was distributed to one of twelve religious organizations recognized by the state. During its early years, nearly 90 percent of the tax went to the Catholic Church (by 2010, the church received less than 50 percent as the tax was more equitably distributed). Not only did the tax relieve Italy of its responsibility for the $135 million annual subsidy it paid for the country’s 35,000 priests, it meant the church had a steady and reliable source of much needed income.55”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“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.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“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.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“Dick Clark was pleased with the group’s success, but he was also happy to be rid of them. They had kept many of the other acts awake by practicing late at night on the bus, and Diane Ross had too many fights with other artists. Once, Ross had a spat with Brenda Holloway, who she thought had taken her can of hair spray. Another fight was with the Crystals’ Delores Brooks, whom Diane accused of stealing a pair of her shoes. Their shouting got them both temporarily kicked off the bus. Another time, she jumped on the back of Mary Wilson, pulling her hair and punching her. Other women complained that Ross hogged the single mirror in the small dressing rooms they all used. “Diane always had a temper,” said Mary Wilson, “and while some people might have seen her actions as the result of conniving, her behavior was actually more like that of a spoiled brat. Once she made up her mind about something, there was no reasoning with her…. Diane would fight with anyone, and often she would take a minor issue and keep on it until you reacted.”
― Gerald Posner, Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power

“And a popular priest, Father Dyonisy Juricev, wrote in a leading newspaper that it was no longer a sin to kill Serbs or Jews so long as they were at least seven years old.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“Two days after he had appointed the special oversight commission, sixty-one-year-old Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, an APSA senior accountant, was arrested. Prosecutors charged he was the mastermind in helping friends avoid taxes on $26.2 million, some of it cash flown to Italy on a private jet from Switzerland.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“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.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“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”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“Berry’s investigation was a searing indictment of how church officials in Louisiana buried reports of sexual abuse of minors and did their best to pay off victims to keep them silent. By the time his story ran, the tiny Lafayette diocese in which Gauthe had committed his crimes was deeply in the red from $4.2 million in confidential settlements to the families of nine victims, and $114 million in pending claims in another eleven lawsuits.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“The small group of Benedict supporters gathered that night were not simply upset at money matters gone awry. There was, as they discussed that evening, something that made most of them squirm. They had seen the proof of what one called a “gay lobby.” The common bond for the gay clerics at the highest positions of the Curia was that they had abandoned their celibacy vows. The problem, the small group agreed, was that they often used sex as a carrot for advancement to ambitious up-and-coming clerics. It was deplorable, they concluded, that a fast career track was within reach for any cleric willing to submit to the Vatican’s equivalent of a casting couch.2,II”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“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.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“Italian reporters uncovered evidence that the Vatican had invested in Istituto Farmacologico Serono, a pharmaceutical company that made birth control pills, as well as Udine, a military weapons manufacturer (there were also unconfirmed newspaper reports of church money in gunmaker Beretta, a Monte Carlo casino, and a printing firm that published pornographic magazines).”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“Ratzinger was afraid to intervene on a deadlocked Roman Curia, with reformers on one side, and the money changers on the other,” wrote author Gianluigi Nuzzi. “So he decided to create a clean slate by bowing out and paving the way for the election of a strong Pope.”34”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had authorized the study.92 It concluded that 95 percent of American dioceses had at least one complaint of a sexual assault by a priest against a minor (the authors did not count incidents before 1950).93 During the five-plus decades, 4,392 priests had been accused of abusing 10,667 children, a figure that in some years was as high as 10 percent of all priests.94 At least 143 were serial molesters who carried out their attacks in multiple dioceses.95 Four out of five victims were minor boys.96”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“Bordoni and his wife fled to Venezuela, where he used some of the stolen money to buy a $3 million home and citizenship.103”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“I can tell you that I have taken all the names I have found in the newspapers and looked them up myself. I didn’t find a single one of these names. This Mafia boss, this politician, Osama bin Laden. None of them have accounts here, nor are they delegates to accounts.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“Play, don’t pray” was the mantra for some, who according to the insiders included dinner parties of clerics and male prostitutes that ended in nights of drugs and sex.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“A Catholic family had hidden a Jewish boy from the Nazis, and had learned that the Germans had murdered the child’s parents. They brought the youngster to Wojtyla and asked him to baptize the child. In contrast to Pope Pius IX and his abductions and forced baptisms of two Jewish boys, Wojtyla refused. The boy should be raised Jewish in the tradition of his parents, Wojtyla told the parents.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

“In 2009, Benedict faced a firestorm after he lifted the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a British bishop based in Buenos Aires.61 Bertone, who oversaw Williamson’s vetting, had apparently not even Googled him. If he had, he would have discovered an interview the bishop gave only three days before to Swedish television, in which he said about the Holocaust: “I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. I believe there were no gas chambers.”
― Gerald Posner, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican