By Pet Melliza/The Beekeeper
Much has been said on two Philippine Catholic bishops for
their gaffes against the RH Law.
One of them, Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo cries
that the tragedy – over 1,000 killed and hundreds more missing – when Bagyo
Pablo struck Campostela Valley and Davao Oriental December 4, 2012 indicates
God’s wrath for its enactment.
Another, Camarines Norte Bishop Gilbert Garcera, calls
family planning defiance to god’s plan. “It is God’s plan for Filipinos to be
caregivers to ageing nations whose populations have become stagnant…Filipinos
have the duty to take care of them”, he preaches.
This space can no more add to flaks fired at them. I can
only come to their defense by comparison. Both are mere urchins crying for understanding, not crucifixion
that adults at Vatican rightly deserve for corruption, high crimes even.
Catholics are punished by excommunication for mere membership
to Freemasonry but some 150 or so cardinals, archbishops, bishops and what-have-you
confirmed to belong to Italy’s notorious Masonic Propaganda Due or Masonic
Lodge 2, are still untouched.
Their link with Lodge 2 remains uninvestigated, and so is
their connection with organized crime like the Mafia in violating state currency
controls, laundering of drug money, murder, drug trafficking, and ownership of
stocks in arms factories and in Italy’s biggest manufacturer of contraceptive
gadgets. Official Vatican dogma bans the use of contraceptives,
notwithstanding.
The tale below revolves around the misadventure of Vatican
Bank that was born in the ‘20s after dictator Benito Mussolini handed the
papacy some $26 million in compensation for its shrinking territory when Italians
voted to be governed by the secular government. Vatican is left with 48 hectares.
That is a preview of events decades later. In 1968, Pope Paul
VI appointed Michele Sindona, chief financial adviser of Vatican Bank. Called “The
Shark”, Sindona was a well known Mafia banker later to be jailed for life for
fraud, perjury and multiple murder.
He was brain for selling in 1973 Banco Cattolica di Veneto
to Banco Ambrosiano di Milan. That outraged Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice
who rushed to Rome to demand an audience with the Pope who referred him to
Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, an American, who in turn, snorted back: “Eminence,
don’t you have anything to do?... You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys.”
Banco Cattolica was friendly to the Archdiocese of Venice
for giving its parishes concessionary loans to finance projects among
parishioners. The outraged Luciani withdrew all deposits of his archdiocese
from it.
Luciani demanded rescission of the sale, investigation of
the scandal and punishment for perpetrators. Ignored by church higher ups, he wrote
the board of directors of Vatican Bank to remove the word “Cattolica” from its
name.
Paul VI’s death on August 6, 1973, started the unraveling of
Vatican’s dark secrets.
His successor, Pope John Paul I, was a kind person but could
not easily forget the way Vatican treated him while he was still Cardinal
Albino Luciani.
John Paul I’s agenda was to institute sweeping reforms –
weeding out corruption, investigate Vatican Bank and reassign the principal
suspects – Marcinkus and Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot the undersecretary to the
Pope – to nondescript positions. He was also poised to issue an edict allowing
the use of contraceptives.
However, his stay in office lasted only 33 days. September
28, 1978 evening, he was assassinated by poisoning (http://www.prose-n-poetry.com/display_work/10583/).
(His family demanded examination of his intestines but Villot said they were
already burned.)
The principal suspects, Marcinkus and Villot, lived long
enough to engineer yet another murder, that of Roberto Calvi, president of
Banco Ambrosiano found hanging on the Old Friars’ Bridge, London, June 1982.
Sindona, participant to several murders including that of
John Paul I, two Italian prosecutors and a police officer, was convicted for
life.
He offered to testify in exchange for freedom on Vatican
Bank including John Paul I’s murder but Vatican connection caught up with Sindona.
March 21, 1986, he was handed poisoned coffee. He died two days later.
John Paul I’s reforms never took off. Impunity rules high at
Vatican.
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