Customer Reviews

The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Growing up in America, one of my favorite topics in school was history, be it American, Western, or world history. Never in all those classes did I come across anything like the tales told in this book. The author is a historian of Christianity, and in this book he gives an inside history of the Vatican, with an emphasis on the 20th century. Specifically, he tells the facts that the Vatican would not like people to know. The major events covered in this book are:

1. The Vatican's treaty with Mussolini and the Fascist Party in Italy whereby the Vatican would get its own land and country from Italy. In exchange, the Vatican would support the Fascists publicly and privately. This occurred in 1929, I think.

2. The Vatican's agreement with Hitler in the 1930s whereby the Vatican would pressure Catholics in Germany to not oppose Hitler. In return, the Nazis gave money to the Vatican in the form of a church tax levied on German Catholics.

3. The Vatican covering up for some of its officials who took part in the Holocaust.

4. The Vatican helping Nazi scientists escape to the US at the end of WWII. In return, the Allies kept secret knowledge about the Vatican's complicy in the Holocaust and private arrangements with the Axis powers.

5. The Vatican aligning itself with the Mafia after WWII to help secure inroads into foreign governments, and get good deals on investments world-wide.

All in all, this was a very impressive book. It is quite short, and probably as easy to read as a Harry Potter book, though shorter than a Potter book. The book is written in chronological order, and there are a lot of references to various primary and secondary sources.

I highly recommend this book.

In God's Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I

I found this book quite intriguing from start to finish. Williams does a really good job of outlining the politicking that goes on in the Vatican from the prewar period to the present. It is a must read for those interested in what goes on behind the closed doors of the Vatican. The Two other must-reads in Vatican Intrigue are David Yallop's `In God's Name' and Lucien Gregoire's `The CIA and the Bolshevik Pontiff. Of all the books I've read - I've read them all - the latter does by far the best job of proving the Vatican's role in the holocaust and World War II as well as solving the mystery of the unwitnessed death of the 33-day Pope.

Murder in the Vatican: The CIA and the Bolshevik Pontiff

During the late 1970's and early 1980's, the Vatican's finances were in the hands of Cardinal Paul Marcinkus. Marcinkus was corrupt and he placed the Holy See's investments in the hands of Roberto Calvi and Michele Sidona, both of whom were Mafia-connected bankers. Their corruption lead to the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano in 1982 and caused the exposure of one of the greatest scandals in Papal history.

Where it stays on focus on this scandal, Paul L. Williams's The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia is an excellent work. However, when it strays from this scandal into other aspects of the Vatican's finances, this book gets shaky. Williams simply bites off more than he can chew.

For instance, Williams calls the Vatican's financing of anti-Communist efforts during the Cold War a scandal. But is not sticking up for your fellow Catholics against atheistic dictatorship a fundamental duty of a church? Also, he attempts to link the Vatican to other financial scandals often without any real proof. In other words, he tries to make the Vatican out to be more corrupt than it really is.

Ths book is worth reading only as far as the Marcinkus scandal is concerned. After that, it becomes not much more than shallow sensationalism and bad reporting.

Mr. Williams traces the dark history of the characters inside the Vatican from prior to WWII to the recently deceased Pope's time. The history is of the dark side from Pius XI's actions and inactions with the Hitler Regime to Pope John Paul II's Vatican Banking scandals. Other reviewers have criticized the author for dwelling on the dark side and have accused him of fantasizing. The notes are there to check. His intentions weren't to point out the benevolence of the Vatican - they were to point out the side that up to recent times have not been brought to light. If a reader is truly interested in history, one has to have all the facts. Some of the facts are contained within Mr. Williams' book and I commend him for bringing them to our attention. Also contained are Appendices of THE LATERAN TREATY OF 1929, a chronological listing of Popes from Peter to John Paul II, and THE CONCORDANT BETWEEN THE HOLY SEE AND THE GERMAN REICH. The facts are noted within the chapters and the notes contained at the end of the book. One can use the notes as a further reading bibliography if desired. This book is 202 pages long and this reader read it in one Saturday sitting. If you're interested only in polemics, read something else. If you're interested in facts, even if they have warts, you need to read this book.

In its expose of Vatican intrique, particularly as it pertains to pre-World War II, this book is exceeded only by Lucien Gregoire's "Murder in the Vatican." Both books are very much history books and both are written to the maker's mark.

This is a quick, easily-accessible, highly disturbing history of modern corruption inside the Vatican. The murder (and the peopel and events surrounding it) of Pope John Paul I is extremely tragic. It is a shame those involved were not instantly shut down and justice allowed to prevail.

This author has an amazing ability to compress vast amounts of material into brief, coherent passages. This is a quick, lucid read and actually enjoyable, despite the horror of its topic.

A must read for anyone who wishes to understand the modern Catholic Church.

I can see that all the good Catholics gave this book 1 Star reviews... to be expected. (I can't wait to see the "Comments" on this review.) I consider myself objective; I have read more than one book on this subject; everything I read here has been documented in other publications.

This book details how the Vatican went from being rat infested and barely able to pay its bills, to a multi-national institution where fraud, money laundering, theft and murder run rampant or are overlooked. The book is easy to follow, even though some of the transactions are complex. It reads better than a fictional murder mystery.

What is amazing is that all of this went on, and is probably still going on, with only one of the popes doing anything to bring this corruption under control. And of course he was murdered.

Vatican, Inc. is a hypocritical corporation of biblical proportions. But what they own and how they got it will probably never be revealed. Don't expect a fairy tale ending.

This book is probably one of the Vatican's worst nightmares. It accurately exposes the various examples of financial corruption that the Vatican has been involved in, sometimes with either the blessing or the complicity of the pope. The book details the complex (and not to mention ancient) origins of the Vatican's wealth and subsequent misuse of it. But the book is not limited to financial corruption. The book also discusses the reprehensible connections between the Vatican and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who received a papal blessing in exchange for a generous monetary gift to the Vatican. Worse yet, it also examines the connections between the Vatican and the Nazi government in Germany before and during World War II. But the author doesn't stop there. Using noted journalist and author David Yallop's book "In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I," the author throws light onto a lesser known sin of the Vatican: the likely murder and subsequent cover-up of Pope John Paul the First ("the smiling pope"). Overall, this book was well-researched, and any Catholic wondering just how holy the "Holy See" really has been should read this.

I would have given this book a four or a five star rating; however, the contents are so thoroughly documented and so utterly believable that 'I like it' or 'I love it' are not the right words, one could not possibly 'like or love' this book especially when other recent and ongoing revelations about child abuse are borne in mind. See 'Sacrilege' by Leon J Podles. If one of the ratings was 'compelling' I would have chosen it.

If religion wasn't such a hot political topic these days, I would forget writing this review. While the Catholic Church is the focus of the book, I'm reasonably sure that the behaviors described are not exclusive of other religions. In this well documented book, The Vatican Exposed forces the reader to confront the chicanery that has been the hallmark of the Catholic Church during the lifetimes of current generations, as well as those that have come before. The recent rash of lawsuits in response to abusive behavior by many church officials is long overdue. Two good friends who have read this book no longer have victim's remorse after having taken the church to court for the abuse they received while trusting church officials to act in their best interest. I hope it becomes a movie.