Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scandal has also brought a wave of unwelcome attention to the Vatican bank's American-born president, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. So far no one has openly accused Marcinkus of any illegal acts. But he is one of three Vatican officials under investigation by Italian authorities, who have indicated that Marcinkus could ultimately be charged. Serious questions are also being raised about his judgment and competence, specifically about his willingness to let the Vatican bank and its good name be used by international wheeler-dealers. At least eleven other official inquiries into Banco Ambrosiano's affairs are under...
...pockets contained some $13,000 in various currencies, as well as 12 lbs. of bricks and stones. He was identified as Roberto Calvi, 62, the president of Banco Ambrosiano of Milan, the largest private banking group in Italy, with operations in 15 countries. Authorities in Italy, in the Vatican and throughout the international banking community were stunned by the news. Calvi, who had disappeared mysteriously from Italy a week earlier, was the architect of a financial house of cards, and his death brought the structure tumbling down...
Italian authorities have since ordered the liquidation of Banco Ambrosiano and declared the institution bankrupt. The government has also been pressing the Holy See for a fuller disclosure of its role in the bank's affairs, thus rekindling the age-old tension between Italy and the Vatican, an independent entity that occupies 108.7 acres in the center of Rome. The Bank of Italy, the nation's central bank, has agreed to cover only part of Banco Ambrosiano Group's $1.2 billion shortfall, and is suggesting that the I.O.R. may have to come up with at least some...
...Vatican, citing its status as a sovereign state, has so far declined to cooperate with the Italian authorities, and Marcinkus has remained inside the Vatican, where he cannot be questioned by the government. But Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, the Vatican's Secretary of State, has named three respected international bankers, all prominent Catholic laymen, to examine the I.O.R.'s role in the scandal.* Casaroli has pointedly not suggested that Marcinkus did anything illegal. At the same time, however, the Archbishop of Florence, Giovanni Cardinal Benelli, a former Vatican Under Secretary of State, has told the Italian magazine Il Sabato...
...impoverished Lithuanian parents who immigrated to Cicero, Ill., Archbishop Marcinkus had enjoyed a steady rise in the Vatican hierarchy before the scandal broke. After taking a degree in canon law at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University, Marcinkus joined the Vatican's State Secretariat in 1952 and soon caught the eye of Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini, who was to become Pope Paul VI in 1963. The new Pontiff made the tall (6 ft. 3 in.), burly American cleric part of an intimate circle of papal advisers. In 1964 the Pontiff selected Marcinkus, a born organizer, to be his advanceman...