Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lousy banker, but at least I'm not in jail," Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, 65, told visitors two years ago, after Italy's biggest bank failure had exploded around him. The Archbishop, who heads the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, commonly known as the Vatican Bank, may not make that claim so confidently in the future. Last week a Milan judge named Marcinkus in an arrest warrant as an "accessory to fraudulent bankruptcy" in connection with the 1982 collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private banking group...
...Vatican Bank was a shareholder in Banco Ambrosiano, and investigators claim that Marcinkus was linked to Ambrosiano President Roberto Calvi's diversion of some $1.3 billion from the bank through ten dummy Panamanian companies. While no evidence of personal gain has ever been alleged, authorities charge that Marcinkus allowed the Vatican Bank to be used by Calvi for his schemes. Marcinkus has strongly denied the accusation, and last Friday the Vatican came to his defense. In an unsigned statement, it expressed "profound astonishment" at the arrest warrants against Marcinkus and two senior officials...
...requirement for everyone? The New Jersey bishops' brief in the Jobes case insists that medical treatments are wholly different from food and fluids, which "are basic to human life." Nutrition, say the bishops, "must always be provided to a patient." But as the CHA experts saw it, neither the Vatican nor the U.S. bishops' conference takes such an absolute stand...
When Pope John Paul II first got a glimpse of the Vatican budget in 1979, he was so shocked by its sorry state that he called an unprecedented meeting of * the College of Cardinals. Unfortunately, things have not improved much since then. Last week the Pontiff's budgetmen froze spending at last year's levels throughout the Curia, the body that governs the Roman Catholic Church...
Though the overall budget of the Holy See is a well-kept secret, church officials estimate that it ran a deficit of $56 million last year. The freeze means that the Cardinals who run Vatican ministries will go without a pay raise and that papal ambassadors around the world will have to watch their expense accounts. The Pope will not have to curb his travel schedule, however, since his trips are mostly paid for by local churches...