www.businessweek.com/maga...778006.htm

(doesnt sound honest--like they run at a defeit?:rolleyes )

How many people in Chicago its about 10 million,I lived there. If the Vaticans yearly budget is as big as theres thats pretty scary considering the size of Vatican city to Chicago. All the dioceses and more raise their own money--to run themselves, the Vatican doesnt give it to them.


hmm interesting book on all these matters.....havent read this one...

The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia
Paul Williams


From the Publisher
Based on his years as a consultant for the FBI, Williams produces explosive and never-before-published evidence of the Church's morally questionable financial dealings with sinister organizations: over seven decades! He examines the means by which the Vatican accrued enormous wealth during the Great Depression by investing in Mussolini's government; the connection between Nazi gold and the Vatican Bank; the vast range of Church holdings in the postwar boom period; Pope Paul VI's reliance on reputed international Mafia chieftain Michele Sindona as the Vatican banker; a billion-dollar counterfeit stock fraud uncovered by Interpol and the FBI; the "Ambrosiani affair," called "the greatest financial scandal of the twentieth century" by the New York Times; the mysterious death of Pope John Paul I; most recently, profits from an international drug ring operating out of Gdansk, Poland; and much more.


From The Critics
Publisher's Weekly
Burdened by a lurid title, this is a short history of the politics and finances of the Vatican during the last hundred years. As in his Complete Idiot's guides to the Crusades and to the lives of the saints, Williams displays an ability to compress a great deal of information in a short, highly readable way. His main argument is that the current financial strength of the Roman Catholic Church as well as many of its problems began in 1929 with the signing of the Lateran Treaty, in which a financially besieged Pope Pius XI exchanged recognition and support of Mussolini's Fascist government for more than $90 million and the establishment of the Vatican as a sovereign state. Williams traces how the Vatican's new emphasis on financial stability led it into other morally questionable financial arrangements with Adolf Hitler, the fascist state of Croatia and reputed Sicilian Mafia financier Michele Sindona. He examines carefully the establishment and workings of the Instituto per le Opere di Religione, commonly known as the Vatican Bank, "an entity unto itself without corporate or ecclesiastical ties to any other agency within the Holy See." While parts of the book overlap with other recent works on the Vatican and the popes (especially on Pius XI's refusal to censure the brutal ethnic cleansing of Orthodox Serbs and Jews by Croatia's Ustashi regime), this is a surprisingly solid short look at the dubious financial dealings of the Vatican from the 1920s to the present. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.



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A reviewer, a concerned Christian, June 30, 2003,
Must Reading
_The Vatican Exposed_ is must reading for Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Williams' clear, concise, just-the-facts-ma'am style lays bare the gross excesses and egregious errors of the Roman Church; his documentation is thorough and convincing. Read this book. You will be amazed and disturbed.

******

Vatican bank stuff is pretty bad.