Catholic Churches are closing down and now being sold to the highest bidder since there is a shortage of Priests, attendance is down, and the price of pedophile lawsuits have gone up. Our Lady Of  Mount  Carmel and Good Council Church   in White Plains, New York are both being closed down both of which my wife was a church organist for many years.  All of this would have been unheard of years ago but yet it is also the   first time we have had two living Popes at the same time. What is going on with that religion? Since when does the Catholic Church run out of money that they even have to sell their real estate   some of which encompasses the most beautiful structures to our eyes? Actually the Vatican Bank is a fairly recent institution.

When we even mention the word Vatican you would think it goes back to the seventh century but in fact it only goes back to World War II. Do we need to go back to centuries old ways of finance control? Whatever that was? Here we have a 2,000 year old institution where they were really Pope Kings who ran their own empire. They used to have 15,000 square miles in Central Italy that was their Empire. They used to collect taxes. All of a sudden they lose that power and get reduced to a small piece of property now called Vatican City.

Look at the history. In 1870,   they are considered to be the largest religion in the world.  By 1929 Benito Mussolini, the Fascist Dictator hits an accord with them and declared them sovereignty by declaring them as an independent country. In turn, they supported him financially. So, when your parents and grandparents were giving money to the collection box they were really giving money to a political war machine, Mussolini. Now our Easter Collections are probably paying off some priest’s pedophile lawsuit.

So now the Vatican is a country the size of a postage stamp in comparison the square footage of most countries of the world. It turns out that Mussolini was giving the Vatican lots of money he was getting from taking over most of Europe during the War. They create the Vatican Bank that now holds about a Billion dollars to   make up   for the loss of the Papal state. In 1942 the British and Americans are looking to stop countries like the Vatican, these tiny little sovereign ants from doing business with the Nazis.  There is a bank that is a cross between a central bank and a Wall Street investment Bank that puts them off the radar and can’t be followed which was the start of the bank that exists now which is a scandal ridden place full of lawsuits.

They at that time was looking for a way out and lose some pressure for not speaking out against the Holocaust. Believe it or not but a lot of the big shot Nazis were Catholic. Perhaps if the Vatican had said something about the Holocaust, history would have been different.  It was a time in the 40;s when the Pope still carried that kingly  weight that Popes used to carry. If he has said that it is a mortal sin for Catholics to kill Jews, it would have been a different war. Of the 50 thousand Germans who administered the concentration camps, three quarters of them were Catholic. Could it be possible for religious people to do immoral things? It seems that real reform is needed everywhere.