Lux Lucet

Financial chicanery has been big news in the US the past two years, and now the Vatican, not wanting to miss out on a good thing, has a banking scandal of it own brewing. It seems that the Vatican Bank, also known as the Institute for Works of Religion, is suspected of money laundering.  Currently $30 million of the bank’s money has been impounded by Italian authorities, and Bank’s chairman, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and director general, Paolo Cipriani, are under investigation.  The Vatican is said to be perplexed and surprised by this turn of events.  For my part,  I’m shocked, shocked!, to hear about scandal in the Roman Catholic Church-State. Really, who would ever suspect such a thing?  

While reading through the various news accounts, one statement from a New York Times article jumped out at me.  The statement read,

In both cases, investigators bypassed the sovereignty of the Holy See by looking into Italian accounts that had received funds from the Vatican Bank.

Notice how the Vatican is said to have “sovereignty.”  How is it that a church can have sovereignty?  Is not that term used primarily – though in error, for God alone is sovereign – of states?  With good reason John Robbins called the Vatican the Roman Catholic Church-State, for it can appear as one or the other depending on what suits its purpose at the time.

For other news accounts of this scandal see here, here, and  here.