Old News: Vatican Corrupt

The world's smallest city-state is in the news once again and, once again, hopes its ridiculously inappropriate Foreign-Sovereign Immunity (which absolves it of all responsibility for child sexual abuse cases in the United States, fyi) will allow it to do whatever it wants while thumbing its nose at the peculiar secular world, where actions have consequences.

VATICAN CITY — Italian authorities seized euro23 million ($30 million) from a Vatican bank account Tuesday and said they have begun investigating top officials of the Vatican bank in connection with a money-laundering probe.

(courtesy HuffPo)

But don't worry, it's probably all a big misunderstanding--it's not like the Vatican has any history of highly-suspicious involvement with the mafia and/or catastrophic financial crimes:

The Vatican bank was famously implicated in a scandal over the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano in the 1980s in one of Italy's largest fraud cases. Roberto Calvi, the head of Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 in circumstances that still remain mysterious.

London investigators first ruled that Calvi committed suicide, but his family pressed for further investigation. Eventually murder charges were filed against five defendants, including a major Mafia figure, and they were tried in Rome and acquitted in 2007.

Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had made to several dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans. While denying any wrongdoing, the Vatican bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors.

(courtesy HuffPo)

Yikes! But soft--who runs the Vatican Bank? Its problems can most likely be blamed on greedy secular bankers operating outside the church's sphere of influence, right? The religious folk just made a few careless mistakes in who they hired to run their financial operations, right?

Wrong:

More after the jump...