Before I start this, let me clearly say that I am not some backwoods fundamentalist railing against Catholicism. This post deals with the power structure of the Vatican itself.
For centuries now, the Vatican has longed for a return to the days of the Holy Roman Empire. Some want this because they want to see Christianity united and, eventually, leading the world. Some want the power and the wealth. Some, I suppose, want both.
Of course, as historians love to point out, it was neither Holy, Roman, or an Empire, but it amassed an incredible amount of wealth and wielded entirely too much power. As it fell apart, many in the Church were loathe to admit that such a thing could happen and began to jealously guard what power they had left, all the while holding fiercely to all that wealth. This led them to fall in with some very unpleasant people and groups.
The church, circa WW2, was fairly complacent in the face of fascism, making deals with Mussolini, and Hitler, uttering only feeble protests against the Holocaust, and, after the fighting, running rat lines that helped many notoriously evil Nazis escape justice. And, yes, this did increase the Vatican wealth.
People being people, some Church officials got their hands into the Vatican bank and caused all sorts of mischief. Ultimately they were dealing with the Mafia in various guns and drug schemes and with the remnants, rather sizable and powerful remnants, of Europe's fascist community, through the quasi Masonic Lodge, P2. Much money was stolen and much havoc reached. We will talk a bit more about this in the next post.
One way we know of the Vatican's continued lust for power is through a very shadowy group, Opus Dei. It is a shame that Dan Brown in The DaVinci Code painted them as a sort of cartoonish group, sort of like James Bond's enemies SMERSH. They are not cartoonish. Instead they are a repressive an deadly cult within the church wielding great power. They were doted on by Popes, John Paul II and Benedict. They profess to be the saviors of the traditional Church but, the more you find out about them, which is difficult to do (I strongly recommend a website called VYSUP for some very well researched info), the more it seems that their conservatism is more toward the wealth and power than any doctrinal issues.
Next post we will get into the weird world of fascism but first, let me mention another group within the Church that has deep ties to the fascist network, The Sovereign Knights of Malta. With roots going back to the Crusades and the Knights Hospitiller, they have a curiously large number of members who have held high, extremely high, positions in American politics, the American Military, and, frighteningly enough, the American Intelligence organizations. Odder still is the deep ties these individuals had to groups often linked to the JFK assassination (however, I am not about to start on that topic). Linked to the SKOM is any even stranger group, the Sovereign Knights of St. John of Jerusalem or the Shikshinny Knights, the difference being that the latter claim succession through the
Russian Church, I point this out so you can see how interlinked so many of these groups are, Nothing on Earth happens in isolation and the PTB are a massively confusing group with fingers in every pie imaginable. Next post I will try to untie a few more of the knots.
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