A Mobbed Up Bank is the Least of His Problems

Pope Francis just fired the whole board charged with overseeing the Vatican bank, the Financial Information Authority (AIF):

Pope Francis has removed the entire board of the Vatican's financial watchdog in his latest attempt to rehabilitate the troubled Vatican bank.

Two years before they were due to step down, the five Italians heading the Financial Information Authority (AIF) have been replaced with a more international group of experts, including one woman.

The change follows reports of clashes between the board members and the body’s Swiss director, René Bruelhart, an anti-money laundering expert.

The new members are Marc Odendall, who manages and advises philanthropic organisations in Switzerland, Juan Zarate, a Harvard law professor who was a security adviser to President George Bush, Joseph Yuvaraj Pillay, former managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Maria Bianca Farina, the head of two Italian insurance companies.

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Pope Benedict XVI created the watchdog in 2010 to supervise and regulate the widely discredited Vatican bank – which is officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) – and prevent it being used for money-laundering and for terrorism.

But when Bruelhart, who cleaned up Liechtenstein’s banking system, arrived as director in 2012 he encountered resistance to the reforms from an old guard.

The group reportedly wrote to Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin earlier this year complaining that they were being kept in the dark, after Bruelhart’s arrival.

Reformist members of the Curia had urged Francis to bring in professionals with a global perspective who could work with the Swiss lawyer.

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And in January he sacked all but one of the five cardinals in the commission that supervises the Vatican bank.

The Vatican Bank is clearly a big can of worms, but compared to Irish Orphanage scandal which includes hundreds of surreptitiously buried bodies and involuntary medical experiments:

It gets worse. One week after revelations of how over the span of 35 years, a County Galway home for unwed mothers cavalierly disposed of the bodies of nearly 800 babies and toddlers on a site that held a septic tank, new reports are leveling a whole different set of charges about what happened to the children of those Irish homes.

In harrowing new information revealed this weekend, the Daily Mail has uncovered medical records that suggest 2,051 children across several Irish care homes were given a diphtheria vaccine from pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome in a suspected illegal drug trial that ran from 1930 to 1936. As the Mail reports, “Michael Dwyer, of Cork University’s School of History, found the child vaccination data by trawling through tens of thousands of medical journal articles and archive files. He discovered that the trials were carried out before the vaccine was made available for commercial use in the UK.”  There is no evidence yet – and there may never be – that any family consent was ever offered, or about how many children had adverse effects or died as a result of the vaccinations. Dwyer told the Mail, “The fact that no record of these trials can be found in the files relating to the Department of Local Government and Public Health, the Municipal Health Reports relating to Cork and Dublin, or the Wellcome Archives in London, suggests that vaccine trials would not have been acceptable to government, municipal authorities, or the general public. However, the fact that reports of these trials were published in the most prestigious medical journals suggests that this type of human experimentation was largely accepted by medical practitioners and facilitated by authorities in charge of children’s residential institutions.” In a related story, GSK — formerly Wellcome — revealed Monday on Newstalk Radio that 298 children in 10 different care homes were involved in medical trials in the ’60s and ’70s that left “80 children ill after they were accidentally administered a vaccine intended for cattle.”

Irish Minister of State for Training and Skills Ciaran Cannon has called for a public inquiry into the treatment of the children and their deaths.  The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has also called for an investigation, adding that it should be free of Catholic Church interference. “We have to look at the whole culture of mother and baby homes; they’re talking about medical experiments there,” he told RTE Radio this weekend. “They’re very complicated and very sensitive issues, but the only way we will come out of this particular period of our history is when the truth comes out.” And a spokesman for GSK said the latest revelations, “if true, are clearly very distressing.”

This is not even the first time information on these kinds of vaccine trials has come to light. In 2010, the Irish Independent uncovered how children born in the homes were subjected to a single “four-in-one” vaccine trial without their mothers’ permission. The children often didn’t even know what they’d been subjected to until well into adulthood. Appallingly,  Ireland had no laws regarding medical testing on humans until 1987. Mari Steed, who was born at the Bessborough home in the ’60s, told the Sunday Independent, “We were used as human guinea pigs.”

Yes, very distressing. 

Seriously, I don't think that Francis could live long enough to drain this swamp.

I don't think that he could live long enough to drain this swamp if he became Pope when he was 12 ……… And his dad was Methuselah.