Much has been said on two Philippine Catholic bishops for their gaffes against the RH Law.

One of them, Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo cries that the tragedy – over 1,000 killed and hundreds more missing – when Bagyo Pablo struck Campostela Valley and Davao Oriental December 4, 2012 indicates God’s wrath for its enactment.

Another, Camarines Norte Bishop Gilbert Garcera, calls family planning defiance to god’s plan. “It is God’s plan for Filipinos to be caregivers to ageing nations whose populations have become stagnant…Filipinos have the duty to take care of them”, he preaches.

This space can no more add to flaks fired at them. I can only come to their defense by comparison.

"Both are urchins crying for understanding, not crucifixion that adults at Vatican rightly deserve for corruption, high crimes even."

Catholics are punished by excommunication for mere membership to Freemasonry but some 150 or so cardinals, archbishops, bishops and what-have-you confirmed to belong to Italy’s notorious Masonic Propaganda Due or Masonic Lodge 2, are still untouched.

Their link with Lodge 2 remains uninvestigated, and so is their connection with organized crime like the Mafia in violating state currency controls, laundering of drug money, murder, drug trafficking, and ownership of stocks in arms factories and in Italy’s biggest manufacturer of contraceptive gadgets. Official Vatican dogma bans the use of contraceptives, notwithstanding.

The tale below revolves around the misadventure of Vatican Bank that was born in the ‘20s after dictator Benito Mussolini handed the papacy some $26 million in compensation for its shrinking territory when Italians voted to be governed by the secular government. Vatican is left with 48 hectares.

After the WWII, in 1948, Italian police imprisoned Msgr. Edoardo Cippico, a Vatican bureaucrat, for evading Italian currency controls through money laundering via the Vatican Bank (Luis Granados  http:// www.secularnewsdaily.com /2011/03/the-vatican-bank-then-and-now/).

That is a preview of events decades later. In 1968, Pope Paul VI appointed Michele Sindona, chief financial adviser of Vatican Bank. Called “The Shark”, Sindona was a well known Mafia banker later to be jailed for life for fraud, perjury and multiple murder.

He was brain for selling in 1973 Banco Cattolica di Veneto to Banco Ambrosiano di Milan. That outraged Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice who rushed to Rome to demand an audience with the Pope who referred him to Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, an American, who in turn, snorted back: “Eminence, don’t you have anything to do?... You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys.”

Banco Cattolica was friendly to the Archdiocese of Venice for giving its parishes concessionary loans to finance projects among parishioners. The outraged Luciani withdrew all deposits of his archdiocese from it.

Luciani demanded rescission of the sale, investigation of the scandal and punishment for perpetrators. Ignored by church higher ups, he wrote the board of directors of Vatican Bank to remove the word “Cattolica” from its name.

Paul VI’s death on August 6, 1973, started the unraveling of Vatican’s dark secrets.

His successor, Pope John Paul I, was a kind person but could not easily forget the way Vatican treated him while he was still Cardinal Albino Luciani.

John Paul I’s agenda was to institute sweeping reforms – weeding out corruption, investigate Vatican Bank and reassign the principal suspects – Marcinkus and Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot the undersecretary to the Pope – to nondescript positions. He was also poised to issue an edict allowing the use of contraceptives.

However, his stay in office lasted only 33 days. September 28, 1973 evening, he was assassinated by poisoning (http://www.prose-n-poetry.com/display_work/10583/). (His family demanded examination of his intestines but Villot said they were already burned.)

The principal suspects, Marcinkus and Villot, lived long enough to engineer yet another murder, that of Roberto Calvi, president of Banco Ambrosiano found hanging on the Old Friars’ Bridge, London, June 1982.

Sindona, participant to several murders including that of John Paul I, two Italian prosecutors and a police officer, was convicted for life.

He offered to testify in exchange for freedom on Vatican Bank including John Paul I’s murder but Vatican connection caught up with Sindona. March 21, 1986, he was handed poisoned coffee. He died two days later.

John Paul I’s reforms never took off. Impunity rules high at Vatican.*