UNITED STATES
The New York Times
By DAMON LINKER
MARCH 20, 2015
Ask a devout, theologically literate Roman Catholic to describe the institution of the church, and you’re likely to be told that it was founded by Jesus Christ at the moment he gave his disciple Peter the “keys to the kingdom of heaven” and vowed that “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.” This made Peter the head of the universal church, empowered to administer the sacraments, spread the Gospel, save souls and forgive sins until Christ’s return, as well as to pronounce with infallible authority on matters of Christian faith and morals. Christ also promised Peter that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against the church — meaning that no matter how corrupt the institution might appear at any given moment of history, it will never be so consumed by evil that it ceases to be capable of fulfilling its God-appointed tasks.
Ask an informed historian or journalist about the history of the church — especially the Vatican and the papacy — and you are likely to hear a different story. On this telling, the church from the beginning has been an all-too-human institution that often follows a logic of self-interest, placing the good of its members ahead of those outside it, and the good of those in positions of ecclesiastical power ahead of the good of everyone else. To a greater or lesser extent, this has been true of most institutions throughout history, though it has been a particular problem in the 2,000-year history of the church, with its lack of democratic accountability and deep roots in the corruption-prone political culture of the Italian peninsula. The result has been a tension — and sometimes a blatant contradiction — between the church’s exalted claims for itself and its behavior.
Think of medieval popes waging the Crusades — raising armies, sacking cities and conquering territory — in the name of Jesus Christ. Or prelates torturing apostates and heretics during the Inquisition. Or Pope Pius V expelling Jews from the Papal States in 1569. Or Pope Pius XI signing the Reichskonkordat with Hitler, which, in return for winning a measure of freedom for German Catholics under the Nazis, assured silence from the Holy See over the forced sterilization of 400,000 people and then only the faintest of objections to the Holocaust. Or more recently, bishops and other church officials concealing widespread and repeated child sexual abuse by priests.
All of these and many other well-known acts of complicity with the ways of the world are touched on in Gerald Posner’s new book, but its main subject is a somewhat more arcane form of corruption. “God’s Bankers” provides an exhaustive history of financial machinations at the center of the church in Rome, from the final decades of the 19th century down to Pope Francis’ sincere but as yet inconclusive efforts to reform the church’s labyrinthine bureaucracy (the Curia) and the Vatican Bank (named Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or Institute for the Works of Religion, also known as the I.O.R.).
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