UNITED STATES
Washington Post
By Gerald Posner
September 18
Gerald Posner’s book “God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican” was published in February.
Pope Francis begins his much-anticipated visit to the United States this week with popularity ratings that are the envy of every U.S. politician. He also arrives with a well-deserved reputation as a reformer. During his more than two years as pope, he has supercharged a wide-ranging overhaul of the scandal-plagued Institute for the Works of Religion, or the Vatican Bank. Since its World War II creation, the bank had often served as an offshore haven for tax evaders and money launderers and frustrated six of Francis’s predecessors. Little wonder that public figures of all faiths are clamoring to share the spotlight with this pope. From a meeting with the president to an unprecedented address to a joint session of Congress, plenty of politicians hope to bask in the “Francis effect.”
Francis’s visit will be a missed opportunity, however, if America’s leaders and many presidential aspirants don’t push to resolve a long-standing impasse between the United States and the Vatican over the church’s steadfast refusal to open all its Holocaust-era archives.
Those sealed records may help settle debate about whether the wartime pope, Pius XII, could have done more to prevent the Holocaust. They could also resolve questions about the extent to which the Vatican did business with the Third Reich, particularly whether it invested in German and Italian insurance companies that earned outsize profits by escheating the life insurance policies of Jews sent to the death camps.
Although Francis is a progressive pope, he is unlikely to act unless U.S. leaders forcefully push the issue of historical transparency. I know this firsthand, since my own numerous appeals to the Vatican for access to the archives, including a personal one to Pope Francis, have gone unanswered.
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