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VATICAN GAMBLED DONATIONS ON DERIVATIVES
by Jules Gomes • ChurchMilitant.com • October 9, 2020
Pope savages speculation hours after revelations of new scandal
VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) - Pope Francis ranted against market speculation hours after the Financial Times revealed that the Vatican had invested donations for the poor to bet on the creditworthiness of now-bankrupt U.S. rental car company, Hertz.
The Vatican's Secretariat of State, under recently disgraced Cdl. Giovanni Angelo Becciu, used a €528 million Vatican-donations portfolio to purchase credit default swaps (CDS) based on a gamble that Hertz would not default on its debts by April 2020.
A CDS is a financial derivative that allows an investor to swap or offset his or her credit risk with that of another investor. Derivatives are financial contracts whose value depends on the future price of an asset such as a share, a currency, a commodity or an index.
Because of the potential risks that derivatives entail and their potential impact on the volatility of spot markets, economists have described them as "wild beasts" and "weapons of mass destruction."
Derivatives, used primarily for hedging, can also spur speculation to the point of destabilizing markets and have spawned numerous bankruptcies.
The Vatican escaped by the narrow margin of a month and gained from its gamble, after Hertz filed for bankruptcy in May 2020 following the economic crisis created by the Wuhan pandemic.
While 16,000 employees lost their jobs, Hertz CEO Kathryn Marinello pocketed over $9 million in total compensation.
MORE AT LINK:
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/vatican-gambled-donations-on-risky-derivatives
Pelican news all day every day
Cry moar?
Maybe it your time to exit stage left as the [P]ain is only just begun.
IF YOU SUP WITH THE DEVIL
by Francis X. Maier
10 . 9 . 20
If you sup with the devil, you’d better bring a long spoon.” In dealing with China, it’s a piece of folk wisdom the Vatican might want to take more seriously.
Concordats have a long and checkered pedigree in Christian history. Over the centuries in Europe, emperors, kings, and governments often had a role in selecting bishops and in regulating the public life of believers. The Church survived them all. More recent Vatican diplomacy—the Holy See’s 1933 deal with Hitler’s Third Reich and its later Ostpolitik policies in Soviet bloc nations—has been more problematic. In both these cases the Church found herself dealing with a new kind of state creature. She faced not merely national regimes with their parochial ambitions, but systematic ideologies that were, in effect, rival political religions demanding the submission of a citizen’s whole being, body and soul.
Modern China is such a creature. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been very adroit at building its economic and military power, growing its global influence, and raising its people’s standard of living. It’s been equally skilled at keeping power, crushing all forms of religion it doesn’t control, and resisting democracy. Western hopes that capitalism would liberalize the Beijing regime have cratered. Instead, Western businesses have found it hard to disentangle themselves from dependency on Chinese production and markets. If the past 40 years are judged as an economic and political chess match, China won.
As for matters of faith: Religious freedom has not improved in China. In many ways, it has deteriorated. With the possible exception of North Korea, China is the most aggressively atheist state on the planet. Beijing is an equal opportunity persecutor. No religious community of any tradition is allowed to exist outside state surveillance and control.
Given these circumstances, and in seeking to ensure the survival of Chinese Catholics, the Vatican worked out a two-year provisional deal in 2018, secret in its details, that allows Beijing a hand in the selection of China’s bishops. That deal expires this month. The Vatican is eager to renew it. In the words of one senior Vatican official, without such a deal “we would have found ourselves—not immediately, but ten years down the line—with very few bishops, if any, still in communion with the pope . . . If we don’t begin now, that’s the future.”
This Roman view is not without seeming merit. One can argue that China is our century’s rising power, with the United States and Europe past their prime. The future of the Church lies in Asia and Africa. The Church has been around for 2,000 years, surviving persecutions and adapting to new environments. The Church outlasted Nero and Diocletian, Islamic conquest and communism. She can surely outlast the CCP.
The trouble with that reasoning, argues Mr. Lai Chee Ying, better known as “Jimmy Lai,” is that it’s disastrously naïve. The current pontificate’s outreach to China is, for Lai, fatally flawed at the expense of China’s Christian believers.
I interviewed Jimmy Lai for the Napa Institute in early October. Take the time to view it. For anyone concerned about the Church in China, it’s essential to hear and see this man speak for himself. Lai has a global profile as one of the most successful and prominent entrepreneurs in Asia. He’s also a strong and vocal supporter of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. This led to his arrest and detainment in August under China’s new national security law. Though he faces possible jail time, he continues to speak and work against Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.
MORE AT LINK:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/10/if-you-sup-with-the-devil
Think Mirror.
The communist chokehold on the Chinese church
BY: LEO SCHAFER ON: OCTOBER 8, 2020
For decades now, the communist government of the People’s Republic of China has been persecuting religion. Uighur Muslims are rounded up and put into prison camps, and practitioners of the cult-like Falun Gong faith are suppressed and even rumored to have been killed.
Most pertinently for our purposes, Christian churches are closed, their parishioners are shot in the pews (or worse, sent to “re-education camps”) and the Holy Eucharist is ripped from its place in the tabernacle and cast into the street. The Catholic Church in China is one of the most persecuted groups on the face of the planet.
For decades, there have been two Catholic churches in China. In an effort to create a façade of religious freedom and to lure the faithful away from the true church, the Chinese Communist Party has appointed its own “bishops,” ordained its own “priests” and operated its own “churches.”
These two Catholic churches, the government-sanctioned and the underground, have existed in tandem with each other since the communist takeover. In an attempt to end the confusion and, more importantly, end the persecutions, negotiations took place in 2018 between the Chinese government, the Chinese church and the Holy See.
The resulting deal was supposed to have merged the two churches, ended the persecutions and given the communist government some input in the appointment of Chinese bishops.
In practice, however, the Chinese communists have gained incredible influence over the Church in China, and true Catholics in that nation have continued to be persecuted.
Just moments after the deal was announced, Cardinal Joseph Zen, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, the leading advocate for Chinese Catholics, ripped into the deal, saying, “It is quite clear that it encourages the faithful in China to enter a schismatic church (independent of the pope and under the orders of the Communist Party). … Can we passively witness the murder of the Church in China by those who should protect and defend her from her enemies?”
Indeed, within weeks, reports started to surface that the communists were back to suppressing the true Church. Was this really that surprising? The Chinese communists are well known for their infidelity regarding international agreements. With so much at stake, what would suggest that this time would be any different?
To preserve an air of international diplomacy, the Vatican has remained silent on the dozens of human rights abuses committed by the Chinese communists.
The deal is set to expire this month. The communist-appointed bishops are still in office. The true Chinese Christians are still being persecuted. The pope is still silent.
It is expected that the deal will be renewed for another two years, but the Chinese will just violate any new deal just like they did the old one, and like they have done for countless international agreements for dozens of years.
Yes, speaking out in the name of human rights may endanger Catholics currently living in China, but the pope has a duty, an obligation, to defend the defenseless in every situation, not to ignore the infractions of one of the most brutal regimes in human history.
Any deal that may come from buttering up the Chinese communists is secondary to the goal of ending the persecutions that come from those same Chinese communists. Forget treaties. It is time to speak.
http://www.troubonline.com/the-communist-chokehold-on-the-chinese-church/
A flood starts with one drop or one scrape.
Q DROP #1950
Holy See Corrupt Universal Government of the Catholic Church
Q !!mG7VJxZNCI 28 Aug 2018 - 4:12:23 PM
U.S.-HOLY SEE RELATIONS
"The Holy See is the universal government of the Catholic Church and operates from Vatican City State, a sovereign, independent territory. The Pope is the ruler of both Vatican City State and the Holy See. The Holy See, as the supreme body of government of the Catholic Church, is a sovereign juridical entity under international law."
https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3819.htm
Wealth?
Power?
Sanctuary against criminal prosecution?
Recipe for …….
Q
You are confused or shilling.
The one who posted the Holocaust is a Holohoax is a racist piece of shit P = Payseur inthematrixxx acolyte.
and you… you are a Vatican Apologist who believes the shit dripping from the asshole of Vigano and Marshall and I got some shit for you if you want it.
[P]ain like you have never felt.
Power struggles entangle the Vatican
Battlegrounds are alleged financial crimes, sexual abuse scandals
and Pope Francis’s reform efforts
Tony Barber 6 HOURS AGO
Sometimes for excellent reasons, presidents and prime ministers in democracies are prone to suspect plots aimed at removing them or forcing fundamental policy changes. The reign of Pope Francis, now in its eighth year, testifies to the fact that ruthless power struggles go on at the Vatican, too.
The infighting revolves around alleged financial crimes, sexual abuse scandals, doctrinal disputes and Pope Francis’s efforts to reform the Vatican’s administrative apparatus. All are being weaponised in a contest for control of the Roman Catholic Church that has persisted since the death in 2005 of John Paul II, the second-longest-serving pope in the Church’s more than 2,000-year history.
What distinguishes these events from turbulent episodes in earlier eras, such as the Italian Renaissance, is that they are tangled up with political battles and culture wars being fought in the US and other western societies, not to mention Africa and Asia. Rightwing secular politicians are aligned with ultra-conservative clerics in wanting to see the back of the Pope and his reforms. Liberal politicians and progressives among the world’s Roman Catholics, estimated by the Vatican to number more than 1.3bn people, hope that he will succeed.
Matters came to the boil last month when the Argentine-born pope took the unusual step of forcing the resignation of Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, an Italian prelate, on grounds of suspected embezzlement of Church funds. The cardinal, who denies wrongdoing, lost his job as head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the Vatican agency that oversees canonisations.
Cardinal Becciu was a very powerful figure from 2011 to 2018 at the Curia, the Holy See’s central administrative organ. As number two at the Curia’s secretariat of state, he was at daggers drawn with Cardinal George Pell, an Australian whom the Pope appointed in 2014 to bring transparency to the Vatican’s notoriously opaque finances.
Cardinal Pell was sentenced to prison in Melbourne last year for sexual molestation of two choirboys, but in April Australia’s highest court overturned his conviction. Now allegations have surfaced in the Italian media that Cardinal Becciu tried to influence his rival’s trial by bribing a witness for his testimony. Both the Italian cardinal and the witness reject the allegations as false.
The clashes show how controversies at the Holy See overlap. Cardinal Becciu was behind a multimillion-pound London property deal that is under investigation by Vatican magistrates. Until he lost his job last year, Cardinal Pell’s responsibility was to throw light on precisely such mysterious investments.
Rival Vatican factions and their allies in national Catholic hierarchies are seizing on these and other scandals to discredit their opponents in matters of religious doctrine. During his reign, Pope Francis has put much effort into wresting control of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican agency that enforces theological discipline, from the conservatives who held sway after 1981 under John Paul and Benedict XVI, his successor.
Pope Francis distanced himself from his two predecessors in 2016 by publishing an apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, which aired the possibility of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments. Conservatives reacted with fury to what would be a sharp break with Catholic tradition.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former papal nuncio, or ambassador, to the US, called in 2018 for Francis’s resignation. In this US election year, the archbishop has emerged as a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and has endorsed various dark conspiracy theories dear to the radical right.
MORE AT LINK:
https://www.ft.com/content
FT uses tracky links so again, if you want the article, all you have
to do is search a minute as it's there.
The BLAME FRANCIS, BLAME THE DEVIL, BLAME SOMEONE!
Movement is failing and this anon will document the fall all the way
to the bottom.
THE MORE:
It must be remembered that the Pope, though reform-minded, is not the Holy See’s equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev. The former Soviet leader pushed liberal reforms so far that he reformed his country out of existence. It is inconceivable that Pope Francis would take such risks, either in reinterpreting doctrine or in reorganising the Curia.
In fact, many Catholic commentators contend that the cause closest to the Pope’s heart is what the Vatican thinks of as the “missionary conversion” of societies where organised religion is stagnant or in decline. As he put it last year, in an exchange of Christmas greetings with Curia officials, the Christian faith “especially in Europe, but also in large parts of the west, is no longer an obvious premise of our common life, but rather is often denied, derided, marginalised or ridiculed”.
Still, Pope Francis has tried — not hard enough, secular critics say — to tackle the problems of sexual abuse and financial misconduct. These have festered ever since John Paul’s 1978-2005 pontificate. One reason why they are so intractable is that the Polish-born pope is a revered figure in modern Catholic history — in 2014 he was elevated to sainthood.
Francis, the first non-European pontiff since the Syrian-born Gregory III almost 1,300 years ago, is 83 years old. Benedict, his predecessor, resigned as pope in 2013 shortly before his 86th birthday. The dismissal of Cardinal Becciu suggests Pope Francis remains determined to prevail in the Vatican’s power struggles. But the struggles have such deep roots that there is every reason to think they will continue long after the reign of Pope Francis has ended.
omuhgerd not Fox too!
Smith Mundt Act BHO > neutered > NDAA
She was not suppose to lose.
You are watching a movie.
If I tell you anymore I gotta kill ya so calm TF down.
kek