LOL. Top-tier Army creole.
Sex, Money, Clericalism & The Papal Foundation
By ROD DREHER • August 30, 2018, 9:12 PM
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/sex-money-clericalism-papal-foundation/
FTA
Here’s a theory. That’s all it is: a theory. But if I had the investigative resources, I would be looking into it.
I learned this week that under John Paul II, there were three people who always showed up at the Vatican with lots of money: Father Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Bernard Law, and Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, who was made a cardinal by JP2. In 1988, McCarrick helped start the Papal Foundation, which raised money from wealthy American Catholics for the Pope’s favored projects. Last month, the Washington Post reported:
“The Papal Foundation was a huge point of leverage for him in terms of going to Rome,” said Steve Schneck, the longtime head of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at Catholic University. Schneck worked often with McCarrick. “There is not a Catholic organization in the United States he hasn’t raised money for.”
The Papal Foundation has grown to be quite large, with assets of over $206 million. According to this report in the National Catholic Register:
The foundation is governed by a board of trustees, comprised of the eight U.S.-domiciled cardinals, who serve as ex officio members and who approved the seven bishops and archbishops and nine laypeople who serve as elected members.
Grants are to be allocated to needs that are of particular significance to the Holy Father, and, often, they have been made to institutions and organizations in Third World countries.
In 2017, for example, grants included $70,000 to construct a primary school in Bangladesh, $90,000 to complete a library for high-school students and the local community in Nicaragua, and $100,000 for an orthopedic and physiotherapy unit for the St. John Paul II Medical Center in Ghana.
Back in February, Lifesite News published a huge scoop about Pope Francis and the Papal Foundation. Excerpts:
Leaked documents obtained by LifeSiteNews connect the Pope himself to a new Vatican financial scandal and raise serious questions about his global reputation as the “pope for the poor.”
LifeSiteNews has obtained internal documents of the U.S.-based Papal Foundation, a charity with a stellar history of assisting the world’s poor, showing that last summer the Pope personally requested, and obtained in part, a $25 million grant to a corruption-plagued, Church-owned dermatological hospital in Rome accused of money laundering. Records from the financial police indicate the hospital has liabilities over one billion USD – an amount larger than the national debt of some 20 nations.
The grant has lay members of the Papal Foundation up in arms, and some tendering resignations.
Most of the board is composed of cardinals and other bishops, who greatly outnumber lay stewards. More:
According to the internal documents, the Pope made the request for the massive grant, which is 100 times larger than its normal grants, through Papal Foundation board chairman Cardinal Donald Wuerl in the summer of 2017.
Despite opposition from the lay “stewards,” the bishops on the board voted in December to send an $8 million payment to the Holy See. In January, the documents reveal, lay members raised alarm about what they consider a gross misuse of their funds, but despite their protests another $5 million was sent with Cardinal Wuerl brooking no dissent.
On January 6, the steward who until then served as chairman of the Foundation’s audit committee submitted his resignation along with a report of the committee’s grave objections to the grant.
“As head of the Audit Committee and a Trustee of the Foundation, I found this grant to be negligent in character, flawed in its diligence, and contrary to the spirit of the Foundation,” he wrote in his resignation letter accompanying the report. “Instead of helping the poor in a third-world country, the Board approved an unprecedented huge grant to a hospital that has a history of mismanagement, criminal indictments, and bankruptcy.”
“Had we allowed such recklessness in our personal careers we would never have met the requirements to join The Papal Foundation in the first place.”
Here is a link to one of the three leaked documents published by LifeSite. It’s a report from the Audit Committee of the Papal Foundation, and it’s a doozy. It says that all the bishops on the foundation board voted as a bloc to fund Pope Francis’s request to bail out the corrupt hospital, and that Cardinal Wuerl strongarmed it through. The Audit Committee said this grant was so unjustified, and so reckless, that the Papal Foundation would have trouble recruiting future donors. [MORE AT LINK ABOVE]
SEE ALSO: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lifesite/The_IDI_Hospital_Summary_(1)_Redacted.pdf