The Vatican is beautiful, charming, and full of architectural monuments.
The smallest sovereign state on Earth is increasingly shrouded in controversy every year.
The current ruler of the Vatican is Pope Francis.
He was the first New World pope, the first Jesuit pope, and the first non-European roots pope in 1,200 years
since Gregory III of Syria, who ruled between 731 and 741.
The Vatican's long existence has given rise to its fair share of secrets, some of which will shock and horrify you.
In this video, we will take a look at what the Vatican does not talk about and by all means, tries to hide from us.
CONSCIOUSNESS
One of the most scandalous cases talked about is the dealings of the Vatican Bank with Hitler's regime.
The bank, also known as the Institute of Religious Affairs (IRD), has over the years carried out
numerous transactions that have been called into question.
The most controversial of them is the deal with Hitler.
Historian Gerald Posner says that the Vatican received a substantial sum from the Führer each year
for the so-called "Kirchensteuer", that is, church tax.
In order to prevent the transactions from being traced, many of them were passed through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
This counteracts the possibility of transfers being traced by other Western banks.
It was at this point that the Institute of Religious Affairs became known as the largest offshore bank in the world.
The Catholic Church benefited from the Institute of Religious Affairs and kept billions of dollars,
never fully revealing to the public the scale of the transactions.
We will probably never know how much money the church bank made from the Germans at that time.
The Vatican is a state within a state in Italy and accordingly,
the bank does not provide information about bank accounts and the names of its depositors.
It is said that it is no secret that they include names from the Italian mafia.
This brings us to Roberto Calvi, better known as
"God's Banker"
Roberto took advantage of the sovereignty of the Vatican and its bank.
He is the chairman of the Italian bank Banco Ambrosiano.
Known for his connection to the Vatican, he earned the nickname "God's Banker".
In fact, the Institute of Religious Affairs is its largest shareholder.
During his time as an administrator, Calvi transferred bank and Vatican accounts
to illegal offshore accounts, from which the Institute for Religious Affairs acquired a significant stake.
In 1982, the authorities discovered discrepancies in Ambrosianos' finances.
Calvi was fired, and a day later was found hanging under mysterious circumstances under London's Blackfriarsbridge.
The investigation excludes a version that the banker took his own life.
The bank subsequently went bankrupt due to huge debts to foreign banks and to the Vatican.
As a result of Calvi's management, his bank's coffers are missing about a billion and a half dollars.
The Vatican never admitted any wrongdoing and simply paid 214 million euros as part of a settlement.
Another little-known fact is that the Vatican has evaded taxes for about 13 billion euros!
The church enjoys tax relief for its non-commercial properties that house chapels.
Using this loophole in the law, between 2006 and 2011, the Vatican deliberately managed to save itself €4 billion in taxes.
However, the Court of the European Union ruled that this was done completely against the law.
Thus, the church was sentenced to pay 4 billion euros in tax.
Calculations have been made that, taking into account the hidden taxes since 1992,
the amount will most likely exceed 13 billion euros!
Secret Court of Conscience.
In the Vatican, there is a secret court for sins based on conscience.
The bishops involved in these processes are also known as the Tribunal of Conscience.
Established by Pope Alexander in 1179, this tribunal was successfully kept secret from the public until 2009.
Sins dealt with by the court ranged from spitting or defiling a communion wafer to breaking a vow of celibacy by the priests.
Sinners seeking forgiveness wrote a petition to the Holy See.
They use pseudonyms to protect their identities.
The tribunal sits on the matter, and decision-making is solely within the authority of the chief penitentiary.
If he has any doubts, then he refers the matter to the Pope.
By the 18th century, brutal crimes such as rape and murder were also dealt with by the tribunal.
The Vatican puts a deceased person on trial
One of the hidden and shameful secrets of the Vatican is that the Catholic Church has put a dead pope on trial.
This happened way back in 897.
Then a posthumous trial was held against Pope Formus.
Pope Stephen VI files a lawsuit against a man who has been dead for 7 months.
But the most scandalous part of this story is yet to come.
Pope Formus was accused of an illegitimate papacy.
The body of the deceased was exhumed, dressed in papal robes,
and brought to the papal court for the reading of the sentence.
The late Pope was found guilty and his papacy was declared invalid.
The Vatican's late chief exorcist performed over 160,000 exorcisms during his tenure.
One of the things the Vatican certainly doesn't want us to know about
is the numerous exorcism rituals the church has been performing.
Not only that but they are said to be carried out to this day.
The late chief exorcist of the Vatican, Father Gabriele Amort, faithfully served the church for over sixty years,
during his lifetime he shared that he performed tens of thousands of exorcism rituals.
Amorth also says that the popes also performed exorcisms.
He states that in 2009, Benedict XIV exorcised "Satan" from two boys, and in 2000,
Pope John Paul II fought fiercely to exorcise a demon from a woman but failed.
Father Amort later claimed to have witnessed the "possessed" woman crawling up the walls like a spider.
Who helped the people of Hitler's regime to escape from Europe after 1945?
As we already understood, the Vatican and Hitler's regime have their history!
There is a lot of talk about the fact that after the Second World War, Europe became a not very friendly place for
the people of this regime, and many of them fled to South American countries.
Fleeing Germans occupying positions in the state prior to 1945
used a route known as the "ratline" or translated as "the road of the rats".
The Vatican knowingly supported thousands of thugs from Hitler's ranks
who escaped after the end of the war in 1945. along this "Rat Road".
They pass through Italy to South America, with the help of the church.
One of the biggest war criminals - Franz Stangl - escapes from prison in Linz.
The former commandant of the camps "Sobibor" and "Treblinka" is responsible for the liquidation of nearly one million people.
Stangl crosses Austria and reaches Italy. His target is Rome, where the Vatican is located.
"You must be Franz Stangl, I was expecting you."
With these words, the Roman bishop Alois Hudal greeted him, who also supplied him with false documents.
With them, Stangl left for Syria, where he waits for his family.
In 1951, he left Damascus for Brazil.
The man responsible for one of the most gruesome death camps spent years working for Volkswagen near Sao Paulo
Gerald Steinacher, a researcher from Harvard,
expresses a position that the help of the Vatican is based on the factor of the revival
of European Christianity and the fear of the Soviet Union
The Vatican was behind the creation of false identities for many German fugitives.
The church refuses to comment on this matter to this day.
The secret archives of the Vatican
Archives also called the "Secret Archives of the Vatican", are associated with many mysteries and speculations.
The archive contains documents that the Church has been collecting for centuries.
Most of them are accessible to the public under special conditions.
However, no one knows exactly what is in the kilometer-long repository located under the Vatican.
A detailed video about this secret archive and the mysteries in which it is shrouded can be found in our channel.
Sometimes, however, things get so entangled that they cannot be covered.
With the development of technology and the rapid spread of information, blunders are increasingly difficult to cover up.
Just 2-3 years ago we witnessed revelations of brutal fraud, corruption, extortion,
and money laundering involving ten Vatican officials, including a cardinal.
fraud, corruption, extortion, and money laundering
They are on trial and charged with a myriad of crimes. Nothing like this has ever happened in the entire history
of the Holy See, Deutsche Welle reported.
"A rotten, greedy system" - this is how the Vatican investigators define the machinations of the accused,
who for years benefited from the finances of the Catholic Church, bypassing all control mechanisms.
The charges include a deal for a luxury property in London's prestigious Chelsea district,
worth several hundred million euros, which should actually have gone to charity,
financial fraud, extortion, corruption, money laundering, and abuse of office, informs Süddeutsche Zeitung (ZC).
The Vatican says it had no idea that those involved had been diverting funds to their own pockets for so long.
For the first time in the history of the Holy See, a cardinal stands before the court.
This is the then 73-year-old Angelo Becciu, who from 2011 to 2018 was Deputy Secretary of State for General Affairs,
and then rose to Cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation.
The suspicions are that Bechiu saw to it that his three brothers received funds and lucrative orders from the Vatican.
One of them owns a brewery that was financed under this scheme.
In the course of the investigation, the traces lead to a large amount of money transferred to the account
of 40-year-old Cecilia Marogna, who, like Bechiu, is from Sardinia.
The Italian media dubbed her "The Lady of the Cardinal".
At least 575,000 euros were transferred to her account in Slovenia,
most of which the lady spent on designer clothes and expensive fashion accessories.
The former head of the financial supervision of the Vatican - the Swiss lawyer René Brühlhart - also testified before the court.
We thought for a long time about what comment to end this video with and in the end we couldn't find the right words.
Let us know in a comment, what would you say to conclude all this.
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