Grubstakers - Patreon Unlocked Episode 100: The Vatican

Episode Date: April 4, 2021

Unlocked for Easter: On this special ep we talk about The Vatican, from its humble beginnings with Jesus destroying the tables of money changers to its modern era as a destroyer of massive international banks. We also talk about the stuff with the kids.

First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world. You know, this may sound like an exaggeration, but it was like the 9-11 of my career and certainly of making kombucha. This idea of income inequality, it always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. Jesus is smart. Berlusconi flatly denies that any mafia money helped him to get a start in real estate. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much. And minorities too little.

I got the loot, Steve! Hello, and welcome to Grubstakers. I am Andy Palmer and I'm joined here with my friends as always. Yogi Polo. Sean McCarthy. Steve Jeffries. And today we are talking about the Vatican and the Catholic Church in general. Now I'm not, I was raised Presbyterian. I think Sean, you're a lapsed Catholic. Yeah.

Steven, you're a lapsed Protestant. I left after Vatican II. I'm actually Presbyterian too. Oh, you're Presbyterianolic yeah uh steven you're a lap i left after vatican too i'm actually presbyterian too oh you're presbyterian too lapsed yeah yeah what is this lapsed nonsense what's like you don't you don't care no i'm tradcaf now so i don't i don't believe in coffee order what's going on here's the thing about like presbyterianism that i've been realizing is they're the centrist democrats of christianity like they just don't really stand for anything, but they still insist that you should believe in the nothing that they stand for.

Sure, sure. And then, of course, Yogi, you're Hindu. To the bone. To the bone. Is that part of it? Yeah, bad to the bone was originally Hindu to the bone. I just want to say that we have heard your complaints, and we do recognize that

it has been heretical we stopped doing the podcast in latin so we will be resuming doing all of our episodes in latin the way christ intended so um have any of you guys been to the vatican by the way yeah i have i was there i didn't go that long but after um john paul ii died i was like i got to the end of the funeral so i saw a bunch of polish people leaving oh for real did you get to see his body uh no no they'd already the the funeral was over it was just like bunch of pilgrims like leaving oh yeah um and you did... Yeah, I visited once. I like that they have Longinus as a saint. Oh, really?

Oh, the guy who stabbed? The guy who speared him? Oh, shit. I didn't know that. Yeah, he's in there. Really? Is Pontius considered a saint, too? Or is he... I don't know.

Like, that's funny that they just, like, make saints the people who killed Jesus, and then they're like... Well, it was like he's being merciful or something. I just realized when I... When I saw all those Polish people leaving, that was presaging Brexit. It's funny because I went there

when Benny was Pope and he... I highly suggest if you're there to see the Pope live, because it's so much better. It's better. It's like Kiss.

Yeah. So who warms up for him? He does his own warm-up. Oh. But here's how he does it. It's so perfect, because... Is there an emcee? The Pope is the perfect emcee.

And there was a huge crowd. I'm here for the Pope? I hate when I go to see the Pope, and then they got, like, four hours of opening cardinals. Like, I didn't pay for this shit. I don't care about the local acts. Two drink minimum. Right, right. Two confession minimum.

Yeah. There's a huge international crowd and everyone had their flags. How does the Pope work through check drop? 40 minutes into the sermon and everybody's getting their bills and checking out. Is there a dress code? Does the Pope got to wear a specific outfit? It was hard to tell because he was up in his little window in his palace. And he would name check

all the nationalities that were out there. So he would, just sort of like when a band is like, hey, it's great to be here in Philadelphia. And everyone screams. He would say something in Polish and then you would see all the Polish flags start waving and they would all scream.

And then he would say something in Spanish. And all the different... They would scream. Yeah pretty it was pretty neat so i guess uh we'll go into uh bio if if y'all are down for that um about the vatican was born uh the year zero bc yeah our story starts about uh two thousand years ago when a heretic jewish preacher who dreamed of one day creating an international pedophilia and money laundering network led a group around Israel. But before he could make that dream. If you read Jesus the most, you'll find out that's what he actually meant.

Yeah. Yeah. You got to read everything, though. Right. Yeah. But he's like, yeah, just set up a giant fucking pedophile conspiracy. Money laundering conspiracy. Oh, my God.

This pedophile cult that's going to exist in 2,000 years is going to be so sweet. Jesus does the Sermon on the Mount, and he's like, look, you're not going to understand this now, but I'm saying this for posterity. When the Nazis fall, you have to get them out of Europe. Listen, listen. Hindsight might be 20-20, but foresight says we're going to fuck people under the age of 18.

Well, sadly, before he could make this dream a reality, he was killed in Jerusalem for violating the Roman Empire's longstanding anti-table flipping regulations. Aw.

Yeah, he saw people doing 4X in the temple. And he was like, that is... He saw people doing forex in the temple and he was like that is some people trying to explain bitcoin and he's just so fucking mad about that Jesus saw the precursor to the blackstone group operating in the fucking temple

so then his followers went out they trekked over to Rome and then over there, they were killed for affiliation with a known table flipper. And the place they were killed was Rome's Vaticanus Hill. historical times where you can use the word deicide which is a very fun word and also something that every catholic who thinks vatican ii is heresy accuses the jews of wait is deicide a deity committing suicide killing god killing god okay got it so it's not suicide it's it's the murder yes i think was it uh benedict at one point we We'll get to his amazing papacy, which is just a series of PR disasters. And at one point, he said that killing Jesus was a scandal for the Jews.

I mean, it's true. Like, killing God is a pretty big deal. Yeah. It's hard to live that one down. You've got to hire a really good PR firm. You know what bit I'm tired of seeing? What? It's the entire Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Maury situation bit.

You guys hear the stand-up bit? It's like Jesus was born out of wedlock. It would have been different if they were on Maury. Joseph, you are not the father. It's the same fucking concept every time. I've seen it in 10 years of doing stand up. I've seen it maybe 50 times. And every time I go, not that funny.

Maybe I don't miss open mics that much. There are probably people in Rome in like the fifth century A.D. doing that joke. Yeah, I bet. That's how old Maury is. So, well, the equivalent of Maury. No, specifically Maury Poach.ach oh he was first helling yeah there's gonna be a crazy show that's gonna be yeah right i'm gonna i'm gonna be the head of a show in chicago that's gonna tell uh parents that they're not technically parents and people are gonna cheer for me mori is... And so it came to pass.

Roman Coliseum-esque. Like, it's very aggressive and, like, really, like, built on one versus the other and, like, just, like, boos and thumbs down. Like, it's very visceral. Yeah, I stopped watching Maury after they stopped doing the show in Latin. So, the book that I used for this was uh god's bankers by gerald posner which is is very good if you have 24 hours to kill on an audiobook um and i used to have this joke that like uh that the vatican was kind of a fortified city-state built of gold that was funded entirely on exporting tickets out of hell and it um turns out that up until about 200 years

ago that's exactly how they paid for things they paid for it with indulgences right um which were you know uh essentially if you pay us money uh you'll uh you'll have a better apartment in the afterlife and uh a few people had took disagreement with that. One of them was Martin Luther, and he started his whole heresy. He also thought the church was going a little easy on the Jews for the day aside. Which is interesting because there were long-standing Jewish ghettos in Rome up until the 20th century. Really? Yeah.

My understanding of how medieval finance works was basically like the king or whoever would borrow money from the Jews because they were allowed to work with money because it was considered sinful for usury and other reasons. They would borrow money from the Jews to fund the treasury, and then they would be unable to repay it. So they'd go, okay, let's have a pogrom and kick out all the jews so i don't have to pay them back oh really yeah well so that um the the papal states which was uh basically central italy the area around rome was actually run by the vatican for a while and they managed to avoid that um but then the french revolution happened and the french kind of got this hobby of just invading rome um at one point they they imprisoned the pope and when he died like there the records in the town were like they had the guy's real name and then they were like occupation pontiff like when he died in prison right right um oh i just want to tell like in like i think it was the

1300s but just like the history is so long that there's some like really incredible obscure popes out there and i know there's like there's one who his cause of death was he was stabbed to death by uh the husband of the wife he was fucking and you know so there were like a bunch of popes who were just like secretly having like orgies in the papal palace oh yeah ancient popes were great like there was one guy who uh he was in the medici family and he became pope at 14 and yeah it was just one of those orgy popes who um yeah took it as a ticket to to fuck um you are the pope so after um let's see first there was uh the french just invaded rome right after the revolution and then napoleon invaded rome again

um and eventually the uh romans had to ask uh the austro-hungarian empire to protect them and around this time because they kept getting invaded, they ended up going bankrupt. And this is like the mid-19th century. They had to take out loans from the Rothschilds. Oh, really? Which did not go well. The second deicide.

Yeah, people, followers of the church were not happy about that. And the church had to also reluctantly ease up on its continuing persecution of the Jews. And they actually had to, because the Rothschilds, at first the Rothschilds were like, okay, we'll loan you some money, you know, business. And then people were like, okay, but aren't you also going to tell them to, you know, stop putting the Jews in ghettettos and the rothschilds were like okay stop putting the jews in ghettos um all right and so uh the vatican um uh because of that they realized that they had to start investing they were very anti-capitalism before that uh because they believed that it it caused workers to get paid too much um and it violated the feudal order they thought that capitalism was a godless uh system but they basically out of necessity had to kind of embrace it so they

started selling um so these are bernie bros you're talking about they're um futile bros they basically started selling bonds and then they would bought a newspaper that they required people um catholics to read and in the newspaper it would always have like a little thing where it's like also buy vatican bonds it's your religious duty right right and they pulled themselves out of the the um they basically paid off all their rothschild's loans and then they used some of that money to rebuild the walls around the jewish ghetto in rome oh really yeah i'm imagining like those world war ii by bonds propaganda posters but for like vatican bonds so it would have like priest who'd be like, he fucks the children so you can

stay home. This man is your friend. He fights for you. He fucks for you. Well, you're over here. He's over there. It's like a picture of a little boy's asshole. By Vatican Bonds. Like a picture of a little boy's asshole. Buy Vatican bonds. Support the troops.

One thing the Rothschilds discovered when they were trying to fix the Vatican finances was that they didn't have a budget. They were just kind of freewheeling it with their money. Really? Yeah. We should get theothschilds to fix our budget our patreon so um basically so basically the vatican they kind of fix things up uh they have vatican one in the meantime uh where they decide that the pope is infallible after he pissed off a bunch of people by saying that uh freedom of speech was evil uh hell yeah he should start a twitter account he'd do great there oh man pope the

pope piouses were like the best like perfectly conservative and evil popes um but uh just so vatican one was mid-1800s or yeah yeah it was up until like the 1860s um and yeah they they uh yeah they they determined that the pope was infallible and uh pissed off a lot of people i guess we should just explain like vaticans uh vatican one and two were these conferences where all the papal uh representatives met and promulgated new rules for the catholic church yes um new rules it was based the vatican one was because uh after the pope made a bunch of very controversial anti-modern statements oh yeah um he just decided that he needed them kind of ratified or given legitimacy by all the all the cardinals and bishops and after he was done getting owned by astronomers right yeah yeah i just imagine the

pope making all these anti-modernist statements and getting like retweeted by a bunch of like wojacks and peppies who like make memes about hoes mad x24 what's so funny about the astronomer thing is that like part of that was that like galileo it wasn't that he violated something that Jesus said or something that was in the Bible. It was that he violated Aristotle, who, of course, was a pagan and vaguely atheistic philosopher. But because the Roman church adopted the works of Aristotle as kind of the foundation of their church they considered something that contradicted aristotle heresy yeah they adopted geocentrism yeah geocentrism that's so interesting that's yeah listen as christians we believe this muslim doctrine and if you're against that you're

against us like you know i mean like that's so fucking backwards yeah it was it's like it's because it's more because it's the roman church you know it's it's based on they they took um sort of the greco-roman legacy and codified it as uh the religious doctrine so were there like vatican hipsters that are like yeah i liked vatican one more than vatican two rules bro they're still alive today. Yeah. Those are trad cats. Oh, okay. Yeah. Because Vatican II, that happened in the 50s. 19? 1950s. And that actually liberalized the church a lot. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. What are trad cats? Traditional Catholics. Oh, okay. Yeah. What a fun... By the way, before you said traditional Catholics, I was like, what are these trad cats? They sound like they do construction and beat up people on the weekends. They're on Twitter now. Oh, yeah, the Pope is.

No. Trad cats? Trad cats. Right, that's where they're doing best for being loudly Catholic on Twitter. So the Vatican's kind of spinning its wheels, and then another Pope pious comes to power around the 30s. And there's kind of this longstanding...

There was a... The 1930s. 1930s. And there was... What else happened then? Well, funny you should ask. Because there was this tension between the Catholic Churcholic church and italian nationalists um because after all the uh invasions you know there was an italian nationalist movement that led to um the modern italian state

and that was a liberal state you know with voting and whatnot and the like't look at the communist. And there were communists, which the Vatican decided were godless heathens and returned to anyone who was anti-communist and boy did that lead to some uncomfortable bedfellows. At various points they've said

communist Catholics are excommunicated pretty much. Oh yeah. Like in 1949, jumping ahead a little bit they had the decree against communism which just excommunicated all of them yeah which is I don't know if we'll have time to get into it today but it's kind of interesting it runs up against liberation theology which is like a Catholic movement particularly in South and Central America where like a lot of, you know, Catholic priests and bishops and cardinals were killed because they were preaching,

not necessarily communism, but certainly economic redistribution and helping the poor. Yeah, it was Marx-inspired, like socialists. And yeah, that's definitely a continuing tension. Like even Pope Francis, and uh explicitly rejected liberation theology even though he's seen as like i mean people everyone sees pope francis the way they want to see him um he's gorgeous gorgeous he's kind of the obama pope yeah uh but he uh he's the most fuckable yeah if any of the pope eat butt it's probably him Oh yeah If you like your altar boy you can keep him Liturgical 7 So

The Because of all of this They struck a deal with This young upstart who took Control of Italy To Make the Vatican its own state. And this was in what was called the Lateran Treaty that officially recognized the sovereignty of Vatican City as its own. And they signed that with a fellow who initially they didn't want to go into business with him because he was a self-described atheist who bragged about never going to mass but then they found it

advantageous to work with him and he found it advantageous to embrace the church because all italians were catholics so they signed a treaty with mussolini and tacitly supported his rule of um italy plus mussolini didn't like the jews and they kind of had that in common with them sure they were hesitant because he was mostly raping little girls instead of little boys so as um things ramped up hitler came to power and the nazis started persecuting catholics and the vatican decided that the best way to get the catholics protected in germany Germany was to follow the lead. Well, actually, they probably led Chamberlain. Basically, the Vatican was the first country to acknowledge the Nazi state as a legitimate state.

And that led to a lot of Catholics to accept the Nazis, especially in Germany. And as soon as the war broke out, there were all these reports of all this violence against the Jews. And the pope before, let's see, there was one pope who was going to release a statement condemning fascism and the violence against um jews but he i guess he died before he could give it and then the next pope mysteriously yeah we'll we'll get to one of those okay great um he was he was editing it all night he really wanted to make that statement calling out hitler perfectly and he was gonna make it too so don't call him a nazi pope because he was about to put that statement calling out Hitler perfectly. And he was going to make it, too.

He was going to do it. So don't call him a Nazi pope, because he was about to put that statement out. Well, no, that was the next pope. So the next pope didn't do anything like that. Well, they were both kind of Nazi popes. A little bit, yeah. The next one, he did this very pope thing where it's sort of a non- condemnation of fascist racism. And so he gave a statement

that decried bigotry. Oh, really? And that was the extent of his criticism of the Nazis. And then... There are a lot of fine people on both sides. I guess, I mean, I should mention, you know, so... And this was also Pope Pius. So they're both Pope Piuses.

It's like 12 and 13 or something, or... No, Pope Pius XIII is the young pope. Okay, so... But not the young pope. Which Piuses are the Nazi Pope? The number is their favorite age. I think they're 11 and 12. 11 and 12.

So... Damn it. Oh, yeah. So I guess my point was the first Nazi Pope, I think 11, like a lot of Catholics or some people will essentially make the defense that it's like he's not really a Nazi Pope. Like he had to sign this agreement with Hitler to protect Catholics in Germany or like it was like a compromise or whatever else,

which I think is kind of spurious. Yeah. or like it was like a compromise or whatever else, which I think is kind of spurious. I don't think he really helped anybody by giving the Vatican agreement with the Germans at all. If anything, he like mollified German Catholics against the Nazi regime. Absolutely. And it is possible that if he did speak up in strong terms against Catholic bigotry, that it could have, you know, by turning German Catholics against the Nazis, it could have made a difference.

But, you know, he didn't. And then the next one did jack shit. Like he he just hung out in the vatican even when um the nazis invaded germany and propped up mussolini after he had been ousted uh the only time he got reports of the holocaust and just ignored them like of the of the atrocities going on in auschwitz like the gas chambers ignored them um at one point the vatican was the vatican he opened the vatican bank um at one point the vatican was the Vatican. He opened the Vatican Bank. At one point, the Vatican was the only country that could move money both for the Axis and the Allies.

Oh, really? Which enabled massive money laundering by Nazis towards the end of the war. Just to go back a bit, when was the Vatican Bank founded exactly? The Vatican Bank founded, that's why I just mentioned it now because it was founded in like the 40s 1940s uh yeah yeah okay and it's let's see was there something with the swiss national bank that was similar because they

were neutral so they were they were laundering money they were both doing the same stuff they both had deposit windows where you could put your tooth gold just a little tooth shaped like sort of like a coin thing it's like molars i did just want to mention like you said the pope was getting like reports of the holocaust and just like something i've learned reading a fair bit about it is how widespread knowledge of the holocaust was you know because it's like once of course the war ends everyone in germany was like oh i had no idea we had no idea. We had no idea. Right. But, you know, there's the diarist, Victor Klemperer, who wrote like as a Jewish survivor who lived in Germany, he survived. His life is like incredible. Yeah.

How he survived is wild. And it's like a great separate story. Maybe we'll tell it later. But, you know, he survived because he was married to a quote unquote Aryan woman. And right as he was about to get shipped off to Auschwitz there was the bombing of dresden where he lived and because the documents were destroyed he was able to go off and live with right which is why i say the bombing of dresden was justified because they saved victor klemper and like a hundred some other jews who hadn't been killed yet but um the the point was uh victor kleper, he's keeping a diary like every day or every other day of what's happening.

And in March 1942, this is a random Jewish guy living in Germany. He identifies Auschwitz by name. So it's like there are so many like survivor reports and reports of soldiers on the Eastern Front coming back that, you know, it was impossible to keep something like this secret like again you know mass murder of millions of people so it is just something where it's like yeah of course the pope would be well informed and be totally aware of the holocaust and it's also worth noting that there was a priest in hungary who uh who granted conversions to thousands of Jews without any expectation that they actually believe they were just paper conversions that actually saved thousands of Jews from being deported. And this wasn't Vatican policy. This was like one priest working on his own. And

even in Rome, they would allow allow convert or they they would allow conversions but then they would grill the jews being like who wanted to convert asking them if they knew the lord's prayer and shit like that and would deny them if they didn't because they thought they were faking it like well they were i mean like they like they're you know not to say that the catholic church was right to do this but people were like, these people aren't down for the cause like we are. They're just trying to escape persecution, a weak man's way to get into Catholicism. They became like Marvel Cinematic Universe nerds. They're like, oh, yeah?

Well, what's your favorite Iron Man storyline, huh? If you're such a big nerd girl, huh? So you don't want to go to Auschwitz, huh? If you're such a big nerd girl, huh? So you don't want to go to Auschwitz, huh? What's Iron Man's real name? Also, during the, while all this was happening, Pope Pius was much more interested in

excavating underneath St. Peter's Basilica to find St. Peter's gravesite. Oh, really? Then he was in, like, what was going on during the war. And the only time he cried during the war was when there were some bombs that he saw off in the distance near Rome. Right.

He didn't give a fuck except when his shit was being bombed, essentially? Yeah, yeah. Man, what a weak bitch. Yeah. And part of that's just, I mean, he was like an Italian through and through. Like most of the popes for like 500 years were all Italian. I fuck at the children. So it was later found that after there was a tripartite gold commission on repatriating gold that was stolen from the Jews, they were unable to account for 177 tons of gold that went missing from Nazi-occupied territories.

And this is after a series of lawsuits in the 90s where switzerland actually cooperated but the vatican did not oh really uh and the vatican still keeps like a lot of its archives from the uh second world war closed uh to people though francis might be changing some of that he is doing some reforms but um there was even a case where man if you get to the archives and they're not in latin i'm gonna be so mad this is heresy there's one case where uh the uh priests at the shrine of our lady fatima had hidden 110 pounds of nazi gold where each bar was stamped with a swastika. What? And the words for Prussian state of Berlin

were also stamped on them. And this came out in the 90s. And when it did, the priests claimed that they sold the gold bars in the 80s to pay for an expansion of a sanctuary. Hell yeah. And then they said like, okay, well, you know what?

We're going to purify the gold by donating. They promised to donate to to like jewish causes or something in the memory to purify the memory of the gold ingots and then the author of the the book on the vatican bank said he couldn't find any evidence that they donated any money anywhere yes it's like the reinmans yeah they still haven't donated that 11 million yeah and i'm still searching for the right the right uh recipient i usually like block all advertisers on twitter but i keep panera up for some reason because anytime i get a sponsored ad

from panera i immediately comment where is that 11 million dollars going it's crazy how many people actually like those tweets and are like uh yeah this is a decent question um but the reitman family figured out that they got nazi roots and went we'll donate money and haven't done shit about it. But to be fair, those gold bars could have been from India. You never know with swastikas. I mean, the German on it, who knows? But the swastikas could have been there for a long time. And what if they tried to shoo it away?

Or they were like, no, no, yeah, they are Indian. They just hold up a mirror to the gold bar so the swastika faces the other way. And then they're trying to act like, no, you're the dumbass because you don't know that backwards it's actually an ancient Hindi symbol. They also have to hold the mirror at like an angle because the Nazi

swastika is tilted. And then the Vatican continued their fun little game where they basically made a rat line for the Nazis after the war. Hell yes. Where they would just give a bunch of people Red Cross passports. Right, because everybody lost their ID documents or whatever else the case may be. Or there were a lot of people without them.

There were millions of refugees all throughout europe so you know if red cross or whoever like gives somebody like this is a refugee document so the vatican made a bunch of those for dr mengala among others klaus barbie was another one well klaus barbie was picked up by the americans wasn't he uh i forget the exact story, but I think he got out through the Vatican rat line. There was a little bit of Operation Paperclip involved, which kind of makes this funnier, which is like, oh, America was also doing some of the same stuff with Operation Paperclip. But there was apparently a quote from Adolf Eichmann that was like, yeah, I was surprised how many Catholic officials I went through to get out of Germany. Right, Eichmann. I was surprised how many Catholic officials I went through

to get out of Germany. Eichmann got out through the Vatican. Yeah, he got out through the Vatican rat line. There were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in the Vatican, and part of it was probably an ideological... They probably didn't have the Nazis

ideological race theory against Jews, but many people in the Catholic Church are certainly anti-Semitic and certainly were at the time. And at the same time, they're also very anti-communist because they saw communism as the great atheist empire,

like Reagan. It violates human rights to property and stuff like that yes when there are things there's like a week so i'm reading this book savage continent it's about europe in the aftermath of world war ii and like um i don't know if you can call it an unintended consequence maybe it was an intended consequence but essentially of the nazi genocide and war is that it made the countries of europe extremely ethnically homogenous whereas they hadn't been before world war ii so just to take poland for example like you know of course the vast majority of the jews where there were murdered but then when many of them came back to try and reclaim property that had been expropriated stolen

from them uh they faced local polish anti-semitism and you know many more were killed in there or just intimidated into leaving so and you know the polish and um the ukrainians i believe had like a back and forth like really vicious ethnic cleansing battle violent uh after the war as well where you know ukrainians were kicked out of poland and so it was just something where it was like because of the nazi invasion poland became an almost entirely polish catholic country so it was like uh you know germans who because like prussia actually extended into right modern day poland germans were kicked out yeah with like you know the blessing of the allies and like in fairness to them it's entirely possible there would have been a genocide of local germans if they weren't like moved the

fuck out of the polish authorities i mean you know hindsight's 2020 but it's a very interesting historical period yeah absolutely uh but yeah i guess i was just kind of saying like the fact that we got a polish pope out of it might have not been a coincidence because they seem to have concentrated a lot more Catholics within Poland in the aftermath of World War II. Right. Yeah. Well,

I mean the Polish, he actually had to hide out in a, in like a seminary or a church during some nazi exterminations towards the end of the war john paul ii yeah i didn't know that yeah um so we're gonna move ahead to sort of the vatican bank and what it became after it was started um it was eventually given the reins by this fellow by the name of uh wait i'm just imagining the uh the papal representatives pitching joseph mangalo on like a trivago kind of like look we've got a package that'll bring you to brazil but what about argentina four-star hotels and then he can like he it'll shop the 20 best prices

for escaping Europe you know you know who was uh really cool with all of this yeah Peron oh yes you know the guy whose uh wife has that fawning musical about her yeah like a bunch of uh let's say south american fascists would take nazis over and be like yeah hey help us set up our security apparatus yeah but you know that's that's what all that catholic colonialism was worth it that we could get the nazis out of europe safely so um so we have uh what other evidence is there for their escape like i know that some of the stuff is alleged but like oh no this isn't alleged this is like hard evidence they went they went to argentina or i mean they went to um yeah they did that i mean they were found in argentina like you know eichmann was uh very famously abducted uh by the massad in argentina

yeah and after uh mangala died it was revealed that he spent the rest of his life in there by the Mossad in Argentina. Oh, really? Yeah. And after Mengele died, it was revealed that he spent the rest of his life in there. And people researched into how they got there, and a lot of it was through the Vatican. Mengele actually looked up. He was in Brazil for a while, and he had an address in Sao Paulo. And next time I go with my wife,

I have to convince her to visit Mengele's house with me. These are the arguments in the McCarthy marriage. Look, we just gotta take an Uber for one hour into the city so that we can look at an apartment block that will probably not have a memorial plaque or any acknowledgement because they're trying

to rent the thing. You talk your way into it. You go in the bedroom and you're like, oh, interesting. Twin bed. So, the Vatican Bank in its early days is... Its early days to about five years ago was not run well because it was basically run by cardinals who would, cardinals and bishops, who would get there

sort of by gaining power within the church and not because they had good financial or business sense. And one of these- All their financial projections were diagonal. Dumb. I know. So stupid. I know. diagonal oh dumb i know so stupid i know but i like it uh one of them was this american by the name of manchinkas who uh well andy i don't think you can say that anymore andy andy just lost a job on snl just the post shane gillis snl days buddy you can't you can't be saying that shit anymore um you need to go to chinatown and get some food right now sorry it's mandatory man chinese

americaness he was uh um weirdly enough andy then launched into a rant about msg but he met madison square garden so it was okay it worked out you know what gets me about that whole controversy is it's like everyone's pretending like snl is is isn't a terrible terrible show already that's completely irrelevant now the only reason to be on snl is it's like a steady paycheck doing comedy it's a good union job and you're not you're not really podcasting and begging people for like a fucking subsistence wage as i think jack allison pointed out like the job at snl is basically you get a phone call at three in the morning from uh what's his name married to scarlett johansson uh colin joe you get like a call from colin jost at three in the morning telling you to rewrite some half-baked

idea he had for a Burger King commercial that's a sketch yeah I think the worst thing about it is that the Shane Gillis situation really points out who's applying for those jobs because most people who are in comedy uh don't give a fuck about SNL nearly as much as the people used to and so a guy like Shane is gonna get those jobs because he's like fuck it who gives a fuck I might as well submit to this the reality is the standard for what you submit to as a comic is so fucking low at this point that only the worst people submitting are going to get the things that are good for for that are good jobs well yeah late night talk shows are just like the comedy's just so bad I'm telling you man you look up the Jimmy Fallon Epstein monologue like when

he was he killed himself and it's like two jokes about guards falling asleep. But I mean, it is atrocious. Like, you know, the most recent fucking Jimmy Fallon sketch was Kim Kardashian and him showing each other their fucking phones. What the fuck is this? That's not good writing. That's not a good sketch. This is horse shit. What's going to be next on Jimmy Fallon?

When to drive through with Nicki Minaj. What? This isn't fucking comedy. This is just two people doing something. It doesn't make any fucking sense. Why are we tolerating this? Jimmy Fallon and the woman from Modern Family decided to go to ballet together. What?

This isn't fucking comedy. What? I'm so fucking mad about this because I love late night and I think that it's been fucking watered down to just horse shit and no one's saying anything. No one's calling out this bullshit.

And none of you guys are even fucking mad about this. You know what's funny to me is how much more angry Yogi is about late night than about the Vatican raping children and smuggling Nazisis out of europe listen some problems we can't change you know some problems they're just gonna be there as long as time continues but fucking this nbc jeff zucker late night era we're in right now kill it kill it to fucking death just the listeners like yeah they went through the holocaust and the

massive rape of children in a very dispassionate and kind of clinical manner. But then they got to Jimmy Fallon's show and they started screaming and you could tell it really bothered them. Listen, we do the real dirt in the middle of the episodes. That's all I want the audience to know.

So Pope Pius was followed by Pope John and he was kind of the first people's pope. That sounds so much like an edit uh he he uh he was really good on tv so people liked him and he did vatican wait what happened to pope chinkus i'll get i'll get to it i'll get back to him sean come on come on you want that job boy so uh John, he kind of liberalizes the church a bit and then dies, followed by Pope Paul. And the whole time there was this bishop from America, Manchinkas, who... What is the spelling of this? I don't know.

When does Pope Ringo come up, huh? I'll get to the dress to kill bit. They change their names when they become Pope, right? How do you spell it? No, this guy, he's not a Pope. He's a bishop. He's a bishop. He's a bishop who...

Oh, I thought he was like, he became Pope and he's like, I could put a slur against Chinese people in my name. Yeah. And nobody would call me that. How do you spell it, though? How do you spell it? Spell it slowly into the mic, by the way. Make sure it's clippable for mashable. Yeah, though. How do you spell it? Spell it slowly into the mic, by the way. Make sure it's clippable for mashable. Please.

Make sure that when you say it, you say it loudly, clearly. If we don't have to say it like that, then we shouldn't. And stop doing that thing with your eyes when you say it. Putting on the fucking hat every time. And the little fake racist glasses they're fake glasses they're real racist how it was pronounced in the audio book

is it a robot voice or is it a person voice audio book read by Shane Gillis it's N-A-R C-I-N-K-U-S. K-U-S? I'll say it.

Marcinkus. Marcinkus. That makes more sense. That's funny that the audio book... That's so great. Read by Shane Gillis. M-A-R-C-I-N-K-U-S? Yes.

Okay. All right. He's a bishop. Marcinkus. What was his deal again? I was totally lost on the racial slur. So he makes his way to the Curia. Pisses off a bunch of people with his brash Americanism, but wins over popes.

I guess he's a bit of a bootlicker. He also likes, he's like a big fan of golfing and living the high life in Rome. So he eventually befriends Pope Paul, who puts him in charge of the Vatican bank and things get a little, uh, uh, wild in there. At one point there is,

uh, during, I think it's the time of the Marshall plan or there's a lot of, um, uh, counterfeit us treasury bonds being moved around this is a little bit post-martial plan but there was uh the fbi uncovered a genovese mob plot to move uh counterfeit or to sell counterfeit american bonds and they trace it all the way to the Vatican and they interview, uh, Marcinkus and they,

he, he just gives them enough non answers and charm and with like interspersed with just being charming that they can't nail anything on him, but he's clearly creating this kind of, um, underground, uh, how,

how would you say it? Um, he's kind of creating his own little deep state in the Vatican Bank, which also is a private bank. It's not under the direct control of the Vatican, even though the Pope can fire the head of the bank. Sweet. How is he creating a deep state in the bank? He's kind of running things his own way out of sight, just kind of, you know, helping people launder money. He has like an underground pool of capital and then nobody's really watching or doing oversight. And then I know you're going to get to this, but like the CIA starts using it too, right?

Yes, the CIA starts using it. Well, it's funny, the CIA after, I think it was after Pope John died, they made contacts with some of the cardinals in the papal conclave, which, you know, is to elect a pope. And apparently CIA people would be like, hey, so could you get someone who's a little more anti-communist than John? Like just the balls of the CIA to just intervene in a papal conclave. Right, right. It's beautiful. So he's doing this thing until Pope Paul dies. And then a new pope comes in, Pope John Paul I.

And Pope John Paul I has a meeting with Marsinkas, and apparently Marsinkas walks out looking just stricken and said to people around him, like, oh, I probably won't be around here very long. Really? And then just a few months later, a nun walks, is knocking on the door of pope john paul i he's not answering so she opens the door and sees him uh with his glasses on holding a file in his hand not moving uh so they get some cardinals in there and this is actually one of my favorite things that i found out about the vatican the way that they test that uh if a pope is dead is they have a literal silver hammer

that they tap on his head i don't know how hard what yeah and then they ask him like like your holiness are you are you awake can you wake up and if he doesn't respond they're like dead he's dead well really yeah that's how they do this yeah there's like a real doctor there too right uh i think the real doctor comes a little later they just poke him in the head with this fucking metal stick and they call it good yeah well here's they walk an 11 year old by him and see if he looks up yeah anything any motion any response well so like no it's just he's it gets that way when people die it's not our actual response so so jp1 anyone um rigor mortis i got you oh nice uh jp1 they there's this whole thing where they're like oh shit a nun found him um like he was discovered by a nun in his uh in his study it's going to be a

big scandal if it gets out that a woman was in the pope's bedroom right right and so how dare she they at first issue false statements about how he died um to i guess deflect from the nun thing right um classic they also can't find his doctor his regular doctor so like they get this other doctor who's nearby yeah was he sitting looking at the file or was he standing up he was sitting he was because i yeah i thought with the way he's standing oh yeah he was sitting up in his bed with like pillows i see i see i see okay okay that makes sense i was very confused though that would have been i i would count that as a miracle exactly if you i'd convert yeah i'm going back you know what vatican 2 was right the popes can die standing up. Clearly God is watching them.

So there's this whole, they do like a half-assed cover-up of the nun finding him, but it's also unclear. Like they also rush his embalming so that he doesn't like stink up the place. But then everyone was like, wait, he just, he was perfectly fine yesterday. Yes. rush his embalming so that he doesn't like stink up the place but then everyone was like wait he

just he was perfectly fine yesterday yes and then he just dies in his bed maybe we should do an autopsy right figure out what's going on here but apparently they rushed the uh embalming to an embalming basically you know you flush the blood with uh fluids that will uh you know keep the body from decomposing right and in that process, it eliminates the ability to test for, let's say, poisons. Oh. Great stuff. Yeah. So they couldn't determine...

Cause of death? Effectively, yeah, the cause of death. If you guys are here to do autopsy, then why am I still embalming him? Yeah, apparently they got this doctor who wasn't his official doctor who just came in and was like cardiac arrest and that was that was the official cause of death um it's not clear if he was taking prescriptions or what his prescriptions were um they just don't know they just don't know and the fact that he also you know not long before that had a bad meeting with right the vatican banker i remember when uh francis became the new pope the current pope uh and i saw some documentary that was like very

strongly saying francis has to be careful because if he looks into the vatican bank he could be murdered i was just like well that's disturbing yeah, that's where those suspicions came from, is what happened to John Paul I. So where are we at now, time-wise, in terms of the era? I think this might be the early 80s. Gotcha. Late 70s, early 80s. So John Paul II comes in. They're're like we'll get a polish guy he doesn't understand banking yeah john paul ii he's funny because he's a little bit like ronald reagan

uh in that he was like he became the people's pope and the fact that he's like a nice guy who everyone's like fawning over him but it was actually very deeply conservative um like a daytime lawyer show the people's pope he said that this cardinal raped this kid what does the pope say not guilty so uh the people's pope comes in and is very uh charismatic apparently immediately the reagan administration reached out to him and the cia had like a meeting with him where they showed him satellite pictures of soviet missile bases and he was just like sitting there really fascinated like the cia just like kind of hooked him as a fan right and uh he yeah he was very very anti-communist um which was probably also because you know he came from poland um where communism didn't uh in in name did not

work out too well and he would he kind of won people over by doing things like he would go to a bob dylan concert and uh you know people would while he's there you know Bob Dylan would play knocking on heaven's door and then the camera would go up to the pope and everyone would cheer um apparently also at the time a young uh bishop by the name of Ratzinger encouraged him not to do it because of Bob Dylan's drug use and sinning. And also at this time, there is the fall of two banks. One of them, Franklin National Bank in Long Island, and the other one, Banco Ambrosiano. Franklin National Bank is taken over by this guy uh my michelle a sandona yeah listener if

you're gonna uh google franklin national bank do not take adderall beforehand because you will spend 48 hours going down that rabbit hole uh yeah so just touching the surface apparently this guy's sindona um he was a member of this lodge this masonic a non-chartered masonic lodge called p2 which stands for uh propaganda due we actually talked a little bit about this on the burlesconi episode. Berlusconi was a member of P2 as well. Yes. They speculate for networking purposes. Yes.

It was, it's so funny too, because it's like, you know, here in America, the Masons are like the Rotary Club, but with slightly fancier digs. But in Italy, the P2, it was, when was uncovered in 81 after the Banco Ambrosiano controversy. Yeah, they found that not only was Berlusconi in it, but the heads of three Italian intelligence agencies, along with other top politicians and business leaders. And they also found a plan for democratic rebirth, which involved consolidating the media media suppressing trade unions and rewriting the italian constitution so they were more or less planning a coup right and uh it turns out franklin bank uh and sindona was a a member of p2 he was using the bank to create a series of offshore shell companies.

And Franklin National Bank was in Long Island. It wasn't in Italy. But he makes all these offshore shell companies. And then tries to use it to move money around, trade in the Forex market. And move money around, trade in the Forex market. And it later came to light. He was also kind of running money for Sicilian drug cartels, maybe skimming a little bit off for other P2 members. And after he underwent a bunch of losses, he defrauded the bank for $30 million. And the bank became insolvent and required a billion from the Fed to guarantee its account holders.

Too big to fail child rape. And it was considered one of the biggest bank failures in America at the time. Sedona was put in jail and then he was extradited to Italy. And apparently Henry Hill, the goodfellas guy revealed to the fbi that he knew um a dude from the dude from prison who hit him uh he apparently was in prison with this guy and then he lived next to the guy and the guy was like oh i've got to go off to italy to do something and then he came back and held up a picture of sindona after he'd been killed and he was like that was me i whacked him uh but part of the franklin national bank scandal was uh the vatican bank was being used by sindona to do a lot of the speculation in the forex market and to run a bunch of money

because it's very difficult to trace something running through the uh the vatican bank and the swiss banks uh because they are very secretive and are very um quick to claim sovereignty when someone tries to investigate them so then the same thing happened in uh banco ambrosiano where this guy by the name of Calvi, who was a personal friend of Marcinkis, used the bank to also create a web of shell companies to inflate the stock prices and take out large unsecured loans. And then in 1982, it was found that the bank couldn't account for $1.3 billion, and Calvi immediately fled the country. Hell yes. And he later turned up dead hanging under a bridge in London. Oh. And it was ruled a suicide at first.

Of course it was. And it was later resolved. It was later revised that maybe that wasn't a suicide. I don't know if the head of a major conspiracy um being ruled to have killed himself is relevant today uh well yeah sorry i was just gonna say on uh the vatican and the cia another thing that happens particularly in the 70s is after watergate there are some u.s congress investigations into the cia and what this does is according to like lots of very credible allegations the cia starts trying to hide their money much better so they end up going through the vatican

and other banks such as i think bcci which are like just very clearly fronts for drug trafficking terrorism so it's like all these like extremely illegal unregulated or banks that are dealing in very extremely illegal money laundering and other stuff such stuff also happen to have cia accounts because that's a good way for them to hide their money from any oversight by the u.s government yeah i ran across uh something mentioning that the cia might have used um uh i think it might have been franklin bank uh it could have been ambrosiano to run money to the contras right like yeah a lot of the iran contra stuff goes through like you know either vatican or bcci so after these two uh big things that went that you could basically

trace right back to marsinkis who who was Pope Paul II's friend. He was very reluctant to do anything about him. Pope Paul, or yeah, Pope Paul II. It was also around the time that Pope Paul II was shot by a dude. Right. And one funny thing that I found out about that is that the guy who shot him was actually a gray wolf.

What's that? Well, right now it's the name of people who uh buy patreon episodes of choppo but um it's based on a neo-fascist uh organization in turkey um that's affiliated with the deep state oh really yeah yeah and so so the guy that shot the pope was a gray wolf yeah he was he was believed to be or at least affiliated with gray wolves yeah yeah didn't the pope forgive that dude he did he did um he was believed to be a gray wolf but he was actually stealing the episodes off reddit yeah he was a black wolf why is it gonna be black i don't know that's the word so marsinkis instead of...

At one point, he's being investigated by Italy, and he has to stop going to his favorite golf course. So, he actually dug out a little hole in the Vatican Gardens and made a little putting range until the other members of the Curia told him to stop. But eventually, he got... Just desecrating the sites of like seven saints eventually he got transferred to a retirement community in i think it was arizona

and was basically a broken man at that point where he he gets to hang out with henry hill again and all the other people in witness protection everyone there was wondering like why is this former major bishop and member of the curia um now presiding over us and it also uh it's it's also worth comparing what happened to marsinkis uh with what happened to people who were actually abusing children yes because it seems like if you want to keep someone in the priesthood and reform them but keep them away from children you should move them to a retirement community at the very least um didn't happen in most of the cases of actual pedophilia um moving on to the sexual assault allegations um they these also at this time first started being reported in the 80s um there's some of the reporters who were uncovering them they tried to run their stories to major outlets like the new york times or the washington post but they all ignored them

so they had to run them through indie papers and it wasn't until 2002 that the the shit really started hitting the fan and the story you know broke in a major way and the story at the time was based around uh boston which i guess was um kind of the all-star team of uh kid fiddling in the in the catholic church yeah if you've seen the uh barry crimman's documentary call me lucky they talk a bit about about the Boston church pedophile ring that happened out there. Yeah, yeah. It was... Hey, Francis, that kid is wicked sexy.

There was one... The Boston diocese ignored dozens of abuse reports over 30 years from a pastor named John Gagan. They attempted to... Well, yeah, there's your hint, right? They attempted to rehabilitate him unsuccessfully. And after that failed. I don't know who's getting fucked worst on Sunday. The team the Patriots are playing or these kids in the church.

That's all they do in Boston. They watch the Patriots. They watch the Red Sox. And they rape children. And then they repeat watch goodwill hunting too yeah they under inflated their payouts hush money um they uh so after they tried to rehabilitate gagan and failed they just transferred him from parish to parish and authorized about 15 million in confidential payouts to victims so after these investigations they found that um files documented abuse allegations against

80 other boston area priests dating back to the 1960s and this was like the boston globe the spotlight movie yeah yeah their investigation into all these priests raping kids and then getting transferred to other parishes when it's discovered that they were raping kids. I don't know. That's a common move for most authority type of entities, whether it's... I mean, I can't speak for the government agencies like the CIA or fbi but i know with the police uh that have committed certain uh assaults and stuff they get moved around like this so i'm not shocked that yeah don't don't read too much into it when andy gets moved to pod damn america it's like you raped a kid okay you're getting a desk job

but that that's literally what it is though it. It's like, instead of dealing with the issue, let's just move them around to... I mean, why are they so complacent? Because they're all implicated in it? Or do they just not give a fuck? So part of it is that they... The Vatican is very protective of its sovereignty. Right. And they essentially see priests or members of the clergy

as a kind of diplomat for the Vatican. And so they see them as only responsible to the law of God and not to the temporal law of regular sovereign nations. Because Jesus is smart. Yeah. Well, and I think you see that with a lot of hierarchical organizations. Like, you know, you could say

for the religious, like the Hasidic community too, will notoriously not go to the police. They consider it their job to police their own members, you know, and the idea is partly there that police coming in and investigating might look places they're not supposed to but you also see that again and again and again with corporate america

where any like power structure that has you know its own setup does not want to bring an outside power structure in they're like we're going to handle this in-house right and even if it is raping children or you know again there's corporate crimes that are uh doesn't you know just as bad or many cases much worse you know like uh what was happening with dine core in um in serbia or the u2 album that was on the iphones that was also a controversial uh corporate issue no but but sean's right though like this you know internal investigation is at the core of all this corruption. Yeah.

Instead of bringing in authority to take it out, let's just figure it out on our own. Yeah. And hush, you know, keep a low profile. And they especially don't want, you know, it exposed to the outer world because it's like, no, this is, you know, we got to do business. And they're going to interfere with our business. Yeah. and they're going to interfere with our business. The Vatican apparently believed originally that it was just like something peculiar to America and they saw it as the byproduct of America's litigious culture

and sensationalist media culture. Hell yeah. These kids are too hopped up on friends. That's why our priests are fucking them so then uh things started dripping in from uh all directions uh an australian church or people looked into australian church records and it revealed that one in 10 priests had been accused at some point of sexual abuse of a minor and some priests had actually returned to the priesthood after serving time for it really yeah um they know background checks on becoming a priest probably i i think there are and they

don't care they you know a lot of it is like they also believe that we can reform them sure because they're like okay well you know god's all powerful we're the ones who are in charge of all powerful right right the belief in higher power is so strong that they believe that even your crimes on this planet could be absolved if your faith in the lord is high enough yeah and that like you know if you have access to that power you can reform someone using it uh apparently as this was breaking there was a vatic Vatican scholar named Casado who did give a speech where he said that abusers in the church, he explicitly said that they should

not be turned over to local authorities because it threatens, uh, church sovereignty based. And also at the same time, because of church lobbying, uh, New York state failed to pass a law that would require the church to be included in a list of groups, which includes doctors and lawyers, uh, uh, groups of professions that would be legally required to report abusers. I know you're probably quoting, but failed to pass makes it seem like we tried, but it just didn't happen, but they just didn't do it. I mean, they chose against it. Yeah, it was like it was maybe up for a vote, but then it got lobbied away.

Right, right. Yeah. There was also, let's vote, but then it got lobbied. Right. Yeah. There was also let's see. John Paul issued statements basically saying and this is sort of like the fascism thing that all the abuse made him sad. And but he also never apologized or took any credit because the Vatican was afraid of how much money they would lose from lawsuits. Right. And at one point, because of all the lawsuits, Boston, they had to pay out $85 million in settlements with 552 victims. And even though the Boston diocese had $14 billion worth of property and $160 million of which was unused, they didn't have a lot of cash on hand,

and I guess they didn't want to sell their property. So they just started closing schools to make the payouts. Yeah. They had to pay out less than half of the Red Sox annual payroll. Yeah. Eventually it came out the church spent more money defending priests in court, 38.4 million, than treating the priests, which was 33.3 million right and the church also

spent millions more to lobby state governments to not extend the statute of limitations on child sex abuse so that that was an interesting thing to find it also came out that john paul ii failed to even consider claims against a cardinal marcial Mexican cardinal, who had charges brought by nine seminarians and was even reported to have raped his own son because that cardinal was bringing in a lot of money for the church. There was another big report that showed that 95% of American dioceses had at least one complaint of sexual assault by a priest against a minor in a time period going back to 1950. 4,395 priests

were accused of abusing over 10,000 children. And in some years, that figure was as high as 10% of all priests. There were at least 143 serial molesters who carried out their attacks in multiple dioceses. And four out of five of the victims were minor boys and fewer than five percent of the instances were reported to the police but it's okay because at the end they said the aristocrats um and then by the time of john paul ii's death the church had paid out 840 million for sex abuse victims oh good stuff yeah so then we come to uh pope benny and i know we're running a bit long uh we're near the end you're right so we come to pope benedict who i'm almost sympathetic to because he he actually kind of wanted to take some action against this stuff, but he's the most incompetent leader that the papacy's probably had in a while.

Apparently in the last vote, it was between him and Francis, and Benedict won out uh but he only briefly was uh he only briefly was an archbishop over diocese and apparently he was really bad at that most of his time was working as a theologian basically making rules right for the catholic church that's all he really knew how to do and um yeah germans are good at that this This is all I know. Yeah. You know, it was well reported that he was in the, uh, Hitler youth, uh, though, and he says that he didn't really believe in it. And that's actually kind of believable because at the time that, uh, it became mandatory

and he had to join the Hitler youth in Germany, uh, they were showing a lot of anti-Catholic propaganda. And so it is plausible that he really didn't want uh anything to do with it but had to uh he also briefly worked you were saying he deserted the hitler youth right well he deserted the he briefly joined the german military and he was stationed in hungary and he saw that they were deporting people here he saw people getting loaded up in the trains for auschwitz and at that point he um he'd actually deserted so you're saying he's a yellow-bellied coward who didn't serve when his country called

him impeach pope benedict so you see robert muller served in vietnam when his country called him but donald trump abandoned his country in its hour of need the worst thing donald trump has ever done it's so true so this is uh pope benedict has one of my favorite papacies because both him and everyone around him is completely incompetent with PR. At one point he made a statement about Islam where he said he criticized Muhammad's use of forcing people to convert at the sword. And this led to a bunch of Catholics internationally getting killed, churches getting burned. And at one point, there's this wonderful clip from the book. Even John Paul's recently paroled wannabe assassin, Mehmet Ali Agha, told reporters that if he could talk to Benedict, he would say, as someone who knows these matters

well, I say your life is in danger. Just such a wonderful understatement. Yeah. Look, I've shot a Pope, and people are going to want to shoot you. I know what it's like to want to shoot a Pope. And then there was also this example of just the Vaticanatican because this the vatican at this time is just a bunch they didn't pope francis got like a pr manager but before that it was just a bunch of old cardinals trying to figure out how to respond to all the media stuff so then there's

this where after it came out that there was a priest who molested a bunch of deaf boys that made the front pages it was was in like Minnesota or Montana. I thought they were signing. Yes. Yes. Give it to me. This is how they responded. His enraged aides seemingly stumbled over each other to prove who was the most incompetent.

In one Sunday sermon at St. Peter's with Benedict in the front pew, a priest compared the church's bad press over the sex abuse scandal to what Holocaust victims had endured. Cardinal Sodano tried putting out that fire with a lecture to the press corps, but he set off another uproar by dismissing the sex abuse charges as idle gossip. A couple of weeks later, Vienna's Cardinal Christoph von Schoenborn, in what he mistakenly thought was an off-the-record chat with reporters, revealed how Sodano had forced Ratzinger in 1995 to back off a sex abuse probe of Schönborn's predecessor, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer. Even mundane public relations events often turned into problems.

When the Pope attended a Vatican Christmas, the press focused on an embarrassing moment when four male acrobats stripped off their shirts in front of the red-faced Benedict. Strippers in Vatican went viral on YouTube and led to another round of finger-pointing among his advisors about who should have previewed the act. They probably all previewed it and were like, it's great, I love it.

One thing that came to light at this time is that there's a big gay scene in the Vatican. Yeah. They're called the Vatican or the Curia's Gay Caucus. And it's kind of not directly related to the papal abuse, but there is apparently a casting couch culture for getting power in the vatican really yeah and it's it's been going on at least since uh marsinkis who kind of once since the beginning of couches there's been a casting couch in the vatican the stickiest substance in the entire city but the one that has the most power is the least sticky yeah they uh the casting couch is the shroud of churen draped over it there's a

actually this great frontline documentary called secrets of the vatican right yeah and there was this reporter who took a hidden camera to this underground Vatican gay nightclub and followed his friend who got picked up by a priest, slept on the couch while the priest and his friend fucked all night. And then the next morning the priest held out like sack or put on all of his papal garb or all of his priestly garb and performed a mass to, to the, to,

to bless the fucking. Yeah what yeah oh that's kind of sweet yeah that's how you prevent yourself from getting hpv so um benedict got really pissed off about this and made several statements decrying homosexuality in general, which didn't go over too well. And at the same time, the Vatican Bank kind of really went into overdrive on all their money laundering. In one case, there were mobsters who were wired by Italian officials. And it was basically this like online banking fraud thing where they would use pilfered computer files and passwords. And over the wiretap, they bragged of having Vatican connections,

so the Italian authorities had to quickly... They couldn't let the mobsters go through with it and get actual stuff to convict them because they realized that if any of the money went through the Vatican bank, it would be impossible to trace. Right, right, right. Too corrupt to be corrupt? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. money went through the vatican bank it would be impossible to trace right right right uh too corrupt to be corrupt is that what you're saying yeah so then there was also research uh at this

time from the university of melbourne that created a list of the top 200 money laundering countries and the vatican came in fifth behind luxembourg switzerland the cayman islands and lichtenstein they also made the top 10 list for most attractive countries to launder money uh that list was made by the un uh it was found that the ior that's the vatican bank was a conduit for 55 billion annually and that was only for italian money and uh by sort of the end of benedict's uh papacy the vatican bank had accumulated 5 billion in cash reserves, and the Financial Times reported that the Vatican controlled $60 billion in a real estate and stock portfolio. So Benedict tried to do some stuff about this,

but he couldn't really... He was just kind of a shitty leader and indecisive and couldn't figure out how to do anything right and then after getting a report on the vatican gay lobby he decided i don't want to do this anymore i'm too old and just quit which probably added you could say he deserted again deserted an organization right when it needed him most. I mean, it probably extended his life by 10 years. I'm surprised that he's still kicking. But that's why he left.

He says he's like, fuck the shit, I'm out. I'm tired. Yeah, between the financial stuff, because the Vatican started getting on the EU blacklist, and the Vatican actually prints EU coins, but because of all the money laundering going on in there, the EU started cracking down on them. Oh, wow. Yeah.

And they were also known to fund terrorism. There were reports of them setting up a bunch of fake charities, or people with Vatican bank accounts would set up fake charities and use that to launder money. There were also reports that 10% of the people who hold accounts in the vatican bank are dead uh just all kinds of yeah yeah yeah implicating things that he went you know what i'm not dealing with any of this i'm getting out of here if you're the pope your options are like uh become a uh what do you want to call it become a co-conspirator in the Vatican bank or investigated and get murdered.

Yeah. So these are your two choices. Oh yeah. And so what was another thing? That doesn't matter. So he resigns. There's a papal conclave. Apparently during the conclave um they were so wary of uh the internet age that

they threatened the regular people who work at the vatican just like uh janitors and elevator cleaners they threatened them with excommunication if there were any link links to the media uh eventually our guy pope francis came and we came a lot and he was so charismatic from like his first talk um to like going around and washing the feet of uh prisoners you know doing all this public outreach stuff that Pope Benedict never would have thought of doing because Pope Benedict was probably, you know, the least charismatic guy in Vatican history, maybe. Not very PR savvy.

Yeah. Whereas Francis understood that stuff better. Yeah. Francis was, is just like a genius with PR. Like he immediately became the people's Pope again and was more, more beloved i'd probably say than um pope john paul ii yeah like people were apparently catholic donations just shot up after he took the papacy and that gave him a lot of leeway to reform the bank and essentially he just axed all of the bank's leaders and replaced them with Goldman Sachs types.

Of course. So when I said he was like the Obama of popes, I mean that in a lot of ways. He's charismatic. Everyone projects what they want to see on him. A lot of people are like, oh, he's going to change their stance on abortion, gay marriage. He's going to allow women to be priests. He did none of that because he's actually a conservative. There are even rumors that he might have turned over some people to the Argentine dictatorship.

Like he might have turned over some leftists. And, you know, at best he was silent in the face of a bunch of abuses by the Argentine dictatorship. Right. uses by the argentine dictatorship right and but he's also very charismatic and um gonna be played by the guy who played the high sparrow in game of thrones in a new netflix movie so he essentially the the ending to the story is that pope francis neoliberalized the church like he's the first neoliberal pope and in terms of one of the impressions i got from learning all this is that the vatican is in general about 50 years behind the rest of modern society socially and so it right now they're just i don't know they're probably going to be more susceptible to uh financial swings especially with all the goldman people they've got in there.

I was going to say, the interesting thing about turning out your bank and then putting a bunch of Goldman people there is you're essentially moving the criminal activity that occurs from one that does not have the blessing of the U.S. federal government to the kind that does have the blessing of the U.S. federal government. Absolutely. Because, yeah, I mean, we've talked about this in particular on the Hank Paulson episode, but it really blows your mind if you don't know, you know, the amount of Goldman Sachs people who have a revolving door to become U.S. Treasury Secretary and who, in the case of Hank Paulson, use their position as U.S. Treasury

Secretary to make sure AIG pays back Goldman Sachs 100% on their bets. So it's like, yeah, if you have a bunch of Goldman people running the Vatican Bank and they're all over the White House, in the event that you're in trouble, you're going to have a friendly ear there. I don't know if Francis was... Francis might have been smart enough to know that when he brought them in.

It's totally possible. On a cynical, real politic thing, you go from your shadowy terrorist funding bank to your like perfectly acceptable mortgage fraud bank. Yeah. Mortgage backed derivative securities fraud bank. That's like if anything goes wrong, you're too big to be in depends on having people on the inside of the payment system regime. And a lot of it flows through the New York Federal Reserve. Oh, really? Absolutely. Like the Bank of International Settlements, they route all of their payments through the New York Federal Reserve System.

And so having someone on the inside of the White House, in addition to just being generally advantageous right would be really important for that there was actually the treasury is uh in charge of that so unsurprisingly there was a whistleblower who worked for the new york fed and she wrote a book i'm spacing on the name of it but maybe we'll do a future episode but she wrote a book and it's unsurprisingly the conclusion was uh the new york fed is supposed to oversee goldman sachs and other too big to fail banks and they just do not do that at all. And they, in fact, deliberately punt on their regulatory and oversight responsibilities because they can just go get jobs at those places afterwards. By the way, if you want to get an idea of where the church is going, I recommend going to the Wikipedia page on the papal conclave for Pope Francis. And then going to the Wikipedia pages for the cardinals who were the runner-ups.

And scrolling down to their views. All of them real angry about gay marriage. And abortion. And it's like, nothing's, everything that everyone projected onto Francis. Like, it's not going to happen. The church is not going to change for a while um but it's good for a laugh if you're like uh there are popes like in your history uh that you detailed like there's there are certain popes that were like a mere 40 years behind their time and then they're like they're basically canceled by like tradcaf extremists yeah yeah within the

vatican yeah i'm just imagining now the vatican brings in like the goldman sachs bankers to run the vatican bank and then the they have to start moving around different priests to different parishes because they've been foreclosing on people with RoboSign documents. Like, yeah, no, the priests in Boston kept like kicking people out of their home with, uh, unknown with false note of notarized documents. And we had to move them to another parish. So, um, I guess we can look forward to the, uh,

Vatican housing crisis. I'm into it, man. Anyone have anything they want to add? Unless we're at 2015, I want to talk about this congressman that stole a glass of water from the Pope, but we can do that later. Oh, sure. This guy, this was in 2015, Representative Bob Brady, Pennsylvania Democrat. He stole a glass of water that touched the lips of Pope Francis. He did this twice.

He did this when Obama was in office as well. And he took the Pope's glass of water, took a sip, and then took it away. And when asked what he's going to do with it, he's's like i'm going to use the water and bless my grandchildren and when reporters were like well unless he blesses the water it's not blessed he's like i don't give a fuck if the pope's lips touched it it's blessed and so uh when they were asked like hey are you going to keep doing this he's like uh i got the first black president's uh fingerprints and the pope's fingerprints i'm good uh just one thing we didn't get to one of my other way if you the market for pope bathwater you think gamer girl gamer girl water is bathwater is bad the pope bathwater market is crazy you should go on the forex

market between gamer girl bathwater and pope bathwater uh and arbitrage some of that shit one of my favorite stories is the only protestant psychopath that i really respect is ian paisley is a northern ireland politician he's dead now and he founded the dup which you might know is currently in coalition with the conservative government in the united kingdom the dup again protestant psychopaths who have absolutely been linked to um ulster militias that just indiscriminately killed civilians in Northern Ireland. But so Ian Paisley... Sounds for dumb Ulster prods. Yeah.

In 1988, he is elected as a Euro member of parliament for Northern Ireland for the DUP. And Pope John Paul visits the European parliament Parliament at which point Ian Paisley interrupts and screams that he is the Antichrist and has to be removed from the chamber and you can watch the video on YouTube I think he even like unfurls a banner because he like told people he was

going to do it in advance and then he starts the Pope starts speaking and he starts screaming that he's the Antichrist and he gets removed forcibly from the chamber that's fucking great i do like i do like that level of protestant uh psychopath i mean yeah if you're representing one of the prod sections of belfast like that's a guaranteed re-election for life. Right, right. Well, with that, I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Yogi Poggle. I'm Sean McCarthy.

Steve Jeffries. Hey, thank you to our Patreons. Yeah, thank you. And we will see you next week. All right, bye. Big news story of the year concerned the Ecumenical Council in Rome known as Vatican II.

Another big news story of the year concerned the ecumenical council in Rome known as Vatican II. Another big news story of the year concerned the ecumenical council in Rome known as Vatican II. Among the things they did in an attempt to make the church more commercial was to introduce the vernacular into portions of the mass to replace Latin and to widen somewhat the range of music permissible in the liturgy. But I feel that if they really want to sell the product in this secular age, what they ought to do is to redo some of the liturgical music in popular song forms. I have a modest example here.

It's called The Vatican Rag. First you get down on your knees Fiddle with your rosaries Bow your head with great respect And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect Do whatever steps you want if you have cleared them with the pontiff everybody say his own Kyrie eleison

doing the Vatican rite Get in line in that processional Step into that small confessional They're the guy who's got religion I'll tell you if your sin's original If it is, try playing it safer Drink the wine and chew the wafer Two, four, six, eight Time to transubstantiate

So get down upon your knees Fiddle with your rosaries Bow your head with great respect And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect Make a cross on your abdomen When in Rome do like a Roman Ave Maria Gee, it's good to see ya

Gettin' ecstatic and sort of dramatic And a-doin' the Vatican riiiight Hey, Maria, gee, it's good to see you. Getting excited, getting sort of dramatic, and doing the batting and the ride.