5 The Alliance With Fascism
Today, the Vatican is famously the smallest country in the world, but it hasn’t always been that way. Rome was the capital of the Papal States for hundreds of years. But after Italy was united in the 19th century, the Pope lost his temporal territories, causing a tense standoff between Church and state. The Vatican only officially became its own country again in 1929—and it did so because the Catholic Church got into bed with fascism.
In 1922, Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party came to power, eventually abolishing democracy and forming a brutal dictatorship. In 1929, Mussolini and the Catholic Church signed the Lateran Treaty, resolving the crisis by granting the Church the status of a sovereign state within Italy. To sweeten the deal, Mussolini gave the Church a hefty cash settlement. The Church in turn used the money to create a lucrative international investment portfolio, which is now valued at around £500 million (USD $781 million).
The Church was also given a generous tax exemption and Catholic priests were given a guaranteed salary by the Italian government. The treaty also officially made Catholicism Italy’s state religion, making religion classes compulsory for all Italian schoolchildren unless a special exemption was granted.
The treaty also included a clause protecting the “dignity” of the Pope, effectively meaning that those who criticized the Church could be prosecuted. In 2008, an overzealous Roman prosecutor launched an investigation into an Italian comic who made a joke criticizing Pope Benedict. Fortunately, the attempt was blocked by the Italian Justice Ministry, a decision officially supported by the Vatican.
In return for signing the treaty, Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship received the public support of the Catholic Church and was recognized as the legitimate government of Italy, despite the fact that Mussolini had abolished democracy four years prior. After the treaty was signed, the Vatican’s official newspaper praised Mussolini, stating: “Italy has been given back to God and God to Italy.”
4 Hiding Child Abuse And Protecting Pedophiles
Widespread child abuse within the Catholic Church has been a problem for a long time, but the issue didn’t truly come to public attention until the late 1980s. The abuse is a huge scandal in and of itself, but the fact that it took so long to come to light speaks to an even larger crime: The Catholic Church as an institution deliberately sought to cover up child abuse and systematically protected pedophile priests.
The issue was fully brought to light in 2002, when five Catholic priests were tried in Boston for their horrifying abuse of children. One of the convicted priests, Father John Geoghan, had allegedly molested as many as 130 boys before he was caught. But Father Geoghan’s superiors had learned of his crimes long before he was charged in a court of law. Not only did the Church not turn him over the authorities, they didn’t even expel him from the priesthood. Instead, they simply reassigned him to other parishes, where he continued to abuse children with impunity.
In Wisconsin, a Catholic priest named Lawrence Murphy raped as many as 200 deaf and disabled boys at a Church-run school between 1950 and 1974. When Murphy’s superiors became aware of the abuse, they didn’t even fire him from his teaching job. Instead, they gave him a leave of absence. It wasn’t until 1996 that the Church internally investigated the abuse. However, the Church decided not to punish the child rapist because he was elderly and in poor health. Murphy died a few months later and was buried with “the full dignity and honors of a Holy Roman Catholic Priest in good standing.”
In February 2014, a special United Nations committee on child rights found that the Catholic Church had “systematically” protected priests who raped children, and is consequently responsible for allowing “tens of thousands” of children to be abused. The committee claimed that the Church has “consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the Church and the protection of the perpetrators above children’s best interests.”
The current Pope, Pope Francis, recently claimed that he had reliable data indicating that around 2 percent of Catholic clergymen are pedophiles. There are currently around 414,000 Catholic priests around the world. So according to the Pope himself, there are an estimated 8,000 pedophile priests currently working for the Catholic Church.
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