title: The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia
author:  Paul L. Williams 
description: Burdened by a lurid title, this is a short history of the politics and finances of the Vatican during the last hundred years. As in his Complete Idiot's guides to the Crusades and to the lives of the saints, Williams displays an ability to compress a great deal of information in a short, highly readable way. His main argument is that the current financial strength of the Roman Catholic Church as well as many of its problems began in 1929 with the signing of the Lateran Treaty, in which a financially besieged Pope Pius XI exchanged recognition and support of Mussolini's Fascist government for more than $90 million and the establishment of the Vatican as a sovereign state. Williams traces how the Vatican's new emphasis on financial stability led it into other morally questionable financial arrangements with Adolf Hitler, the fascist state of Croatia and reputed Sicilian Mafia financier Michele Sindona. He examines carefully the establishment and workings of the Instituto per le Opere di Religione, commonly known as the Vatican Bank, "an entity unto itself without corporate or ecclesiastical ties to any other agency within the Holy See." While parts of the book overlap with other recent works on the Vatican and the popes (especially on Pius XI's refusal to censure the brutal ethnic cleansing of Orthodox Serbs and Jews by Croatia's Ustashi regime), this is a surprisingly solid short look at the dubious financial dealings of the Vatican from the 1920s to the present. <br />Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  Contents
  Preface
  1	Murder	in	London
  2	The	Last	Pope	King
  3	Enter	the	Black	Nobles
  4	“Merely	a	Palace,	Not	a	State”
  5	An	Unholy	Alliance
  6	“The	Pope	Banker”
  7	Prelude	to	War
  8	A	Policy	of	Silence
  9	The	Blacklist
  10	Blood	Money
  11	A	Nazi	Spy	in	the	Vatican?
  12	The	Ratline
  13	“He’s	No	Pope”
  14	The	Men	of	Confidence
  15	“You	Can’t	Run	the	Church	on	Hail	Marys”
  16	Operation	Fraulein
  17	Il	Crack	Sindona
  18	The	Battle	of	Two	Scorpions
  19	“A	Psychopathic	Paranoid”
  20	The	Year	of	Three	Popes
  21	The	Backdoor	Deal
  22	“The	Vatican	Has	Abandoned	Me”
  23	“You	Have	to	Kill	the	Pope”
  24	“Tell	Your	Father	to	Be	Quiet”
  
  25	“Protect	the	Source”
  26	“A	Heck	of	a	Lot	of	Money”
  27	“I’ve	Been	Poisoned”
  28	White	Finance
  29	Suitcases	of	Cash
  30	Burying	th