Thanks to L for reporting
Dr.
Rath Health Foundation Newsletter
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22 February 2013
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Here is our
latest selection of the key health and politics news stories from around the
world. You can read the entire newsletter online on our website. To
go straight to any individual story, just access its title below.
During the past weeks,
the world’s attention has been captivated by the surprise resignation of Pope
Benedict XVI. With the Catholic Church currently facing one of its deepest
crises, a closer look at the role of this Pope, the German-born Joseph
Ratzinger, is therefore justified.
On Monday, 11 February,
2013, in an unexpected announcement, the Vatican Information Service reported Ratzinger’s
resignation. Judging by the subsequent reaction of the global media, we are
seemingly supposed to believe that Ratzinger was driven by an act of God-like
heroism in his decision to step down. In reality, however, the truth may be
far more complex.
To understand the
political views of this Pope one cannot ignore his upbringing. His grand
uncle, Georg Ratzinger, was a member of the German Parliament in the late
19th century and belonged to a political party that - behind the deceptive
name of “Zentrum” - promoted nationalistic, right-wing goals. A case in
point: With the vote of the Pope’s grand uncle and his party, the German
Parliament passed a law literally outlawing the German Social Democratic
Party and banning it from political life. Thus, his portrayal, e.g. on
Wikipedia, as an ‘early Benedict’ on a mission to help the poor is little
more than a whitewash.
During Pope Benedict’s
youth, this political “swamp” continued. His father, Joseph Ratzinger Sr.,
was a member of the Nazi-Ordnungspolizei (the Nazi “Order-Police”). The
“Orpo” was formally under the administration of the Nazi Interior Ministry
but in reality was controlled by the SS. ‘Father’ Ratzinger remained part of
the “Orpo” even during the time when these ‘nationalistic and racist robots’
became part of the machinery for imposing the Nuremberg racial laws on the
Jewish people. The Wikipedia portrayal of Ratzinger Sr. as an “anti-Hitler”
freedom fighter therefore remains an unsubstantiated fairy tale disseminated
in order to cover the Pope’s political history.
With this background it
was no surprise that Pope Ratzinger became an official member of the Hitler
Youth, was trained as a Nazi anti-aircraft soldier and later fought in WWII
as a young Nazi infantry soldier. After his election as Pope, a “whitewash”
campaign was subsequently launched that tried to re-paint his Nazi past and
portray him as yet another anti-Nazi freedom fighter. Here too, Wikipedia
served as the allegedly independent platform for this “clean-up
operation”.
With this political
background, with his expertise in re-interpreting the past, and with post-war
Germany becoming the single largest financier of the Vatican, it was
inevitable that Ratzinger rose to the position of a key ‘puppeteer’ within
the Catholic Church. For a quarter of a century he was pulling the strings
behind the scene as head of the ‘Sacred Congregation’ - the successor of the
infamous ‘Catholic Inquisition’.
So what about his
surprise resignation?
Only days after the
announcement that he would be stepping down, Ratzinger made the final key
appointment of his crisis-ridden papacy. It was the approval of a German
lawyer, Ernst Von Freyberg, to head the Vatican's embattled bank. Freyberg
was a first choice - he had managed the finances of the Malteser Society, a
semi-clandestine fraternity with dark Medieval roots.
Was this appointment a
coincidence - or was the embattled Vatican bank a cause for Ratzinger’s
surprise resignation as Pope? A closer look at the Vatican Bank’s embattled history
may provide the answer.
Thirty years ago, David
Yallop’s well-researched book, “In God’s Name”,
detailed the activities of a Mafia-linked Masonic lodge inside the Vatican
and the mysterious death on 17 June 1982 of Roberto Calvi, also known as
“God’s Banker”. Calvi, chairman of Banco Ambrosiano with close ties with the
Vatican, was found hanging from London's Blackfriars Bridge with $15,000 and
a number of bricks in his pockets. Calvi’s death was initially ruled a
suicide but the case was reopened by Italian prosecutors several times amid
strong suspicions, which persist to this day, that Calvi had been murdered.
Notably, therefore, on
November 25, 1981, barely seven months prior to Calvi’s impious death under a
London bridge, Ratzinger had been appointed head of the highly influential
‘Congregation’ of the Vatican, formally titled the ‘Sacred Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith’. In taking on this elite role, he essentially
became the second most powerful man in the Vatican - and known as the ‘papal
enforcer’. An executive body of the Vatican, the ‘Congregation’ had, over the
years, become a hybrid group with a part- cabinet/part-religious policing
role within the Vatican power structure. From this position, Ratzinger must
have had intimate knowledge about the dealings of the Vatican Bank with Banco
Ambrosiano and Robert Calvi.
Now, three decades later,
startling new evidence has
emerged pointing to a connection between Calvi and the Columbian Cocaine
Cartel. The exposure of this link was published in the “International
Business Times” in November 2012, a mere three months before Razinger’s
surprise resignation announcement and his subsequent appointment of von
Freyberg to head the Vatican Bank.
With global awareness
growing regarding both this and other underreported controversies linked to
the Vatican and its bank, could this be why Ratzinger is apparently to be “hidden from the world”
in his retirement years? As always, only time will tell.
The Dr. Rath Health
Foundation
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