20. What example shows religion’s involvement in corrupt business practices?

²⁰ As foretold by the glorious angel, religion has been deeply involved in such corrupt business practices. For example, there is the Vatican’s involvement in the collapse of Italy’s Banco Ambrosiano in 1982. The case has dragged on through the 1980’s, the unanswered question being: Where did the money go? In February 1987 Milan magistrates issued arrest warrants for three Vatican clerics, including an American archbishop, on charges that they were accessories to fraudulent bankruptcy, but the Vatican rejected an extradition request. In July 1987, amid an uproar of protest, the warrants were nullified by Italy’s highest Court of Appeals on the basis of an old treaty between the Vatican and the Italian government.

In contrast, Babylonish religion often has unsavory links with big business. For example, in 1987 the Albany Times Union reported that the financial administrator of the Catholic archdiocese of Miami, Florida, U.S.A., admitted to the church’s owning stocks in companies that make nuclear weapons, R-rated movies, and cigarettes.

[Box on page 264]

“The Traveling Merchants . . . Became Rich”

“Between 1929 and the outbreak of World War II, [Bernadino] Nogara [the Vatican financial administrator] assigned Vatican capital and Vatican agents to work in diversified areas of Italy’s economy​—particularly in electric power, telephone communications, credit and banking, small railroads, and the production of agricultural implements, cement, and artificial textile fibers. Many of these ventures paid off.

“Nogara gobbled up a number of companies including La Società Italiana della Viscosa, La Supertessile, La Società Meridionale Industrie Tessili, and La Cisaraion. Fusing these into one company, which he named CISA-Viscosa and placed under the command of Baron Francesco Maria Oddasso, one of the most highly trusted Vatican laymen, Nogara then maneuvered the absorption of the new company by Italy’s largest textile manufacturer, SNIA-Viscosa. Eventually the Vatican interest in SNIA-Viscosa grew larger and larger, and in time the Vatican took control​—as witness the fact that Baron Oddasso subsequently became vice president.

“Thus did Nogara penetrate the textile industry. He penetrated other industries in other ways, for Nogara had many tricks up his sleeve. This selfless man . . . probably did more to infuse life into the Italian economy than did any other single businessman in Italy’s history . . . Benito Mussolini had never quite been able to achieve the empire of which he dreamed, but he enabled the Vatican and Bernadino Nogara to create a dominion of another kind.”​—The Vatican Empire, by Nino Lo Bello, pages 71-3.

This is just one example of the close cooperation between the merchants of the earth and Babylon the Great. No wonder these merchants will mourn when their business partner is no more!