VATICAN WEALTH COULD MAKE OR BREAK AMERICA OR ANY WORLD POWER

Erle Frayne Argonza

In a previous article I tackled the real reason behind the unprecedented respect accorded on the Pope by the officialdom of the USA. As I cogitated in the article, the reason has got to do with the enormous wealth of the Church.

In some previous articles, I tackled about the financial power of the Catholic Church in the Philippines, a power that bestows on the Church the status of being the wealthiest landlord-capitalist oligarch in the country. I have also been discoursing, for over a decade now, that Philippine poverty can be fast-tracked if and only if the Catholic Church would be taxed of its properties and businesses, and its estates undergo land reform.

If we take the Catholic Church as an entirety in the planet, with its diverse archdioceses and dioceses, religious orders, banks and related financial institutions, lay clubs with their vast assets, and all the social development groups involved (combining all member of the Church), we have before us a gigantic web of organizations and colossal assets. At the center of it all is the Vatican, with the 2nd College of Bishops as the top organ of corporate governance.

Without doubt, no other corporation on Earth could match the Church organizationally and wealth-wise. And no corporate group, both private and state, would ever clash with the Church concerning policy or the highlighting of church wrongdoings, as this would badly backlash on the bellicose party. Likewise wouldn’t any nation among the ‘open society’ states openly clash with the Church without experiencing the fatal backlash.

If we were to estimate the wealth of the Church, we will surely be overwhelmed by the immensity of quantity at hand. The annual income alone from all church and church-related operations, counting both the huge donations and the business operations, would already amount to trillions of dollars. By my own rough estimate, the Church ‘gross domestic product’ would well surpass the USA’s or EU’s.

How about the value of the land estates and the buildings (church, schools, businesses, retreat houses, seminar houses, humanitarian & social development, health-related, etc)? current assets from both donations and financing institutions (banks, financial houses)? gold bullions accumulated after centuries of operations, including those taken through plunder of conquered lands? These must run in the hundreds of trillions of dollars!

Fellows, the Vatican is indubitably the wealthiest, most powerful global corporation or holding company. With such power, it could make or break any nation for that matter, as it had done secretly on the atheistic Soviet Union.

Destroy a nation’s currency, and you would destroy it totally. This is an axiom known to Keynes and economists that includes myself. Knowing this well, the financial operators of the Church did exactly apply this shock operations on the Soviet Union that saw its total irreparable collapse.

Led by combined mafia-Opus Dei operations, the Church purchased the greater bulk of USSR currency at quite promising sums. Having then run out of bills for daily transactions, the USSR through KGB operators had to buy back the rubles via black market, but this time bought at very costly prices (in US dollars). Until finally realizing that it doesn’t have sufficient foreign reserves and gold to leverage the ruble drain, the USSR collapsed under the deadweight of its own roof. Simple!

And that, fellows, is the subtle message of the Vatican to both the American and British oligarchs whose predatory financial transactions and wars are now proving to be catastrophic, that they threaten the heart of Vatican operations itself. And time is now running out on the same oligarchs and their respective states.
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[Writ 28 May 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]