I was a bit shocked by BXVI's proclamation that any churches other than catholic are not salvific. Even when I was a catholic, we had more enlightened priests that claimed all christian sects were truly christian. This latest statement by the pope makes me even happier that I'm now an atheist! I don't like him. I don't get good vibes from him.
Try reading Paul Williams excellent book 'The Vatican Exposed' if you really want to know what these guys are up to, behind those massive pillars.
You'll love the historical prologue where Constantine meets the Bishop of Rome, who is somewhat befuddled by the emporer's frequent allusions confusing Christ with Sol!
http://atheism.about.com/library/books/full/aafprVaticanExposed.htm
"There is no disputing the fact that the Vatican, by which I mean the clerical bureaucracy which controls and leads the Roman Catholic Church, is a very powerful and secretive organization. There is also little disputing the fact that great power and great secrecy typically help an organization to become corrupt. Has the same occurred with the Vatican?
Put this way, it seems unreasonable to think that somehow the Vatican has managed to escape the sorts of corruption that have afflicted every other human enterprise through history, especially considering just how long the Vatican has had in order to succumb to the temptations of greed and power. On the other hand, it's not enough to simply suggest that the Vatican is susceptible to corruption - can a case be made that it *has succumbed to corruption?
That's what Paul L. Williams tries to do in his recent book The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia. Williams, who holds a doctorate in philosophy and a masters of divinity in church history from Drew University and who has taught religion and philosophy at the University of Scranton and Wilkes University, argues that the seeds of corruption were planted very early on when Constantine made Christianity the state religion, thus linking the Catholic Church with political power. This was a difficult time for Pope Miltiades, but he managed to cope well enough:
Miltiades was befuddled. What was transpiring before him was too bizarre to be true! Two worlds had collided. The world of Caesar with its riches and power, its pomp and splendor, was a world to be shunned. The world of Christ was a world of poverty and service, of persecution and self-denial.
Militades died in a regal bed, surrounded by attendants. The old bishop was succeeded by Sylvester, who reigned for nearly twenty-two years. During this time the pope came to wield secular power.
And so began a long, gradual slide away from principles of self-denial and towards the greed for power and money that accompany any sort of corruption. Today the extent of the Vatican's holdings are unknown, but a major shift occurred in 1929 when Pope Pius XI signed the Lateran Treaty with Mussolini - an act which did a lot to help Mussolini solidify his own power in Italy. At the time the Vatican was destitute, lacking sufficient funding to maintain its buildings or get the rats out of the walls. Currently, conservative estimates put the gold reserves of the Vatican above those of some industrialized countries, and its real-estate holdings larger than the land area of some nations.
A deal with Mussolini was a deal with terror and fascism, but it wasn't all that different than the deal with Constantine - it's a pattern that the Vatican has not shied away from even today. The quest for financial power led to heavy investments in fascist Italy (effectively ending ancient bans on usury), a concordat with Nazi Germany that ended Catholic political organizations in exchange for the Nazis collecting massive amounts of taxes which flowed to the Vatican, not to mention deals with fascist Croats and Mafia hoodlums.
Today, the bulk of the financial power of the Vatican (not to mention its corruption) seems to lie in the Instituto per le Opere di Religione, commonly known as the Vatican Bank:
Despite its claims otherwise, the Vatican Bank is not a branch of the State of Vatican City. It exists as an entity unto itself without corporate or ecclesiastical ties to any other agency within the Holy See. It is under the direct supervision of the pope. He is the one and only stockholder. He owns it; he controls it.
Unlike any other financial institution, the Vatican Bank is audited by neither internal nor outside agencies. Its worth remains a matter of conjecture, even for members of the College of Cardinals. There is not a scrap of its papers among all of the other bureaucracies of the Roman Church - not even ecclesiastical financial agencies - that attests to its assets or accounts. In 1996 Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the internal auditor of the Holy See, told investigators that he has no authority over the Vatican Bank and has no knowledge of its operations.
Much of Williams' book involves an investigation of the activities of the Vatican Bank and those who have represented it in the name of the pope. Murder, mobsters, fraud...the title of the book may be rather lurid, but if only a portion of what Williams writes is true, then the title is also quite accurate and fair."
