What the Epstein Files get wrong about Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation

(LifeSiteNews) — A recently released email from the Epstein Files asserts that a major turning point in Vatican affairs was a 2012 “change in leadership” at the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), commonly called the Vatican Bank, which the email suggests led to the shock resignation of Pope Benedict XVI the following year.

On January 30, the U.S. Department of Justice released more than 3 million documents in the so-called Epstein Files. Among them, some reporters identified an email that appears to have been sent to Larry Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, dated February 21, 2013, in which the change at the top of the IOR was discussed.

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“The most important change in the Vatican may not be Pope Benedict XVI’s sudden retirement but the change in leadership at the Institute for Works of Religion,” the email reads. “Last May, Vatican Bank President Ettore Gotti Tedeschi was fired after Italian authorities opened an investigation into a far flung bribery scheme in which he was allegedly involved.”

“Then 47 dossiers, including compromising [details] about internal enemies of his in the Vatican were found in a search of his home. They had instructions how they were used in case something happened to him,” the declassified file continues.

“Tedeschi’s intercepted calls further revealed that his concern was that he would be assassinated because he knew the Vatican’s secrets.” And further: “By late 2012, he was cooperating with the ongoing Italian investigation. It was at this point that the all-powerful College of Cardinals, in one of the last acts in the Benedict papacy, appointed German lawyer Ernst von Freyberg as president of the bank. Then came the extraordinary resignation of Pope Benedict.”

The circulation of the email has once again generated speculation about the real reasons behind Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation and about the alleged blackmail situation in which Gotti Tedeschi is said to still find himself today.

Upon careful analysis, the email in question contains several critical elements and a series of crude, if not outright erroneous, pieces of information and reconstructions, which can be deconstructed and reorganized in a reasoned manner, since all the events referenced here are well known in recent Italian judicial history.

To begin with, IOR is not really the “Vatican Bank,” as is often asserted in journalistic contexts, but an entity that manages movable property and real estate assets intended for religious works in a broad sense, and which makes use of Italian and foreign banks as intermediaries in order to operate within the financial system.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, much stricter international regulations for banking systems were introduced (known as FATF standards), with the aim of combating money-laundering activities, particularly those related to the financing of terrorism.

On the basis of these regulations, three lists were created: the black list included countries with serious deficiencies in their anti-money-laundering systems; the grey list included countries under observation, with deficiencies but cooperative; finally, the white list comprised states that complied with FATF standards.

Benedict XVI cared deeply about the credibility of the Holy See, including at the economic level. After 2001, banks monitored all Vatican transactions extremely rigidly, considering them not fully compliant with the new regulations. Benedict XVI therefore appointed Ettore Gotti Tedeschi president of the IOR on September 23, 2009.

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The two had known each other for several years, and the Pope was well aware of the seriousness, professionalism, and discretion of the Italian economist, who had even overseen the economic section of the well-known encyclical Caritas in Veritate, published a few months earlier on June 29, 2009.

Gotti Tedeschi’s main task was to introduce an anti-money-laundering law in the Vatican that would allow the pontifical state to enter the white list. He worked for a long time in close cooperation with Cardinal Attilio Nicora.

On December 30, 2010, Benedict XVI instituted, by motu proprio, the new anti-money-laundering law drafted by Gotti Tedeschi and Nicora, as well as the Financial Information Authority (AIF), headed by Nicora himself.

However, within the Roman Curia many were opposed: some out of fear of losing sovereignty, others – as Gotti Tedeschi himself explained to Euronews – because they considered the controls illegitimate, “confusing secrecy with confidentiality,” without understanding that the absence of internal controls would inevitably lead to even more unpleasant external controls.

Thus, without Benedict XVI’s knowledge, the anti-money-laundering law was amended on January 25, 2012, through an intervention by the Governorate that reformulated substantial parts of the legislation. Banks began closing accounts with the IOR and, at the same time, the Vatileaks affair broke out, exposing to the media confidential documents and internal conflicts in the economic and financial management of the Vatican.

Still without the pope’s knowledge, a few months later, on May 24, 2012, Gotti Tedeschi was voted out with nine charges by the IOR supervisory board – that is, the lay board that operationally governs the Vatican entity – even though it had no authority to do so. In fact, it is the Cardinal Commission that exercises ultimate oversight and appoints or replaces the leadership.

Here we find the first serious inaccuracy in the Epstein email: Gotti Tedeschi was not “fired” and was not replaced by Ernst von Freyberg as part of “one of the final acts of Benedict’s pontificate.”

On the contrary, for nine months the cardinals of the aforementioned commission refused to accept the vote of no confidence carried out by the board, effectively leaving Gotti Tedeschi’s position in a state of vacancy.

Von Freyberg was appointed IOR president only on February 15, 2013, that is, three days after the pope’s declaration of resignation, precisely when the Cardinal Commission overseeing the IOR was renewed (though announced in the official bulletin only the following day), with Cardinal Nicora replaced by Cardinal Domenico Calcagno. Was a new environment evidently being prepared?

Moreover, Gotti Tedeschi was never “involved” in any vast corruption scheme. In brief: in 2012, the leadership of Finmeccanica (the largest Italian state-owned company operating in high-technology and defense sectors) was at the center of investigations for international corruption, concerning alleged bribes linked to military supplies abroad, in particular helicopters sold to India. The accusations later proved to be “unfounded,” but the investigation had strong political and media repercussions.

During the investigations, Gotti Tedeschi was intercepted in a conversation with a senior Finmeccanica executive, and his home was searched, not as a suspect, within the framework of an investigation by the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Some newspapers spoke of “47 folders seized by law enforcement,” within which there was allegedly a letter in which the former IOR president recommended using a certain memorandum as a “life insurance policy.” In reality, this was a journalistic dramatization based on a real note, but far less sensationalistic than it was portrayed.

Gotti Tedeschi expressed concern for his own safety – a legitimate concern, given the extremely delicate role he had held in the Vatican for almost three years. But this does not mean that Gotti Tedeschi was under threat from anyone, nor does it correspond to reality that among those backup files seized by investigators there were “compromising” materials against “internal enemies in the Vatican.”

The alleged Epstein email to Summers therefore presents several elements that do not correspond to the reality of the facts and should not generate any special speculation.

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Furthermore, why would a powerful figure such as the former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and candidate for the presidency of the Federal Reserve, have felt the need – with all the far more authoritative sources he certainly had at his disposal – to ask Epstein for interpretive keys regarding Benedict XVI’s resignation?

According to the subject of the declassified email, Summers would have addressed such a question to Epstein a week earlier, that is, at the same time as Ratzinger’s declaration of resignation.

This perplexity becomes even greater if we consider that Epstein’s response is practically the forwarding of another email he had received almost an hour earlier from the American investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein. One should note carefully that the homonymy may cause confusion, but they are two distinct and unrelated individuals.

A rigorous reading of the facts therefore greatly reduces the supposedly “revealing” scope of the email that emerged from the Epstein Files. It offers no new or reliable elements for reinterpreting the IOR affair or, even less, for establishing a causal link between the removal of Gotti Tedeschi and Benedict XVI’s resignation. On the contrary, it reiterates a confused narrative, built by accumulating suggestions, chronological inaccuracies, and interpretive distortions.

Most likely, Jeffrey Epstein considered the change at the top of the IOR so important simply because Benedict XVI had pursued a process – suddenly interrupted or diverted – to transform the Vatican from a tax haven (or at least one perceived as such by many magnates, as shown by the well-known history of the IOR from the 1970s onward) into a financially transparent state. And this was unwelcome.