Vatican department shares Rome palazzo with gay sauna

12 March 2013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21753860

A historic palazzo in Rome that houses a key Vatican department is also the home of a well-known gay sauna.

The Holy See paid 20m euros (£17.5m) in 2008 for around 20 apartments in the building for the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples.

Its Prefect Emeritus, Cardinal Ivan Dias, is one of the priestly residents.

The proximity to Europa Multiclub, billed as Italy's top gay sauna, has drawn comment due to the Vatican's strict stance on gay partnerships.

The facility boasts a Turkish bath, Finnish sauna, whirlpools and massages.

Also on offer are "bear parties", which are advertised on its website with a video of a man stripping down before donning clerical attire.

Bruno, "a hairy, overweight pastor of souls, is free to the music of his clergyman, remaining in a thong, because he wants to expose body and soul", the website says.

The Vatican has declined to comment on the proximity of the sauna to the headquarters of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples - which is responsible for missionary activities - but Cardinal Dias has previously said that gays and lesbians can be cured of their "unnatural tendencies" through the "sacrament of penance"...

New pope’s economic stance

Dr. Webster G. Tarpley
Tue Mar 19, 2013
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/03/19/294355/new-popes-economic-stance/

The election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as head of the Roman Catholic Church marks a watershed, since this is the first time that a prelate from a third world or developing country has become Pope.

Bergoglio is also strongly identified with Catholic social doctrine, which has traditionally stressed a preferential option in favor of the needs of the poor, rather than a concern with the privileges of the rich, combined with a rejection of laissez-faire, neoliberal, or monetarist economics in favor of social solidarity. Francis has set his first official day in office on the March 19 festival of St. Joseph the carpenter, the patron saint of workers.

This papal election was also remarkable for what did not occur. Elements of the US Catholic hierarchy, evidently backed by forces within the State Department and the Obama White House, had made no secret of their desire to take control of the Vatican and employ it henceforth as an abject tool of US imperial policy. The New York Times and Washington Post contributed articles seeking to highlight the many advantages which they claimed would derive from electing the first American pope. The delegation of US cardinals, second in numbers only to the Italians, attempted to act as a political machine in Rome on the eve of the conclave, giving daily press conferences in an attempt to stampede the 115 members of the College of Cardinals into electing an American.

According to insider reports, the manager of this effort to elect an American pope was New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who focused on the effort to install Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley as the new pontiff. Italian newspaper accounts revealed that O’Malley’s main advisor was the clergyman Terrence Donilon, the brother of Tom Donilon, the political operative who currently serves as the director of the National Security Council in the Obama White House. The danger was thus clear enough that, if O’Malley had prevailed, the next pope would get his inspiration from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

To pose this danger in slightly different terms: Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland is currently a quite serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. If Sean O’Malley were to become pope, the potential might then exist to have within a few years President O’Malley in Washington and Pope O’Malley in Rome. As the great Italian poet Dante argued 700 years ago in his Divine Comedy, it is essential for the spiritual and religious power of the papacy to be kept separate from the political and military power of the empire. The virtual absorption of the Vatican by Washington could well have spelled the final collapse of the Catholic Church.

Since the 1943 Anglo-American invasion of Italy during the time of Pius XII, the Vatican has continuously found itself under pressure to toe the London-Washington imperial line. Some popes were able to assert a significant degree of independence, notably Paul VI Montini, whose reign marked the high point of influence within the church by veterans of the wartime European resistance against fascism. More recently, the Polish Pope John Paul II sought to condemn the aggression committed by the Bush administration, but was always pulled in the other direction by the Polish tendency to look to Washington as a counterweight against Russia. Benedict XVI turned out to be far weaker, reflecting the postwar subordination of Germany to the United States. He was always on the defensive because he had taken part in German air defense during World War II.

The anti-imperialist tradition is strong in Argentina

But now we have a pope whose national origin will tend to impel him towards independence from Washington. Among all the nations in Latin America, Argentina is surely second to none in its tradition of national sovereignty and resistance to imperialism, a tradition which has persisted through many changes of political regime. According to some reports, 10 Downing Street in London has already witnessed apoplectic scenes by Prime Minister David Cameron due to the fact that Pope Francis I Bergoglio, as the Argentinean that he is, regards the Malvinas (or Falkland) Islands as an integral part of Argentina, regardless of any referendum staged there by the British among their colonizers.

On the day after his election, Francis went personally to the guesthouse where he had been staying in Via della Scrofa in downtown Rome to pay his bill and pick up his baggage. As part of this gesture of humility, he had no elaborate security and no disruptive motorcade, but rode in a single automobile of the papal gendarmes. Under Benedict XVI, the Vatican had appeared under siege, doubtless as a result of the pope’s gullible acceptance of the Anglo-American phantom of a global war on terror. The Vatican remains haunted by the mysterious death of John Paul I in 1978, and by the 1981 attack carried out by Ali Agca, a co-worker of Frank Terpil of the CIA. But Francis is signaling that he is not afraid, and is not willing to hunker down behind the Vatican walls.

Another danger which has been avoided is the election of an oligarch camouflaged as a modernizer or reformer. This was the role sought by the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan, who did not live to see this year’s conclave. This year’s plausible oligarch-reformer might have been Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna, a representative of the feudal aristocracy of the Holy Roman Empire. And there were others seeking to play this role. Instead, Bergoglio brings with him the concerns of the global South, starting with the imperative of economic development and the eradication of poverty.

Bergoglio’s track record in this regard is instructive. The Argentine military junta of 1976-1983 and the neoliberal economic policies it started wrecked the nation’s economy during the 1990s. By the end of the military government, unemployment was at 18% officially, and there were bouts of hyperinflation at the end of the 1980s. Under the pro-IMF economics Minister Domingo Cavallo, Argentina established a fixed rate of exchange to the US dollar. The propertied classes indulged in massive tax evasion and sent flight capital to foreign banks. Taking power in the midst of this crisis, President de la Rua imposed seven rounds of brutal austerity, driving unemployment up to 20% in December 2001. When the IMF cut off further loans to Argentina, there was a panic run on the banks. Strikes and riots forced de la Rua to resign and flee on December 21, 2001.

During the latter months of 2001, Bergoglio did not hesitate to lecture President de la Rua to his face Sunday after Sunday about the bankruptcy of neoliberal economics and the terrible social consequences, as Rua sat in his pew of the cathedral in Buenos Aires. During this time, Bergoglio commented that extreme poverty and the “unjust economic structures that give rise to great inequalities” constituted violations of human rights and that social debt was “immoral, unjust and illegitimate.” During a strike by public employees in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio noted the differences between, “poor people who are persecuted for demanding work, and rich people who are applauded for fleeing from justice.” (“Argentines protest against pay cuts,” BBC, August 8, 2001)

A subsequent president, the Peronist Adolfo Rodriguez Saà, declared a debt moratorium, causing Argentina to default on $132 billion in foreign debt, one of the biggest burdens of any developing country in the world. The link between the peso and the dollar was severed, and the resulting devaluation lowered the standard of living - just as in Iceland over the last few years. After an 11% fall in GDP during 2002, Argentina stabilized and recovered under Presidents Duhalde and Kirchner. Although the debt moratorium policy substantially reduced foreign debt, the International Monetary Fund demanded full payment of every penny, with no discounts and no haircuts.

Bergoglio opposed “anonymous and perverse mechanisms of speculative economy”

These were the conditions in which Bergoglio operated around the time that he was named Cardinal in February 2001. Bergoglio organized soup kitchens and food banks in the favelas (slums) of Buenos Aires and other cities for the relief of the poor. He condemned the policies that were leaving the Argentine people “strangled by the anonymous and perverse mechanisms of a speculative economy.”

In an interview with the magazine Trenta Dias of the Communion and Liberation movement, Bergoglio declared: “the current imperialism of money also shows an idolatrous face. Where there is idolatry, God is canceled, and human dignity is canceled.” For this he blamed “left-wing ideologies just as much as the imperialism of money.” Bergoglio can thus be considered a principled opponent of both neoliberal economic doctrine, and of the ultra-left liberation theology. (Geninazzi and Rizzi, Avvenire, March 13, 2013)

An article by Dylan Matthews posted on March 13 on the Washington Post blog points out that the Argentine bishops, with Bergoglio chief among them, were sharp critics of the laissez-faire or neoliberal economic policies of Argentine President Carlos Menem, who was in office from 1989 to 1999. Citing the essay “Argentina, the Church, and Debt” by Thomas Trebat, Mathews argues that, at the height of the debt crisis in 2002, Bergoglio was a leading voice in calling for a debt restructuring in which social programs would be considered more important than repaying and servicing existing financial debt. Statements by the Argentine bishops at that time diagnosed the main problems of the Argentine economy as “social exclusion, a growing gap between rich and poor, insecurity, corruption, social and family violence, serious deficiencies in the educational system and in public health, the negative consequences of globalization, and the tyranny of markets.” These were technically joint statements of all the Argentine bishops, but there is every reason to believe that these were above all Bergoglio’s own views.

In 2001-2004 Argentine crisis, Bergoglio supported debt reduction, rejected austerity

In one of his own later speeches, Cardinal Bergoglio commented: “We live, apparently, in the most unequal part of the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least,” where “the unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers.” (National Catholic Reporter, March 3, 2013) Plutocratic ideologues intent on shredding the social safety net will get no comfort from Francis.

According to Carlos Burgueno of the Argentine business newspaper Ambito Financiero, Bergoglio is “Anti-liberal. A tough critic of the IMF and the policies of adjustment. A defender of the process of debt restructuring.” “Anti-liberal” can be understood as a rejection of economic policies designed to benefit a narrow financier oligarchy. In IMF jargon, “adjustment” and “structural adjustment” are euphemisms for genocidal austerity and killer cuts targeting the poor, the sick, the old, the very young, and the underprivileged. “Debt restructuring” means debt moratoriums, debt freezes, defaults, haircuts, write-downs and other means of reducing the illegitimate debt burden which is now crushing so many of the world’s people.

A major statement on the economic crisis was issued by the conference of Argentine bishops under Bergoglio’s leadership in August 2001. This landmark statement pointed out that “some of the most serious social ills we suffer in economic and political affairs are a direct reflection of the crudest liberalism.” The state was defined as “an instrument created to serve the common good, and to be the guarantor of equity and solidarity of the social fabric." The Argentine bishops with Bergoglio at their head condemned the lack of a “social safety net” to care for those cast out by the existing economic model. They targeted in particular “two diseases, tax evasion and squandering of state funds, which are funds sweated by the people.” Organized labor was advised to exercise moderation in using the right to strike.

But the bishops saw the foreign financial debt of Argentina as the biggest negative factor, taking care to condemn the “external debt that increases every day and makes it difficult for us to grow.” (Ambito Financiero, March 14, 2013; Buenos Aires Herald, March 14, 2013)

In 2005, the Argentine government offered foreign creditors a reimbursement of thirty cents on the dollar. Many of the most rapacious hedge fund hyenas rejected this offer, instead launching lawsuits and unsuccessful attempts to seize Argentine assets held abroad, including Argentine airliners, ships, and the Argentine central bank deposits at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Bergoglio intervened in these conflicts several times, supporting the ability of the Argentine government to reduce and restructure the foreign debt. (Ambito Financiero, March 14, 2013; Buenos Aires Herald, March 14, 2013)

In October 2009, Cardinal Bergoglio again sought to call attention to the unsolved problems of poverty in Argentina under the presidency of Nestor Kirchner. According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, “Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio harshly criticized the government and society for failing to prevent the rise of poverty in the country, a situation he called ‘immoral, unjust and illegitimate’ because it occurs in a nation that has the capacity to avoid or correct the damage. ‘Instead, it seems that it has chosen to exacerbate the inequalities,’ said the head of the Catholic Church in Argentina, for whom ‘human rights are violated not only by terrorism, repression and murder, but also by unjust economic structures that cause great inequalities.’” He added that the position of the Catholic Church was “very clear” as it had “warned for some time about the social deficit of Argentines.”

Bergoglio supported justice and peace October 2011 call for Wall Street sales tax

As the world economic depression was felt more and more in Argentina, Bergoglio sharpened his confrontation the plutocrats, telling them in May 2010: “You avoid taking the poor into account.” In the following year, Bergoglio spoke out against the terrible wages and working conditions prevailing in the Argentine capital, which he compared to a form of modern slavery: “In this city, slavery is the order of the day in various forms. In this city, workers are exploited in sweatshops and, if they are immigrants, are deprived of the opportunity to get out. In this city, there are kids who have been on the streets for years. The city has failed and continues to fail in the attempt to free them from this structural slavery that is homelessness.” (La Nacion, September 24, 2011)

The main Vatican response to the European financial crisis which broke out in early 2010 was the document entitled Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority, issued by the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace in late October 2011. Although Bergoglio was apparently not formally a member of Justice and Peace, press accounts from Buenos Aires indicate that in the eyes of Argentine public opinion he was closely associated with this initiative and the reforms it recommended. The Argentine journalist Carlos Burgueo writes: “As worldwide recognized church representative and leader of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, [Bergoglio] signed along with his Ghanian fellow cardinal Peter Turkson in October 2011 the Vatican’s harsh document against adjustment policies that were beginning to be applied in the European countries in crisis.” (“Ya como referente mundial de la Iglesia y conductor, junto con el tamién papable ghanés Peter Turkson, del Pontificio Consejo para Justicia y Paz, firmo en octubre de 2011 una dura cr?tica del Vaticano contra las politicas de ajuste que se comenzaban a aplicar en los paises europeos en crisis.” Ambito Financiero, March 14, 2013; Buenos Aires Herald, March 14, 2013.)

The Council for Justice and Peace blamed the 2008 world panic triggered by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy on “a liberalist approach, unsympathetic towards public intervention in the markets” which “chose to allow an important international financial institution to fall into bankruptcy, on the assumption that this would contain the crisis and its effects.” According to this document, a central threat to the world economy and to world peace comes from “an economic liberalism that spurns rules and controls.”

The Council for Justice and Peace criticized in particular the International Monetary Fund for being an institution now totally inadequate for the needs of world economic development, citing “…the gradual decline in efficacy of the Bretton Woods institutions beginning in the early 1970s. In particular, the International Monetary Fund has lost an essential element for stabilizing world finance, that of regulating the overall money supply and vigilance over the amount of credit risk taken on by the system. To sum it up, stabilizing the world monetary system is no longer a ‘universal public good’ within its reach.”

A key aspect of the Vatican’s October 2011 recommendation for dealing with the new world economic depression was the enactment of a financial transaction tax, also known as a Tobin tax, and in the United States increasingly referred to as a Wall Street Sales Tax. The document states: “… it seems advisable to reflect, for example, on taxation measures on financial transactions through fair but modulated rates with changes proportionate to the complexity of the operations, especially those made on the ‘secondary’ market. Such taxation would be very useful in promoting global development and sustainability according to the principles of social justice and solidarity.” Bergoglio has thus endorsed the approach of Pope Paul VI as seen in the famous encyclical letter Populorum Progressio of 1967, which “clearly and prophetically denounced the dangers of an economic development conceived in liberalist terms because of its harmful consequences for world equilibrium and peace.” (Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority, Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, October 24, 2011)

Were the new pope’s first words a veiled opening to China?

Another significant novelty is doubtless the fact that Bergoglio is the first member of the Jesuit order to become pope. The Jesuits have a well-earned reputation for using intrigue to seek political power. As some commentators have pointed out, Jesuits are traditionally associated with elite education, which grew out of their desire to serve as tutors of the children of kings and princes with a view to shaping the opinions of future rulers. Even today, the Jesuits are considered one of the most cohesive and powerful of the Catholic orders. Should this situation be seen in negative terms? Maybe not, as a glance at history might suggest.

The Jesuits were founded under Venetian auspices in 1534, but, gravitating towards a greater power, soon entered into a close alliance with the Spanish Empire. The Spanish-Jesuit alliance lasted until about 1767, the year when the Jesuit order was banned by the Portuguese Empire, France, the Spanish Empire, and some Italian states. This was followed by the suppression of the Jesuit order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. The Jesuits survived only by fleeing to the non-Catholic states of Prussia and Russia.

The response of the Jesuits to their suppression took the form of a de facto alliance with the British Empire. This meant specifically that the Jesuits threw their considerable influence on the side of the movements for independence that arose during the Napoleonic wars throughout the Spanish and Portuguese possessions in Latin America. When Lisbon and Madrid lost most of their possessions in Latin America, the revenge of the Jesuits was complete, and many of these states passed under predominantly British influence. After the British had eliminated Napoleon as a competitor for world domination, the Jesuit order was restored in 1814 by Pope Pius VII.

We can thus say, simplifying somewhat, that the Jesuit order has been in uneasy alliance with the British and later Anglo-American world system since about 1770. The election of Pope Francis I may mark a real departure from this arrangement. And the reason for the change may well have to do with the Vatican’s policy towards China.

Francis I and a possible Vatican opening to China

At a time when church membership is declining in Europe, and when American Catholics are becoming increasingly secular, the Vatican is looking to Africa as any area of future growth. But China may offer even greater possibilities for expansion, and the Vatican may consider an opening to the Middle Kingdom as more valuable than an alliance with the declining US empire. There are today an estimated 12 million Roman Catholics in China, but the actual number may be far higher. The Chinese government sponsors a national Catholic Church, styled the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which does not recognize the Roman papacy and which claims some 5.3 million members. Rome claims the sole ability to appoint bishops, and this is rejected by the Beijing government. Because of this conflict, the Vatican has failed in its attempts to establish full diplomatic relations with Beijing. The Vatican very much wants a concordat or treaty which would resolve these outstanding issues.

One of the most sensational elements in the so-called Vatileaks document dump engineered by Anglo-American intelligence in 2012 was a report of a conversation allegedly held between Cardinal Paolo Romeo, a Jesuit-trained Vatican diplomat serving as the Archbishop of Palermo, Sicily and (apparently) Chinese officials in Beijing in the autumn of 2011. According to this account as reported in the pro-US Italian newspaper Il Fatto, Romeo told the Chinese that Benedict XVI Ratzinger would no longer be Pope a year later, or in other words by about November 2012. As it turned out, this prediction was off by just a few months. But, perhaps as part of the doctoring of Vatileaks documents by the CIA or by MI-6, this prediction morphed into the exposure of a supposed plot to assassinate Ratzinger. However, Romeo may have only intended to inform the Chinese government that the diplomatically inept Benedict XIV, considered incapable of defying Washington and London by re-orienting the Vatican towards China, was about to be eased out in favor of a new pope more open to an accommodation with Beijing. (Marco Lillo, “Complotto contro Benedetto XVI entro 12 mesi morirà,” Il Fatto Quotidiano, February 10, 2012) The first events of Francis’ papacy would seem to lend credence to this view.

When Bergoglio appeared for the first time as Pope on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, the second sentence of his speech noted that the conclave had chosen a new bishop of Rome “from almost the end of the world.” According to Professor Filippo Mignini, an expert in the history of philosophy from the University of Macerata quoted by Il Giornale of Milan, these words are a quotation from the Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci, a missionary sent to Imperial Chinese court of the Ming dynasty in 1601. Ricci and his fellow Jesuits were able to interest the Chinese emperor and many of the leading nobles in exhibits of European technology, including steam engines but also chronometers, telescopes, and other precision instruments. The successes of Ricci and other Jesuits were envied by the competing Dominicans and Franciscans, and this issue was still alive at the time the Jesuits were dissolved in 1773. But by 1958 the Vatican had endorsed Ricci. Does the Vatican now believe that the developing sector and China are more important for its future growth than Europe and America? The coming months will tell.

Anglo-American propaganda has already turned hostile against Pope Francis, attempting to dredge up discredited old charges that he was somehow in collusion with the 1976-1983 Argentine military junta. The murderous excesses of that regime were in fact encouraged by US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as revealed by secret State Department documents released in September 2002. As for Bergoglio, one Jesuit he is accused of betraying has come forward to deny the charges. The Argentine human rights activist and leading opponent of the military junta, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, has formally stated that Bergoglio was not one of the churchmen who collaborated with the dictatorship.

Finally, there remains the question of where this project might go wrong. Bergoglio has taken the name of Francis, after a saint who is celebrated for his humility and simple lifestyle. But there is also the more recent attempt to recast St. Francis as the patron saint of environmental fanaticism, radical ecology, and even green fascism. The rich elitists who fund the main environmental groups will try to influence the new pope in the direction of Agenda 21 and its anti-human doctrines. One example is the Italian demagogue Beppe Grillo, who greeted the new pope with the claim that his Five Star Movement -- largely devoted to implementing Agenda 21 -- represents the true followers of St. Francis today. The new pope would do well to avoid such false friends.

Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1946. A philosopher of history, Tarpley seeks to provide the strategies needed to overcome the current world crisis. He first became widely known for his book George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992), a masterpiece of research which is still a must read. During 2008, he warned of the dangers of an Obama presidency controlled by Wall Street with Obama: The Postmodern Coup, The Making of a Manchurian Candidate and Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography. His interest in economics is reflected in Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide Through the Worst Financial Crisis in Human History Against Oligarchy. His books have appeared in Japanese, German, Italian, French, and Spanish. Tarpley holds a Ph.D. in early modern history from the Catholic University of America.

Men And The Monsters They (Allegedly) Made

Book Review by Ray Palm
Friday, September 16, 2011
http://xrayer.blogspot.com/2011/09/men-and-monsters-they-allegedly-made.html

Man, the Freemasons can't catch a break.

Almost every conspiracy theory smears the Masons with some sort of shadowy evil. In the book, Man-Made Monsters by Dr. Bob Curran (2011), that apparently harmless fraternal order is tied in with the artifical creation of life.

What kind of life? Take a look at the book's sub-title: A Field Guide to Golems, Patchwork Soldiers, Homunculi, and Other Created Creatures. So we're not talking about cute little beings like Smurfs or Teletubbies.

The author doesn't buy in to all the negative stories told about the Freemasons, especially the one that says the Masons inherited the secret of artificial life from the Knights Templar. Dr. Curran only describes the tales, questionable records and urban legends he encountered when researching his work. The book is categorized as Paranormal/Mythology which the emphasis on the mythology part.

Back in year 1119 the Templars were founded in the Holy Land just after the First Crusade. Apparently this military monastic order uncovered buried artifacts and documents from the Temple of Solomon, objects with mystical power such as scrolls written by Melchezidek, the legendary priest king of Salem. It was whispered the Templars used this power to create homunculi that they worshipped.

The reason for such stories is that some wanted the Templars destroyed. The Order was involved in early banking and amassed a great fortune. Besides religious enemies, such as rival orders, the Templars also had secular enemies, monarchs greatly in debt to them.

When a new pope came to power, there was an opportunity to portray the Templars as secret practitioners of witchcraft and other satanic acts. The order was accused of creating homunculi to act as spies, thieves and assassins. Under torture some Templars confessed to evil but improbable acts.

So what happened to the creatures created by the Templars?

Conspiracy theories surround Berenger Sauniere, the priest of Rennes-le-Chateua in Southern France who officially served from 1885 to 1909. Somehow this priest had access to all sorts of money, building many projects around the village. What was the source of his wealth?

Dr. Curran relates the tale that Sauniere found a Templar homunculus within his church and he sold it to the Vatican for a tidy sum. The creature is hidden somewhere in the Vatican.

And the Templars' mystical knowledge? 400 years after the downfall of the Templars the Freemasons rose to power, learning the secrets of Solomon's Temple, or so says the legend. The Masons kept the secrets in various lodges throughout the world. Dr. Curran observes:

"Hints and directions leading to such secrets were to be found not in hidden texts, but in the geometry and symmetry of Masonic building and ornamentation, and throughout the years here have been attempts by non-Masons to decode these and to discover what these supposed 'secrets' might be."

As far as I know no non-Mason has cracked the code.

But the Freemasons aren't the only secret society that is tied in with conspiracy and man-made monsters. Dr. Curran mentions rumors about Rosicrucianism, that some modern-day followers are secretly working for the government in stem-cell and cloning projects.

I don't think the government needs Rosicrucians on the payroll to create monsters. It does a fine job on its own.

Pope seeks to start debate on condoms and AIDS

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iHdhpWg0cErNmNvWWR5D4EtVdgng?docId=be8ec61528f04f009b3a01338b7a1d47

Pope seeks to start debate on condoms and AIDS
11-22-10

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI sought to "kick-start a debate" when he said some condom use may be justified, Vatican insiders say, raising hopes the church may be starting to back away from a complete ban and allow condoms to play a role in the battle against AIDS.

Just a year after he said condoms could be making the AIDS crisis worse, Benedict said that for some people, such as male prostitutes, using them could be a step in assuming moral responsibility because the intent is to "reduce the risk of infection."

The pope did not suggest using condoms as birth control, which is banned by the church, or mention the use of condoms by married couples where one partner is infected.

Still, some saw the pope's comments as an attempt to move the church forward on the issue of condoms and health risks.

For years, divisions in the Vatican have held up any effort to reconcile the church's ban on contraception with the need to help halt the spread of AIDS. Theologians have studied the possibility of condoning limited condom use as a lesser evil, and reports years ago said the Vatican was considering a document on the issue, though opposition apparently blocked publication.

One senior Vatican official said Monday he believed the pope just "wanted to kick-start the debate." He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

For the deeply conservative Benedict, it seemed like a bold leap into modernity — and a nightmare for many at the Vatican. The pope's comments sparked a fierce debate among Catholics, politicians and health workers that is certain to reverberate for a long time despite frantic damage control at the Vatican.

In a sign of the tensions, the Holy See's chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, rushed out a statement to counter any impression the church might lift its ban on artificial birth control. Lombardi stressed the pope's comment neither "reforms nor changes" church teaching.

While much of the world hailed Benedict's statement as a major shift toward lifting the church ban, conservatives insisted the pontiff was not "justifying" condom use from a theological point of view.

Many Vatican observers were struck by the example the pope used — that of a male prostitute — though the comments clearly were not meant to condone prostitution or homosexual conduct, which the church condemns as "intrinsically disordered."

And while Benedict made only a tiny opening, he stepped where no pope has gone since Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical "Humanae Vitae," which was supposed to have closed debate on church policy barring Catholics from using condoms and other artificial contraception.

Notably, the pope chose to make his statement in an interview with a German journalist, Peter Seewald, and not in an official document. Excerpts of Seewald's book, "Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times," first appeared Saturday in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

Luigi Accattoli, a veteran Vatican journalist who will be on a Vatican panel launching the book Tuesday, said Benedict had taken a "long-awaited" step that only the highest authority of the church could do."

Also on the panel is an influential prelate who showed his independence last year when he argued that Brazilian doctors should not be excommunicated for aborting the twin fetuses of a 9-year-old child who was allegedly raped by her stepfather. Monsignor Rino Fisichella argued the doctors were saving the girl's life and should be shown mercy; he was forced out as head of the Vatican's bioethics advisory committee for his stance.

Benedict previously had shown little sign of budging on the issue of condoms. Last year while en route to Africa, the continent hardest hit by HIV, he drew criticism from many health workers by saying condoms not only did not help stop the spread of AIDS but exacerbated the problem.

With Benedict prone to gaffes and crises — such as his remarks likening Islam to violence that caused a fury in the Muslin world and his lifting of the excommunication of a Holocaust-denier — some wondered whether it was again a communication problem.

However, Seewald wrote in the preface that Benedict had reviewed the text and made only small corrections. Seewald, who wrote two other books of interviews with Benedict while he was a cardinal, spent six hours over six days with Benedict at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo in July.

The German-born pope appears comfortable talking with his fellow countrymen. The only other interview the pope has given was to German television in 2006.

Beyond the debate within the Roman Catholic church on its condoms policy, it is unclear how much effect the shift could have on health policy in Africa.

Kevin O'Reilly, a World Health Organization AIDS expert in Geneva, said the pope's comments "will remove some barriers in Africa."

"The fact that the Vatican is demonstrating any flexibility at all, and is considering the real-world use of condoms, is encouraging," O'Reilly said.

"Some of the churches there have been actively campaigning against condom use," he added. "But I don't think there are a lot of people making decisions about condom use while worrying about what the Vatican is up to."

Still, Sister Christine Schenk, executive director of FutureChurch, a liberal church reform group in the United States, said the pope expressed a principle about the benefits of using condoms to prevent disease that could apply to women too.

"You can probably take from that example and extend that to other examples," Schenk said. "Clearly, there will be many women who will also be prevented from getting HIV if you look at the principle of what he said."

Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll in New York and medical writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

America’s Nazi Secret BY John Loftus

America’s Nazi Secret BY John Loftus: An Insider’s History of How the US DoJ Obstructed Congress By Investigations into Famous American Families Who Funded Hitler, Stalin and Arab terrorists
Due to be released by Trineday Publishers
Bookstores in November 2010

Despite government censorship, the original version of this book, The Belarus Secret, was the Knopf Nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in History, and earned 60 Minutes an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Thirty years later, this final manuscript has not been submitted for government review. All the censored items, and more, much more, are revealed for the first time. A third of modern history has been classified, until now.

The Nuremburg trials were fixed. The US Justice Department did it. Some of America’s most influential families funded Hitler. Ambitious lawyers in Washington covered it up under a cloak of national security. The Justice Department brought Nazis into America by the thousands to be trained as cold war spies.

The Attorney General personally sponsored some of the worst war criminals for immigration to the USA, including the chief of the Ukrainian security service, Mykola Lebed. His troops murdered tens of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews, including Simon Wiesenthal’s mother.

In 1985, the Justice Department pawned this Ukrainian mass murderer off to Congress as an innocent leader of the Anti-Nazi resistance. Almost everything the Justice Department has ever told Congress about Nazis in America has been a conscious and deliberate lie. The hunt for Nazi war criminals has been a mere public relations effort to placate Jews and WWII veterans.

It gets worse.

For sixty years, the US Department of Justice has remained the legal shield of the Arab-Nazi network, known as the Muslim Brotherhood. America is the only major nation still refusing to designate the Brotherhood as a terrorist group. Thirty years ago Justice Department Attorney John Loftus read the Top Secret Files and was ordered into silence under threat of imprisonment. Now the declassification clock has run down. Loftus says it is time for Justice to face the jury about where the Arab-Nazi connection went wrong and who is really to blame for 9/11.

America’s Nazi Secret: An Insider’s History of How the United States Department of Justice Obstructed Congress By Blocking Congressional Investigations into Famous American Families Who Funded Hitler, Stalin and Arab terrorists; Lying to Congress, the GAO and the CIA about the Postwar Immigration of Eastern European Nazi War Criminals to the US; and Concealing from the 9/11 Investigators the role of the Arab Nazi War Criminals in Recruiting Modern Middle Eastern Terrorist Groups.
-----
John Loftus is a former US government prosecutor, a former Army officer, and the author of numerous books, including The Belarus Secret; The Secret War Against the Jews; Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican’s Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets; and Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks. He appeared regularly as a media commentator on ABC National Radio and Fox News. He lives in Florida.

Vatican bank chief investigated over money laundering claims

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/21/vatican-bank-chief-investigated-laundering

Vatican bank chief investigated over money laundering claims
In unprecedented move, judge freezes €23m held in account at financial institution with close church links
John Hooper in Rome
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 September 2010

The head of the Vatican bank has formally been placed under investigation in an inquiry into a suspected violation of Italy's money-laundering laws, judicial sources said today.

At the same time, a judge in Rome ordered a freeze on €23m (£19.5m) held in an account opened by the Vatican bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), at another financial institution in the Italian capital. It was thought to be the first time such action had been authorised against the IOR in Italy.

Since last September, the Bank of Italy has classified the Vatican bank as a non-EU institution whose dealings with other banks are thus subject to especially close scrutiny.

The sources said that last Wednesday, on the eve of Pope Benedict's departure for Britain, a unit of the Italian revenue guard alerted prosecutors to an anomaly in an account owned by the IOR at the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano, which has close historic ties to the Catholic church.

Of the €28m deposited, €23m was destined for transfer to JP Morgan in Frankfurt and another €3m to another Italian bank. But in neither case, it is alleged, had the Vatican's bankers supplied details of the individual or corporation for whom they were acting, as required by a 2007 legislative decree.

The sources said the president of the IOR, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, and another senior executive were under investigation. It was not immediately clear whether there was any connection between this inquiry and another in which the Vatican bank has been named, which concerns suspect property dealings.

The Vatican has a long history of withholding co-operation from Italian investigators seeking access to its bank's books. The IOR was involved in a major scandal in 1982 arising from the fraudulent bankruptcy of Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank.

Pedophiles and Popes: Doing the Vatican Shuffle

Michael Parenti
When Pope John Paul II was still living in Poland as Cardinal Karol Wojty³a, he claimed that the security police would accuse priests of sexual abuse just to hassle and discredit them. (New York Times, 3/28/10). For Wojty³a, the Polish pedophilia problem was nothing more than a Communist plot to smear the church.

By the early 1980s, Wojty³a, now ensconced in Rome as Pope John Paul II, treated all stories about pedophile clergy with dismissive aplomb, as little more than slander directed against the church. That remained his stance for the next twenty years.

Today in post-communist Poland, clerical abuse cases have been slowly surfacing, very slowly. Writing in the leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza, a middle-aged man reported having been sexually abused as a child by a priest. He acknowledged however that Poland was not prepared to deal with such transgressions. “It’s still too early. . . . Can you imagine what life would look like if an inhabitant of a small town or village decided to talk? I can already see the committees of defense for the accused priests.”

While church pedophiles may still enjoy a safe haven in Poland and other countries where the clergy are above challenge, things are breaking wide open elsewhere. Today we are awash in a sludge of revelations spanning whole countries and continents, going back decades---or as some historians say---going back centuries. Only in the last few weeks has the church shown signs of cooperating with civil authorities. Here is the story.

Protecting the Perpetrators.

As everyone now knows, for decades church superiors repeatedly chose to ignore complaints about pedophile priests. In many instances, accused clerics were quietly bundled off to distant congregations where they could prey anew upon the children of unsuspecting parishioners. This practice of denial and concealment has been so consistently pursued in diocese after diocese, nation after nation, as to leave the impression of being a deliberate policy set by church authorities.

And indeed it has been. Instructions coming directly from Rome have required every bishop and cardinal to keep matters secret. These instructions were themselves kept secret; the cover-up was itself covered up. Then in 2002, John Paul put it in writing, specifically mandating that all charges against priests were to be reported secretly to the Vatican and hearings were to be held in camera, a procedure that directly defies state criminal codes.

Rather than being defrocked, many outed pedophile priests have been allowed to advance into well-positioned posts as administrators, vicars, and parochial school officials---repeatedly accused by their victims while repeatedly promoted by their superiors.

Church spokesmen employ a vocabulary of compassion and healing---not for the victims but for the victimizers. They treat the child rapist as a sinner who confesses his transgression and vows to mend his ways. Instead of incarceration, there is repentance and absolution.

While this forgiving approach might bring comfort to some malefactors, it proves to be of little therapeutic efficacy when dealing with the darker appetites of pedophiles. A far more effective deterrent is the danger of getting caught and sent to prison. Absent any threat of punishment, the perpetrator is restrained only by the limits of his own appetite and the availability of opportunities.

Forgiving No One Else

The tender tolerance displayed by the church hierarchy toward child rapists does not extend to other controversial clergy. Think of those radical priests who have challenged the hierarchy in the politico-economic struggle for liberation theology, or who advocate lifting the prohibitions against birth control and abortion, or who propose that clergy be allowed to marry, or who preside over same-sex weddings, or who themselves are openly gay, or who believe women should be ordained, or who bravely call for investigations of the pedophilia problem itself.

Such clergy often have their careers shut down. Some are subjected to hostile investigations by church superiors.

A Law Unto Itself

Church leaders seem to forget that pedophilia is a felony crime and that, as citizens of a secular state, priests are subject to its laws just like the rest of us. Clerical authorities repeatedly have made themselves accessories to the crime, playing an active role in obstructing justice, arguing in court that criminal investigations of “church affairs” violated the free practice of religion guaranteed by the US Constitution—-as if raping little children were a holy sacrament.

Church officials tell parishioners not to talk to state authorities. They offer no pastoral assistance to young victims and their shaken families. They do not investigate to see if other children have been victimized by the same priests. Some young plaintiffs have been threatened with excommunication or suspension from Catholic school. Church leaders impugn their credibility, even going after them with countersuits.

Responding to charges that one of his priests sexually assaulted a six-year-old boy, Cardinal Bernard Law asserted that “the boy and his parents contributed to the abuse by being negligent.” Law himself never went to prison for the hundreds of cover-ups he conducted. In 2004, with things getting too hot for him in his Boston archdiocese, Law was rescued by Pope John Paul II to head one of Rome’s major basilicas, where he now lives with diplomatic immunity in palatial luxury on a generous stipend, supervised by no one but a permissive pontiff.

A judge of the Holy Roman Rota, the church’s highest court, wrote in a Vatican-approved article that bishops should not report sexual violations to civil authorities. And sure enough, for years bishops and cardinals have refrained from cooperating with law enforcement authorities, refusing to release abusers’ records, claiming that the confidentiality of their files came under the same legal protection as privileged communications in the confessional---a notion that has no basis in canon or secular law.

Bishop James Quinn of Cleveland even urged church officials to send incriminating files to the Vatican Embassy in Washington, DC, where diplomatic immunity would prevent the documents from being subpoenaed.

Just a Few Bad Apples

Years ago the Catholic hierarchy would insist that clerical pedophilia involved only a few bad apples and was being blown completely out of proportion. For the longest time John Paul scornfully denounced the media for “sensationalizing” the issue. He and his cardinals (Ratzinger included) directed more fire at news outlets for publicizing the crimes than at their own clergy for committing them.

Reports released by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (one of the more honest organizations in the Catholic Church) documented the abuse committed in the United States by 4,392 priests against thousands of children between 1950 and 2002. One of every ten priests ordained in 1970 was charged as a pedophile by 2002. Another survey commissioned by the US bishops found that among 5,450 complaints of sexual abuse there were charges against at least sixteen bishops. So much for a few bad apples.

Still, even as reports were flooding in from Ireland and other countries, John Paul dismissed the pedophilic epidemic as “an American problem,” as if American priests were not members of his clergy, or as if this made it a matter of no great moment. John Paul went to his grave in 2005 still refusing to meet with victims and never voicing any apologies or regrets regarding sex crimes and cover-ups.

With Ratzinger’s accession to the papal throne as Benedict XVI, the cover-ups continued. As recently as April 2010, at Easter Mass in St. Peter’s Square, dean of the college of cardinals Angelo Sodano, assured Benedict that the faithful were unimpressed “by the gossip of the moment.” One would not know that “the gossip of the moment” included thousands of investigations, prosecutions, and accumulated charges extending back over decades.

During that same Easter weekend, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico City, declared that the public uproar was an “overreaction” incited by the doings of “a few dishonest and criminal priests.” A few? An overreaction? Of course, the picture now becomes clear: a few bad apples were inciting overreaction by engaging in the gossip of the moment.

The church seems determined to learn nothing from its transgressions, preoccupied as it is with avoiding lawsuits and bad publicity.

Really Not All that Serious

There are two ways we can think of child rape as being not a serious problem, and the Catholic hierarchy seems to have embraced both these positions. First, pedophilia is not that serious if it involves only a few isolated and passing incidents. Second, an even more creepy way of downplaying the problem: child molestation is not all that damaging or that important. At worst, it is regrettable and unfortunate; it might greatly upset the child, but it certainly is not significant enough to cause unnecessary scandal and ruin the career of an otherwise splendid padre.

It is remarkable how thoroughly indifferent the church bigwigs have been toward the abused children. When one of the most persistent perpetrators, Rev. John Geoghan, was forced into retirement (not jail) after seventeen years and nearly 200 victims, Cardinal Law could still write him, “On behalf of those you have served well, in my own name, I would like to thank you. I understand yours is a painful situation.” It is evident that Law was more concerned about the “pain” endured by Geoghan than the misery he had inflicted upon minors.

In 2001, a French bishop was convicted in France for refusing to hand over to the police a priest who had raped children. It recently came to light that a former top Vatican cardinal, Dario Castrillón, had written to the bishop, “I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil authorities. You have acted well, and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all the bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his ‘son’ and priest.” (The bishop actually got off with a suspended sentence.) Castrillón claimed that Pope John Paul II had authorized the letter years ago and had told him to send it to bishops around the world. (New York Times, 4/22/2010.)

There are many more like Cardinal Law and Cardinal Castrillón in the hierarchy, aging men who have no life experience with children and show not the slightest regard or empathy for them. They claim it their duty to protect the “unborn child” but offer no protection to the children in their schools and parishes.

They themselves are called “Father” but they father no one. They do not reside in households or families. They live in an old-boys network, jockeying for power and position, dedicated to the Holy Mother Church that feeds, houses, and adorns them throughout their lives.

From their heady heights, popes and bishops cannot hear the cries of children. In any case, the church belongs not to little children but to the bedecked oligarchs.

The damage done to sexual victims continues to go unnoticed: the ensuing years of depression, drug addiction, alcoholism, panic attacks, sexual dysfunction, and even mental breakdown and suicide—all these terrible aftereffects of child rape seem to leave popes and bishops more or less unruffled.

Circling the Wagons

The Catholic hierarchy managed to convince itself that the prime victim in this dismal saga is the church itself. In 2010 it came to light that, while operating as John Paul’s über-hit man, Pope Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger) had provided cover and protection to several of the worst predator priests. The scandal was now at the pope’s door---exactly where it should have been many years earlier during John Paul’s reign.

The Vatican’s response was predictable. The hierarchy circled the wagons to defend pope and church from outside “enemies.” The cardinals and bishops railed furiously at critics who “assault” the church and, in the words of the archbishop of Paris, subject it to “a smear campaign.” Benedict himself blamed secularism and misguided applications of Vatican 2’s aggiornamento as contributing to the “context” of sexual abuse. Reform-minded liberalism made us do it, he seemed to be saying.

But this bristling Easter counterattack by the hierarchy did not play well. Church authorities came off looking like insular, arrogant elites who were unwilling to own up to a horrid situation largely of their own making.

Meanwhile the revelations continued. A bishop in Ireland resigned admitting he had covered up child abuse cases. Bishops in Germany and Belgium stepped down after confessing to charges that they themselves had abused minors. And new allegations were arising in Chile, Norway, Brazil, Italy, France, and Mexico.

Then, a fortnight after Easter, the Vatican appeared to change course and for the first time issued a directive urging bishops to report abuse cases to civil authorities “if required by local law.” At the same time, Pope Benedict held brief meetings with survivor groups and issued sympathetic statements about their plight.

For many of the victims, the pontiff’s overtures and apologies were too little, too late. Their feeling was that if the Vatican really wanted to make amends, it should cooperate fully with law enforcement authorities and stop obstructing justice; it should ferret out abusive clergy and not wait until cases are publicized by others; and it should make public the church’s many thousands of still secret reports on priests and bishops.

In the midst of all this, some courageous clergy do speak out. At a Sunday mass in a Catholic church outside Springfield, Massachusetts, the Rev. James Scahill delivered a telling sermon to his congregation (New York Times, 4/12/10): “We must personally and collectively declare that we very much doubt the veracity of the pope and those of church authority who are defending him. It is beginning to become evident that for decades, if not centuries, church leadership covered up the abuse of children and minors to protect its institutional image and the image of priesthood”

The abusive priests, Scahill went on, were “felons.” He had “severe doubt” about the Vatican’s claims of innocent ignorance. “If by any slimmest of chance the pope and all his bishops didn’t know-–they all should resign on the basis of sheer and complete ignorance, incompetence, and irresponsibility.”

How did Father Scahill’s suburban Catholic parishioners receive his scorching remarks? One or two walked out. The rest gave him a standing ovation.

Michael Parenti’s latest book is God and His Demons (2010) which deals with all sorts of theocratic misconduct and misbelief. For further information about his work, see:

http://www.michaelparenti.org/

Pope Vows To Get Church Pedophilia Down To Acceptable Levels

http://www.theonion.com/articles/pope-vows-to-get-church-pedophilia-down-to-accepta,17201/

Pope Vows To Get Church Pedophilia Down To Acceptable Levels
April 5, 2010 | ISSUE 46•14

VATICAN CITY — Calling the behavior shameful, sinful, and much more frequent than the Vatican was comfortable with, Pope Benedict XVI vowed this week to bring the widespread pedophilia within the Roman Catholic Church down to a more manageable level.

Addressing thousands gathered at St. Peter's Square on Easter Sunday, the pontiff offered his "most humble apologies" to abuse victims, and pledged to reduce the total number of molestations by 60 percent over the next five years.

"This is absolutely unacceptable," Pope Benedict said. "It seems a weakening of faith in God has prevented our priests from exercising moderation when sexually abusing helpless minors."

"And let me remind our clergy of the holy vows they all took when they entered the priesthood," he continued. "They should know that they're only allowed one small child every other month."

The pope said he was deeply disappointed to learn that the number of children sexually abused by priests was almost 10 times beyond the allowable limit clearly outlined in church doctrine. Admitting for the first time in public that the overindulgent touching of "tender, tender young flesh" had become a full-blown crisis, the Holy Father vowed to implement new reforms to bring the pedophilia rate back down to five children per 1,000 clergy.

"The truth is there will always be a little bit of molestation—it's simply unavoidable," Vatican spokesperson Rev. Federico Lombardi said. "But the fact that young boys have gotten much more attractive over the past few decades is no excuse for the blatant defiance of church limits that have been in place for centuries."

"The majority of priests don't want to molest kids at all," he added. "But for those who do, we must make sure they're doing it at a reasonable rate."

Following the pope's speech, the Vatican released a statement outlining its plan to reduce pedophilia. Starting next year, specially trained cardinals will make unannounced visits to inspect and observe random churches in order to ensure they are not going beyond diocese-wide molestation caps. The inspector-cardinals will grade each parish based on long, private interviews with altar boys in darkened church basements, and careful observation of priests' sexual activity.

These senior officials will also have the authority to enforce harsh punishments for any clergy member violating his allotment of pedophilia.

"If a priest goes even one child over the limit, there will be hell to pay," said Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for Bishops Giovanni Battista Re, explaining the Vatican's new "Three Strikes, You're Out Rule." "After the third offense, the offending priest will immediately be moved to another parish. This will give officials time to investigate the case, and will act as an effective deterrent since it usually takes months for priests to gain the trust of the new children."

As a "goodwill measure," Cardinal Re said all churches will also be required to display a sign next to the altar showing the number of days since the last molestation.

Criticism of the pope's new plan has already begun to emerge from within the Catholic Church itself. Rev. Walter Moore, a pastor at St. Peter's in Chicago, questioned the Vatican's methodology in calculating the molestation rates, saying the church's inconsistent definition of pedophilia may have skewed the numbers.

"Is it technically pedophilia if the child's clothes are fully on the entire time? What if he's asleep when it happens?" Moore said. "It's time we had some clear guidance from Rome on this issue. For instance, the church counts it as one incident regardless of whether the child is molested multiple times by the same individual or by two priests at once. That's just plain wrong."

"Plus, if it's supposed to be a special secret between the priest and the boy, is it even any of the church's business in the first place?" he added. "Maybe Brandon is just trying to get attention."

The Vatican would not release details of the pope's upcoming world tour, in which he plans to clear up any confusion on the matter by personally demonstrating what constitutes molestation.

Pope: Scientific analysis done on St. Paul's bones

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062801356.html

Pope: Scientific analysis done on St. Paul's bones
By NICOLE WINFIELD
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 28, 2009

ROME -- The first-ever scientific tests on what are believed to be the remains of the Apostle Paul "seem to conclude" that they do indeed belong to the Roman Catholic saint, Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday.

Archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of St. Paul.

Benedict said scientists had conducted carbon dating tests on bone fragments found inside the sarcophagus and confirmed that they date from the first or second century.

"This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul," Benedict said, announcing the findings at a service in the basilica to mark the end of the Vatican's Paoline year, in honor of the apostle.

Paul, along with Peter, are the two main figures known for spreading the Christian faith after the death of Christ.

According to tradition, St. Paul, also known as the apostle of the Gentiles, was beheaded in Rome in the 1st century during the persecution of early Christians by Roman emperors. Popular belief holds that bone fragments from his head are in another Rome basilica, St. John Lateran, with his other remains inside the sarcophagus.

The pope said that when archaeologists opened the sarcophagus, they discovered alongside the bone fragments some grains of incense, a "precious" piece of purple linen with gold sequins and a blue fabric with linen filaments.

Vatican archaeologists in 2002 began excavating the 8-foot-long coffin, which dates from at least A.D. 390 and was buried under the basilica's main altar. The decision to unearth it was made after pilgrims who came to Rome during the Roman Catholic Church's 2000 Jubilee year expressed disappointment at finding that the saint's tomb - buried under layers of plaster and further hidden by an iron grate - could not be visited or touched.

The top of the coffin has small openings - subsequently covered with mortar - because in ancient times Christians would insert offerings or try to touch the remains.

The basilica stands at the site of two 4th-century churches - including one destroyed by a fire in 1823 that had left the tomb visible, first above ground and later in a crypt. After the fire, the crypt was filled with earth and covered by a new altar. A slab of cracked marble with the words "Paul apostle martyr" in Latin was also found embedded in the floor above the tomb.

Monday is the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, a major feast day for the Roman Catholic Church, during which the pope will bestow a woolen pallium, or scarf, on all the new archbishops he has recently named. The pallium is a band of white wool decorated with black crosses that is a sign of pastoral authority and a symbol of the archbishops' bond with the pope.

At the end of Sunday's service in the warm basilica, the 82-year-old Benedict lost his balance slightly as he slipped on a step on the altar, and was steadied by one of his assistants who was by his side.

'Angels & Demons' tour illuminates Rome

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2009-05-14-rome-angels-and-demons-tour_N.htm

'Angels & Demons' tour illuminates the charms of Rome
By Chris Gray Faust, USA TODAY
5-14-9

VATICAN CITY — The faithful stream into St. Peter's Square on Christianity's holiest day, engulfing the Egyptian obelisk that centers the piazza so carefully planned by 17th-century sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Stern despite their colorful striped uniforms, members of the Swiss Guards direct those in the Easter crowd fortunate enough to procure free tickets to chairs, while others stand, waiting for a glimpse of papal pomp.

It's a scene that could be taken straight out of Angels & Demons, author Dan Brown's best-selling prequel to the hugely successful — and highly controversial — novel The Da Vinci Code. Just like that book, Angels & Demons has been made into a movie starring Tom Hanks as symbologist Robert Langdon, which opens today around the world.

Set in Vatican City and Rome, Angels & Demons pits Langdon (paired with an intelligent and attractive female sidekick, Vittoria Vetra) against a modern incarnation of an ancient foe of the Roman Catholic Church, the Illuminati. In the book, Catholics fill St. Peter's Square, awaiting the announcement of Il Conclave, the assembly of cardinals charged with selecting a new pope. Little do they know they are sitting atop a time bomb — and that four cardinals in line for the job are being murdered at sites around Rome.

It's not a tale you'd expect the Catholic Church to embrace. And indeed, several prominent religious leaders — including Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights president Bill Donohue— have come out against the film (although the church itself has not issued a boycott call).

No matter. Catholic indignation did nothing to stop The Da Vinci Code movie from grossing more than $758 million in 2006.

And it did nothing to stop Sony Pictures from shooting key scenes of the movie in Rome, which will only enhance the city's allure for Angels & Demons fans. Among the sites from the book that will be seen on film: the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Castel Sant'Angelo and its Pasetto di Borga, the secret passageway that connects the fortress with the Vatican.

The Vatican itself is not on film, nor are the interiors of two churches prominently featured in the book, Santa Maria del Popolo or Santa Maria della Vittoria; the Rome diocese said last summer that it had banned filming there because of the movie's themes. Reggia di Caserta, an 18th-century royal palace outside Naples and south of Rome, stood in for the Vatican in some scenes (and an elaborate replica was built on a Los Angeles studio lot).

Executive producer Todd Hallowell says the production didn't bother asking permission to film at the Vatican, as the church never grants it. He promises that viewers will feel as if they are within the Vatican, even if the church itself wasn't crazy about the filming.

Says Hallowell: "Given the fact that The Da Vinci Code was perhaps not their favorite movie, the concept of a sequel being shot in their backyard was not the best news they had all week."

Mapping out the book

On the steps outside Santa Maria del Popolo — the site of the book's first element-themed murder, Earth— about 30 people gather for Angels & Demons guided tours. While the operating company, Angelsanddemons.it, bills it as "the official Angels & Demons tour," several tour operators in Rome offer a similar version.

The group is split, and guide Graham Hannaford, 26, passes out a map of Rome, a replica of the one from Angels & Demons. Fewer than half the people on Hannaford's tour have read the book, but he carries it with him for reference (and occasionally, to debunk the poetic license that Brown sometimes took with Roman geography).

The first stop on the "Path of Illumination" that Brown has devised through Rome is the Chigi Chapel inside the church. Designed by Renaissance master Raphael and filled with sculptures by Bernini — the baroque wunderkind whom Brown cheekily portrays as a secret Illuminati mastermind — the Chapel is an artistic masterpiece, albeit one that might fall lower on a typical tourist itinerary.

Subsequent stops in the four-hour tour call at Roman sites both familiar and off-the-beaten-track: St. Peter's Square, the gloriously elaborate Santa Maria della Vittoria and the always-hopping Piazza Navona, sites of the book's Air, Fire and Water murders, respectively. It concludes at the imposing Castel Sant'Angelo, where the Hassassin in Brown's book keeps Vittoria captive in an alleged ancient Illuminati lair.

Jennifer Carroll, 32, of French Settlement, La., takes pictures at nearly every stop.

"My book club will kill me if I don't," she says.

Carroll and her husband, Basil, attended the papal Easter Mass and bought rosaries for family at the Vatican, including one for their daughter to use at her First Communion. Carroll had some friends who felt The Da Vinci Code was anti-Catholic and others who felt the murders in Angels & Demons were too violent. But the controversy has been overblown, she says.

"It's fiction, it's OK," she says. "You could get offended by just about anything if you wanted to."

Hannaford calls for a coffee break next to the Pantheon. With Roman tourism down, the Napa, Calif., native had questioned returning after Christmas, but he figured the release of Angels & Demons could trigger the same bump in visitors that Paris received from The Da Vinci Code.

The tour is not the company's best seller — visitors tend to hire guides to the immense Vatican Museum more often, Hannaford says. But he thinks that Angels & Demons provides a good road map to Rome's charms.

"The book does capture the spirit of Rome," he says. "There are a lot of chaotic things going on, but it all pulls together."

Seeing the story

Of course, visitors don't have to take a guided tour to see the parts of Rome explored in Angels & Demons. But some sites do require planning ahead.

Such is the case with the Vatican Scavi, the necropolis under St. Peter's Basilica said to contain the grave of Peter, the founder of the Christian church. In the book, Langdon chases the camerlengo (played by Ewan McGregor in the film) through the subterranean passages to find the hidden canister of dangerous antimatter.

In real life, the Vatican Excavations Office carefully controls the number of people allowed to walk through the Scavi. Only 12 people are allowed through at a time, with a limit of 250 visitors a day. Travel agents and tour guides are not allowed to buy tickets; visitors must petition through e-mail or fax months ahead of time to secure a spot.

The machinations are well worth it. Undertaken in 1939 through 1950, the excavations unearthed pagan and early Christian tombs from a cemetery that existed on the site before Constantine built the original St. Peter's Basilica around 322. The corridors between the tombs are narrow and uneven, and the air is slightly dank. But what you'll see are remarkably well-preserved frescoes and mosaics that provide a glimpse into the time when Christianity was a religious newcomer.

Back above ground, a Vatican trip is not complete without visiting the Sistine Chapel, although doing so requires negotiating the crowded Vatican Museums. With the masses of people snapping photos of Michelangelo's famed ceiling, it's hard to imagine the Sistine Chapel as a quiet place of deliberation. But this is where Il Conclave chooses papal succession, broadcasting their results through smoke from a chimney brought in for the occasion.

A better job of crowd control takes place at the Galleria Borghese, where visitors are limited to two-hour time blocks. While the museum — set amid leafy Villa Borghese, Rome's version of Central Park— is not referenced in Angels & Demons, it's a must-stop for readers who are curious about Bernini's other works. Some of his most famous pieces are here, including The Rape of Proserpina, his determined David and Truth Unveiled by Time, created for himself.

The latter sculpture was composed when Bernini — a papal darling who not only designed the colonnades of St. Peter's Square but also came up with the idea for the 10 angels guarding Ponte Sant'Angelo, the bridge between Rome and Vatican City — was out of favor. Could it be that during this time, as Brown suggests, Bernini joined disgruntled intellectuals such as Galileo in the Illuminati ranks?

Vatican tour guide Joseph Mancinelli dismisses such speculation. "It is just a story, it has nothing to do with Christianity," he says of Angels & Demons. "You must believe what is true, not what people say in a story."

Follow Chris Gray Faust at twitter.com/CAroundTheWorld.

IF YOU GO

Getting there: Rome's main airport, Leonardo da Vinci, is known by its old name, Fiumicino. The Leonardo Express runs shuttles to Rome's Termini rail station every 30 minutes ($15, trenitalia.com). Taxis or car service to and from the airport costs about $60.

Lodging: The Westin Excelsior Rome is offering a two-night Angels & Demons package that includes a private or group movie tour, as well as 20% off at the hotel's restaurants and bars. The promotion starts at $444 a night and runs through 2010 (westin.com/angelsanddemons.com). The venerable Hotel Hassler at the top of the Spanish Steps also has a three-night package that includes a tour starting at $2,323 (hotelhassler.com). Or live like the fictional Robert Langdon, who stayed at Hotel Bernini on Plaza Barberini (Bernini's Triton fountain is right in front). Rates start at $395 (berninibristol.com).

Generally, a cheaper way to stay in Rome is to rent an apartment through a service such as venere.com. The Beehive, with dorm beds starting at $34 and private rooms at $109, is the No. 1-ranked budget hotel on Trip Advisor (the-beehive.com).

Dining: Rome's better restaurants are in alleys away from main tourist streets. Near the Pantheon, try the pasta at Osteria del Sostegno (primi, $8-$11, secondi, $12-$20). Osteria dell'Angelo, about 10 minutes from the Vatican on Via G. Bettolo, has an outstanding version of the Roman classic spaghetti carbonara at similar prices. Do as the Romans do and enjoy an evening gelato; Gelataria della Palma, also near the Pantheon, has 100-plus flavors.

Tours: The "Official Angels & Demons Tour" is four hours and includes some bus transport, $76 (angelsanddemons.it). To book tickets to the Vatican Scavi, e-mail the Excavations Office several months in advance; the visit costs $14 (scavi@fsp.va). Advance tickets to Vatican Museums can be purchased online for $19 (mv.vatican.va); private companies such as Context Rome also have tours with art historians (contexttravel.com/rome). The Galleria Borghese requires advance reservations for its two-hour blocks for $12 (ticketeria.it).

Information: en.turismoroma.it

Tyler Durden Strikes Again Part II

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-odd-religious-broadcast-gone-wild,0,2049291.story

Philly cable glitch switches Vatican service broadcast to 'Girls Gone Wild' ad
By Associated Press
April 11, 2009

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A Philadelphia cable network's early morning broadcast of a Good Friday service at the Vatican abruptly changed to something wildly different — a 30-second "Girls Gone Wild" ad.

Comcast spokesman Jeff Alexander says the 2 a.m. Friday programming glitch was due to a required test of the Emergency Alert System. He says such tests are usually done in the overnight hours.

The test automatically tunes viewers to a preselected channel that would provide information in the event of an emergency. But during tests, the channel airs regular programming, which in this case included a paid advertisement for the racy videos.

Alexander says the problem affected the network's entire local area, but only one person called to complain.
___
Information from: Philadelphia Daily News, http://www.philly.com

Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6040521.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=2015164

April 6, 2009
Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin, says Vatican
Richard Owen in Rome

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.

The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.

The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.

Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.

However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

Dr Frale said that among other alleged offences such as sodomy, the Knights Templar had been accused of worshipping idols, in particular a “bearded figure”. In reality however the object they had secretly venerated was the Shroud.

They had rescued it to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of heretical groups such as the Cathars, who claimed that Christ did not have a true human body, only the appearance of a man, and could therefore not have died on the Cross and been resurrected. She said her discovery vindicated a theory first put forward by the British historian Ian Wilson in 1978.

The Knights Templar were founded at the time of the First Crusade in the eleventh century to protect Christians making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Order was endorsed by the Pope, but when Acre fell in 1291 and the Crusaders lost their hold on the Holy Land their support faded, amid growing envy of their fortune in property and banking.

Rumours about the order’s corrupt and arcane secret ceremonies claimed that novices had to deny Christ three times, spit on the cross, strip naked and kiss their superior on the buttocks, navel, and lips and submit to sodomy. King Philip IV of France, who coveted the order’s wealth and owed it money, arrested its leaders and put pressure on Pope Clement V to dissolve it.

Several knights, including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake. Legends of the Templars’ secret rituals and lost treasures have long fascinated conspiracy theorists, and figure in The Da Vinci Code, which repeated the theory that the knights were entrusted with the Holy Grail.

In 2003 Dr Frale, the Vatican’s medieval specialist, unearthed the record of the trial of the Templars, also known as the Chinon Parchment, after realising that it had been wrongly catalogued. The parchment showed that Pope Clement V had accepted the Templars were guilty of “grave sins”, such as corruption and sexual immorality, but not of heresy.

Their initiation ceremony involved spitting on the Cross, but this was to brace them for having to do so if captured by Muslim forces, Dr Frale said. Last year she published for the first time the prayer the Knights Templar composed when “unjustly imprisoned”, in which they appealed to the Virgin Mary to persuade "our enemies” to abandon calumnies and lies and revert to truth and charity.

Radiocarbon dating tests on the Turin Shroud in 1988 indicated that it was a medieval fake. However this had been challenged on the grounds that the dated sample was taken from an area of the shroud mended after a fire in the Middle Ages and not a part of the original cloth.

After the sack of Constantinople it was next seen at Lirey in France in 1353, when it was displayed in a local church by descendants of Geoffroy de Charney, a Templar Knight burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay.

It was moved to various European cities until it was acquired by the Savoy dynasty in Turin in the sixteenth century. Holy See property since 1983, the Shroud was last publicly exhibited in 2000, and is due to go on show again next year.

The Vatican has not declared whether it is genuine or a forgery, leaving it to believers to decide. The late John Paul II said it was “an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age.” The self proclaimed heirs of the Knights Templar have asked the Vatican to “restore the reputation” of the disgraced order and acknowledge that assets worth some £80 million were confiscated.

The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, based in Spain, said that when the order was dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties, farms and commercial ventures belonging to knights were seized by the Church. A British branch also claiming descent from the Knights Templar and based in Hertfordshire has called for a papal apology for the persecution of the order.

Michelangelo 'hid secret code in Sistine Chapel'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/2163492/Michelangelo-%27hid-secret-code-in-Sistine-Chapel%27.html

Michelangelo 'hid secret code in Sistine Chapel'
By Malcolm Moore in Rome
20/06/2008

Michelangelo hid a secret code in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel made up of mystical Jewish symbols and insults aimed at the pope, according to a new book.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which the renaissance artist worked on for four years in the early 16th century, is actually a "bridge" between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish faith, according to The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo's Defiant Masterpiece.

The book, which is already on the New York Times bestseller list, is the work of Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a tour guide at the Vatican.

Scanning through the arrangement of figures on the vast 14,000 square foot ceiling, the authors have found shapes that correspond to Hebrew letters.

For example, the book states, the figures of David and Goliath form the shape of the letter gimel, which symbolises g'vurah, or strength, in the mystical Kabbalah tradition.

Kabbalah is a set of ancient esoteric teachings which are meant to decode the inner meaning of the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, and to explain the reasons for Jewish religious observances.

On the opposite wall, the scene showing Judith and her handmaiden carrying the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes is in the shape of the Hebrew letter chet, which represents chesed, or the characteristics of "loving kindness".

"There are so many layers of meaning on meaning, and most of it is from the Jewish tradition," said Mr Doliner on an American television programme.

Rabbi Blech added that all the figures in the nine scenes on the ceiling are Jews.

"He emphasises only Old Testament figures in the entire ceiling, and what he was trying to say was: Why have we ignored our true roots?" he said.

The book adds that the tree of life in the fresco is not, as usually thought, an apple tree, but instead a fig tree according to ancient Jewish tradition.

The authors believe the entire Sistine Chapel, which they say is built to the same proportions as the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, is a "lost mystical message of universal love" which was intended to be decoded.

The authors believe Michelangelo picked up his knowledge of Judaism while at the court of Lorenzo de Medici in Florence.

In addition, they say there are several attacks on Pope Julius II, who commissioned the work, embedded in the painting.

Disgusted with papal corruption, they think Michelangelo painted the prophet Zechariah in the pope's likeness.

Behind him, one angel is "making an extremely obscene hand gesture at the back of his head."

Critics of the new book point out that there is no record in Michelangelo's extensive and well-preserved writings of any secret code in the ceiling.

Dr Arnold Nesselrath, a curator at the Vatican museums said there was no way that Michelangelo could have painted any of the ceiling without the pope's express consent.

Marco Bussagli, an art history professor at Rome's La Sapienza university, said the revelation of "anti Catholic and anti-Christian" messages on the roof "suggests that the Dan Brown syndrome has struck again."

Mr Brown is the author of the controversial book, The Da Vinci Code, in which he writes that Jesus was secretly married to Mary Magdalene.

The two authors are not the first to have "seen" a secret Michelangelo code.

In 1950, a Venezuelan diplomat named Joaquin Diaz Gonzalez wrote a pamphlet arguing that an outline of the face of Dante, the poet, was hidden in the arrangement of the figures in the Last Judgement. He also "saw" a giant depiction of Jesus on the cross.

In 1990, Frank Meshberger argued in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the central panel, showing God and Adam reaching out to touch each other was in the shape of a brain and spinal cord.

In 2000, Dr Garabed Eknoyan saw the shape of a kidney in the painting, while in 2005 two Brazilian doctors found hidden body parts throughout, including a bronchial tube hidden in the tree trunk in the panel showing Eve's Creation.

Vatican: It's OK to believe in aliens

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jNDAezCCDKzEJpnyPFSj7IVCvwawD90KVBC00

Vatican: It's OK to believe in aliens
By ARIEL DAVID
5-14-8

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican's chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother,' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'? It would still be part of creation."

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion "doesn't contradict our faith" because aliens would still be God's creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like "putting limits" on God's creative freedom, he said.

The interview, headlined "The extraterrestrial is my brother," covered a variety of topics including the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and science, and the theological implications of the existence of alien life.

Funes said science, especially astronomy, does not contradict religion, touching on a theme of Pope Benedict XVI, who has made exploring the relationship between faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.

The Bible "is not a science book," Funes said, adding that he believes the Big Bang theory is the most "reasonable" explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.

But he said he continues to believe that "God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the result of chance."

Funes urged the church and the scientific community to leave behind divisions caused by Galileo's persecution 400 years ago, saying the incident has "caused wounds."

In 1633 the astronomer was tried as a heretic and forced to recant his theory that the Earth revolved around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.

"The church has somehow recognized its mistakes," he said. "Maybe it could have done it better, but now it's time to heal those wounds and this can be done through calm dialogue and collaboration."

Pope John Paul declared in 1992 that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."

The Vatican Observatory has been at the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between religion and science. Its scientist-clerics have generated top-notch research and its meteorite collection is considered one of the world's best.

The observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, is based in Castel Gandolfo, a lakeside town in the hills outside Rome where the pope has a summer residence. It also conducts research at an observatory at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.

On the Net:
Vatican Observatory: http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo

Leonardo da Vinci's Sangreal

http://realmoftwelve.kryptos.info/about/grail.html

Dan Brown details the idea that Leonardo's painting in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan is not that of the obvious twelve disciples of Christ. The chalice from which Jesus says, "This is my blood," seems to be missing altogether. Conspiracy theorists are convinced that the chalice isn't a literal cup but is the bloodline of Mary Magdalene. Sangreal, the term from which Holy Grail is derived, has been interpreted San Greal; holy grail. However, some suggest Sangreal should be divided into the words Sang and Real meaning Royal Blood.

The actual biblical event should show John, a child in contrast to the elder disciples, leaning on the breast of Christ, which was John's most significant event in the story. Variations of the traditionally held view of Christ's last supper are considered heretical as some of the Gnostic Gospels are portrayed in stark contrast to the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

I am willing to bet Leonardo da Vinci made it known that he hid the chalice somewhere in the painting when questioned as to why one of the most significant aspects of the story is completely missing. To his confidants the painting shows a woman. Many other anomalies appear in The Last Supper, but should word get back to Vatican in his day, Da Vinci had a back-up explanation of where the chalice is hidden.

One of the disciples is making the John Gesture as if referencing Saint John the Baptist who was imprisoned and beheaded, not to be confused with the John depicted in the painting. I've always wondered why the upward-pointed index finger was a sign for John and didn't know it when I assumed that this particular disciple is pointing at the ceiling.

Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
- Albert Szent-Gyorgi (biochemist 1893-1986)

My first thought was that Leonardo wanted us to recognize his understanding and details of depth perception. The ceiling has a pattern that reflects the depth and realism of the painting. I began to realize the effort made to portray depth, noticing even the asymmetrical banners or niches in the walls, but something didn't seem quite right as I analyzed the picture as a whole. My eyes were drawn to a symbol on one of the supposed banners that seemed to not fit with the flow of depth.

I drew the symbol on scrap paper over and over again, turning it upside down and using different shading techniques. The symbol appeared to be a filled semicircle with the flat side opposite a solid rectangle. I wasn't sure what it was, but I was convinced Leonardo put it there, like everything else, for a specific reason. He was too good with details to put a seemingly symbolic reference in his painting for nothing. I researched the symbol with no results.

The boundaries of bodies are the least of all things. The proposition is proved to be true, because the boundary of a thing is a surface, which is not part of the body contained within that surface; nor is it part of the air surrounding that body, but is the medium interposted between the air and the body, as is proved in its place. But the lateral boundaries of these bodies is the line forming the boundary of the surface, which line is of invisible thickness. Wherefore O painter! do not surround your bodies with lines, and above all when representing objects smaller than nature; for not only will their external outlines become indistinct, but their parts will be invisible from distance.
- Leonardo da Vinci

The following day I reviewed The Last Supper and almost immediately noticed something resting on the head of St. Bartholomew, the disciple at the extreme left. I was astonished to find that the symbol on the banner, not following the depth-perception of the painting, was nothing other than a giant chalice. To this day, I can not see this painting without the Holy Grail staring out as if it is the only thing meant to be seen.

It is interesting that St. Bartholomew makes reference to Mary Magdalene in a Gnostic Gospel attributed to his authorship. Although I do not fully agree with the gnostic version of the story, perhaps Leonardo was saying that the history of the sangreal rests on Saint Bartholomew. If you look at the post-restoration painting from now on, you will see nothing but the Holy Grail. Remember where you heard it first: Realm of Twelve .net.

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.
- Leonardo da Vinci

What are people saying about this discovery?

"You'll have to check out his highly intriguing page to see it for yourself. All I can say is that I... like his idea a whole lot more than the 'negative space = uterus = Chalice' business." - Excerpt from review in About.com Art History

"I gratefully credit Gary Phillips II with the original insight that this symbol in Da Vinci's The Last Supper probably represents the Holy Grail, and agree completely with his observation that once you notice the Grail staring back at you from Da Vinci's masterpiece, it jumps right out at you every time you see the painting. You cannot not see it there. That little ‘ah-ha' moment, that slight shift into greater awareness and consciousness, was at the very heart of Original Christianity. We increase in knowledge, integrity, and perfection through the smallest of steps, inching back closer and closer to ourselves and our Creator with every healthy choice we make. Recognizing the Grail hidden within in Da Vinci's painting is a perfect example of this sort of shift in perspective, and the increase in knowledge, or gnosis, that was once so central to the Christian faith" - Excerpt from acclaimed author of the groundbreaking books The Division of Consciousness and The Lost Secret of Death: Peter Novak's web site, DivisionTheory.com

"If you've some how missed the discovery of the hidden image of THE HOLY GRAIL by GARY PHILLIPS... I encourage an immediate visit to his web site. He has some excellent graphics and while you're there take time to wander through his entire site. This is an extremely intelligent young man. His research into encryptions is of specific interest to me. With all the hidden images, numbers, letters, etc., found within LEONARDO DA VINCI'S works of art, I've openly admitted I'm at a loss as to their possible meaning. I'm well aware it will require the knowledge of someone like GARY PHILLIPS to unravel the possible meaning that perhaps da Vinci was counting on to make sense of all this. I'm hoping Mr. Phillips will continue to publish additional discoveries." - Excerpt from Leonardo researcher Vladimir's web site N 2 da Vinci and Beyond

"It may seem a bit farfetched that after centuries someone discovered a detail in the Last Supper that no one had ever seen before, but as far as I can tell, that's the case." - Excerpt from Holy Grail Found in Da Vinci's Last Supper: www.MuseumOfHoaxes.com describes the discovery as legitimate.

"The Professor gasped. He immediately dialed Getit's cellular phone. 'Getit, you aren't going to believe this. I can see the Chalice clearly in the Last Supper. Just look at the space above the head of St. Bartholomew, the disciple left most. There is the Chalice, so visible and yet so invisible.'" - Excerpt from The Da Vinci Dagger by Prastil: www.daVinciDagger.com describes the dagger in the painting as an ancient graille.

"Fortunately for you, this website will show you the Chalice. Once you see it, you will always see it... I thank Gary Phillips II for sharing his discovery of the Da Vinci Chalice." - Excerpt from www.daVinciChalice.com

"Discover the secrets of Leonardo da Vinci's work with this great source." - Excerpt from The Solomon Key - online news source