Here are some excerpts courtesy of the Daily Beast:
The book is filled with salacious scoops, backed up by copies of documents printed in an exhaustive index. He shines a light on the disappearance of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee who went missing 30 years ago after a music lesson and whose body has never been found. Conspiracy theorists waffle between theories that she was kept as a sex slave for priests for years or that she was murdered by a local Roman gang of criminals as a threat to her father, who may have witnessed a crime.
Nuzzi provides interview transcripts, sealed court documents and secret video from when police opened a mobster’s tomb in Rome to search for her body to support the theory that she was murdered by an “international group” that Pope Francis has been made aware of. He asks if justice has or will ever be served in the case.
On Mother Teresa:
Nuzzi also sullies the legend of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, made a saint by Francis in 2016. He has uncovered accounting slips from secret bank accounts, in dollars and Italian lire, that the austere nun kept in her charity’s name in the troubled Vatican bank during the time when American archbishop Paul Marcinkus led the institution.
Nuzzi said her accounts were so flush that if she had withdrawn the money or transferred to a more legitimate institution, the bank “risked default.” The nun, whose net worth is thought to be in the billions in the name of her charity, was such a valued client that she was ushered in through a secret door so no one suspected she was the bank’s wealthiest patron at a time when most women were prohibited from having accounts in their own names.
On the almost institutionalized pedophilia:
But the most troubling revelation in the book is one that Nuzzi himself admits he only scratched the surface of. He provides horrific proof of widespread sexual abuse inside San Pio X, the pre-seminary boarding school where middle school and high school age boys who express interest in joining the priesthood are still sent today.
The boys of the institute, housed in the same majestic building where former Vatican secretary of State has a controversial penthouse apartment which was recently renovated with funds from the Vatican’s children’s hospital, officially serve as altar boys at Vatican masses and choir boys for St. Peter’s basilica. But the author also alleges they are actually nothing short of play things for the Vatican priests who like sex with young boys.
Nuzzi interviewed a former seminarian thought to be a victim and published disturbing phone transcripts in which priests discuss playing with the boys, how ejaculate was referred to as “milk” and that oral sex was described as “a game” that should only be played once every two days.
He also amplifies the accusations of a Polish man named Kamil Tadeusz Jarzembowski, who was a student at the pre-seminary when he was 13 years old and who has sent a number of complaints about what he saw to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which acts as gatekeeper for such accusations to determine their legitimacy. Despite saying he witnessed at least 140 sexual acts by an older priest who was “favored by various monsignors in the Church” on his underage roommate, he was eventually expelled from the seminary.
By all rights this book should launch an investigation that would essentially destroy the Catholic religion, and see the Vatican disassembled brick by brick.
But of course that will not happen, and the church has actually survived two previous books by Nuzzi which also contained astonishing revelations.
It is certainly no secret that I do not have much use for ANY religion, but Catholicism in particular seems to be incredibly toxic.
In my opinion no parent worth a damn would ever consider sending their child to be an alter boy in the Vatican, or ANY Catholic church for that matter.
