His Holiness, Pope Francis: Time to Release the Secrets of the Vatican Bank’s Wartime Files

The Vatican Bank –founded in the middle of World War II– has been accused at times of being a co-conspirator in complex international banking frauds, and serving as a safehaven for the mega-rich to evade taxes, Italian politicians to keep secret slush funds, and the mafia to launder illegal money.

Now the Vatican Bank stands charged in a new book, God's Bankers, as having used Italian proxies to covertly do business with the Nazis during World War II. Only when it was clear the Nazis would lose the war did the Vatican Bank start dialing back its involvement with German and Italian Fascist firms.

After the war, U.S. counterintelligence tracked looted gold from the national treasury of Croatia to the very gates of St. Peters . At that point the trail to the gold vanishes.

The documents about the bank’s wartime role are sealed inside the Secret Archives of the Vatican. The Vatican Bank has only one shareholder: the Pope. Because of that, with a single decree, the Pope can open the bank’s World War II files. By ordering the release of its Holocaust-era files, Pope Francis can provide answers to troubling questions about the bank’s wartime profits and its postwar role as a possible depository for Nazi gold. The truth is long overdue.