Description
A deeply reported, New York Times bestselling exposé of the cash and the clerics-turned-financiers on the heart of the Vatican—the world’s biggest, most powerful religious institution—from an acclaimed journalist with “exhaustive research techniques” (The New York Times).
From a master chronicler of legal and financial misconduct, a magnificent investigation nine years within the making, God’s Bankers traces the political intrigue of the Catholic Church in “a meticulous work that cracks wide open the Vatican’s legendary, enabling secrecy” (Kirkus Reviews). Decidedly not about faith, belief in God, or religious doctrine, this book is in regards to the church’s accumulation of wealth and its byzantine financial entanglements internationally. Told through 200 years of prelates, bishops, cardinals, and the Popes who oversee it all, Gerald Posner uncovers an eyebrow-raising account of money and power in one of the vital world’s most influential organizations.
God’s Bankers has it all: a revelatory and astounding saga marked by poisoned business titans, murdered prosecutors, and mysterious deaths written off as suicides; a carnival of characters from Popes and cardinals, financiers and mobsters, kings and prime ministers; and a set of moral and political circumstances that clarify not only the church’s aims and ambitions, but reflect the larger tensions of more latest history. And Posner even looks to the future to surmise if Pope Francis can succeed where all his predecessors failed: to conquer the resistance to modify within the Vatican’s Machiavellian inner court and to rein within the excesses of its seemingly uncontrollable financial quagmire. “As exciting as a mystery thriller” (Providence Journal), this book reveals with strange precision how the Vatican has evolved from a foundation of faith to a corporation of extreme wealth and power.