Saturday, November 07, 2015

The Devil's Advocate: Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone


"Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Holy See's secretary of state under former Pope Benedict XVI, took a 23,000-euro helicopter ride to southern Italy paid for by funds for sick children from a Catholic Hospital, apparently to do 'marketing' for the hospital. The same hospital, Bambin Gesu, paid 200,000 euros for enlarging Cardinal Bertone's apartment at the Vatican, an allegation which the hospital confirmed, according to the author [Gianluigi Nuzzi] of the book [Merchants in the Temple], claiming they were also hoping to use the apartment for 'institutional' purposes." — Delia Gallagher and Daniel Burke, CNN, "New Books Allege Financial Scandals at the Vatican," November 5, 2015

The unsung "hero" of the normalization juggernaut was Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who did the legwork while Pope Francis took the credit. In a recent interview with the Huffington Post, Bertone admitted that he "made five trips to Cuba and made my own contribution to Cuba-U.S. relations," explaining that "it was not something that just fell from heaven; there was a lot of work behind it." Indeed, nothing of the kind "fell from heaven,"  though it well may have bubbled up from hell, with Bertone as its conjurer.

Bertone has always been willing to work on behalf of the Castro dynasty and its interests. Communist Cuba has no need to pay for agents of influence in the Vatican when it has Cardinal Jaime Ortega as its official lobbyist there. Bertone's special relationship with the Cuban kleptocracy is born of their mutual venality and sustained, perhaps, as it certainly is in Ortega's case, by home movies stored in the vaults of State Security.

In 2005, Cardinal Bertone called the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba "unjust and ethically unacceptable" (it would take years for the Vatican to denounce as such the clerical molestation of children); and in 2008, Bertone declared, in Havana, that "the embargo constitutes an act of oppression against the Cuban people and a violation of Cuba's independence." He did not, however, condemn the oppression of the Cuban people by the Castro regime, nor explain why the refusal of the U.S. to trade with Communist Cuba oppresses its people or violates its independence while the denial of human and civil rights to its citizenry by its unelected rulers does not.

Moreover, how can a country be "independent" which blames all its domestic troubles on its inability to trade with another country (and "trade" as defined by Castro always means being subsidized by a third country in exchange for surrendering Cuba's independence to it)? The most notorious example in modern times of a servile state is surely Communist Cuba's 30-year vassalage to the Soviet Union which ended only when the Soviet empire itself ended. Yet never did the Vatican protest the fact that Cuba's main export to the Soviet Union was cannon fodder. One would suppose that such trade would be more objectionable to the Vatican than the absence of such trade. But such contradictions are the stock in trade of Vatican diplomacy, which supported sanctions on South Africa's apartheid regime but not on Cuba's apartheid regime.

Of course, Cardinal Bertone, as an exploiter and despoiler himself, sees nothing wrong with using humans as chattel or profiting from their misery. It is no surprise that a man who hails Fidel Castro as a "humanitarian" would believe that he, too, can commit any vile act and still be considered a "humanitarian," The fact that his carrion prey are children and sick children at that explains the great affinity between Castro and Bertone, for Castro has never had any mental reservations about stealing the kids milk money, much less their future.

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