PUBLIC AND MEDIA ADVISORY SPECIAL REPORT CALLS FOR THE EXPULSION OF THE VATICAN FROM THE U.N.

Dethroning a Rogue Power

Why the Vatican and Holy See must be denied membership and presence at the United Nations and in the world community

A Position Paper issued to the Public and the United Nations by The International Tribunal of Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS)

May 31, 2019

Dedicated to all of the victims of religious violence and tyranny: past and present, young and old

Table of Contents

Preamble

What is this Thing called the Vatican?

The Vatican and the United Nations

The Vatican as a Transnational Criminal Organization

Towards a Second Nuremberg Precedent? Unseating the Vatican with the Common Law

Dethroning the Vatican: A Plan of Action Summary

Preamble

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. There is no worse evil than when the office sanctifies the holder of it. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. -​ ​John Dalberg-Acton, 1887, in reference to the Vatican’s declaration of so-called “papal infallibility”

The Holy See, a pseudo-state, has established a foreign law jurisdiction in other states through which, in utter secrecy, it has dealt with sex abusers in a manner incompatible with and even contrary to the law of the nations in which it operates … The Catholic Church has in many countries been running a parallel system of criminal justice, unbeknownst to and deliberately hidden from the public, police and parliaments, in which the guilty goes unpunished and the lips of their victims are sealed, by forced oaths and confidential legal settlements. -​ Geoffrey Robertson, Q.C., ​The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuses​ (2010)

And Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’. -​ John 18:36

An all-too-accurate Monty Python comedy sketch depicts a gangster-like “Vice Pope Eric” speaking to a gaggle of his Cardinals about their mission in the world. Puffing on a cigarette, the Vice Pope declares to his minions,

“Listen, boys, if we’re going to worship a poor and humble man we’re gonna need a rich and powerful institution to do it with.”

And therein lies the paradox and the issue at hand.

The Church of Rome is the oldest and wealthiest corporation in human history and claims absolute authority in both the spiritual and temporal worlds, subject to no law but its own. More the descendent of the Roman Empire than an itinerant peasant from Galilee, the Catholic Church, and its ruling Vatican and administrative arm called the Holy See, has operated historically as a violent empire with all of the benefits but none of the legal and moral obligations of a nation. This supremacy has made it responsible for the death of more people than any other institution in human history, even as it claims to “represent” the “Prince of Peace”, Jesus Christ. European Genocide and its swath of destruction across our planet over many centuries was directly created by the Vatican and its papal statutes that compelled and sanctified the extermination of any non-Catholic peoples.

Despite our modern world’s claim of enlightenment when it comes to human rights conventions and the laws of so-called civilized nations, the Roman Catholic Church continues to operate with impunity and immunity as an unaccountable rogue power in the world. Its policies, like the infamous Crimen Sollicitationas, ​openly protect and provide a global sanctuary for child rapists and killers, and require that all Catholics aid and abet them and subvert the child protection laws of their own countries.

Despite this, and against all logic and legality, not only do a majority of governments facilitate such criminality by the Church of Rome but they actively facilitate it with tax exemptions, “diplomatic” recognition and other privileges. This shield allows the Church to remain unaccountable and above the law, even while terrorizing the lives of children and endangering the public safety.

Tragically, this criminal complicity extends even to the level of the United Nations.

Why and how the Catholic Church as a religious cult insinuated itself into the United Nations by circumventing normal procedures and falsely posing as a government is a remarkable tale of duplicity and corruption, some of which we will outline in this paper. It is our position that a church has no legitimate place within a community of nations, especially one like the Church of Rome, with its exclusivist, regressive and clandestine policies and practices. It is discriminatory and a violation of international law to grant the so-called Holy See a special status at the United Nations without extending the same privilege to every other world religion.

Quite simply, for a criminal body like the Vatican and its Holy See to sit on UN committees and enjoy a privileged and illegal status within the General Assembly is nothing less than a subversion of the UN and its founding Charter. It also represents a denial of the most basic philosophy and precepts of the United Nations, including the separation of church and state.

The aim of this paper is to equip people of good will and especially members of the United Nations with the knowledge and desire to see justice restored by removing the Vatican and Holy See from all UN bodies and nullifying their special diplomatic, legal and financial privileges. The community of nations has no place within it for any religious group that sets itself above the law and moral responsibility, and that uses its power to harm the innocent and subvert democracy.

What is this Thing called the Vatican?

The term “Vatican” – taken from an ancient Etruscan word meaning “divining serpent” – is often used to refer to the Roman Catholic Church as a whole. In fact, the expression refers to the 108 acres of Vatican City in downtown Rome that functions as the administrative, financial and political heart of that Church.

The Curia, or College of Cardinals, is the Church’s daily seat of power, even though that body officially calls the Pope’s office or Papacy ​“an absolute monarchy in which the head of State is the Pope, who holds full legislative, executive and judicial powers.”​ (1) In short, the Roman Catholic Church is a political-religious oligarchy much like that of the Pharaohs of Egypt or more accurately, the Roman Emperors, whose titles are still borne by the so-called Pope, or Bishop of Rome.

In reality, the Vatican has always been an illusory state authority that exists only through the indulgence and support of “worldly” powers. In 1529, 1796 and 1870 the Papacy was overthrown, respectively, by the German Emperor, by Napolean Bonaparte, and by the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi. Between 1870 and 1929, the Vatican did not exist as a political entity until it was restored by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and given the fictional title of a “state”. The re-establishment of the Church of Rome by a fascist regime laid the basis for the present privileges and power enjoyed by that Church, in its capacity as a make-believe nation state that operates outside and often opposed to both domestic and international laws.

The creation of the modern Roman Catholic Church by Italian Fascism has great significance, since both ideologies are a close reflection of each other.

In the words of Pope Pius XII in 1940, ​“Fascism is the implementing of Catholic social doctrine in the political realm.”​ (2)

That doctrine can be summed up in a single word: ​Corporatism​, which is the rule of an absolutist super-state that fuses a monopolized capitalism with a political oligarchy that allows no dissent or political opposition. Mussolini and the Catholic Church inaugurated such a society in Italy during fascism’s twenty year reign there, and inspired Adolf Hitler to do the same.

In February 1929, Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty with the Church that designated it a “sovereign state” equipped with its own courts, diplomatic corps and secretive Vatican Bank. The latter received over one billion lira from the dictator as well as immunity from auditing and review. Created as the brainchild of fascism, it was small wonder that the Vatican was the first “government” to diplomatically recognize the Nazi regime, through its 1933 Concordat with Hitler that sanctioned his bloody dictatorship.

Paradoxically, when Mussolini’s fascist regime was overthrown in 1943, the Lateran Treaty remained in effect. The Vatican continued to be treated by nations as a sovereign government even though it did not fulfill the criteria of a state according to the Montevideo Convention of 1933 that governs international law on the question of nationhood. (3)

As an episodic and purely domestic agreement with a deposed regime, the Lateran Treaty should have had no binding force outside of Italy and become nullified after the fall of Italian fascism. But Cold War politics, and American global strategy, required the continued existence of a politically dominant Catholic Church as a bulwark against the powerful Communist-Socialist political blocs in Italy and France following World War Two.

The Communists had led the French and Italian Resistance during the war and had widespread popular support. They appeared ready to assume power in both countries in their 1946 and 1948 general elections. Indeed, the first official act of America’s newly created Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was to intervene in and subvert the impending Italian elections to prevent a Communist victory, by organizing and funding the Catholic-led Christian Democrats whose party stole the election from the Left. (4)

An even more odious example of the political role of Roman Catholicism during the 1940’s was its deep involvement in the genocide of non-Catholics across Europe and the post-war smuggling of many Nazis to Canada, America and elsewhere through the Vatican’s “Rat Lines”. The latter were set up by Cardinal Giovanni Montini – the future Pope Paul VI – and channeled many Nazi war criminals through a chain of Franciscan monasteries across Italy. But the Catholic Church actually committed direct mass murder during World War Two. In 1941, Pope Pius XII personally ordered and sanctioned the slaughter of over 800,000 non-Catholic Orthodox Serbs in the Jasenovac death camp in Croatia. Jasenovac was the largest extermination center in Europe after Auschwitz and Treblinka and was run by the Ustashe Catholic militia and the Franciscan Bishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Saric. Like many Vatican crimes, the knowledge of this genocide and the Church’s sheltering of Nazi criminals was censored and put “down the memory hole” after the war. (5)

Such overt criminality by the Catholic Church is shocking only to people who are ignorant of the complete history of that institution. The body count of those slaughtered by the Church of Rome since the fourth century easily exceeds fifty million people; the additional collateral damage to survivors and subsequent generations and cultures has been astronomical. (6)

According to the Canadian indigenous genocide scholar Kevin D. Annett,

“The same European culture of Christendom was responsible for the Inquisition, the global extermination of aboriginal nations and the death camps of Nazism. All of these killing grounds enunciated the essential doctrine of religious Genocide, namely that those outside the circle of the ‘Saved’ are unworthy of life.” (7)

The United Nations arose from the ashes of World War Two ostensibly to prevent a recurrence of such genocide. One of the chief tools in this effort was the creation of a new kind of international human rights law that would supersede the so-called shield of national sovereignty that allowed rogue criminal nations to commit war crimes and never face prosecution for them. Ironically, the most consistent perpetrator of such crimes and an active accomplice of European fascism – the Roman Catholic Church – was never named or indicted by the UN thanks to the aforementioned Cold War climate that caused public opinion to look the other way at the bloody deeds of western allies. In the seven decades since the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide in 1948, only two cases based on the Convention have ever been brought to trial, both of them involving regimes unallied or hostile to the West: Rwanda and Serbia. (8)

The nature of the Roman Catholic Church as an empire operating outside of all law except its own makes it a perfect cover for inter-generational and transnational criminality. The Lateran Treaty established the Vatican as a tax-free haven without import or export duties whose operations are not subject to monitoring or auditing by any outside agency. This system provides a perfect medium for gangsterism. In the words of Italian Senator Furio Colombo,

“The Catholic Church and the Mafia and the banking cartels whose money they launder are one and the same people, their only concern is their money, and they are answerable to no-one but themselves.” (9)

The political and criminal nature of the Catholic Church is evident once we pull back the camouflage created around the Church by its classification as just one of many “Religious NGO’s” associated with the UN. In fact, the Church is in a special position of privilege in the international community; its assets far outstrip even the largest Religious NGO’s like World Vision. No other participant at the United Nations has been able to ignore and violate international law and UN conventions to the extent of the Catholic Church.

For these reasons, understanding how and why that Church ensconced itself in such a position of influence at the United Nations in the years after World War Two is essential if we are to begin to reverse the destructive and the inordinate influence of this one religion on world affairs.

The Vatican and the United Nations

Like its Nazi co-conspirators, the Vatican made diplomatic overtures to the western powers during the waning years of World War Two as the United Nations was taking shape. In 1944, Vatican officials applied for membership in the nascent body and were rebuffed. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull told them that ​“as a diminutive state the Vatican would not be capable of fulfilling all of the responsibilities of membership in an organization whose primary purpose is the maintenance of peace and security.”​ These member responsibilities included contributing soldiers for UN peacekeeping forces and adhering to human rights conventions whose statutes opposed Church doctrine.

Hull also pointed out that the Catholic Church’s membership in the UN would violate Article 24 of the Lateran Treaty, which established the Church’s political neutrality as a consequence of the Pope’s “abandonment of temporal power”. (10)

Disregarding this, the Vatican through its so-called “diplomatic arm”, the Holy See, began insinuating itself into the United Nations apparatus without the consent of that body ​and​ before the See had applied for or passed the qualification test for statehood required of all UN members. In short, completely illegally.

In 1948, the Holy See joined a Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Conference and was granted observer status, but somehow it ended up as an actual signatory to an International Wheat Agreement sponsored by the FAO and even appended its official coat of arms to the Agreement, as if it was a church creation. In 1951, Vatican diplomats attended for the first time special meetings of the General Assembly, UNESCO and the World Health Organization (WHO) without being invited, and yet they won Permanent Observer status at UNESCO. By 1956 the Holy See became a full member with voting rights at the Atomic Energy Commission, not from a vote of AEC members but because of the decision of a single Catholic AEC officer.

In 1964 the Church made its direct play for power by unilaterally informing UN Secretary-General U Thant that it was sending a Permanent Observer Mission to UN headquarters in New York City. Violating his terms of office and the stipulations of the United Nations Charter, U Thant did not refer the matter to the UN Security Council or the General Assembly, but accepted the Holy See’s action as a ​fait accompli.​ The Vatican still claims falsely that the UN “invited” it to join in 1964.

By 1967, a similar Permanent Observer Mission had been dispatched from Rome to the United Nations’ Geneva office, and in the same arbitrary and obscured manner won speaking and voting rights at the WHO. The Church eventually elevated itself to the actual status of a ​“non-member permanent observer state”​ in the General Assembly, a status shared by Switzerland and North and South Korea. The Holy See was granted membership rights on July 1, 2004. (11)

The Vatican’s illegal entering of the United Nations through the back door conveniently maneuvered around the biggest roadblock to the Catholic Church’s presence at the UN: the fact that the Church fails to qualify as a state under the terms of the governing Montevideo Convention of 1933.

According to Article One of that Convention,

“The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population, b) a defined territory, c) government, and d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.”

The Roman Catholic Church and the Holy See, as the Church’s official presence at the UN, fail to meet any of these criteria. Here is why:

1. The Vatican has no permanent population; not even the Pope lives there full time. The Vatican is a large palace without residents or nationals; rather, it contains a transient church bureaucracy. Vatican employees carry no special ”Church” passport and pass through no border, customs or security checkpoints when entering Vatican City. In other words, a distinct “Vatican nationality” does not exist.

2. Vatican City is not a territory but a large palace built on land that once housed the Emperor Caligula’s private estate where Christians were tortured to death. These 108 acres are contained within the city of Rome that is part of the nation state of Italy. It is therefore logically impossible for the Vatican to be a state within a city of another state, under the legal norms of both sovereignty and territoriality. Furthermore, actual “micro-states” like Monaco and Tuvalu in the Pacific possess what the Vatican doesn’t: a culturally defined group of people who consider themselves as distinct, and not simply as members of a religion, which by itself does not constitute the basis of any territory, since by definition a religion is an entity based not on geography but doctrine.

3. A government cannot be said to exist if it lacks the ability to establish its own sovereignty, police and defend its borders, protect its citizens and enforce its own laws. The Vatican cannot do any of these things, since it has no actual citizens and its sovereignty is a contrived assertion that cannot be backed up by force. The only force it possesses, the Vatican Swiss Guards, rely on assistance from the Rome police to defend its grounds and protect Church employees. The Vatican exercises no jurisdiction over either itself or its employees and so cannot be considered to be a government. It is, in the words of the English barrister and legal scholar Geoffrey Robertson, ​“a Santa Claus state”​: a convenient fairy-tale fiction shared expediently by people who know better. Even Italian courts have rejected the plea – made by the attempted assassin of Pope John Paul II in 1981, Mehmet Agca, who tried to resist extradition from the grounds of the Vatican – that Vatican City constitutes a separate state. The subsequent court ruling affirmed that the Catholic Church was an institution, not a state.

4. The Vatican makes a pretense of entering into treaties with actual states through what it calls “Concordats”, like the infamous 1933 Concordat with Nazi Germany and the mysterious “Financial Concordats” that secretly channel taxpayers’ money from over a hundred nations into the Vatican Bank. ​(​www.concordatwatch.eu)​ ​Under International Law, these agreements are not bona fide treaties at all since that are not made between co-equal governments. Not being a sovereign governance or a state as defined by the Montevideo Convention, the Vatican is fraudulently posing as a state and thereby invalidating any agreement it signs. By this measure, the Catholic Church cannot enter into bona fide relations with any state in the world, any more than an aboriginal “nation” can do so in Canada or the USA, since under both International and domestic laws such “nations” are the legal dependencies of larger sovereign states.

In addition, the Vatican refuses to abide by the laws of other nations – like its child protection laws – and routinely interferes in the internal affairs and politics of other nations. These actions violate the terms of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and thereby invalidate the Church’s capacity to legitimately enter into relations with actual states. The fact that the Church also operates its own secret system of “Canon Law” that is not recognized as a legitimate judicial process under International Law prevents it from treating equally with nations. (12)

Nevertheless, most governments in the world have disregarded these facts, their own sovereign integrity and International Law, and have established a fraudulent “diplomatic relation” with the Holy See and the Papal Nuncios who function as “ambassadors” to nation states. This entire system of expedient subterfuge is designed to make the Roman Catholic Church appear to be something that it is not: a nation as well as a religion.

There may be expedient political reasons for states to placate Catholic voters and Vatican bankers by treating the Church as a co-equal nation even when it isn’t. But such make believe can extend only so far. For example, the Vatican’s claim of nation-state status is rejected within Europe itself, where the European Union has repeatedly denied its claim and barred it from membership in the Union. So if the Holy See is not a state in Europe, why is it considered to be so at the United Nations?

We have described some of the historical process of the Catholic Church’s insinuation of itself onto UN bodies as a self-proclaimed “observer state”. With the active collusion of the UN officialdom, the Holy See has illegally turned itself into not only an observer or consultant but a voting participant on every major UN Commission or organization. Once again, such a move is entirely illegal under the United Nations Charter, which clearly states that religious NGO’s can only operate as ​consultants​ to UN bodies, not – as in the case of the Holy See – as formulators of policy.

In recent years, the Holy See has directly influenced and actually sabotaged important policy planks of international human rights conventions, including the Rights of the Child. In 1995 at the UN’s Cairo Conference on Population and Development, the Holy See prevented the passing of policies that would have advanced birth control education and practices in poverty stricken countries, nonsensically defining any form of birth control as “abortion”. At the same conference, the Church allied with fundamentalist Muslim nations and condemned homosexuality as a “heinous evil”. The same year, at the Bejing Conference on Women, the Vatican blocked the inclusion of policy statements referring to gender equality, unwanted pregnancies, AIDS, the use of condoms, rape or alternative lifestyles.

Even more tragically, during 1998 the Vatican prevented the inclusion of vital human rights safeguards in the founding statutes of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Rome Convention, including a provision that would have defined gang rape during war as an undeniable crime against humanity. Thanks to the Holy See’s intervention, this provision was modified to state that ​“this definition shall not be interpreted as affecting national laws relating to pregnancy”​. That is, in countries where the Catholic Church has succeeded in having abortion banned by law, women who are raped in war are not the victim of a crime and must bear the child of the soldier who raped them.

In addition, within the final ICC Treaty the Holy See forced an inclusion of a clause that prevents genders outside of male and female to be included in the definition of “persecution”. As a result, governments or churches can do whatever they like to transsexuals or other genders without being charged by the ICC with persecution (which is defined as ​“ the intentional and severe deprivation of human rights”​). Now thanks to the Vatican, only heterosexual males and females have the protection of the ICC Treaty’s Article 7(3). (13)

This blatant imposing on international law of the regressive morality of one religion is equally deadly when it involves the Vatican’s influence on UN Conventions covering Torture and The Rights of the Child. This is hardly surprising, considering the Catholic Church’s active complicity in the torture, death and trafficking of children around the world, and the continual refusal of that Church to abide by the requirements of its status as a “state” and take effective steps to prevent acts of torture as well as violence against children. Indeed, the Church’s own policy of ​Crimen Sollicitationas​ (1929) encourages such violence and torture and obstructs the very justice required by UN Conventions to which the Vatican is a signatory.

The Holy See acceded to the UN Convention against Torture (1984) on June 25, 2002. Under the terms of that Convention, the Catholic Church was obligated to provide a report within a year describing the steps it was taking to combat ​“torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.​ It never did so, no doubt because early in 2003 international courts held that child rape and sexual abuse can constitute torture when they serve to “intimidate, degrade, control humiliate or destroy a person”.​ Normally, failure to provide such a report is grounds for expulsion as a signatory state to the Torture Convention; but the Holy See has never been reprimanded or even criticized for its violations and its refusal to comply with its obligations as a “non-member state.”

Even more blatantly, the Holy See has over the years refused to endorse or ratify any of the following United Nations human rights conventions: The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, The Convention on Migrant Workers, The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances, Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, and The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. (14)

The incompatibility of the unaccountable Roman Catholic Church with the standards and obligations required of a United Nations member-state is most blatantly revealed in the Church’s manipulative, misleading and secret policies and actions regarding its crimes against children, which are clearly irreconcilable with International Law and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).

In practice, the Holy See abides by the self-protective provisions of its own in-house legal system known as Canon Law even as it claims to be adhering to International Law. On matters of human rights, child protection and legal process and accountability, Church law and International Law are unalterably counterposed. The clearest example of this are the continual statements of Popes and other Vatican officials that declare that the provisions of UN conventions like the Rights of the Child will only be recognized and applied by the Church when they are compatible with Canon Law – which quite frankly, is rarely.

For example, Canon Law regarding child abuse does not uphold the safety of children as an absolute principle; instead, its bottom line principle is the need to maintain absolute secrecy regarding that abuse. This is a clear breach of Article 3(1) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Neither Canon Law nor its guiding policy of ​Crimen Sollicitationas​ provide neutral or competent judicial procedures for investigating abuses. The Church controls the process of investigation and offers a no-fault absolution to its own criminals. Priestly wrongdoers never face prosecution since a) all parties are sworn to silence, and b) the violation of a child is not considered to be a crime under Canon Law but rather a “forgivable sin”. (15)

The Holy See is the only member of the United Nations that has the option to ignore the provisions and responsibilities of the Conventions it is obligated by law and the UN Charter to uphold. In effect, the Catholic Church is above the law, even at the United Nations, and can flout and violate the UN Charter at its whim without repercussions while enjoying all of the privileges and power of member states.

It is therefore undeniable that in practice, the United Nations is in the same subservient relationship with the Papacy as is any Catholic cleric or church member. In that subservient state, the UN has aided and abetted Vatican crimes by allowing the Church to create a parallel foreign jurisdiction system of law and governance, not only at the UN but in many nations. That system actively undermines and threatens the sovereignty of all of those states.

Under International Law such an assault on other nations’ sovereignty and laws is normally considered to constitute an act of war.

The Vatican as a Transnational Criminal Organization

The Roman Catholic Church in its corporate entirety meets the criteria of a

Transnational Criminal Organization (TNCO) as defined by the United Nations

Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (December 2000).

(​https://www.unodc.org/documents/middleeastandnorthafrica/organised-crime/UNITED_NATIONS_CO NVENTION_AGAINST_TRANSNATIONAL_ORGANIZED_CRIME_AND_THE_PROTOCOLS_THERETO.pdf​)

According to Article 2(a) of this Convention,

“An Organized criminal group shall mean a structured group of three or more persons, existing for a period of time and acting in concert with the aim of committing one or more serious crimes or offences established in accordance with this Convention, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit …”

This Convention defines the criminal actions of such a group to include the trafficking of human beings, especially women and children, smuggling migrants, laundering money for criminal groups and illicitly manufacturing and trafficking firearms.

It has been irrefutably established that the Vatican and Catholic agencies and officials have engaged in three of these four criminal actions: trafficking people, laundering money for organized crime, and trafficking in firearms. Therefore the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church constitute a TNCO, according to this UN Convention. (16)

The TNCO Convention requires that all state parties to it take measures to seize the assets of TNCO’s, extradite suspected or convicted TNCO officials, conduct criminal investigations of the TNCO’s within their respective jurisdictions, and generally assist all other state parties in disrupting and halting the actions of recognized TNCO’s. Significantly, the Convention also requires that state parties actively assist the victims of TNCO’s through judicial and police action, and cooperate fully to prevent the rise of TNCO’s and their accomplices.

By that criteria and under this Convention, any nation that is a signatory to the TNCO Convention ​must​ actively assist in the arrest of Catholic officials and child raping priests, seize church funds, investigate church crimes and give aid to victims of church rape and torture. If they fail to do so they are violating their obligations as signatories to the Convention and must be removed as parties to it.

We will now briefly examine the specific culpability of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church for the three major crimes of which they are guilty under the TNCO Convention.

Human Trafficking

The Catholic Church has had a very long history of kidnapping, trafficking, exploiting and causing the death of people, especially women and children. These crimes are in fact a systemic feature of the Church because of its traditional role in the forefront of European genocide, colonialism and religious persecution, and by its operation of boarding schools, orphanages, child labor sweatshops and hospitals designed to exploit, terrorize, control and exterminate whole groups of people. In addition, the standing Vatican policy of ​Crimen Sollicitationas t​ hat proves a sanctuary for church child rapists actively encourages not only such rape but an organized system of child trafficking to facilitate the crime and its concealment. In the words of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Common Law Court of Justice at the trial of ​The People v. Joseph Ratzinger, Elizabeth Windsor et al,

“For every priest who rapes a child another ten clergy actively conceal and facilitate the crime … In the single Catholic Diocese of Philadelphia, it is estimated that over one quarter of all priests are engaged in trafficking children for the purpose of abuse, pornography, rape and exploitation. Children are rarely victimized only once but rather face repeated violations in a system designed to provide a regular stable of little victims to their torturers.” ​​(17)

It is important to note that these crimes are of an ongoing nature and are sanctioned and protected by every level of the the Catholic Church and by official papal edicts and policies. Because in practice the priority of that Church is not the protection and inviolability of children but rather the security and secrecy of its institution, child trafficking is an inevitable consequence of such institutionalized criminality.

Overseas Catholic child trafficking tends to be concentrated in disaster relief agencies, orphanages and within undeveloped countries like Thailand. The latter nation is a hotspot for the “sex tourism” trafficking of the indigenous children of the Akha indigenous tribes, through Catholic funded “boarding schools” run by the Scarboro Foreign Mission Society in Toronto, Canada. Similar Catholic church front groups for child trafficking exist in Guatemala, like the Mayan Missions Inc. run by an open child rapist, the Catholic priest William Auth of Lansing, Michigan. (18)

Such church-based child trafficking is equally present across North America, operating under the cover of religious and government child care agencies. This trafficking even involves new born babies. An extensive west coast baby adoption racket operates through Catholic Church hospitals in Vancouver and Seattle, as part of the wider pan-Pacific human trafficking industry.

Hanne Andersen, a Vancouver Catholic, went public in 2007 with her story of how her child was stolen and trafficked while in her womb. In 1983 after she became pregnant at age 16, Hanne was visited by their family’s Holy Rosary parish priest. He convinced her to enter a church-run facility known as the Maywood Home for Unwed Mothers. She was only six weeks pregnant.

At the Maywood Home she was subjected to what she calls “a constant system of intimidation and brainwashing to make me want to give up my baby even before it was born … I was locked up like I was a prisoner and given drugs every day. We had to watch these propaganda films that told us we were morally unfit to be mothers and had to let the church raise our babies, to make us hate the idea of being mothers. I even had to sign a letter saying I didn’t want to raise my child and when I wouldn’t sign they denied me food until I did.”

As it turned out, Hanne was just one of many hundreds of young women in Vancouver who, like the incarcerated inmates of the murderous Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, were part of a massive baby trafficking network in which local clergy, social workers, doctors, police and judges collude. St. Paul’s Catholic hospital in Vancouver is a center of this network, at which a so-called “BFA Protocol” operates – designating “Baby for Adoption” – that targets vulnerable young pregnant women and drugs them with lactation suppressants, sedatives, oxycontin and barbiturates. After birthing their child, these women are never allowed to see or touch their baby, which is whisked away forever to adoption agencies or unknown parties.

According to Hanne,

“I saw the BFA designation on my hospital chart so it was an institutional thing going on. I heard my doctor, Bertha Brisco, talk about how the local Catholic Church had a quota of newborns they needed to provide to the adoption agencies they had contracts with … I got the impression that it’s a huge racket.” (19)

An even darker aspect of such Catholic infant trafficking was revealed in 2014 in an abandoned cistern in Tuam, Ireland, the site of the former Bon Secours Catholic Orphanage. In the cistern were the burned and cut-up remains of nearly 800 newborns and young children. Before the Catholic Church and Irish government closed off the site and issued a whitewash account of the mass grave, local Gardai (police) examined the remains and reported to ITCCS investigators that ​“The children’s bones bear signs of cultic desecration and possible human sacrifice of a kind investigated at sites in Wexford.”

Not surprisingly, this evidence was censored out of all subsequent media accounts and the “official” Irish government report on the Tuam remains, which offered no explanation for the state of the children’s bones or who was responsible. The report also exonerated the Roman Catholic Church of any responsibility, despite the fact that the bones were identified as being from children interned at the Bon Secours orphanage where they had been under the Catholic Church’s legal protection. (20)

Over the past five years, mounting evidence points to the existence of a centuries-old child sacrificial network operating within the Roman Catholic Church known as the Ninth Circle, and referred to as the Twelve Mile Club on Canada’s west coast. According to at least three eyewitness-participants, the members of these cults routinely abduct, rape, torture and ritually slaughter newborns and children, and then cannibalize their remains. Witnesses Toos Neijenhuis and Anne Marie von Blijenburgh claim to have seen top Catholic Cardinals at these ceremonies along with Popes Benedict and Francis, and members of the Dutch, Belgian and British Royal families. (21)

At least one documentary source leaked from closed Vatican Library archives refers to the Ninth Circle as a cult established by the Jesuits during the 17th century as a means to control and blackmail church and political leaders, and to ​“conduct arcane rituals and experiments to captivate human and spiritual energy”. I​ NTERPOL has informally confirmed their knowledge of the existence of this cult and its extensive ties to the European Mafia crime cartel known as Ndrangheta, or “The Octopus”, that controls human and drug trafficking networks in Europe, America and throughout the Catholic Church.

The Papacy itself and a series of Popes are also directly implicated in child trafficking. The present Pope Francis, Jorge Bergoglio, assisted in and concealed the trafficking of the children of political prisoners during Argentina’s Dirty War of the 1970’s and ‘80’s. Bergoglio did so as an intimate associate of the ruling military junta while serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, according to the statements of former junta member Jorge Zorriega and Catholic priests. (22)

Similarly, during the Franco dictatorship in Spain from the 1930’s to the seventies, and extending into the 1990’s, the Catholic Church conducted a similar trafficking of an estimated 300,000 children of political prisoners that profited the Church to the tune of at least $200 million. Adult survivors in Barcelona have described to ITCCS investigators that this trafficking network continues today through the same Catholic Church agencies. (23)

In summary, the ITCCS estimates that the Roman Catholic Church and its criminal associates are implicated or directly engaged in the trafficking of at least twenty million people every year. The majority of them are children and women.

Laundering Money for Organized Crime

The Vatican’s close historical relationship with the Mafia and its continual laundering of the money of organized crime is thoroughly documented and has been established as undisputed fact in courts of law. This financial tie is a reflection of a bigger corporate network linking the Papacy with criminal syndicates across the world as well as their banking and business associates.

The Vatican Bank, or “Institute of Religious ​(sic)​ Works” (IOR), was created on February 11, 1929 by the dictator Mussolini, ostensibly as compensation for the loss of church income caused by the disestablishment of the Papal States in 1870. The IOR operated clandestinely until June 1942 when it was established by papal decree. From the beginning, the IOR has been a secret institute accountable only to a committee of Cardinals and the Pope. The IOR cannot be audited nor can its directors or operations be disclosed. Its total assets are officially listed as between $10-15 billion, a ludicrously low figure considering that the annual global income of the Roman Catholic Church well exceeds $50 billion. (24)

Because of its secrecy and independence, the Vatican Bank has the ability to withhold account information from regulators and authorities. This secrecy has provided an excellent cover throughout history, as the Vatican moved money here and there to gain illegal profits and power.

“It was not much of a secret that for decades Italy’s elite had used the IOR to hide their money,” Gerald Posner writes in ‘​God’s Bankers’: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican​ (2015).

“One internal review estimated there were approximately 9,300 accounts belonging to ‘privileged citizens of Italy,’ compared to only 2,500 that met the bank’s strict rules. Some accounts were proxies for the Spatola and Inzerillo crime families.”

The secretive nature of the IOR is also connected to its function as the chief money laundering conduit not only for organized crime but the world’s major banks and financial institutions.

It is estimated that over 60% of global bank profits are channeled into tax havens linked to the IOR and to the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements, which like the City of London constitute an extra-territoriality jurisdiction subject to no laws. The secretive and protected nature of the IOR ideally situates it to be the perfect repository of the growing assets of a multinational corporate “super entity” that is increasingly controlling world financial markets. (25)

The IOR serves as not only a money laundering device for Big Finance and organized crime but a contractor in the operations of Ndrangheta and Mafia networks in Europe and North America. In that capacity it provides financing for military hardware, technology and personnel for criminal syndicates, as it does for dictatorships all over the world. An example of this is when the Vatican and the IOR sold Exocet missiles to the Argentine military during the Falklands War in 1982, thanks to the intermediary role of the future Pope Francis, then the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. In return for assistance from Rome, crime groups like Ndrangheta supply the Vatican’s child trafficking and sacrificial networks like the Ninth Circle with children through “meat market” delivery systems operated by police, judges, doctors and politicians on their payrolls. (26)

The business dealings between Rome and the Mob are even more direct. The Vatican and the Italian and American Mafia were for some time joint stock owners of the world’s largest real estate company, Immobiliare Ltd, and continue to be in a host of banks, casinos and resorts, including Finabank of Switzerland, Continental Illinois Hotels and Continental Bank of Illinois. In addition, members or close associates of the Mafia have for many years occupied direct and key roles in the Vatican hierarchy.

Just a few of the more prominent mobster-linked high Vatican officials included and include Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, Cardinal John Cody of Chicago, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, Pope Paul VI, whose advisors included members of the Gambino and Inzerillo Mafia families, and Pope Benedict / Joseph Ratzinger, who appointed as the head of the IOR Ernst von Freyburg, former banker for the Mafia-run Malteser Society and a member of the secret right-wing Opus Dei society. (27)

According to the US Justice Department and Washington DC lawyer Jonathan Levy, the Mafia and other crime groups have laundered as much as $100 billion through the IOR over the past two decades. The much-trumpeted “reform” steps by the present Pope Francis to “clean up” the IOR in fact are a not very subtle cover up of the financial record of the dealings between the Mafia and the IOR, and of Francis’ personal complicity in the IOR’s funding of the weaponry of the murderous Argentine junta.

We turn now to the evidence of the third criminal category in which the Vatican is implicated as a TNCO: illicitly trafficking in weapons.

Arms Dealing

The Vatican’s Pontifical Economic Commission and Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (its treasury) are formally separate from the IOR and handle the corporate portfolio and investments of the Catholic church. Its assets are heavily invested in the global arms industry, including small arms, missile guidance systems and land mines, and in major criminal syndicates that illicitly manufacture and sell them.

To name just a few of the more prominent arms companies connected to the Catholic Church, the Vatican owns 100% of the shares of Pietro Beretta Ltd., the world’s largest small arms manufacturer, and a majority share in Udine, a missile systems contractor and the British arms company BAE Systems. Along with the Italian government, the Catholic Church is heavily invested in the ninth largest military contractor in the world: the Leonardo-Finmeccanica company of Rome that specializes in aerospace weapons, defense contracts and security.

The Holy See routinely creates the appearance at the UN that it opposes the global arms industry. In reality, the Catholic Church profits heavily from that industry. It does so not only from these direct investments but through its deep association with military regimes and their corporate associates. The latter include major banks like HSBC, Chase Morgan and Bank of America, Pharmaceutical cartels and their links with global drug trafficking, and high grade weapon design companies. (28)

None of this should surprise any student of Catholic Church history and its long, Papal-sanctioned tradition of Just War, Holy War and Imperialism. For sixteen centuries, the Church has led, legitimated and profited from warfare in Europe and around the world. Popes led their own armies into battle, blessed Crusading armies, granted an “Indulgence” (a supposed cleansing of sins) to anyone who killed in defense of Christendom, and funded Catholic warrior societies like the Templars and Hospitallers (the latter being the present Knights of Malta, which also enjoys UN observer-member status).

The militaristic Jesuits, established in 1543 by the Spanish mercenary soldier Ignatius Loyola to destroy all enemies of the Pope, established a massive global arms manufacturing and trading network that persists to the present.

Jesuit agents armed their Huron native allies to wage perpetual war against the English-allied Mohawks in what became Canada, trafficking guns, alcohol and smallpox-infected blankets that exterminated two thirds of the people of those indigenous nations. The wealth amassed by the Jesuits during this genocide allowed them to eventually own some of the world’s major banks, including Citibank and Chase Morgan, that are big underwriters of the global arms industry. These banks in turn provide the Church with offshore holding companies by which it invests in the global arms trade without detection.

The present Pope Francis/Jorge Bergoglio, a Jesuit, is adept at making politically-correct statements about establishing a “zero tolerance policy” in his church towards child rape and church arms trading. Policy positions are fine, but they are never enforced in a big corporation when they conflict with their money. As a man who owes his rise in the Church to his friendship with and promotion of the Argentinian military and with killers like the founder of Argentina’s notorious death squads, Jose Lopez Rega, Jorge Bergoglio is well aware of this fact.

Jorge Bergoglio (left) and Argentine dictator General Jorge Videla, 1981

Towards a Second Nuremberg Precedent? Unseating the Vatican with the Common Law

The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.
– Justice Robert Jackson, Chief American Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial, from his opening remarks, November 20, 1945

If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

– Justice Robert Jackson, ibid.

The rise of a new standard and body of law in the wake of World War Two is normally attributed to the legal and moral precedents established by the series of war crimes trials held in Nuremberg, Germany in 1946, and codified in legal principles at the United Nations in 1950. In truth, the higher form of “international law” that was propounded as the basis for the unprecedented trial of Nazi leaders had been taking shape for more than a century, as European Empires’ competition for land, resources and overseas markets spilled over traditional national borders and the constraints of domestic legal systems. A new judicial forum was required to adjudicate the conflicts of a new global order. The battle for hegemony between Germany, Britain, France, Russia and America that culminated in the two World Wars of the 20th century provided the impetus for such a restructuring.

The Nuremberg Trials represented in theory the formulation of that new body of law by which transnational powers could coexist and prevent further devastating world wars and atrocities. In reality, the trials were constrained by the political agendas of the victorious Allied powers and the looming bipolar cold war between America and Russia. In the words of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (1980),

“Those ​(Nuremberg)​ trials were thinly veiled politics posing as legal process. Hitler and his entourage should have been tried for murder rather than for waging an ‘aggressive war’, which is an ill defined legal concept since all major powers employ ‘aggression’ to be victorious in war. By American standards the trials were unconstitutional since they were based on ex post facto laws ​(ed: These are actions not unlawful at the time of commission but are retroactively declared to be a crime).​ Trying other powers for ‘aggressive war’ is levying penalties against the losers of a war. The guilt of the Nazis did not justify us substituting power for legal principle.” (29)

By operating from the partisan political basis of victorious nations rather than according to the universal norms of law and legal procedure, the Nuremberg trials actually frustrated genuine efforts to create a new global court that could prevent and prosecute crimes against humanity inflicted by entire nations. Proof of this is evident in two glaring examples: the post – Nuremberg restriction of war crimes indictments to individuals rather than to whole groups, and the emasculation of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Crime and Prevention of Genocide to safeguard major western powers from being charged with genocide. These limitations are responsible for the failure of modern courts to prosecute governments and churches for such crimes as the genocide of indigenous people and the ongoing trafficking, torture and murder of children by churches.

In his seminal work ​Murder by Decree: The Crime of Genocide in Canada (2016), Kevin Annett notes,

“The Canadian government and churches, like all parties caught in their own crime, have relied on the ‘loophole’ provisions inserted into Section Two of the United Nations Genocide Convention that states that genocide is ​intent to commit the crime, not the crime itself … Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide made no mention of ‘intentionality’ regarding this crime. For him, intent was not a factor; genocide simply meant an action – the destruction of a group. That act of destruction by itself demonstrated the intent to commit the crime … Both the Canadian and American governments worked hard to revise Lemkin’s original definition to protect themselves from prosecution for their own homegrown war crimes by defining genocide as ‘the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, any national, ethnic, racial or religious group’. T​ his legally evasive definition was adopted in the final United Nations Convention on Genocide in 1948 and absolved western regimes of responsibility for their extermination of aboriginal nations.” (30)

Besides this focus on intent rather than act, the UN Genocide Convention protected western powers by de-emphasizing the cultural and biological aspects of genocide (like wiping out languages, separating children from their families and other normative practices in church-run Indian schools) and reconceptualizing genocide to primarily mean the physical killing of targeted people. This redefinition allowed the Catholic Church in particular to avoid prosecution for their clearly genocidal programs aimed not just at aboriginal children but anyone who was not a Catholic or fell into disfavour with church authorities. These programs included the common church practice of sexually sterilizing rebellious aboriginals or those who refused to convert to Catholicism. ​(w​ ww.murderbydecree.com​ , p. 62ff)

The actions by the victors of World War Two to make it seem that their former enemies had been the only powers to commit genocide deliberately fogged the fact that the modern eugenics movement of so-called “racial purification” had begun not in Nazi Germany but in America during the latter 19th century. Sterilization laws aimed at the morally and mentally “unfit”, Indians, Negroes, the poor and immigrants were legislated in a majority of American states and three of Canada’s provinces by 1920. Official programs of mass sterilization of non-Christian aboriginals reached a high point in church-run Indian schools across North America by the 1950’s, including in relation to military programs connected to the notorious MKULTRA project. Efforts to prosecute the governments and churches responsible for these war crimes have been continually blocked in Canadian and American courts. (31)

In the same vein, human rights tribunals established under United Nations auspices after World War Two, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the more recent International Criminal Court (ICC), have strictly avoided bringing charges against the institutions responsible for these and other crimes against humanity, declaring instead that only individuals can be indicted for such crimes. Only twice in the past seventy years has the Genocide Convention ever been actually applied and used to prosecute perpetrators of genocide, during the Serbian and Rwandan civil wars. But while Slobodan Milosevic and assorted Hutu militiamen served as public scapegoats for a bigger crime, the bloodier institutions of Church and State that wiped out millions of people have not only been ignored but legally protected from prosecution – once again, by the agencies and top officials of the United Nations.

An echo of this practice of “straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel” is routinely displayed in court cases involving child rapists in the Catholic Church, where the Vatican officials bearing fiduciary responsibility for allowing and concealing the rape and torture – including the Pope – are left out of either the indictment or the final verdict. The legal system as it stands now systematically protects the institutions that are the source of the crime while slapping the wrist of individual perpetrators, thanks to the example set by the United Nations and its member-nation states.

In June of 2010 in Dublin, an alternative to this impasse was born. The absence of any effective legal forum in which criminal institutions could be prosecuted compelled a coalition of victims of Catholic Church crimes to meet in conference and launch a new initiative, known as The International Tribunal of Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS). Basing itself on the Common Law and the judicially-recognized right of people to conduct “Citizens’ Tribunals of Conscience” when existing courts are compromised or a party to the offenses being adjudicated, the ITCCS was formed with a twofold mandate:

1. To lawfully prosecute those people and institutions responsible for the exploitation, trafficking, torture and murder of children, past and present, and
2. To stop these and other criminal actions by Church and State, including by disestablishing those same institutions.”(​http://murderbydecree.com/the-itccs-org-archive/​ )

The formation of the ITCCS struck a nerve and a deep discontent, especially among survivors of Church-State crimes. Within two years, the ITCCS had expanded into nine countries and launched its first common law court proceedings against the Vatican, the British Crown, Canada and the Catholic, Anglican and United Churches. These proceedings occurred through The International Common Law Court of Justice (ICLCJ), established as a lawful court of record by the ITCCS. On February 11, 2013, the ICLCJ proceedings compelled the resignation from his office of Pope Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger, along with three other top Vatican officials. Pope Benedict resigned shortly before the release of the ICLCJ verdict on February 25, 2013 that found all of the defendants and their institutions guilty of committing and concealing genocide as part of a global criminal conspiracy. (32)

Ratzinger’s resignation and the ICLCJ verdict was more than a shot heard around the world. For these events constituted a wake-up call to the United Nations, and churches and governments everywhere, that not only heads of state and world leaders were subject to indictment and prosecution, but so were their entire institutions.

Like a latter day “Nuremberg Revisited”, the ICLCJ trial introduced a new philosophy and practice into international law: a legal equivalent of direct democracy, in which citizens can convene and conduct their own courts of law according to the usual norms of due process and rules of evidence, but with the aim of stopping and not simply reprimanding the institutions and systems of thought and power historically responsible for ongoing crimes against humanity.

This right to establish Tribunals of Conscience whose verdicts can be acted upon by other courts is recognized by International Law, United Nations agencies and NGO’s. As far back as the Russell Tribunal, the legitimacy of citizen-led inquiries is recognized and upheld as a watchdog on the existing judiciary and a guarantor of justice for people locked out or targeted by the system. Analogous to the power of Grand Juries in America, which Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia called ​“a fourth arm of government, monitoring the courts of our land”, C​ ommon Law Courts have proven to be a means to force unacceptable crimes to light and indict the powers responsible.

In the matter at hand – the criminal actions and unaccountable nature of the Vatican, its irreconcilability with the UN Charter and International Law, and the necessity to disestablish its diplomatic presence at every level of the UN and among governments – Common Law exists as a judicial and a practical remedy, especially for people without the means to face off against powerful corporate adversaries. Indeed, the extent of the Vatican’s influence and control of governments, judiciaries and UN agencies makes the creation of such an independent legal process and court system imperative. Any campaign to lobby UN member-states to support the expulsion of the Holy See will founder without the legal means to compel such a fundamental step.

The need for a new legal forum with which to confront Vatican crimes was evident most notably in June of 2013, when the International Criminal Court (ICC) dismissed an application by a group of survivors of church crimes to prosecute former Pope Benedict for crimes against humanity. The ICC decision contradicted International Law and its own precedent decisions when it claimed that the application ​“does not appear to fall within the court’s jurisdiction”,​ when in fact any head of state (or head of a church claiming state status, like the Vatican) can be tried before the ICC. (33)

The ICC’s flagrant enabling of Pope Benedict’s proven complicity in crimes against children – established by the ICLCJ trial between July 18, 2012 and February 25, 2013 – constituted a direct miscarriage of the law and an obstruction of justice. The ICLCJ subsequently applied to the ICC to aid in the enforcement of the verdict that found Benedict/Ratzinger guilty by issuing arrest warrants against him and his convicted co-conspirators. But the ICC ignored the application, disregarding its own mandate and the rule of law. Clearly, the existing international courts have proven themselves to be unwilling to act against the Vatican even when the latter’s crimes have been established as fact in bona fide court proceedings. As such, the ICC, like other UN affiliates, is operating as an accessory to those crimes.

With this understanding, the question before us is how can a citizen-led process of disestablishing the power of the Roman Catholic Church be assisted by United Nations member states and agencies. What steps are needed within and without the UN to remove the Holy See from all positions of authority and diplomatic power at every level, and specifically, from its present status as an “observer non-member state”?

Dethroning the Vatican: A Plan of Action

A Member of the United Nations who has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.
– Article 6 of the United Nations Charter

At first, the prospects for disestablishing the diplomatic presence of the Vatican at the United Nations seem minimal at best, and not simply because of the former’s considerable financial, psychological and political influence.

Historically, the UN has rarely disciplined a member or observer state, and only on one occasion has it actually expelled a member from its ranks: on October 25, 1971, when it removed Taiwan and replaced it with The People’s Republic of China. (UN Resolution 2758) However, the UN still officially does not consider this move to have constituted an actual expulsion but rather a “change in representation”. In addition, the UN Charter has no provision to allow a member state to even withdraw from membership. (34)

On the other hand, the same Charter clearly states in Chapter Two, Article Six, that ​“A Member of the United Nations w​ hich has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter​ may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” ​(our emphasis)

The evidence in this paper clearly shows that the Vatican/Holy See has persistently violated the principles and the conventions of the UN. This violation was present at the very instant that the Holy See forced itself into the UN, according to the two entry statutes of the UN Charter, namely:

1. Membership in the United Nations is open to all peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgement of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations​ and
2. The admission of any such state to membership in the United Nations will be affected by a decision of the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.​ (our emphasis)

Neither of these entry requirements occured in regards to the Vatican/Holy See, as we have described. Its admission was never formally recommended by the Security Council nor adopted by a vote in the General Assembly. Nor has the judgement of the UN regarding the capacity of the Holy See to carry out its Charter obligations ever been tested, even when the Holy See has demonstrated its incapacity and outright refusal to fulfill such obligations.

On these grounds alone, there exists absolutely no basis for the presence of the Vatican and the Holy See at the United Nations​. The absurdity and illegality of its presence is indicated even more fully by the fact that it does not fulfill the definition of a “sovereign state” stated in the UN Charter, as one that has ​“sovereignty over a given area … and is neither dependent on nor subjected to any other power or state”.​ As we have seen, the Vatican has no actual sovereignty over a given area and is utterly dependent on other powers for its existence, beginning with Italy’s Lateran Treaty and extending to the pseudo-jurisdiction it is unlawfully and fraudulently granted by governments and the United Nations itself.

What then is to be done?

No one ever likes to admit to an historic wrong or to their own complicity in it. If they happen to be part of an institution or a government, they are also legally and politically restrained from making such an admission. As a UN delegate commented to Kevin Annett in the fall of 2001 during his effort to bring the evidence of the Canadian Genocide to the General Assembly,

“No member state will ever open that can of worms because most of them are guilty of it, too. The tacit agreement is for no state to ever point a finger at another concerning something that could rebound on them.”

The crimes of the Vatican are shared by every major government in the world and their array of corporate associates. Politically, the Church has always felt itself on solid ground within the UN for that very reason, and because of the historic establishing of many of those major powers by the Church itself. But that fact also makes the entire arrangement of Church and State complicity in criminality extremely vulnerable and prone to exposure, as our ITCCS campaign in Canada and abroad has proven over many years. That vulnerability can and must be exploited through four proven means:

a) Education, b) Diplomatic, Political and Economic Pressure, c) Legal Action and d) Direct Action.

Here then are the components of a global campaign to expel the Holy See from the United Nations and nullify the diplomatic and political status of the Vatican in the world community:

1. Education​: The evidence in this paper and the truth of the nature and criminality of the Vatican will be massively propagated to the public, the media and throughout the United Nations and its members and agencies. It will be made clear that the Roman Catholic Church is a transnational criminal organization and an unaccountable rogue power that has no place in a lawful gathering of nations.

2. Diplomatic, Political and Economic Pressure:​ Building on this knowledge, a campaign will commence within the United Nations and other international forums to expel the Holy See and Vatican from all presence, representation or membership in any UN body, to dispatch UN peacekeeping forces to protect those threatened or victimized by the Catholic Church or its associates, and to bring sanctions against that Church.

At the same time, a parallel campaign will pressure world governments to cancel their diplomatic relations with the Vatican, expel the Papal Nuncios and cancel the tax exemptions and other privileges enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church in their nations. This will include collecting all back taxes owed and funds usurped by the Church from their nations, including through the lawful expropriation or nationalization of Church property, lands and assets.

3. Legal Action:​ The Vatican and Roman Catholic Church and its chief officers will be brought to public trial for their proven crimes against humanity, including war crimes, genocide, mass murder, child trafficking, criminal conspiracy, fraud, obstruction of justice and subverting the sovereignty and laws of other nations and the international community. This action will be conducted within both national and international courts of law, as well as in common law courts and Tribunals of Conscience established by the People according to their inborn sovereignty and non-statutory Natural Law. The aim of this legal campaign will be to lawfully indict and convict the Church and its officers of these and other crimes, and enforce the sentence against them that would be applied to any group of convicted felons.

4. Direct Action:​ The daily criminal operations of the Roman Catholic Church constitute a real, present and ongoing danger to children and humanity, and to the peace, security and sovereignty of all nations. Because these operations are actively aided and abetted by the police, judicial and governmental authorities of many nations, the ultimate and only reliable safeguard against such institutionalized criminality lies in the people themselves.

Therefore, whenever the existing authorities refuse by acts of commission or omission to challenge and stop these Church crimes, the people are obligated and empowered to take direct action to do so. This includes by making citizen’s arrests against known or suspected child predators at any level of the Church, peacefully occupying and seizing Church property and assets, recovering and analyzing the remains of victims of Church crimes, banishing individuals and the Church as a whole from their communities and taking any other actions required to protect their children and communities and maintaining their peace and liberties.

Let it be clear that it is morally, legally and politically incumbent on the United Nations and its member states and agencies to assist this global campaign, under the terms of international law​. Their failure to do so can and will be construed to indicate that the UN and these states are aiding and abetting the Vatican as a rogue power to commit these crimes and subvert law and justice. In that event, the UN and these states will be considered and publicly named as active co-conspirators in such criminality, and the same sanctions and measures deployed against the Vatican will be applied against them.

Summary

In the course of deposing a tyrannical regime of Crown and Church in England, Oliver Cromwell declared in 1651,

“Catholicism is more than a religion, it is a foreign political power. Therefore there will be no peace in our land until the power of that church is crushed. These matters are too weighty for good manners.”

Cromwell’s words have been borne out over the past centuries. The largest and most murderous criminal organization in human history has been unlawfully elevated above the law and is maintained there by the world’s nations and the political status quo. But under Natural Law, a higher Necessity outweighs all statutory arrangements and is entitled to employ any method to ensure the lives, security and liberty of humanity. Such was the case at Nuremberg in 1946. Such is the case in times of war. And such is the case in humanity’s fight against the oldest war-making power on earth, the Roman Catholic Church.

This is a life and death matter. Many of us who have uncovered and publicly confronted the crimes of this Church have been assaulted, harassed, censored, imprisoned and even killed by church agents or the authorities under their influence. Seven of our aboriginal activists in Canada have died from proven foul play after naming the names of and confronting high level child killers in the Roman Catholic Church. Many lives hang in the balance, especially the lives of children, and their survival depends on how people of conscience will respond to these facts and this campaign for law and justice.

This paper is an opening salvo in a global battle. If the United Nations and its member-states refuse to abide by their own Charter and stated principles by continuing to allow the Church of Rome legitimacy and presence within diplomatic and political institutions, they have indicted themselves under international law as co-conspirators with Vatican crimes. Regardless, our global ITCCS network and the people themselves will take whatever actions are needed to end forever the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church.

Notes

​1. ​The Case of the Pope: Vatican​ Accountability for Human Rights Abuse​ by Geoffrey Robertson, QC (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 12 .

2. Referred to in ​Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII​ by John Cornwell (1999).

3. See Chapter Five in Robertson, ibid.
4. See ​The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies that Threaten to

take over America​ by Jim Marrs (2008), ​https://williamblum.org/chapters/killing-hope/italy​ .​ 5. Marrs, ibid, and ​https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jasenovac-camp​ .

​6. As with any genocide, estimating precise figures is difficult, but are calculated at these sites and from a reading of the history of religious wars, the Inquisition, colonialism and European genocide : https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Death_toll_of_Christianity​ , and http://www.truthbeknown.com/victims.htm​ .

​7. ​Murder by Decree: The Crime of Genocide in Canada – A Counter Report to the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’​ by Kevin D. Annett (Amazon, 2016), Chapter One. See also www.murderbydecree.com .

8. In practice, the “cloak of national sovereignty” has been invoked to avoid prosecuting the leader of any regime friendly to western powers, even after the establishing of the ICC Convention in 1998.

9. Spoken to Kevin Annett by Furio Colombo in Rome on April 11, 2010. 10. Robertson, ibid., p. 96.

11. See a general discussion of this history in Robertson, ibid., Chapter Six, “The Holy See and the United Nations”.

12. See a general discussion of this issue in Robertson, ibid., Chapter Twelve, “Crimes against Humanity”.

13. See the discussion of all of these above incidents in Robertson, ibid, pp. 99-111.

14. Robertson, ibid., p. 109.

15. See the discussion of Canon Law in Robertson, ibid, Chapter Three,
p. 42. The text (quite possibly redacted) of ​Crimen Sollicitationas​ is found at http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_crimen-sollicitationis-1962_en.html​ .

16. The full text of the UN Convention is found at:

https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/organized-crime/intro/UNTOC.html

17. Presented in the Prosecutor’s opening statement to the ICLCJ on July 8, 2012 in Brussels. See ​www.murderbydecree.com​ .

18. From the sworn testimonies of Matthew McDaniel and Joyce Krueger. See also ​www.akha.org​ .

19. From the sworn testimony of Hanne Andersen. See also the discussion in Annett, ibid., p. 146.

20. From the statement of an anonymous Gardai police official to Kevin Annett, May 4, 2016, and see ​www.murderbydecree.com​ and :

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-babies-and-children-foun d-at-tuam-orphanage-in-ireland

21. See ​www.murderbydecree.com​ (ITCCS Archives) and these statements by both women: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E35Hh8Hl8FQ&t=7s​ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cTBp7_oka8&t=213s

22. See ​www.murderbydecree.com​ (ITCCS Archives) and these news links:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21794798​ and https://www.globalresearch.ca/washingtons-pope-who-is-francis-i-cardinal-jorge-mario-ber goglio-and-argentinas-dirty-war/5326675​ .

23.​https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049647/BBC-documentary-exposes-50-year- scandal-baby-trafficking-Catholic-church-Spain.html​ and

https://www.ranker.com/list/catholic-church-trafficked-stollen-babies-spain/jacob-shelton​ .

24​.​ In 2013, the Catholic Church’s income in America alone was $13.4 billion, in a nation holding only 15% of the world’s Catholics. By the Church’s own admission only 1.6% of that income went to charity. The source of these figures is the US Internal Revenue Service Accounting Office.

https://www.thestreet.com/story/13295788/1/how-rich-is-the-catholic-church-it-s-i mpossible-to-tell.html​ and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/21/vatican-secret-property-empire- mussolini​ .

25. From a discussion with Dr. Katherine Horton. See also ​“The Network of Global Corporate Control” (2011) found at ​https://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728​ .

26. See ITCCS Archives at ​www.murderbydecree.com​ as well as ​In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I​ by David Yallop (1984), pp. 327, 340, 361.

27. See the details of these individuals in Yallop, ibid. 28​.​https://www.skepticink.com/tippling/2012/12/16/guns-and-violence-vatican-bank-is-the

-main-shareholder-in-pietro-beretta-arms-company/​ , https://geopolitics.co/2014/09/20/vatican-owns-media-firm-selling-porn/​ , https://archive.org/stream/TheVaticanAndPharmaceuticalIndustry/TheVaticanAndPharmace uticalIndustry_djvu.txt​ .

29. From ​The Court Years – 1939-1975: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas​ (New York: Random House, 1980).

30. Annett, ibid., pp. 43-45.
31. See ​War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Plan to Create a

Master Race​ by Edwin Black (2009).

32. From the ITCCS Archives, ​www.murderbydecree.com​ . The other Vatican officials who resigned after being named in the ICLCJ indictment were Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Cardinal Sean Brady, and Jesuit leader Adolfo Pachon.

33.​https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/international-criminal-court-dismiss es-abuse-claims-against-the-vatican/2013/06/14/36bb567a-d51f-11e2-b3a2-3bf5eb37b9d0 _story.html?utm_term=.5a8ca4be11c7​ . Also ITCCS Archives, ibid.

34.​ ​http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question104446.html​ . See also the United Charter at​ ​https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/un-charter-full-text/​ .

A free government and the Roman Catholic religion can never exist together in any nation or country. Liberty and Popery are opposed. – ​John Adams, Founding Father & second President of the United States of America, 1797

The Pope is Jesus Christ on earth, God incarnate, and thus is above all of man’s laws and civil authorities.​ – Pope Pius X, 1895

I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so. -​ Adolf Hitler to General Gerhard Engel, 1941

If the American people knew what I know of the fierce hatred of the Jesuits and the priests of Rome against our sacred rights, our institutions and our democracy, they would drive them from America as traitors.​ – Abraham Lincoln, 1864

Jesus of Nazareth had a simple prescription for anyone who harmed a child, and that was to tie a ten ton grinding stone around his neck and throw him into the nearest ocean. Is there a stone big enough to drown the biggest violator of children in the world today, the Roman Catholic Church? There is indeed. It is We the People.​ – Kevin D. Annett, Oxford University, 2013

The contents of this paper are published under the provisions of the Common Cause Copyright Agreement. Any or all of its contents may be freely quoted, reproduced, photocopied and circulated in any medium for non-commercial and non-profit purposes, provided that the authors and the sources are acknowledged.

To contact the International Tribunal of Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS) and to obtain copies of this paper, please write to ​[email protected]​ and [email protected]​ . See ​www.murderbydecree.com​ .

Published on May 31, 2019 by the ITCCS Directorate
and its North American Field Secretary Kevin D. Annett, M.A., M.Div.

The ITCCS operates offices in New York, Geneva and Vancouver.