The extent of papal wealth has traditionally been cloaked in secrecy. Even within the Vatican's own walls there is no individual who has an overall view of its infinitely ramified financial operations. In The Vatican Empire, Nino Lo Bello, a former Rome correspondent for Business Week, presents the first comprehensive and authoritative report on the Vatican as a nerve center of high finance. The picture that emerges is one of awesome fiscal power.

Mr. Lo Bello describes in fascinating detail Vatican investments in real estate - one third of Rome is owned by the Holy See - electronics, plastics, airlines, and chemical and engineering firms. He also gives evidence that the Vatican is heavily involved in Italian banking and that it has huge deposits in foreign banks. Many of these are in Swwitzerland, since the Vatican financiers prefer numbered Swiss accounts where annonymity is maintained and where they can gain control of foreign corporations far from the public eye.

In addition, Mr. Lo Bello shows that the Vatican is one of the world's largest shareholders, with a stock portfolio that can be conservatively estimated in the billions of dollars.


About the author:
Nino Lo Bello (1922–1997) was an American author and journalist who specialized in writing about the Vatican. He also wrote under the pseudonym Walter Hoffman.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from Queens College in 1943 with a BA in Political Science.
He taught at the University of Kansas before moving to Rome where he reported on the Catholic Church. He worked as the Italian correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune for eight years. Lo Bello mostly wrote travel articles and about the arts.[1]
He wrote a tell-all book about the Vatican named The Vatican Papers, published in 1978 by New English Library, Sevenoaks, UK. The book, which delved into the financial side of the Catholic church, was a best-seller in 1968. He died at the age of 75