Vatican Bank in the News. Again.

Well that's...odd.

"...A spokeswoman for the Bank of Italy said it had been acting under European Union directives."

It is the very last phrase of this article which catches my attention. 

Here, in the final sentence of the story, we learn something that turns the entire story upside down, as it were. 

Throughout the story, we are under the impression that someone at the Bank of Italy was responsible for this decision to sequester Vatican funds and open an investigation of the Vatican bank’s top two officials. 

Then, here, at the end of the story, we learn that the Bank of Italy was “acting under European Union directives." 

We know that the European Union began — with considerable input from leading Catholic laymen, like Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, Robert Schuman — as a political structure to try to ensure that Europeans would never again engage in a fratricidal civil war. 

We know that Europe has become something different than what those three men envisioned: a place where the Christian roots of Europe are denied, and where many Christian moral beliefs have been cast aside. 

What were the “European Union directives” which led to this action against the Vatican by the Bank of Italy. Who issued those directives, and for what reason? 

These are open questions.