Vatican Bank’s New President

As this article from Chiesa reveals, the new president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, is a Catholic who understands the value of capitalism and population growth, two foundational elements for national well-being.

An excerpt.

“The new president of the IOR is a staunch proponent of a capitalism inspired by Christianity. For him, a high birth rate is the main engine of the economy. …

“His most recent appearance, before his appointment, was on September 19 at the Palazzo della Borsa in Genoa. Together with the archbishop of the city and president of the CEI, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, he discussed the encyclical "Caritas in Veritate" by Benedict XVI. He said that the current global economic crisis "originated in the failure to follow the guidelines of 'Humanae Vitae', that is, in the rejection of life and the suppression of childbirth."

“Gotti Tedeschi had expressed the same idea in an editorial in "L'Osservatore Romano" last June 6. If the economic hegemony of the world passes from the West to China, he wrote, it will be because of their different birth rates and population densities. Demographic trends determine the increase or decrease of an economy's productive capacity.

“Gotti Tedeschi has five children, "all from the same mother," he specifies. He lives in the countryside of Piacenza, where he was born 64 years ago, in Pontenure, not from from the Po river. He gets up very early in the morning, like a monk. In his BMW, he gets to Milan by dawn. He reads the newspapers in his office as president for Italy of Banco Santander, the biggest private bank in Europe, owned by a lay Spanish family, the Botíns. Then he goes to Mass, every morning, without fail.

“He teaches financial ethics at the Catholic University of Milan. But he is also a board member of Banca San Paolo in Turin and of the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, the operational wing of the treasury ministry….

“Gotti Tedeschi was formed as a banker in the American McKinsey school of international finance. As a Catholic, he converted from "superficial" to fervent in the 1960's, under the spiritual direction of the traditionalist thinker Giovanni Cantoni. The books that revealed his thought to the general public are "Denaro e Paradiso [Money and Paradise]," published in 2004, with a preface by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, and "Spiriti animali. La concorrenza giusta [Animal Spirits: The Right Kind of Competition]," published by Università Bocconi and with a preface by Alessandro Profumo, president of the largest Italian bank, Unicredit.”