Unholy Dealings

Three men have been convicted by a Vatican court of the most serious offence a Roman Catholic can commit. A former president and two legal consultants of the Institute for Works of Religion received prison sentences for embezzling the Vatican's pious profits from the sacred sale of real estate. All of the heinous criminals denied having done anything wrong, although it remains as yet unclear whether they did so on the grounds of helping the Vatican resist the temptations of worldly wealth. In any case they must be cursing their bad luck in having been found guilty of quasi-Semitic financial crimes, rather than the comparatively trivial canon-law misdemeanours of child abuse, cruelty, kidnapping and rape.