God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

by Gerald Posner

  As word spread throughout the Curia about Bertone’s move against Viganò, others watched it as the ultimate test of Benedict’s commitment to the financial reforms. Four high-ranking Italian cardinals appealed personally to Benedict, asking him to reverse Bertone.34 The cardinals even suggested that the Pope should immediately elevate Viganò as a cardinal to conclusively demonstrate his faith both in him as well as the zealous cleanup on which he had embarked. One of Benedict’s closest confidants, Sister Ingrid Stampa, met him privately and lobbied for the beleaguered Viganò.35

  In the case of Viganò, a senior Curial cleric who had the courage to identify widespread corruption and wanted the Pontiff’s backing to stop it, Benedict was frozen. Viganò did not, as “Vatican Insider” predicted, get elevated to a cardinal and put in charge of the Ministry of Finance. Only weeks before the Moneyval inspectors had arrived, he was sent four thousand miles from the Vatican to serve as the Papal Nuncio to Washington. Once again, as he had throughout his Papacy, Benedict had shied away from confronting his Secretary of State. Bertone’s power seemed unchecked.

  * * *

  I. Among some of Bertone’s foes whom he transferred out of the Vatican over a two-year purge were Monsignor Vincenzo Di Mauro, the Secretary of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See; Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the powerful Secretary General of the Governorate; and Monsignor Ettore Balestrero, the Undersecretary for Relations with States. Bertone had also helped block Cardinal Angelo Scola from becoming the president of the Italian episcopal conference. And he replaced Cardinal Fernando Filoni, who held the key position of the Sosistuto in the Secretariat of State, with fifty-two-year-old Archbishop Giovanni Becciu, the Apostolic Nuncio to Angola, and someone who notably had never in his career served inside the Vatican.4

  38

  The Butler

  In late 2011 a handful of insiders gathered at the Vatican apartment of one of Benedict’s closest advisors. There was a war, they concluded, playing out for the soul of the church between reformers and the old guard. They were convinced that while Benedict’s heart was solidly with the reformers he was incapable of asserting himself to change the tide of the battle. By allowing his Secretary of State to make unchallenged decisions about top Curial appointments, the Pope had abdicated his administrative powers. That evening the discussion of what to do got around to whether a coup inside the Curia was possible.I They wanted Bertone out. After all, they argued, it was Benedict who had been elected Pope, not Bertone. Sandro Magister, one of Italy’s most respected Vaticanologists, captured the essence of what so rankled those gathered that evening: “There are appointments that only the pope can make, but that Bertone is in the habit of administering himself with nonchalance, as if they belonged to him.”1 If Benedict was not going to stop his Secretary of State from acting as if he ran the church, maybe they could find an unorthodox way to move against him.

  This was not easy for any of them. Each was loyal to the church and to Pope Benedict. None wanted to do anything that hurt either. But they also realized that if they were to push Bertone from his throne, it could be messy. They knew there would likely be unintended consequences from any plot they hatched.

  There were few realistic options. They could try to get a private meeting with Benedict. A few were close to him, personal friends on whom he had long relied. Arranging such a get-together would not be difficult, and it could be kept off the official calendar. Yet they knew firsthand that senior clerics had already met and pled with the Pope to restrain or dismiss Bertone, all to no effect.

  Maybe they should enlist some of Bertone’s fellow cardinals, and with them develop a strategy to check the Secretary of State. But the cardinals who would be instrumental were survivors through many power wars. They were unlikely to risk their own political capital in taking on Bertone at the behest of a group of lower-ranking clerics and some laymen who might be gone once Benedict was no longer Pope.

  The small group of Benedict supporters gathered that night were not simply upset at money matters gone awry. There was, as they discussed that evening, something that made most of them squirm. They had seen the proof of what one called a “gay lobby.” The common bond for the gay clerics at the highest positions of the Curia was that they had abandoned their celibacy vows. The problem, the small group agreed, was that they often used sex as a carrot for advancement to ambitious up-and-coming clerics. It was deplorable, they concluded, that a fast career track was within reach for any cleric willing to submit to the Vatican’s equivalent of a casting couch.2,II

  They were not an old-world throwback to antigay traditionalists in the church. One had a gay sister and another a pair of brothers who had come out to their family. They did not pay attention to the sometimes salacious rumors that made the rounds at the Vatican about the sexual escapades of those clerics. “Play, don’t pray” was the mantra for some, who according to the insiders included dinner parties of clerics and male prostitutes that ended in nights of drugs and sex. Just the previous year, the press was filled with salacious stories about a Vatican choirboy who was dismissed after it was discovered that he was arranging male prostitutes for a Gentleman of His Holiness who also served as a senior consultant to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.3

  None of those gathered that night admitted having witnessed any of it with their own eyes. Moreover, they knew that some of the clerics who were part of the gay lobby were among the Curia’s most effective reformers and among Benedict’s best prelates.

  The small group that evening did not know that the lobby they had discovered had a long history in the Vatican. Mussolini’s spies had compiled thick dossiers on the secret gay lifestyles of key Papal aides as far back as the 1920s.The police even privately concluded that a 1956 knife attack by a young man on the Vatican’s fascist intermediary, Father Tacchi Venturi, was over a love affair with another man.4 Peter Murphy, the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission to the Vatican from 1984 to 1989, told me that while he could not verify anything about the Vatican after he left, while he was there, “I know the gay lobby was true. I know it to be absolutely true. It was discreet but I had evidence of it with some of those with whom I worked and saw socially.” (Murphy raised the matter with the archbishop who was a senior official for the U.S. Conference of Bishops. “He refused to believe me,” recalls Murphy. He also told Archbishop Marcinkus about it. “He did not seem that surprised, but did not say anything.”)5 In 1999, a small publishing house released a book by Luigi Marinelli, a monsignor who had worked at the Vatican for forty-five years. Fearing reprisals from the church, he wrote Via col vento in Vaticano (Gone with the Wind in the Vatican) under a pseudonym.6 The seventy-two-year-old prelate who was dying of liver and bone cancer had decided to purge his conscience. In sometimes overwrought prose, Marinelli presented a hodgepodge of accusations of corruption and venality within the Vatican. One of his strongest charges was that inside the Curia, where he had worked, simply being gay “can help a hopeful candidate advance more quickly and cause a rival to lose the desire to present himself for promotion . . . the one who gives himself from the waist down has a better chance than the one who gives his heart and mind to the service of God and his brothers. For many prelates in the Curia, the beautiful boy attracts more goodwill and favor than the intelligent one.” According to Marinelli, there was also widespread sexual blackmail inside the Curia, the kind that “in the national civil code . . . is punishable as a crime; in the ecclesiastical code, the demand is justified by that golden rule promoveatur ut amoveatur, which means, ‘let it be moved forward so that it can be put aside.’ ”7,III

  Since that 2011 evening when those Benedict insiders discussed a “gay lobby” at their hastily called meeting, there has been some frank public talk about it. None more so than Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, who in a June 2013 meeting with representatives from CLAR (the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women) in charge of communities of priests, monks, and nuns, s
tartled everyone: “In the Curia, there are holy people. But there is also a stream of corruption. The ‘gay lobby’ is mentioned, and it is true, it is there. We need to see what we can do.”9 A month later, after advisors contended that such an admission was unnecessary and potentially damaging, Francis pulled back during an impromptu news conference on a flight to Rome from Brazil. “So much is written about the gay lobby. I have yet to find on a Vatican identity card the word ‘gay.’ . . . I think that when we encounter a gay person, we must make the distinction between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of a lobby, because lobbies are not good.”10

  In 2014, Elmar Mäder, the former commander of the Swiss Guard, told a Swiss newspaper about “a network of homosexuals” and said that to the extent it had “become a network or even a kind of secret society, I would not tolerate it in my sphere of decision making.”11,IV Some suspected Mäder as the source of the embarrassing leak the prior year that the Vatican owned a central Rome property that served not only as housing for some cardinals but also had Europe’s biggest gay bathhouse (at a weekly “bear night,” a man dressed as a priest was billed as “Bruno, a hairy pastor of souls . . . [who] wants to expose his body and soul”).13

  The group that gathered that night in 2011 to decide what to do about Bertone was upset by recent headlines that had nothing to do with whether a gay lobby flourished inside the Vatican. They had been startled by the news that the church reportedly profited from pornography published by Weltbild, its wholly owned $2.3 billion German bookseller. The tabloid press reprinted some of Weltbild’s more profane titles such as “Slut’s Boarding School” and “ ‘Fuckable’ Lawyer’s Whore.” Instead of banning the publication of such titles, the church instead threatened litigation against some of the tabloids. Such raunchy material accounted for only a tiny fraction of Weltbild’s publications. The material in question was “erotica.” It did not meet any legal definition of porn. Moreover, one spokesman pointed out, all such sales amounted to $391,000, not a great deal of money.14

  One of those at the table had recently spoken to Ingrid Stampa, the German nun who had Benedict’s ear. She said all the crises facing the church were so serious that anything undertaken must be bold.15 That added to the sense that they should act even if it was messy. After four hours of sometimes heated discussions the group settled on a plan. It was fraught with danger and real risk for the person tapped to carry it out.

  The coup’s il corvo (the raven) was an unlikely choice, Paolo Gabriele, the forty-five-year-old butler to Pope Benedict, someone investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi later described as “a pious Catholic so devoted to the Pontiff that he saw him as his own father.”16 The posting held by the well-liked Gabriele was one of the Vatican’s most coveted lay positions. A Pope’s butler attends to all the Pontiff’s needs from the moment he awakes. Gabriele typically clocked twelve-hour days, seven days a week. He lived in the Vatican, close to the Apostolic Palace, with his wife, Manuela, a devout Catholic, and their three young children. Whether Benedict was meeting with a head of state, traveling abroad, receiving a personal gift or donation from a prominent visitor, or consulting with other clerics inside the Apostolic Palace, Gabriele, with his trademark array of dark suits, starched white shirts, dark ties, and spit-shined shoes, was ever present. Sometimes Gabriele was invited to sit at the Pope’s table for meals.

  Gabriele was not a lifelong Vatican employee. After falling out from the church as a teenager, and working with a film company, in the mid-1990s he reconnected with his Catholicism after his prayers about an important personal matter were answered by St. Faustina, a mystic Polish nun. He began doing small jobs around a local diocesan church in Rome. The pastor was Polish and knew John Paul II. He liked the energetic young man and his family and recommended him to John Paul’s private secretary, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz (now the Cardinal of Kraków). Not long after—around 2002—Milwaukee-born Monsignor James Harvey, who was the Prefect of the Papal Household, called on Gabriele. He was soon working as a janitor inside the Vatican.V Everyone liked the quiet, shy, hardworking newcomer. Gabriele soon moved up under the direct supervision of a legendary Papal butler, Angelo Gugel, who had cultivated a reputation for fierce loyalty. Gugel, who was a source of some of the most coveted gossip in the city-state, wielded far more power than his position would have indicated.

  Pope John Paul took notice of the good-looking young apprentice with the military posture and immaculate clothes, and often made a point of acknowledging Gabriele—calling him Paoletto (little Paul)—when he walked past the domestic staff. Others noted that Gabriele had carved out a fast reputation as an eager go-getter.

  When Ratzinger became Pope in 2005, Gugel kept the coveted butler’s spot. But by 2006, Monsignor Gänswein, who was himself Benedict’s jealous gatekeeper, decided it was time to get rid of Gugel. He had too lofty a view of his role as butler. Gänswein directed Monsignor Harvey to find someone who was efficient and loyal but also faded into the background, a person with no ambition to wield influence with the Pontiff.

  Gugel fought for his job, but when he realized change was imminent, he pushed for his son-in-law. Harvey instead surprisingly tapped Gabriele.

  As Gabriele later recounted to a colleague, he learned of the decision when Gugel called him into his apartment. The longtime butler looked grim, almost, Gabriele recalled, as “if someone had died.” When Gabriele sat down, Gugel informed him that he had been selected as Benedict’s butler.

  “It is very, very hard work,” Gugel said. “If you can’t do it, say so now.”

  Gabriele realized that Gugel was looking for any excuse to return to Harvey and report that Gabriele was in over his head.

  “No, no, it’s okay,” Gabriele assured him.

  There were only nine people who had access to the Pope’s private apartments. In record time, Gabriele was one of them.18 For the next two months Gugel and Gabriele worked together on the transition. The relations between them were frosty, and Gugel did the minimum of what was required to bring the newcomer up to speed. Gänswein kept an eye on the duo. Always polite and humble, with never any desire to gossip, Gabriele seemed the antithesis of Gugel. Gabriele’s desk was set up on the far side of the same room in which Gänswein worked. He said nothing unless he was spoken to. He was just what Gänswein had ordered.

  • • •

  The first sign of what Gabriele was up to came to light on January 25, 2012, on a respected Italian television program, Gli Intoccabili (The Untouchables). Gianluigi Nuzzi, the investigative journalist who had written the 2009 exposé of the Vatican Bank based on Dardozzi’s treasure trove of IOR documents, was the host. Somehow Nuzzi had learned about Archbishop Viganò’s efforts to root out corruption in Vatican City and that his transfer to America was against his will. Once again someone inside the Vatican had fed Nuzzi information. Nuzzi portrayed clerics in the Secretariat of State as well as some of Viganò’s colleagues in the Governorate as if they were part of a cover-up to protect corrupt contractors.19

  Press secretary Lombardi and his staff had picked September 26 as the day to get some good media coverage for the church’s rewriting of its 2010 anti-money-laundering law. Moneyval inspectors had informed the Vatican a few months earlier that the statute did not meet the EU’s stringent standards.20 The revisions obligated the church to create a roster of terror organizations in line with those identified by the U.N., and also required it to enter into agreements with other countries by which it promised to share financial data. At the same time, the Vatican had ratified three anticrime treaties with New York, Vienna, and Palermo, to comply with standards set by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force to help combat money laundering and terrorism financing.21

  But Lombardi’s plans to talk about the church’s progress with the EU got scuttled when he woke up to front-page stories about Nuzzi’s show. No one was interested in the Vatican’s financial fine-tuning. By mid-morning Lombardi issued a statement blasting the program, complaini
ng about its “questionable journalistic methods” and its “biased coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church.”22 But all he could offer weakly about the factual core of Nuzzi’s story was that “the positive criteria of correct and transparent management which inspired Archbishop Viganò certainly continue to guide the current directors of the Governorate.”23

  How did Nuzzi obtain the embarrassing insider information? The hunt for the leaker was on. The Vatican police, under the control of General Domenico Giani, a former commander in Italy’s financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, ran the investigation.24 Giani, who had been with the gendarmes since 1999, had been in charge since 2006. The man Nuzzi dubbed the city-state’s Napoleon was considered the most able security chief in the Vatican’s modern history.25

  A few days later, on January 31, the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano published the contents of a confidential memo from the influential APSA chief Cardinal Nicora. In the memo he raised serious questions about whether the Vatican should fully comply with EU money laundering statutes, reigniting concerns in Brussels about whether or not the Vatican was serious when it came to reform and compliance.26

  What no one then knew was that the secret group of Vatican insiders who had concocted a plan to oust Bertone had personally selected Nuzzi. He was accumulating an ever-growing cache of explosive documents. Every Thursday, in an unfurnished apartment in Rome’s Prati district, the journalist met with Gabriele—someone he identified only as “Maria”—and at each get-together received confidential documents.27 Nuzzi then scanned the documents and transferred them to a USB stick that he wore around his neck. It was his safety precaution to ensure that someone did not break into his home or office and take back Gabriele’s papers.28