Infiltration
Page 14
The Mafia families weren’t the only ones left holding the bag. The 1974 failure of Sindona’s papier-mâché banking system deeply injured the Vatican. Under Paul VI, the Vatican lost 35 billion Italian lire (or 53 million in 1974 U.S. dollars). That number amounts to a loss of 288 million in 2019 American dollars.116 Financial historians unanimously agree that Sindona was mixing Vatican funds with heroin profits from Mafia families. There is no escaping it — except that Pope Paul VI died on 6 August 1978 and left the scene of the crime. The aftermath would be left to John Paul I, John Paul II, and eventually Benedict XVI.
After the death of Paul VI, the drama continued. The Milanese lawyer responsible for liquidating Sindona’s assets, Giorgio Ambrosoli, was murdered on 11 July 1979. The crime was traced back to a hit ordered by Sindona. The Sicilian Mafia also murdered the police chief Boris Giuliano, who was investigating the Mafia’s heroin sales and connecting it to Sindona’s operation. Sindona was kidnapped by the Sicilian Mafia and brought to Sicily. The Mafia sought to blackmail politicians to reacquire their lost assets through Milan and New York. Their plot failed, and Sindona surrendered himself to the FBI. In 1980, he was convicted on sixty-five counts of money laundering, fraud, perjury, and misappropriation of funds. The Italian government then extradited Sindona back to Italy to stand trial for the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli. He was convicted and given a life sentence. In prison, he was poisoned with cyanide in his coffee and died on 18 March 1986.117 The Freemason Milanese Mafia banker was sixty-five on the day of his murder.
113 Annuario Pontificio 2012, 1908.
114 “Vatican Bank Launches Website in Effort to Increase Transparency,” Catholic Herald, 1 August 2013.
115 The details regarding the workings of Sindona and the Vatican Bank derive from “Sindona’s World” in New York Magazine, 24 September 1979. Montini allegedly met Sindona while he was still a monsignor.
116 “Sindona’s World.”
117 “Michele Sindona, Jailed Italian Financier, Dies of Cyanide Poisoning at 65,” New York Times, 23 March 1986.
25
Infiltration and the Mysterious Death of John Paul I
Before his death, Pope Paul VI openly denounced accusations of sodomy. The controversy surfaced when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a document entitled Persona humana, which addressed the immorality of adultery, homosexuality, and masturbation.118 This provoked the author Roger Peyrefitte, who had written two books in which he claimed that Montini/Paul VI had maintained a long homosexual relationship with an Italian actor.119 The rumor of Paul VI’s secret homosexual relationship was spread in French and Italian print. The alleged homosexual partner of Paul VI was the Italian actor Paolo Carlini, who appeared in forty-five films between 1940 and 1979. Americans would recognize him as Audrey Hepburn’s hairdresser in the 1954 film Roman Holiday. In a public address to approximately twenty thousand people in Saint Peter’s Piazza on 18 April 1976, Paul VI denied the allegation of sodomy. He referred to the allegations as “horrible and slanderous insinuations.”120 The following year, Pope Paul VI fell ill with an enlarged prostate. His health continued to fail, and he died of heart failure on 6 August 1978 at Castel Gandolfo.
Not only had Pope Paul VI revoked the voting rights of cardinals over the age of eighty in 1970;121 he had also created an innovation in 1975 by expanding the number of cardinal electors from 70 (like the 70 elders of Moses and the 70 disciples of Christ) to 120. The revocation of the voting rights of cardinals over eighty is one of the greatest coups in Catholic history. Pope Paul VI essentially banned all older cardinals appointed by Pius XII from voting in future papal elections. By this maneuver, Paul VI ensured that his cardinals, and his alone, would choose his successor. The math worked. In the August 1978 papal conclave, of the 111 cardinal electors, 100 had been personally appointed by Pope Paul VI; 8 had been appointed by John XXIII, and only 3 by Pius XII. Eliminating the voting rights of cardinals over eighty nearly erased the legacy of the former generation of cardinals.
Since Paul VI had radically revamped the College of Cardinals, the conclave of August 1978 had no conservative candidate. Nearly every cardinal elector to the man was fully supportive of Pope Paul VI and the reforms of Vatican II. The reforms of Vatican II were assured, and the next pope would be tasked with issuing a new catechism and a new Code of Canon Law to conform with Vatican II.
The pressing need, however, was the financial scandal at the Vatican Bank, of which the world knew little. Nevertheless, the inside circle of curial cardinals deeply understood that the Sindona scandal could reach and expose them.
The short conclave lasted from 25 to 26 August 1978. Cardinal Albino Lúciani was favored to win and he knew it, as he told his secretary that he would decline if elected pope.122 The College of Cardinals, stacked by Paul VI, elected Cardinal Lúciani on the first day of voting after four ballots. When Jean-Marie Cardinal Villot asked Lúciani for his acceptance, he replied, “May God forgive you for what you have done.” He then became the first pope to take a double papal name “John Paul” in honor of the two popes of Vatican II: John XXIII and Paul VI. Notable also is the fact that his two papal successors, Karol Wojtyła and Joseph Ratzinger were among the cardinals present to elect him as Pope John Paul I.
John Paul I was in line with the modernizing and liberalizing tendencies in doctrine, politics, and liturgy of Vatican II. Prior to 1968, he had openly supported the position of Giovanni Cardinal Urbani of Venice that artificial birth control could be used responsibly by married Catholics in good conscience.123 After Pope Paul VI issued Humanae vitae in 1968, Cardinal Lúciani conformed to the teaching against artificial contraception, but quietly.
Pope John Paul I reigned for only thirty-three days, dying on 28 September 1978. This was during the financial scandal surrounding the enormous loss of funds from the Vatican Bank through the machinations of the Freemasonic Michele “the Shark” Sindona. There was pressure by voices in the Vatican to join with the Sicilian Mafia in restoring their lost funds. The modern equivalent of a loss of $288 million dollars in Vatican funds is nothing to sneeze it.
Three Vatican officials were working on the Vatican Bank scandal: Jean-Marie Cardinal Villot, secretary of state; John Cardinal Cody of Chicago; and Archbishop Paul “the Gorilla” Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank, or IOR. All three were big players. Archbishop Marcinkus, an ex-rugby player who stood at six foot four, would later be indicted in Italy in 1982 as an accessory in the $3.5 billion collapse of Banco Ambrosiano. Marcinkus is famous for telling Pope John Paul II, “You cannot run a Church on Hail Marys.” Conspiracy theories link these men together in a plot to murder John Paul I, with Cardinal Villot as the one who would organize it and later destroy all evidence.
All three were working in 1978 with Roberto Calvi, the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano. Calvi was a Freemasonic member of P2 and nicknamed “God’s Banker.” In 1982, the same year as Archbishop Marcinkus’s indictment, the body of Calvi was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London. This was thought to be a sign, since the Italian P2 Lodge refers to themselves as “black friars.” The death was ruled a suicide, but this has been contested ever since.
The five players in the story are Cardinal Villot, Cardinal Cody, Archbishop Marcinkus, and the two prominent bankers Sindona and Calvi. Three of these five, Marcinkus, Sindona, and Calvi were indicted — and the latter two died untimely deaths. Something deeply evil was at work in 1978. Villot died in 1979. Cody died in 1982. Within a few years, everyone involved was either dead from natural causes, had committed suicide, or was in prison.
The reconstructed theory is that Villot, Cody, and Marcinkus were working together with the Freemasons and the Sicilian Mafia to hide the Vatican Bank involvement in the heroin profits laundered through the Vatican Bank to Banco Ambrosiano and Sindona’s banks. Beyond hiding the crime, they may also have been working with Calvi and Sindona’s people to reacquire the Vatican Bank’s loss of funds of $288 million, adjusted for inflation today
. Paul VI, who was a friend of Sindona and himself complicit in the loss, was willing to play along until his death. Pope John Paul I was not willing to comply, and so, the theory holds, he was murdered after thirty-three days as pope.
David Yallop published In God’s Name in 1984. He recreates the timeline of the death of John Paul I and pins it on Cardinal Villot as the person with the most to gain and the most to lose. Yallop claims that John Paul I received a list of Freemasonic cardinals during his short papacy. On 12 September 1978, Mino Pecorelli released his list of prominent Italian Freemasons, which named several cardinals and archbishops.124 Pecorelli himself was a member of the Freemasonic Propaganda Due (P2) Lodge, and six months after publishing this list, he was found murdered (20 March 1979). Featured on “Pecorelli’s List” were:
Jean Cardinal Villot (Pope Paul VI’s secretary of state, whose family is believed to have historic ties to the Rosicrucian Lodge)
Agostino Cardinal Casaroli (future secretary of state for Pope John Paul II)
Ugo Cardinal Poletti (president of Pontifical Works and of the Liturgical Academy)
Sebastiano Cardinal Baggio (camerlengo and president of the Pontifical Commission of the Vatican State)
Monsignor Pasquale Macchi (Pope Paul VI’s personal secretary from 1954 to 1978)
Joseph Cardinal Suenens (one of the four moderators at Vatican II)
Archbishop Annibale Bugnini (creator of the Novus Ordo liturgies for Pope Paul VI)
Archbishop Paul Marcinkus (president of the Vatican Bank from 1971 to 1989)
When Cardinal Villot realized that Pope John Paul I had taken interest in Pecorelli’s List, Villot began to plot against him. Pecorelli’s List was published on 12 September 1978 and the pope was found dead on 28 September 1978.
At 4:45 a.m. of that day, Sister Vincenza Taffarel entered the papal apartment and saw Pope John Paul I sitting in bed, holding papers in hand, with an expression of agony.125 After checking his pulse, she confirmed he was dead. At 5:00 a.m. Cardinal Villot arrived from across town. He gathered the pope’s prescription of Effortil on the bedside table, took up the papers in the pope’s hands, and removed the pope’s glasses and slippers, probably because they had vomit on them. He also took the pope’s will. All these items were never seen again. Villot asked Sister Vincenza to take a vow of silence over everything she had just seen.
Cardinal Villot called the morticians and sent a Vatican car to fetch them. Allegedly the embalmers had already gone to work on the dead pope before a doctor was called to issue a death certificate. When the doctor did arrive, the death was attributed to acute myocardial infarction that likely occurred at 11:00 p.m. the previous night.
Villot began to notify the cardinals beginning at 6:30 a.m. Sergeant Roggan of the Swiss Guard, who was on duty, saw Paul Marcinkus on the premises at 6:45 a.m. The Vatican officially announced the pope’s death to the world at 7:30 a.m. The morticians returned at 11 a.m. allegedly to restructure the pope’s gruesome face. Villot instructed them to embalm the pope by the end of the day. The nuns were asked to clean and polish the room (removing vomit, fingerprints, and evidence), and the pope’s clothes, books, and notes were taken away in boxes. By 6 p.m. of the day of his death, every belonging of Pope John Paul I had been removed from the papal apartments
The morticians began embalming the body with formalin that night but were instructed by Villot not to drain the pope’s blood, as was custom. The allegation here is that Villot did not want any of the blood to be tested during an autopsy, since it likely contained poison that was introduced into the pope’s veins through a falsified dose of his nightly prescription of Effortil — which is why Villot took the bottle of Effortil when he first arrived.
118 Persona Humana: Declaration on Certain Questions concerning Sexual Ethic (29 December 1975).
119 Roger Peyrefitte, “Mea culpa? Ma fatemi il santo piacere,” Tempo, 4 April 1976.
120 Jose Torress, “Paul VI Denies He Is Homosexual,” Observer Reporter, Associated Press, 5 April 1976, 27.
121 Pope Paul VI, Ingravescentem aetatem (21 November 1970).
122 John Allen Jr., “Debunking four myths about John Paul I, the ‘Smiling Pope,” National Catholic Reporter. 2 November 2012. Retrieved 28 February 2019.
123 John Julius Norwich, The Popes (London, 2011), 445.
124 The principal “list” appeared in Osservatorio Politica Internazionale Magazine on 12 September 1978.
125 All details about the death of John Paul I here are derived from David Yallop, In God’s Name (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
26
Infiltration of John Paul II’s Pontificate
The second papal conclave of 1978 was held from 14 to 16 October. Cardinal Villot oversaw the conclave as camerlengo. The early death of Pope John Paul I and the rumors of the Vatican Bank scandal made the way forward more complicated than the conclave held less than two months before. Once again, 111 cardinals participated in the voting, but this time a non-cardinal would be admitted. A young (future cardinal) Donald Wuerl was admitted to the conclave to assist the frail John Cardinal Wright.
Cardinal Siri of Genoa, who had been the conservative candidate twenty years earlier in 1958, was favored again as a dependable father figure in a time of uncertainty. The liberals had rallied to Giovanni Cardinal Benelli of Florence, who had been a dear friend of John Paul I. Surprisingly, the liberal Benelli could not attain the two-thirds majority initially. Attention turned to a moderate candidate in the person of Giovanni Cardinal Colombo, who explicitly stated that it was a waste to vote for him — he would decline the papacy if elected.
The arch-liberal Franz Cardinal König, who had publicly dissented from Paul VI’s 1968 condemnation of artificial contraception in Humanae vitae, suggested that the perfect compromise candidate would be the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyła. Oddly, Cardinal Cody had traveled to Kraków, Poland, just before the death of John Paul I to meet with Cardinal Wojtyła. Why this happened we do not know, but Wojtyła was perhaps asked whether he were willing to ascend to the papacy. Wojtyła was relatively unknown, but he was an ideal compromise candidate. He was non-Italian, signaling a universal pontificate. This would make him the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI, who died in 1523. Moreover, Wojtyła was young at age fifty-eight. The American cardinals, wanting to see a non-Italian pope, rallied to him. Best of all, the conservative Cardinal Siri agreed to support Wojtyła.
On the third day, Cardinal Wojtyła won by a landslide with 99 of the 111 votes. He captured 89 percent of the conclave’s votes when papal election only required 67 percent. He accepted by saying, “With obedience in faith to Christ, my Lord, and with trust in the Mother of Christ and the Church, in spite of great difficulties, I accept.” It’s rumored that he initially suggested taking Stanislaus as his papal name but was encouraged to take something more Roman.126 To honor the recently deceased John Paul I and his predecessors John XXIII and Paul VI, he chose the papal name John Paul II.
Thousands of books have been written on the long and celebrated pontificate of Pope John Paul II. The young Wojtyła grew up in Poland under pious parents; he attributes his vocation to the faithful witness of his father. He played soccer as a goalie and enjoyed theater. He learned twelve languages, including Polish, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English, and Latin. He discerned the priesthood and studied covertly during the Nazi occupation of Poland. He was smart, affable, masculine, and inspiring. He had been consecrated bishop in 1958 and had partaken in the Second Vatican Council. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Vatican II, but his Eastern European patrimony disposed him to political conservatism — especially against Communism.
As Pope John Paul II, he returned to Poland in June 1979 and inspired the Solidarity movement that would exert soft pressure against Soviet Communism and its eventual demise in Eastern Europe. Theologically, however, John Paul II advocated the ressourcement or nouvelle théologie authors. He was influenced by Balthasar
, de Lubac, and even Rahner. He appointed Rahner’s theological protégé Cardinal Ratzinger as his doctrinal chief and prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981. Throughout his pontificate, John Paul II innovated by making Ratzinger his number two and not the cardinal secretary of state, as was the centuries-long tradition for popes.
A few months prior to appointing Cardinal Ratzinger, John Paul II was shot on the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima — 13 May 1981. The Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Ağca fired two shots from his Browning 9mm pistol into the pope’s colon and small intestine. Both bullets missed his mesenteric artery and abdominal aorta, but he lost three-fourths of his blood during the ride to Gemelli Hospital. Piously, John Paul II asked the doctors not to remove his Brown Scapular before surgery. The gunman claimed that he received his mission from the Turkish mafioso Bekir Çelenk of Bulgaria. In 2010, he changed his story and said that the cardinal secretary of state under John Paul II, Agostino Casaroli, had arranged the assassination. In 2013, he changed his story again. This time he claimed that the Iranian government and Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the assassination. We may never know the reason or forces behind the assassination plot.
Also in 1981, John Paul II made the mistake of appointing Archbishop Marcinkus as head banker and pro-president of Vatican City — even though John Paul II knew that Marcinkus was implicated in the Sindona scandal. A year later, Marcinkus himself would be indicted and imprisoned; Marcinkus, however, is credited with saving the pope’s life. In 1982, he was present with John Paul II in Fatima, Portugal, when Father Juan Maria Fernández y Krohn, a deranged priest, attacked the pope with a bayonet. Interestingly enough, Marcinkus had also saved the life of Pope Paul VI when a blaspheming Bolivian painter thrust a knife at the pope’s neck during a visit to the Philippines in 1970. There’s a reason Marcinkus was known as “the Gorilla.”