Dark Mysteries of the Vatican (6 page)

Some church commentators viewed his “pontificate as a time of grace and joy,” calling him “the smiling pope.” “Other analysts characterized Pope John Paul as out of his depth, and as a man who was overwhelmed by the burdens of his new position.” Vatican veterans and traditionalists worried that John Paul was too liberal and feared that he intended to revolutionize Church doctrines, including revising laws on contraception.

Cardinal Ratzinger saw “great goodness, simplicity, humanity and courage.”

In an article by Ruth Bertels, she writes that on the evening of September 28, 1978, when John Paul “sat down for dinner in the third-floor dining room of the Apostolic Palace, his two secretaries, Father Diego Lorenzi, who had worked closely with him in Venice for more than two years, and Father John Magee, newly appointed since the papal election, were present. Nuns had prepared a simple supper of clear soup, veal, fresh beans, and a salad.” The three men ate while watching the news on television.” The Pope appeared in good spirits and good health.

“On the floor below, lights were still on at the Vatican Bank, where its head, Bishop Paul Marcinkus, [had recently received a report about the Pope’s] investigation of the Vatican Bank and the bishop’s methods of running it, including its recent takeover of the Banca Cattolica.” Its shares were held by various dioceses, but the majority rested with the Vatican Bank.

“Cardinal Jean Villot, the Vatican secretary of state, was also still at his desk that evening studying the changes the pope had given him an hour before. Villot had pleaded and argued…, but the pope was adamant. The changes would stand.”

In Buenos Aires, banker Roberto Calvi and a pair of associates, Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani, knew that “the Bank of Italy had been secretly investigating Calvi’s Milan bank since April, prompted by a public campaign against Calvi, begun in 1977, giving details of criminal activities….

“In New York, Sicilian banker Michele Sindona had been fighting the Italian government’s effort to extradite him to Milan to face charges involving a fraudulent diversion of $225 million. A federal judge had ruled in May that the extradition should be granted. While free on a 3 million dollar bail, Sindona had demanded that the United States government prove that there was well-founded evidence to justify the extradition. The hearing was scheduled for November.”

In Chicago, Cardinal John Cody, “head of an archdiocese of “21/2 million, with nearly 3,000 priests, 450 parishes, and an annual income he refused to” disclose knew that numerous organizations had petitioned Rome to remove him.

The pope went to bed. Nighttime quiet enveloped the Vatican.

In the predawn hours of September 29, 1978, the Pope’s housekeeper knocked at his bedroom door, as she always did, promptly at 4:30
A.M
. Hearing no response, she left. “She returned fifteen minutes later to find him still not stirring.” When she entered his bedroom, “she found him propped up in bed, still holding his papers from the night before.” Dead.

“On the night table beside him lay an opened bottle of Effortil, a medication for his low blood pressure.” The shaken and tearful housekeeper immediately informed the papal chamberlain, Cardinal Villot. Villot arrived in the Pope’s room at 5:00
A.M
. and gathered the crucial papers, the Effortil bottle, and several personal items that were soiled with vomit. None of these items were seen again.

“The Vatican claimed that its house physician had determined myocardial infarction as the cause of death. Although Italian law required a waiting period of at least 24 hours before a body may be embalmed, Cardinal Villot had the body of Albino Luciani prepared for burial 12 hours after his death. Although the Vatican refused to permit an autopsy on the basis of…canon law, the Italian press verified that an autopsy had been” done on Pope Pius VIII in 1830.

The initial report to the public was that “the Holy Father was found dead by Sister Vincenzia and not by his secretary…. One report had him dead in his bathroom, another by his desk in his bedroom.” There were also discrepancies about the time of death, though the official estimate was that he died at 11
P.M
. on September 28.

“Another report stated John Paul had complained during the day of feeling sick but wouldn’t call a doctor. It said he had suffered a pain and a violent cough during that afternoon.” It was reported that “after dinner he rushed down the hallway to get a telephone call around 9:15 pm.”

Did this trigger a fatal heart attack? Or had he been poisoned?

Some who believed he was murdered stated that the motive was fear that the spiritual leader of Roman Catholics was embarking on a revolution. He wanted to set the Church in a new direction that was considered undesirable and dangerous by many of the high-ranking Church officials.

In a 1984 book titled
In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of John Paul I
, British author David Yallop contended that the pontiff was ordered killed by one or more of six suspects, all of whom “had a great deal to fear if the papacy of John Paul I continued.” Among those in the Vatican with a reason to worry were numerous members of a clandestine Italian Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due [doo-ay], or P2. Founded in 1877, in Turin, as “Propaganda Massonica,” it had as members politicians and government officials from across Italy. “The name was changed to ‘Propaganda Due’ following World War II when the Grand Orient numbered its lodges.” Although the Church banned Catholics from joining the Freemasons, P2 extended its reach into the Holy See in the form of “The Great Vatican Lodge.” In September 1978, members included cardinals, bishops, many high-ranking prelates, and laymen.

The Grand Master was Licio Gelli. A financier, he had been a Mussolini fascist, “liaison officer” for the Nazis, organizer of a “rat line” to assist Nazis in avoiding arrest as war criminals by fleeing to Argentina, ally of Argentine dictator Juan Peron, post–World War II informant for both U.S. Intelligence and Italian Communists, and agitator for the establishment of a right-wing government in Italy.

According to Yallop, the murder of John Paul was triggered by his decision to purge the troubled Vatican Bank and cleanse the Church of ties to P2.

“The man who had quickly been labeled ‘The Smiling Pope,’” wrote Yallop, “intended to remove the smiles from a number of faces the following day.”

Yallop cited Villot, who had learned he would be replaced as the Vatican’s Secretary of State and who was dismayed that John Paul was thinking of loosening the church’s prohibition on artificial birth control; Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank, who was said to have been scheduled for immediate removal; Roberto Calvi, president of Banco Ambrosiano, who faced ruin if his trickery with Vatican funds were discovered; Sindona, who knew about the Vatican Bank’s alleged laundering of Mafia money; Gelli; and John Cardinal Cody of Chicago, who was said to have been tipped off that he would be asked to resign.

Yallop speculated that the Pope was poisoned, possibly by someone tampering with a bottle of low blood pressure medicine called Effortil that John Paul was said to have kept at his bedside. Yallop wrote that these inconsistencies in the Vatican’s account of the papal death and the absence of an autopsy pointed to a cover-up.

“It was abundantly clear,” he wrote, “that on September 28th, 1978, these six men, Marcinkus, Villot, Calvi, Sindona, Cody and Gelli had much to fear if the Papacy of John Paul I continued. It is equally clear that all of them stood to gain in a variety of ways if Pope John Paul I should suddenly die.”

Conspiracy theorists were quick to find a prediction of John Paul’s murder in the writings of the ancient prophet Nostradamus:

All that could be said with certainty was that John Paul had been Pope for thirty-three days

EVENTS AFTER JOHN PAUL’S DEATH:

October 1978:
Election of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyła to the papacy. He takes the name John Paul II in honor of the dead Pope. None of John Paul I’s instructions or edicts are carried out.

January 21, 1979:
Judge Emillio Alessandrini, a magistrate investigating the Banco Ambrosiano activities is murdered.

March 20, 1979:
Nino Pecorelli, an investigative journalist, exposing membership and dealings of the Freemason’s P-2 group, is murdered.

July 11, 1979:
Giorgio Ambrosioli, following his testimony concerning Sindona and Calvi in Vatican business circles, is murdered.

July 13, 1978:
Lt. Col. Antonio Varisco, head of Rome’s security service, is murdered. Varisco was also investigating the activities of the P-2 group; he was seen speaking with Giorgio Ambrosioli two days before Ambrosioli’s death.

February 2, 1980:
The Vatican withdraws an agreement to provide videotaped depositions of Sindona in his trial in the U.S. on charges of fraud, conspiracy and misappropriation of funds in connection with the collapse of Franklin National Bank.

May 13, 1980:
Sindona attempts suicide.

July 8, 1980:
Roberto Calvi, also jailed for fraud, attempts suicide.

September 1, 1981
: The Vatican Bank acknowledges its controlling interests in a number of banks fronted by Calvi—for more than one billion dollars of debt.

January 2, 1981:
Shareholders in Banco Ambrosiano send a letter to John Paul II that expose the connections between the Vatican Bank and Roberto Calvi, P-2 and the Mafia. The letter is never acknowledged.

April 27, 1982:
Attempted murder of Roberto Rosone, General Manager of Banco Ambrosiano. Rosone was reportedly trying to clean up the bank’s operations.

October 2, 1982:
Giuseppe Dellacha, executive of Banco Ambrosiano, dies after a fall out of one of the bank’s windows.

March 23, 1986:
Michele Sindona, in the Italian jail for which he was serving time for ordering the death of Giorgio Ambrosioli, is poisoned to death.

The most sensational of these events occurred on June 17, 1982. On that date, Roberto Calvi was found hanging by the neck from a bridge in London.

O
n June 21, 1982, a postal clerk on his way to work in London glanced over “the parapet of the embankment of Blackfriars Bridge and noticed orange nylon rope lashed to a scaffolding pole under the bridge.” Hanging from it was the body of a man, “suavely dressed in his own topcoat and expensive Patek Philippe watch on his wrist, loafers by the same firm were on his feet…. In his wallet were about 10,000 pounds sterling, Swiss francs and Italian lira. Stuffed into the pockets and down his flies were bricks and stones that the police believed came from a nearby building site.

“The presence of the money and the watch appeared to rule out a mercenary murder. At the same time, a coroner found no marks on Calvi’s body indicating he had [not] been the object of violence before his death, no syringe marks to suggest he had been drugged, and no drugs in his system besides the residue of the single sleeping pill he had taken the night before.” A coroner’s jury filed a verdict of suicide.

Because this ruling made no sense to Calvi’s widow, son and daughter, “they challenged the original inquest. A second one, held in London in 1983,…[ruled] it was impossible to say whether Calvi had killed himself or been killed by others. Yet Carlo Calvi, the banker’s only son, who was studying for a doctorate at Washington’s Georgetown University when his father died, refused to give in…So in 1989 he hired a firm of private detectives to take the forensic investigation further than had the London Police.

“Kroll Associates located the scaffolding poles from which Calvi had been suspended, reassembled them exactly as they had been under Blackfriars Bridge, and then had a stand-in for Calvi, of the same height and weight, take the route that Calvi would have to have taken if he really had ended his own life at the end of the orange rope.

“The detectives were not interested in the factors that had already convinced Carlo Calvi that his father could not possibly have killed himself this way. Roberto Calvi was 62 when he died, overweight, and a chronic sufferer from vertigo. In the pitch darkness he would have had to spot the scaffolding under the bridge, practically submerged in the high tide, stuff his pockets and trouser flies with bricks, clamber over a stone parapet and down a 12 ft-long vertical ladder, then edge his way eight feet along the scaffolding. He would then have had to gingerly lower himself to another scaffolding pole before putting his neck in the noose and throwing himself off, because both inquests noted that there was minimal damage to the neck, indicating he had not dropped a long way.”

Kroll Associates was “not interested in what was probable,” noted an account of the case by London’s
The Independent
, “only in what was unavoidable.” “They had their Calvi stand-in wear the same kind of loafers the banker was wearing when he died, then maneuver his way onto the scaffolding by the various possible routes: after which the shoes were soaked in water for the same length of time as Calvi’s.

“Each time the test was tried, microscopic examination of the shoes by a forensic chemist picked up traces of the yellow paint with which the scaffolding poles were stained. Because the shoes Calvi was wearing when he died betrayed no such traces, Kroll concluded, ‘Someone else had to have tied him to the scaffolding and killed him.’

“As a result of Carlo Calvi’s long campaign to clear his father from the dishonor of suicide, in September 2003 City of London Police reopened the case as a murder inquiry. Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith asserted, ‘We have been applying 21st century forensics and investigative techniques to a twenty-one-year-old crime.’”

The murder investigation would lead police, the general public, and Catholics into the modern manifestation of the two-thousand-year-old religion symbolized by the Vatican and, at the same time, unravel the mysterious life of the victim.

A cold, shy, stubborn man from the mountains north of Milan, Roberto Calvi in his prime was one of the most brilliant bankers in Italy. He had risen rapidly in the ranks of the private Banco Ambrosiano, which had been founded by a priest and had long had close relations with the Vatican’s bank, Istituto per le Opere di Religione.

“For all his brilliance,” wrote journalists Peter Popham and Philip Willan in Rome and Robert Verkaik for the
Annotico Report
in June 2007, “Calvi landed in desperate trouble. As well as co-operating closely with the Vatican’s bankers, he also got into bed with the Sicilian Mafia, setting up a network of offshore shell companies which enabled them to launder the proceeds of the heroin trade.”

Calvi was a “member of P2, the secret Masonic lodge to which hundreds of Italian politicians, businessmen, secret service agents, policemen, civil servants” and high officials of the Vatican belonged, that Pope John Paul I had been determined to drive from the Holy See.

The Roman Catholic Church and Freemasonry had long been at loggerheads. The first public written attack on Masons was made on April 28, 1738, by Pope Clement XII in his decree
In eminenti
. “The principal objections to Freemasonry were: that it was open to men of all religions; that oaths were taken; that Masons denied clerical authority, and that Masons met in secret. Clement banned Masonic membership by Catholics and directed ‘Inquisitors of Heretical Depravity’ to take action against Catholics who became Masons or assisted Freemasonry in any way. He ordered excommunication as punishment for those who defied his ban.”

In an address by Pope Pius IX,
Multiplices inter
, on September 25, 1865, the pontiff renewed condemnation of Freemasonry and other secret societies. In it, he accused Masonic associations of conspiracy against the Church, God, and society. He attributed revolutions and uprisings to Masonic activities, and denounced Masonry’s secret oaths and clandestine meetings.

On February 15, 1882, Leo XIII’s encyclical
Etsi nos
referred to a “pernicious sect” at war with Jesus Christ. Two years later in
Humanum genus
(April 20, 1884), the most vicious attack on Freemasonry of any papal pronouncements stated, “The Masonic sect produces fruits that are pernicious and of the bitterest savor.” It went on to say that “Freemasonry’s goal was the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church, and that Freemasonry and the Roman Catholic Church were adversaries.” It further stated that “many Freemasons were unaware of the ultimate goals of Freemasonry and should not be considered partners in the criminal acts perpetrated by Freemasonry. He also condemned the naturalism of Freemasonry, by which is meant the belief that ‘human nature and human reason ought in all things to be mistress and guide.’ American Masonic leader Albert Pike stated that this encyclical was a “declaration of war, and the signal for a crusade, against the rights of man.”

In the 1917 Code of Canon Law, the Church incorporated the attitude of many previous papal encyclicals into statutory law. In Canon 2335 of the 1917 Code, the Church held that “those who joined a Masonic sect, or other societies of the same sort, plot against the Church” incurred excommunication.

On November 26, 1983, the same year that the church adopted a new Canon of Church Law, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that “the Church’s negative position on Masonic associations”…remained unaltered, since the principles had always been regarded as irreconcilable with the Church.” It stated, “Catholics enrolled in masonic associations are involved in serious sin and may not approach holy communion.”

By 1978, the Masonic group P2 “had become a sort of state within the Italian state, manipulating the direction of the country from a strong right-wing position, exerting a profound but long undetected influence on government decision making. The Vatican, the Mafia, P2; three drastically diverse worlds, linked by the fact that Italy was, throughout the Cold War a key frontline player in East–West relations, and possessor of the biggest Communist Party in Western Europe.

“According to one of the more persuasive theories swirling around the Calvi case,” noted authors Peter Popham, Philip Willan, and Robert Verkaik, “the Milanese banker became a pivotal player not only in the laundering of Mafia money but in the secret channeling of large sums from the Vatican to the struggle of the Polish trade union Solidarity against Poland’s Communist government.”

“Since the accession to the papacy of the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtylła in 1978, [aiding Solidarity] had become a matter of vital importance for the Vatican.” As the successor to St. Peter, who had been crucified upside down by the tyranny that was the Roman Empire, Pope John Paul II had begun a personal crusade to break the tyrannical stranglehold of the Soviet Union on his native Poland by showing that the Polish trade union Solidarity had the support of the Pope.

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had once been asked if he was worried about what Pope Pius XII might have to say about aggression by the Red Army. Stalin had cynically replied, “How many divisions does the pope have?”

John Paul II planned to show Stalin’s successor that Pope John Paul II did not need troops. His weapons were words—and money.

“Founded in 1942 to invest and increase the funds given to the Holy See for religious works, the [Istituto per le Opere di Religione] I.O.R.,…better known as the Vatican bank,” was similar to any other international commercial bank. Located in the “medieval tower of Sixtus V,…it accepted savings and checking accounts, transferred funds in and out of the Vatican, and made investments. Depositors had to be in some way connected with the Vatican. The list of those eligible included members of the Curia (the Pope had a personal account, No. 16/16), the 729 permanent residents of Vatican City, and a small group of clergymen and laymen doing regular business with the Vatican.” As
Time
magazine noted, “No others need apply.”

Laundering Vatican money through Latin America, mostly in Panama, in order to provide millions to the Solidarity movement, the Vatican also helped the Central Intelligence Agency to channel money to anti-communist groups, such as the Contras in Nicaragua. The Vatican’s main conduit was Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest privately owned bank. Its chairman Roberto Calvi, shuffled money between his vaults and the IOR.

Known as God’s banker, Calvi was “one of the men who knew a lot about a lot,” noted authors Popham, Willan, and Verkaik. For years Calvi “handled the affairs of his highly disparate clients with flair, rewarding them with fat rates of interest, managing the illegal funding of political parties, playing the midwife to secret arms deals, and laundering Mafia profits.” Key to the high-rolling success of such deals was his network of offshore shell companies.

“A man who later boasted that he taught Calvi all he knew about tax havens, the Sicilian financier Michele Sindona was reckless in a way that Calvi had never been. The two became ever more closely tied by secret financial favors—but when an American bank Sindona controlled, Franklin National Bank of New York, collapsed in 1974, Calvi refused to bail him out to the extent Sindona believed he deserved. He began putting pressure on Calvi to give more, pressure that soon yielded negative publicity about Calvi, prompting the Bank of Italy to send in inspectors.

“In 1978 the Bank of Italy had concluded that Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano had exported several billion lire illegally, prompting a criminal investigation. The Banco Ambrosiano was suddenly in meltdown, and Roberto Calvi’s nightmare was under way. On May 20, 1981, finance police officers rang Calvi’s doorbell at dawn with the news that the banker was under arrest and would be taken to prison. Inside, he attempted suicide.

“Convicted of currency law violation, Calvi was given a suspended four-year sentence. But his troubles were only beginning.” The bank, it was revealed, “was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. In terror of being imprisoned again, fearful also that mafiosi to whom he owed hundreds of millions would take their revenge, he went on the run. Escorted by…Flavio Carboni, a playboy and property developer, and Silvano Vittor, a smuggler based in Trieste who acted as his bodyguard, he left Italy under a false identity, traveling by speedboat to Yugoslavia, from there to Austria and by private plane to Britain. In London, he checked into a cheap residential hotel, the Chelsea Cloisters, and remained incommunicado.”

Subsequent investigations indicated that Calvi was “lured to London, where he had been handed over to…members of Italian organized crime. Carboni, a Sardinian businessman with links to former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi; imprisoned Mafia boss Pippo Calo; former contraband smuggler Vittor; and Roman loan shark Ernesto Diotallevi conspired together to murder Calvi…to punish him for losing money that belonged to the Cosa Nostra and to prevent him from blackmailing former accomplices in the Vatican, the P2 Masonic lodge and Italian political parties. According to a Mafia informant, Calo engaged an assassin called Francesco di Carlo to carry out the murder…. Mafia turncoat Antonino Giuffre…accused Carboni of playing the traitor’s role in a classic Mafia murder conspiracy: first gaining Calvi’s confidence and then delivering him for execution…. The Mafia accountant, Calo, accused of ordering the killing to punish Calvi for embezzling Cosa Nostra’s funds,” said later that “he would never have turned to the men [responsible]…for strangling Calvi if he knew they were in rival organizations or were banned in disgrace from Cosa Nostra.” At trial, the judge ordered the acquittal of four defendants for lack of proof.

Before Mafia assassins tracked down Roberto Calvi, God’s banker placed the worth of the Vatican Bank to be in excess of $10 billion. In May 1981, the Italian police raided the home of P2 Grand Master Licio Gelli and found a list of P2 Masons that included names of fifty-two members of the Italian government. Investigators tracing transactions between dummy corporations and Swiss bank accounts set up by Calvi followed the flow of money to P2 and found that the Solidarity movement had gotten more than $100 million.

Assistance to the anti-communists in Poland by Pope John Paul II that went far beyond words and moral support did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin.