Dark Mysteries of the Vatican (8 page)

“For centuries, the Vatican was a prime target of foreign espionage. One of the world’s greatest repositories of raw intelligence, it was a spy’s gold mine. Ecclesiastical, political and economic information filtered in from thousands of priests, bishops and the papal nuncios of the Office of the Papal Secretariat. So rich was this source of intelligence that after the war, the CIA created a special unit in its counterintelligence section to tap it and monitor developments within the Vatican….

“Since World War II, the CIA was reported to have subsidized a Catholic lay organization that served as a political slugging arm of the pope and the Vatican throughout the Cold War; penetrated the American section of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Vatican orders (Knights of Malta); and passed money to a large number of priests and bishops—some of whom became witting [an agent who knows he reports to an agency of the U.S. government] agents in CIA covert operations. They employed undercover operatives to lobby members of the Curia and spy on liberal churchmen on the pope’s staff who challenged the political assumptions of the United States; and prepared intelligence briefings that accurately predicted the rise of liberation theology.” The CIA also collaborated with Catholic groups to counter actions of leftist clerics in Latin America.

“In February 1981, just over a year following his triumphal visit to the United States, Pope John Paul II planned to refuel for three hours in Anchorage, Alaska, en route home following a major pastoral trip to the Philippines, Japan, and Guam. When the White House learned of this plan, National Security Council staffers recommended that Reagan ‘establish an early, personal relationship with the Pope while welcoming him back to North American soil.’ On February 5, NSC staffer James M. Rentschler proposed that a ‘Nanook-of-the-North mission’ be mounted during the pope’s Alaskan layover.

“Accordingly, when John Paul landed in Anchorage on February 25, the envoy-designate to the Vatican, William Wilson, handed him a letter from Reagan, stating: ‘…I hope you will not hesitate to use [Wilson] as the channel for sensitive matters you or your associates may wish to communicate to me.’”

Three moths later, John Paul II was being driven slowly around St. Peter’s Square in his open jeep to greet thousands of people who crowded into Vatican City to see him and receive his blessing. On May 13, 1981, dressed in a papal-white cassock, he was shaking hands and lifting small children into his arms. As he reached a point just outside the Vatican’s bronze gate, there was a burst of gunfire.

“One hand rising to his face and blood staining his garments,” reported the
New York Times
, “the Pope faltered and fell into the arms of his Polish secretary, the Rev. Stanislaw Dziwisz, and his personal servant, Angelo Gugel, who were in the vehicle with him….

Rushed by an ambulance to Gemelli Hospital, two miles north of the Vatican, for surgery,…John Paul was conscious as he was taken to the operating room….

“The gunman had fired four times in the attack. Two tourists, an American and a Jamaican, were wounded by two of the bullets. The gunman, armed with a nine-millimeter Browning automatic, was set upon by bystanders, who knocked the pistol out of his hand. He was arrested, taken away by police car, and later identified as twenty-three-year-old Mehmet Ali Agca. Police quoted him as having told them, ‘My life is not important.’

“He was said to have arrived in Italy the previous Saturday at the Milan airport and arrived in Rome on Monday. The police said that he had in his pocket several notes in handwritten Turkish, one of them saying, ‘I am killing the Pope as a protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and the United States and against the genocide that is being carried out in El Salvador and Afghanistan.’

“The Turkish news agency Anatolia reported that Agca had been convicted of murdering Abdi Ipekci, the editor of the Turkish newspaper
Milliyet
, in February 1979, but had escaped from prison later that year. Anatolia said he wrote a letter to the newspaper on Nov. 26, 1979, saying that he had fled from prison with the intention of killing the Pope, who was due to visit Ankara and Istanbul….

“The Vatican announced that the Pope…had suffered multiple lesions of the abdomen and a massive hemorrhage and had been given a transfusion of about six pints of blood. The Vatican also said that he had been wounded in the right forearm and the second finger of his left hand.”

Some news media quickly assumed the plot was the work of Turkish terrorists known as the Gray Wolves, a neo-Nazi group of both former military and Islamist extremists. This theory surfaced within hours of the arrest of Agca. Later, authorities investigating the attack declared it had been directed by the Bulgarian secret service, “acting on orders from the Soviet Union. This accusation depended on the secret confession of [Agca].…As he was taken from a Rome police station, Agca surprised waiting reporters by publicly implicating the Soviets in the conspiracy. He said, ‘The KGB organized everything.’

“In a chaotic encounter outside the police station, the slim, unshaven Turk, speaking in broken English and flawed Italian, claimed that he was trained as a terrorist ‘in Bulgaria and in Syria.’ Italian officials believed that he was aided in the assassination attempt by three Bulgarians: two former employees at [Bulgaria’s] Rome embassy and Sergei Ivanov Antonov, onetime Rome manager of the Bulgarian airline. ‘Was Antonov involved?’ newsmen asked, as Agca climbed into a police van. ‘I knew Sergei,’ Agca replied. ‘He was my accomplice.’

‘And the KGB?’ ‘Yes, the KGB.’”

In 2008, “Claire Sterling, a prize-winning journalist and author, had just published
The Terror Network
when Ali Agca tried to kill the pope…. Miss Sterling had quickly seen the Bulgarian connection when it became known that Agca had made several trips to Sofia, Bulgaria, and stayed in a hotel favored by the Bulgarian KGB. In Rome he had also had contacts with a Bulgarian agent whose cover was the Bulgarian national airline office.

“
The Time of the Assassin
, published in 1983, was Miss Sterling’s in-depth look at the plot to kill Pope John Paul II and the subsequent investigation. She had no doubt the plot originated at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, KGB headquarters in Moscow. The KGB assigned this super-wet operation to the Bulgarians…. The Bulgarians then looked for cover and deniability among a Turkish extremist group involved with the KGB in lucrative drug smuggling routes through Bulgaria to Western Europe.”

President Reagan and CIA Director William Casey decided to play down the Soviet link. Reagan had survived an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel. He and Casey feared any administration hint of Soviet involvement in the plot to kill the pope might upset U.S.-Soviet relations, and conspiracy theorists would quickly conclude the KGB had also targeted Reagan.

Shortly after John Paul was released from the hospital, he visited Agca in prison. Sentenced to serve nineteen years, Agca was released early and sent back to Turkey to stand trial on an earlier unrelated charge. The pontiff later told old friends on two occasions that he was also satisfied the hand behind the plot was in Moscow.

During his trial, “Ali Agca feigned madness by declaring he had acted on God’s instructions. He later claimed to be the new messiah and to have conspired with Vatican prelates who recognized him as deity. Italian psychiatrists concluded he had been instructed to play the fool as a way of hiding Bulgaria’s—Moscow’s—tracks.

The Italian examining-magistrate in charge of the investigation, Ferdinando Imposimato, told Italian radio, ‘I believe Agca said many true things, but then he tried to torpedo the trial after being threatened inside prison by a Bulgarian agent who got inside to make sure he would retract his allegations.’”

Later, “
Corriere della Sera
, Italy’s most influential daily newspaper, disclosed new documents found in the files of former East German intelligence services which confirmed the 1981 assassination plot was ordered by the Soviet KGB and then assigned to the Bulgarian satellite service. Metodi Andreev, a former official in charge of the Bulgarian KGB’s files [reportedly] said he had seen correspondence between Stasi, the East German service, and the Bulgarian agents. These included an order from the KGB to pull out all the stops to bury Bulgaria’s connection to the plot.” Bulgaria then handed the execution of the plot to Turkish extremists, including Mehmet Ali Agca, who pulled the trigger. On the Pope’s sixty-first birthday (May 22, 1981), Reagan sent Congressman Peter Rodino to Rome with a personal letter for John Paul, who was still hospitalized after the attempt on his life. Having also been shot in the chest in an assassination attempt on March 30, Reagan wrote, “The qualities you exemplify remain a precious asset as we confront the growing dangers of the moment.”

“On December 12–13, 1981, the Communist government of Poland arrested thousands of Solidarity activists. Over the next weeks the White House and the Vatican consulted closely on the events in Poland by telephone, cable, and through diplomatic representatives….

“The United States will not let the Soviet Union dictate Poland’s future with impunity,” Reagan wrote the Pope on December 29, 1981. “I am announcing today additional American measures aimed at raising the cost to the Russians of their continued violence against Poland.”

“A week later,” Ambassador Wilson was handed a letter from John Paul II to Reagan “pledging support for the U.S. sanctions. Though John Paul worried about the impact of sanctions on the Polish people, he said that he would stand with Reagan, even if he could not say so publicly.”

A cable to Haig said, “The Vatican recognizes that the U.S. is a great power with global responsibilities. The United States must operate on the political plane and the Holy See does not comment on the political positions taken by governments. It is for each government to decide its political policies. The Holy See for its part operates on the moral plane, [but] both the Holy See and the United States have the same objective: the restoration of liberty to Poland.”

On June 7, 1982, President Reagan arrived at the Vatican to meet with John Paul. Reporter and author Carl Bernstein wrote, “It was the first time the two had met, and they talked for fifty minutes. In the same wing of the papal apartments, Agostino Cardinal Casaroli and Archbishop Achille Silvestrini met with Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Judge William Clark, Reagan’s National Security Adviser.”

In that meeting in the Pope’s private library, Reagan and John Paul II agreed to undertake a secret campaign for the dissolution of the Communist empire.

Said Richard Allen, Reagan’s first National Security Adviser, “This was one of the great secret alliances of all time.”

According to aides who shared their leaders’ view of the world, Bernstein noted, Reagan and John Paul II “refused to accept a fundamental political fact of their lifetimes—the division of Europe as mandated at the Yalta [a conference in 1945] and the Communist dominance of Eastern Europe. A free Poland…would be a dagger to the heart of the Soviet empire.” If Poland became democratic, other East European states would follow. This secret Vatican meeting cemented the foundation for an outright war with Soviet Communism, with the USA and the Holy See as allies.

On January 10, 1984, the Reagan administration established full diplomatic relations with the Vatican, ending more than a century of official separation, but often secret contacts, between the White House and Vatican.

History has recorded that the friendship between the Pope and the president that Richard Allen called “one of the great secret alliances of all time,” sealed with a handshake in the Vatican, resulted in the liberation of Poland, the fall of the Iron Curtain, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the demise of Communism in Europe, and the end of the Cold War.

T
he vast majority of Americans, and many, if not most, Roman Catholics in the United States never heard of Opus Dei before the publication of Dan Brown’s novel
The Da Vinci Code
or until the film version opened in theaters from coast to coast. The sensational book and movie introduced Opus Dei in the form of an albino priest committing a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

At the zenith of
The Da Vinci Code
phenomenon,
Time
magazine noted that the book depicted Opus Dei as “a powerful and ultraconservative Roman Catholic faction riddled with sadomasochistic ritual…. In its 78 years, Opus Dei was a rumor magnet. Successful and secretive, it was accused of using lavish riches” and influence in the Vatican “to do everything from propping up Francisco Franco’s Spanish dictatorship to pushing through” rapid beatification for its founder in 1992, only seventeen years after his death.

Declared by Pope John Paul II to be a “personal prelature” in 1982, Opus Dei, meaning “God’s work,” has been called a “global quasi-diocese, able in some cases to leapfrog local archbishops and deal directly with [the Pope in] Rome.

Opus Dei states that it is a Catholic institution with a mission to spread “the message that work and the circumstances of everyday life are occasions for growing closer to God, for serving others, and for improving society.”

Critics say it’s a dangerous, if not malevolent, religious cult.

Wherein lies the truth?

On October 2, 1928, in Spain, twenty-six-year-old Josemaría Escrivá envisioned “a movement of pious laypeople who would, by prayerful contemplation and steady dedication of their labor to Christ, extend the holiness of going to church on Sunday into their everyday work life…. He saw Opus eventually acting as ‘an intravenous injection [of holiness] in the bloodstream of society.’”

In the wake of the publication of
The Da Vinci Code
, and the description of Opus Dei in the novel as a sinister and malevolent group,
Time
reported, “Opus Dei is not a kind of spiritual pick-me-up for casual Catholics. It features a small, committed membership (85,500 worldwide and a mere 3,000 in the U.S.), many of whom come from pious families and are prepared to embrace unpopular church teachings such as its birth-control ban. Members take part in a rigorous course of spiritual ‘formation’ stressing church doctrine and contemplation plus Escrivá’s philosophy of work and personal holiness.” Opus Dei says that it helps everyday people to “seek holiness in their work and ordinary activities.”

According to the Opus Dei website, any lay Catholic may ask to join Opus Dei as long as he or she is at least eighteen years old. It takes about five years to join, with a person’s commitment to joining having to be renewed each year, before a lifelong commitment is possible. Opus Dei has been described as “a strong advocate of traditional Catholic values, focusing on the spreading of the Catholic teaching that every individual is called to become a saint and an apostle of Jesus Christ and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity….

“There are three types of members of Opus Dei: numeraries, associates and supernumeraries. Associates and numeraries make up about 25 percent to 30 percent of [the] members. They are celibate, live with other members and, on occasion, practice corporal mortification.” This is the practice of physically enduring a minor amount of suffering. “Some of the celibate members of Opus Dei practice traditional Catholic penances such as using the cilice (a light metal chain with prongs which is worn round the thigh) and the discipline (a woven cotton strap). The motivation for these voluntary penances is to imitate Christ and to join in His redemptive sacrifice, and to suffer in solidarity with poor and deprived people all over the world.” The majority of Opus Dei members are supernumeraries. They account for around three quarters of the members. They are usually noncelibate, married men or women.

In 1982, Pope John Paul II made Opus Dei the only “personal prelature” in the Catholic Church. This meant that Opus Dei’s members were responsible only to Rome and God, not to local bishops. Opus Dei says “that this unique position does not in any way mean that its members are in specifically high regard by the Vatican, or given any special treatment. Personal prelature is a canonical term meaning that the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church over Opus Dei covers the members of Opus Dei, rather than a geographical area like a diocese. A personal prelature operates in a similar way to a religious order, however there are no geographical limits, and members are laypeople rather than monks or nuns.

“Those Catholics who belong to Opus Dei also continue to be part of the congregation at their local church. Unlike members of religious orders, the members of Opus Dei join by means of private contracts and not vows. In order to join members must ask to do so, and they must also be convinced that they have received a vocation…. Members have to donate a significant part of their income to Opus Dei. It is a decentralized organization and does not publish its general accounts.” Critics have also described it as a sort of Catholic Freemasonry, accusing it of being secretive and manipulative. It has a special set of greetings: “Pax” and “In aeternum” (“Peace” and “In eternity”). Its 1950 constitution barred members from revealing their membership without getting permission from the director of their center. In 1982, a new document repudiated “secrecy or clandestine activity.” Yet Opus did not identify its members, and many preferred not to identify themselves.

The American branch of Opus Dei noted that it began its apostolic activities “in Chicago in 1949, when Sal Ferigle, a young physics graduate student, and Fr. Joseph Muzquiz, one of the first three priests to be ordained for Opus Dei, arrived in Chicago. The first center was established near the University of Chicago. Today there are more than 3,000 members in the United States, and a great many more who participate in Opus Dei’s activities of spiritual formation. These activities are organized from 60 centers in 19 cities: Boston; Chicago; Dallas; Delray Beach, Florida; Miami; Milwaukee; New York; Pittsburgh; Princeton, New Jersey; Providence; St. Louis; San Antonio; Houston; Los Angeles; San Francisco; South Bend, Indiana; South Orange, New Jersey; Urbana, Illinois; and Washington, DC.”

The Prelature of Opus Dei uses seven conference centers for retreats and seminars. They are located near Boston, Chicago, Houston, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC.

Opus Dei members, in cooperation with others, operate one college and five secondary schools in the United States. They are Lexington College in Chicago, The Heights and Oakcrest near Washington, DC; Northridge Prep and The Willows near Chicago; and the Montrose School near Boston. Opus Dei also has residences for university students, the largest of which is Bayridge Residence for women in Boston. Other residences for university women are Petawa Residence in Milwaukee and Westfield Residence in Los Angeles. Residences for university men include Elmbrook Student Center in Boston; Lincoln Green in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; Windmoor in South Bend; and Wingren in Dallas.

In 1991, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago, entrusted the parish of St. Mary of the Angels to priests of Opus Dei. The Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC, and the Holy Cross Chapel in Houston, Texas, have also been entrusted to priests of Opus Dei.

Opus Dei’s inconspicuous U.S. headquarters is a sedate red-brick $69 million, seventeen-story building at Lexington Avenue and Thirty-fourth street in Manhattan.

On October 6, 2002, Pope John Paul II elevated Escrivá to sainthood in a ceremony “watched by at least 300,000 of the priest’s followers, who filled St Peter’s Square and spilled into the surrounding streets and along the bank of the Tiber River….

“The crowd was so quiet for most of the two-hour ceremony that they might have been holding their breath. It was surely one of the most decorous crowds ever to pack St. Peter’s Square. They arrived in suits and ties, Burberry capes, and the occasional dinner jacket.” The Pope, “dressed in white vestments, arrived at the square in his popemobile,” built with bulletproof glass after the 1981 assassination attempt. Behind his stage, a giant image of the Catholic Church’s newest saint was draped from the balcony of St. Peter’s basilica. A relic of the saint, a fragment of his tooth, was placed next to the altar. At the climax of the ceremony, the 82-year-old pontiff said, ‘With the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, the saint apostles of Peter and Paul and our own, after a long reflection, many invocations of divine assistance, and having listened to the advice of many of our brother bishops, we declare and define blessed Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer saint, and we will write his name in the album of the saints.’

“Many of the pilgrims attending the ceremony were from…Spain, but others came from Latin America, where Opus Dei had strongly taken hold. Spanish doctor Manuel Nevado Rey, whose recovery from radiation-caused skin disease was deemed a miracle performed by Escrivá, was among the crowd…. Medical experts consulted by the Vatican said there was no scientific explanation for the transformation.

“The progression of Escrivá to sainthood was rapid. He was beatified, or made blessed, in 1992.” He became the 468th saint to have been created by the Pope during his 24 years in office, more than those created by his predecessors over the past four centuries put together. “It was one of the fastest canonizations on record,…and one of the most controversial.” “Escriva’s path to sainthood was marred by charges that the Vatican refused to hear testimony from his critics.”

Speculating that canonization of Escrivá transgressed canon law,
Newsweek
magazine religion correspondent Kenneth Woodward said that the Vatican’s ‘Devil’s advocate’ system,” designed to slow down the canonization process by questioning the validity of the “miracle,” “was bypassed when witnesses hostile to Opus Dei were not called.” Opus Dei claimed that “eleven critics of Escrivá’s canonization had been heard.” Woodward said there was only one, and the “‘consultors’ were mainly Italian and members of Opus Dei: this stopped Escrivá’s many critical Spanish peers from upsetting the canonization procedure.”

What is more, said Opus Dei critics, it was “out of order for forty percent of the testimony to come from Escrivá’s two henchmen, both of whom have since become Opus leaders…. Dei allegedly pressured ‘hundreds’ of bishops, ‘especially from the cash hungry third world,’ to send favorable reports to Rome’s saint makers. It was alleged that 1,300 Bishops sent in glowing reports, yet of these only 128 had personally met Escrivá.”

Critics of Opus Dei in the United States pointed to “disgraced FBI agent, Robert Hanssen, who was jailed for life in 2001 for spying for the Russians over a fifteen-year period in return for payment of almost a million pounds, and was exposed as a devout Opus Dei member…. Hanssen’s brother-in-law was reported to be an Opus Dei priest in Rome whose office was steps away from the pope.”

Robert Hanssen’s motive for his treachery was said to be a desire to afford the Opus Dei lifestyle and send his children to Opus schools. He allegedly justified his actions by the maxim of the Jesuit moral theology of the greater or lesser good.

In an article for
America, the National Catholic Monthly
, James Martin, S. J. noted that Opus Dei “is an increasingly strong presence on U.S. college campuses. Traditionally their efforts to attract new members had led them to colleges and universities. And it has sometimes led them into conflict with other campus Catholic groups.” Donald R. McCrabb, executive director of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association, told McCrabb, “We are aware that Opus Dei is present at a number of campuses across the country. I’m also aware that some campus ministers find their activities on campus to be counterproductive.”

One of the concerns was Opus Dei’s emphasis on recruiting, supported by an apparently large base of funding. “They are not taking on the broader responsibility that a campus minister has.” He also related, “I have heard through campus ministers that there’s a spiritual director that’s assigned to the candidate who basically has to approve every action taken by that person, including reading mail, what classes they take or don’t take, what they read or don’t read.”

A former Columbia University student noted, “They recommended I not read some books, particularly the Marxist stuff, and instead use their boiled-down versions. I thought this was odd—I was required to do it for class!”

Susan Mountin, associate director of Marquette University’s campus ministry, asserted that it was her sense “that there probably is a need for many people to experience some sort of devotion in their lives.” What worried her was a “cult-like behavior, isolation from friends.”

The director of campus ministry at Stanford University from 1984 through 1992, Russell J. Roide, S. J., told McCrabb that he initially approached Opus Dei with an open mind. However, students began coming to him complaining about Opus Dei’s recruiting. “They just didn’t let the students alone,” he said. “Students would come to me and say, ‘Please get them off our backs.’”

When he felt his only recourse was to pass out information to students about Opus Dei, including critical articles, Opus Dei numeraries visited Father Roide and said that he was “interfering with their agenda.” Eventually, because of continued student complaints about recruiting, Roide decided “not to let them anywhere near the campus.”

In 2003, an Internet posting claimed, “As part of its normal modus operandi, Opus Dei attempts to infiltrate and take over other mainstream Catholic organizations with the aim of turning them into recruitment fronts. Opus Dei will attempt to infiltrate both the leadership councils and the general memberships of any Catholic organization that it does not control. Such organizations can include, but are not limited to, young adult groups, CYO groups, college/university Newman Clubs, Campus Ministries, parishes, and schools. The purpose of this Guide is to provide tried and tested methods for maintaining the independence of Catholic groups and to prevent [an] Opus Dei takeover and destruction of other organs of the Catholic Church.”