God's Banker (9 page)

Then again, in the late 1960s, when deposits from US Catholic
institutions with the IOR began to fall off, what better choice could
Paul VI make to head the bank than a dynamic American prelate and
proven manager, who originated from the largest US archdiocese?

Inevitably the swift rise of this foreign intruder with his no-
nonsense ways aroused some resentment and jealousy within the
Italian-dominated Curia. But America loves a success story; and
some who crossed the Atlantic on Church business are said to have
regarded a round of golf with Marcinkus at the Acqua Santa golf club
down on the Appian way as a status symbol to match an audience with
the Pope himself.

Such different views, of course, sharpened later, first with the
Sindona scandal, and then the Ambrosiano affair. Americans who
knew Marcinkus well were generally prepared to forgive him. He
might have been gullible, they maintained, but at heart he was a "nice

*
Chicago Tribune
,
March 13 1983.

guy", basically honest, loyal and good company, always ready to put
himself out for a friend. From the other side of the cultural divide,
many Italians who had to deal with him could find Marcinkus rude
and abrupt. Some found it quite plausible that he was the Vatican end
of a conspiracy stretching from Calvi
,
Sindona and the P-2 to the CIA
and the Mafia.

Sindona himself has claimed that he had a hand in Marcinkus'
appointment to the IOR, nor would that be surprising. Both were
friends of Continental Illinois' David Kennedy, head of the biggest
bank in the archbishop's home town of Chicago. The Sicilian was
already helping the APSA dispose of its embarrassing holdings in
Italian industry; while Paul VI had had reason in his Milan days to be
grateful to Sindona for helping the success of Church-backed char­ities. In any event, Marcinkus was first named manager and then, in
1971
,
chairman of the Vatican Bank.

The enterprising archbishop thus became the latest embodiment of a
dilemma which in varying degrees has haunted the Church since it
ceased to be a temporal power in Italy in the nineteenth century. How
was it to reconcile its rejection of crude liberal capitalism (a hundred
years ago at its height) with the practical need of working with that
system, to raise money to finance its mission?

Back in 1860 devout Catholics attempted to resolve the difficulties
by instigating the device of "St Peter's Pence", individual contribu­tions from the faithful donated each year to the person of the Pope.
Catholic financiers rallied round, too, providing loans and other
ingenious fund-raising proposals. One of them was a certain Andre
Langrand-Dumonceau, who first earned the nickname of "Europe's
financial Napoleon", only to go spectacularly bankrupt in 1870. A
recent study* has observed that he was "the extreme example of a
strategy worked out by Catholic financiers, French and Belgian in
particular. They aimed to involve the Holy See in their business deals,
thus profiting from the moral and economic good name of the entire
Catholic Church." Something of the same could be said for the
relations of Sindona, and then Calvi, with the IOR. But Marcinkus
seems to have been unmindful of the precedents.

*Carlo Crocella,
Augusta Miseria,
Nuovo Istituto Editoriale Italiano 1982.

When he took over the IOR he already inherited some links with
Sindona, notably the holding in Banca Privata Finanziaria. But the
two, who got on splendidly, rapidly extended their collaboration.
Sindona is fond of claiming today that he saved the Vatican from
financial disaster by relieving it not only of SGI, but two other
companies as well. One was Condotte d'Acqua (later to pass to IRI,
the giant Italian state industrial conglomerate); the other was Ceramica Pozzi, a badly run manufacturer of, among other things, lava­tories. In return the IOR bought into various Sindona enterprises,
both in Italy and outside. Marcinkus, with his lack of financial
training, was no banker. Indeed, it has been maliciously observed
that his troubles began when he started to regard himself as one. The
real expertise belonged to Luigi Mennini, the IOR's managing
director, a rarely-seen figure with a lifetime's experience in the
Vatican bank—and of the ways of Catholic Italian finance.

Just how and when Paul Marcinkus and Roberto Calvi met is not
clear. Marcinkus has declared that he was put on to Calvi by the
Milanese Curia; Sindona has asserted that he was responsible. But
the fateful meeting must have happened in 1971 at the latest. For by
the August of that year, as we have seen, Marcinkus was seated on the
board of Calvi's Cisalpine Bank in Nassau. The moment marks the
start of IOR's hidden association with Ambrosiano. The Vatican
bank took an early shareholding of Cisalpine of two and a half per
cent, later to rise to eight percent. Nobody noticed, or paid attention
to, the fact that Marcinkus was one of its directors. But then nobody
was paying much attention to Calvi in those days.

The archbishop has since stated that he saw Calvi only two or three
times a year, "to discuss ideas and arrangements". He maintains that
apart from that first stay in Nassau, he hardly met the banker socially,
although Calvi's family dispute this. What is true is that Marcinkus
was an ever busier man, and that day-to-day dealings between
Ambrosiano and the IOR were left to Mennini and his equally
retiring deputy, Pellegrino de Stroebel, chief accountant of the IOR.

The personal relationship between the gregarious, direct Mar­cinkus and the diffident and elusive Calvi is not easy to visualize.
Professionally, however, Calvi had much to recommend him. His
bank had three-quarters of a century of links with the Catholic
Church in Milan, his discretion was absolute, and his financial skills
considerable. However mixed the feelings in the Vatican over the
rough and tumble of international finance, it needed to increase its
income—and the IOR was an
obvious
means to
this
end.

Of
all
the mysteries of
the
Eternal Church, few are greater than that
of its finances. The
sheer
geographical extent of the institution is part
of the
difficulty,
but
a bigger
reason is the Vatican's obsessive secrecy.
Clearly its possessions are huge, in terms of land, art and property.
But Michelangelo's
Pieta
cannot be
sold
off to
balance a
budget. Like
any other state, the Vatican must
try
to match income to expenditure.
But as rising government deficits around the world were there to
prove, that task became from the mid-1960s steadily harder. Inflation
was rising, and
salary increases, not just
for the Curia's staff but also
the 1,400 predominantly lay workers who enable the Vatican to
be
administered, had to
keep
pace. Extended international travel by the
Pope, new departments
set
up after the Second Vatican Council in
1962, more forceful diplomacy and
a
new sense of international
mission,
all
cost money. To meet these outgoings, and cover a
declared budget
deficit
which by 1980 had reached $25 million, the
Vatican must have been
forced to rely
increasingly on its two sources
of
undeclared
income:
St Peter's Pence and the earnings of the IOR.
Under Paul VI, however, the former were unable to keep up with the
growing demands. It is held that the proceeds of St Peter's Pence
fluctuate with the popular appeal
of
individual Popes. In the reign of
John XXIII, with his earthy warmth, they had soared.
*
But his more
detached, introspective successor, especially in the later years of his
Papacy, was a less compelling
figure.
Income, it is
said,
stagnated. So
that left the IOR.

The Institute for Religious Works had been created by personal
decree of Pius XII in June 1942, when the war was causing extra
problems for the Vatican's financial workings. Its stated purpose was,
and is, to manage assets entrusted to it—cash, shares and property
—
in the interests of the world-wide Church. Completely independent of
the APSA and the Prefecture for Economic Affairs of the Holy See

*Only now, with
the global appeal
of
John
Paul II,
has
the
trend
been reversed.
Figures unprecedentedly released in November
1982
showed that
in
1981, offerings
of $24 million to the Pope, including $15.4 million of "St Peter's Pence", had helped
the Vatican to show a general budget surplus of over $4 million.
(in effect the Vatican's Finance Ministry), the IOR is theoretically
supervised by a panel of five cardinals. In practice, however, Marcinkus had a free hand, reporting only to the Pope himself. Tradi­tionally the IOR has never given the smallest detail of its business,
still less published a balance sheet, although that might change after
the Calvi debacle. But as a bank it is medium-sized at best. Calvi
would describe it as colossal to his few intimates; the more likely truth
is that it administers funds of probably no more than $2 billion, half
the size of Ambrosiano at its height. Its own assets may not exceed
$150 million. The IOR's operations are now computerized. But its
visible premises, including an ill-lit banking hall complete with
clerical tellers, seem as dingy as the courtyard of Sixtus V, through
which it is approached. Marcinkus' own office is more like a comfort­able smoke-filled study.