In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  We should add that the penthouse has been adapted for the cardinal’s personal convenience. A lift means that Sodano, who has made good provision for his old age, doesn’t have to climb the stairs. In the corridors I see photographs of the cardinal with Benedict XVI – when everyone knows that they were intractable enemies. The furniture is horrible, as it often is in the Vatican. And what isolation! As I can confirm, there is only one other Italian cardinal living on the top floor, next door to him: Giovanni Lajolo. A protégé and close friend of Sodano, Lajolo was his secretary of foreign affairs, his direct deputy at the Secretariat of State. A successful Silvestrini.

  There are several sources for the dark legend, the terrible reputation of Angelo Sodano. This northern Italian, ordained priest at 23, whose father was for a long time a Christian Democrat member of parliament, is powerful and strong-willed and has used his power to make and unmake careers. His ambition was precocious. He was spotted by Paul VI when he was dealing with Hungary as the secretary of state, and appointed nuncio to Chile in 1977. Number 2 at the Vatican for 14 years under John Paul II and dean of cardinals, he accumulated functions as few men of the Church had done before him. His achievements were generally recognized with regard to the Yugoslavian conflict, the first Gulf War, the conflicts in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and indeed the multiple tensions in the Holy Land during his mandate.

  Sodano has often been compared to Cardinal Mazarin, the Italian state prelate who served both the pope and the kings of France, and whose abuses of power, number of enemies and secret amorous relationships are legendary. During the decade when John Paul II, a young and athletic pope, large and vigorous, was transformed into the ‘pope of suffering’, soon paralysed by Parkinson’s disease, incapable of running the Curia, gradually deprived of his mobility and even of the power of speech – according to all witnesses – Sodano became the true interim pope.

  Theoretically, as I have said, he formed a duo with Mgr Stanisław Dziwisz, the private secretary of John Paul II, and even a trio with Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But the first of these, who was close to the pope, was not yet a bishop; the second, however central he might have been, was essentially packed off to doctrine and ideas. The ambition of these men would gradually be fulfilled, but in the meantime the tetrarch Sodano governed all of the internal affairs and diplomacy in the Vatican without sharing power with anyone else.

  His political ideas added a fundamental hatred to personal animosities that were already well known in Rome. Unlike Cardinal Casaroli and his dauphin Achille Silvestrini, who were men of compromise, Sodano was a rigid and peremptory man. He was tough and, it was said, violent, returning any blows dealt to him a hundredfold. His mode of operation: silence and rage. His ideological mainspring, the thing that animated him, was principally anti-communism. Hence his rapid proximity to John Paul II, which was formed or confirmed during the pope’s controversial trip to Chile in 1987. Angelo Sodano was nuncio to Santiago at the time. And his troubled Chilean past, which no one knew in detail, would come to do a great deal of harm to the image of the cardinal secretary of state.

  The history of the Vatican in the 1990s and the 2000s was thus formed ten years previously in the Chilean capital, where Sodano began his rise. I went there twice for this book and interviewed dozens of witnesses. Some of the archives of the dictatorship were starting to ‘speak’, even while the trial of the accomplices of General Pinochet were still going on. If there are apparently no archives from DINA, the secret services (probably destroyed), important American archives, notably those of the State Department and the CIA, were recently declassified as a result of international pressure. Copies of these original documents have been entrusted by the United States to the Chilean government and are now accessible in the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago. I have made intensive use of these thousands of unpublished documents for the part of this book devoted to Angelo Sodano. Many things that were still unknown a few years ago are therefore beginning to rise to the surface, like the corpses that the dictator Pinochet wanted to make disappear.

  ‘The man of good, in these times, is close to the man of evil.’ The phrase comes from Chateaubriand – but it applies equally to Sodano.

  Here I am in Santiago for my investigation, and it’s here that, without meaning to, I become a kind of biographer of Angelo Sodano. I wish the cardinal and his biographer could have met; in spite of letters and friendly espistolary exchanges, though, that meeting never took place. That’s probably a shame. It makes me all the more aware of my responsibility. I know that the career – alas! – of the cardinal secretary of state may be summed up in the pages the follow.

  Ecce homo. Angelo Sodano was the Vatican representative in Chile from March 1978 until May 1988. He arrived in Santiago in ‘the time of crazy hope’, shortly after the coup of Augusto Pinochet. It was a country that he knew already, having lived there between 1966 and 1968 as deputy to the nunciature. At the time, it was a crucial country for the Vatican, taking into account relationships that were considered ‘specially sensitive’ with the Chilean dictator.

  Sodano formed a long relationship with Pinochet, which many witnesses whom I have questioned had no hesitation in calling a ‘deep friendship’ or even an ‘intense friendship’.

  ‘Angelo Sodano was very concerned with the rights of man. We did as much as we could. Don’t forget that we had about thirty political refugees in the dependencies of the nunciature in Santiago,’ argues Archbishop François Bacqué, who was Sodano’s deputy in Chile.

  I had several opportunities to converse and dine tête-à-tête with this emeritus diplomat, now retired. This was a stroke of luck: Bacqué is as chatty as Sodano is tight-lipped; as chummy and playful as the former secretary of state is silent and humourless: one wants to be loved, the other to be hated. Unlike Bacqué, Sodano always saved his kind words for his little group of cronies, sibylline nuncios and impenetrable cardinals. And yet these two very different characters, the nuncio who succeeded and the nuncio who failed, resemble one another – mirror-image acolytes.

  Most witnesses and experts that I interviewed in Santiago don’t share this positive, albeit slightly second-hand appreciation of François Bacqué. For them, Sodano’s past is in fact ‘blacker than his cassock’.

  Look at his way of life, first of all! According to the testimony of Osvaldo Rivera, a close adviser to Pinochet, which we collected in Chile, Angelo Sodano lived in luxury: ‘One day I received a dinner invitation from the nuncio, which I accepted. When I arrived, I realized that I was the only guest. We sat down at a very elegant table covered with silverware. And I said to myself: “this priest wants to show you the meaning of power, of absolute power, and he wants me to understand that I am the lowest of the low”. Because not only was it a luxurious environment, the display itself was ostentatious.’

  Many other witnesses remember this way of life, which was far from usual for a priest, even for a nuncio. Sodano did not make modesty a virtue.

  ‘I remember Sodano very well; he was a prince. I saw him all the time: he enjoyed the high life. He went out in his car with a police escort with a blue light. He went to all kinds of launches and demanded a reserved seat in the first row. He was the exact opposite of the Church, because he was pro-Pinochet while the Chilean Church wasn’t,’ the writer and journalist Pablo Simonetti tells me.

  An academic of some repute, for a long time Ernesto Ottone was one of the leaders of the Chilean Communist Party. He knew Sodano, and he tells me: ‘In Chile, Sodano didn’t give the impression of being a churchman at all. He loved good food and power. I was struck by his misogyny, which contrasted with the fact that he was very effeminate. His way of shaking hands was very unusual: he didn’t shake your hand, he gave you a kind of feminine caress, like a nineteenth-century courtesan before she faints and demands smelling salts!’

  Witnesses were also dumbfounded to see Sodano ‘bowing all the way to the floor’ when he
met the dictator. With subalterns he was more friendly: ‘he would slap you on the back,’ a witness tells me. But women remained entirely absent from the life of the nuncio. Sometimes this loner was on his own; at other times he would appear in a crowd. Then he would arrive with his entourage, a pageant of male creatures, devoted to him body and soul. Wickedness settled in over time.

  One person who worked with Sodano in the nunciature confirms this development. ‘At first Sodano was prudent and reserved. He came to Chile with Rome’s ideas about the dictatorship: he had a rather critical vision of Pinochet, and wanted to defend the rights of man. But gradually, in contact with reality and the dictatorship, he became more pragmatic. He began to work with the regime.’

  The retired nuncio François Bacqué, who was also in office with Sodano in Chile, has similar memories: ‘At first, he didn’t want to compromise with Pinochet. I remember a day when he was supposed to appear beside him for a military ceremony. The nuncio was traditionally present, and Sodano didn’t want to go for fear of compromising the Church.’

  The diplomatic archives, which are now declassified, effectively confirm that there were tensions between Sodano and Pinochet, particularly during the first few years. In 1984, in particular, when four left-wing extremists entered the apostolic nunciature asking for political asylum. But there are more documents that prove Sodano gave Pinochet his complete support: the nuncio would go so far as to close his eyes when the government ordered the arrest of priests accused of subversive activity.

  In fact, Angelo Sodano inadvertently became Pinochet’s guardian angel. He began minimizing his crimes, taking the approach of his predecessor in Santiago, who had, in 1973, bluntly dismissed them as ‘communist propaganda’ (according to documents from the American diplomatic missions revealed by WikiLeaks). He also sought to play down the systematic use of torture, which was massive and brutal, and to maintain diplomatic relations between Chile and the holy see, after several states, including Italy, had severed them.

  From then on, according to numerous witness statements that I have collected (including that of the priest Cristián Precht, one of the closest colleagues of the Bishop of Santiago, Raúl Silva Henríquez), Sodano contributed to the appointment of neutral or pro-Pinochet bishops, disqualifying priests opposed to the regime. In 1984, he manoeuvred to have Silva Henríquez replaced, a moderate cardinal who criticized the violence of the dictatorship and was close to the president of the Republic, Salvador Allende. Instead, Sodano sought the appointment of Juan Francisco Fresno Larraín, a notorious ally of Pinochet and an ‘insignificant’ bishop according to all witnesses.

  ‘Cardinal Fresno was essentially concerned with his passion for orange cake,’ the journalist Mónica González tells me in Santiago.

  It seems, however, that Cardinal Fresno was a more ambivalent figure: although a visceral anti-communist, he was said to have criticized Pinochet severely in private, and the dictator, who had been enthusiastic about him at first, soon considered him as an ‘enemy’ of the regime. Pinochet was said to have complained about Fresno to Sodano, threatening to ‘change religion’! Sodano then put Fresno under pressure to calm down his criticisms of the regime (according to the declassified telegrams and notes from the CIA that I have consulted).

  Gradually Sodano hardened. The nuncio became colder and more rigid. He maintained his silence about the arrest and murder of four priests close to liberation theology, which explains why he was often criticized by the progressive Chilean Catholic networks (particularly by the movement También Somos Iglesia, which denounced him for his complicity with the dictatorship). He also called to order many clerics who participated in non-violent actions against Pinochet. Sodano’s Church was a Church that mobilized its forces against progressive priests, against worker-priests, against the weak – not a Church that protected or defended.

  Finally, with a political skill that he would become used to deploying alongside John Paul II, the nuncio locked down the Chilean Bishop’s Conference, appointing at least four bishops close to Opus Dei to check it and limit its internal debates. (Most of these ultra-conservative bishops had, when they were seminarians, frequently visited the parish of the priest Fernando Karadima, who is central to this story, as we shall see.)

  From Rome, when he became secretary of state to John Paul II, Angelo Sodano continued to pull strings in Chile and protect the dictator. In 1998, he had Francisco Javier Errázuriz appointed to the post of Archbishop of Santiago, and would then contribute to his being created cardinal. It wouldn’t matter that Errázuriz would be accused of covering up cases of sexual abuse, or that he raised eyebrows in Santiago over his worldly associations and his private life: Sodano defended him against all comers.

  The journalist and writer Óscar Contardo, who wrote a book about a paedophile priest who was protected by Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, had no hesitation in criticizing those who encouraged his appointment to the post. ‘We find Angelo Sodano at the very heart of these scandals here in Chile. The nuncio wasn’t in Santiago only for reasons of faith.’

  One of the journalists I interviewed in Santiago, who has written a great deal about the crimes of the dictatorship, puts it even more strongly: ‘Let’s call a spade a spade: in Chile, Angelo Sodano behaved like a fascist, and he was the friend of a fascist dictator. That’s the reality.’

  In the Vatican, a number of people had no hesitation, in private, in comparing Sodano to the priest Pietro Tacchi Venturi. Another reactionary, this Italian Jesuit was the intermediary between Pope Pius XI and Mussolini, and we know, from the revelations of historians, that he accumulated many wrongs. He was pro-fascist, and was considered to be a great ‘sexual adventurer’ (with young men).

  In April 1987, Sodano supervised Pope John Paul II’s visit to Chile, in close cooperation with the pope’s personal assistant, Stanisław Dziwisz, who was in Rome and would be travelling with the pope. According to two witnesses who took part in it, the preparatory meetings for this risky visit were ‘very tense’ and led to intense confrontations between the ‘two camps’ – the anti-Pinochet progressives and the pro-Pinochet conservatives. The other extraordinary thing about them was that they were ‘chiefly composed of homosexual priests’.

  The Chilean bishop who coordinated the preparation for the visit, and one of its most effective architects, was a certain Francisco Cox: this conservative would go on to play a part in the Pontifical Council for the Family in Rome, where he would present himself as very homophobic, before being denounced in the end for homosexual abuses in Chile.

  Another of those behind the visit, the priest Cristián Precht, was close to the progressive cardinal of Santiago: he represented the other camp, in that violent opposition between right and left in the Chilean episcopacy. During an interview, Precht gave me detailed descriptions of those meetings, in which the nuncio Angelo Sodano participated ‘three or four times’, and told me on the record: ‘Sodano acted, on certain subjects, like a representative of the government and of Pinochet, and not like the representative of John Paul II.’ (In 2011, and then in 2018, Precht was also accused of sexual abuses of boys and suspended by Rome, before being reduced to the status of layman.)

  At this time, even the United States had distanced themselves from Pinochet, whom they had initially supported. ‘Now it was only the Vatican that was defending the dictatorship! No one else wanted to grant political legitimacy to Pinochet except Angelo Sodano!’ I was told by Alejandra Matus, a Chilean investigative journalist and researcher who specialized in the dictatorship, and whom I met in the Starbucks at her university in Santiago.

  During this trip, Sodano allowed – or, according to some versions, organized – the highly symbolic appearance of the pope and General Pinochet, together on the balcony at the Presidential Palace of La Moneda: the photograph of the two men, smiling, would be criticized all over the world, and in particular by the democratic opposition and part of the Chilean Catholic Church.

  Piero Marini, John Paul
II’s ‘master of ceremonies’, was among those present. He spoke of this version of events during two interviews in Rome, in the presence of my researcher Daniele: ‘Everything had been prepared in great detail, but Pinochet took it upon himself to invite the pope on to the balcony at La Moneda and take him there straight away. It wasn’t part of the protocol. The pope was taken along against his will.’

  The next day, at a mass in front of a million people, there were scuffles with the police, who charged the rioters during the mass; six hundred people were wounded. According to many witnesses and several investigations, Pinochet’s secret services manipulated the trouble-makers. Sodano issued a communiqué holding the democratic opposition responsible, while the police were the victims.

  That visit by John Paul II was one of the finest political stunts carried out by Pinochet and – therefore – by Sodano. The dictator heaped praises on the apostolic nuncio, offering him, a few months later, a lunch in honour of his ten years in Santiago. I have collected several witness statements about this meal, which suggest an unusual and abnormal complicity between a nuncio and a dictator. (The declassified documents of the American State Department confirm this point.)

  A few weeks later, in May 1988, when a crucial referendum was being prepared for Pinochet (which he would lose in October, and which would force him to step down), Sodano was called back to Rome, where he was appointed ‘minister’ of foreign affairs at the Vatican. In 1990 he became the pope’s ‘prime minister’.

  His honeymoon with Pinochet still wasn’t over. As Montesquieu says: ‘Any man with power is led to abuse it; he is bound to find its limits.’ Without limits, then, and at the holy see, an adventurer and extremist more than ever, and less than ever a disciple of the Gospel, Sodano continued to keep a watch over his friend the dictator, and went on supporting him even after his fall. In 1993 he insisted that Pope John Paul II bestow his ‘divine grace’ on General Pinochet on the occasion of his gold wedding. And when Pinochet was hospitalized in Great Britain, in 1998, and arrested because he was subject to an international arrest warrant and an extradition demand from Spain for his crimes, Sodano still kept an eye on him, supported the dictator and publicly opposed his extradition.