by Tobias Jones
The third ‘secret’ was written down in the 1940s, but remained unrevealed for the entirety of the remaining twentieth century. Only in 2000, at the ceremony in which two of the Portuguese peasant children – Francisco Marto and his sister Jacinta – were beatified, did John Paul II make the third secret public: speaking of the killing of a ‘white bishop’ by enemies of the faith, it was interpreted as a prediction of the assassination attempt against the Pope himself. The shooting had occurred in 1981, on the day the Church calls the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. Karol Wojtyla, with his grey hair and white cassock, was being driven slowly through the crowds outside St Peter’s. A Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, stepped forward and fired. The Pope (the first non-Italian pontificate since 1523) collapsed, apparently whispering ‘Mary, mother of mine’ as his entourage rushed towards him. The Pope, though, has never shown any interest in who, apart from Agca, was responsible for the shooting. Rather, he’s constantly emphasised who it was who saved him: ‘One hand shot, another hand guided the bullet,’ he once said. On the first anniversary of the shooting he went to Fatima to give thanks to the Virgin and place the actual bullet in her crown.
John Paul II is, few doubt it, an honest and humble figure besieged by the realpolitik of the Vatican. He genuinely seems to fight, with shrewd political calculation, for religious causes which, inevitably, spill over into the temporal. He has always urged peaceful resolutions. He has acknowledged Judaism as Christianity’s ‘older brother’. Under his command, the Catholic church has also partially apologised for its own intolerance during the Counter-Reformation. Now a bowed figure shaking with Parkinson’s, he still relentlessly travels the world, angrily admonishing those who fail to heed his slurred words. He has sometimes tried to promote the unity of Christianity and urge ecumenicalism. Against the wishes of both the Catholic hierarchy and the Greek Orthodox church, he visited Greece in 2001 and pleaded that the ‘Western Church’ and the ‘Eastern Church’ become the left and right lungs of a united Christianity. He also apologised for the horrors committed by Catholics against the Orthodox church during the Fourth crusade. That brave decision to apologise was seen as a wooing of not only the Greek Orthodox church but also the Russian one. As a Pole who suffered under Soviet rule, in 1984 he dedicated the Soviet Union to the Immaculate Heart of Mary (as was commanded by the Virgin in the revelations at Fatima). He has publicly made it his dying ambition to be admitted to Russia, though has so far achieved it only via satellite.
Critics of John Paul II claim that he is like a Pope from the Middle Ages. He has actively promoted the Catholicism of interventionist saints and miracle-workers. During his pontificate he has beatified more people (798) and made more saints (280) than were given the honour during the previous five centuries. He has also halved the number of miracles necessary to make a saint. Padre Pio’s double-quick procession to sainthood was announced only two years after the beatification. Such criticisms, though, are unthinkable within Italy. The country now identifies so wholeheartedly with its pontiff that it’s hard to imagine that the Vatican and its papacy were once the enemies of the Italian state. In fact, the lack of Italian patriotism is probably in large part thanks to the hostility of that other country called the Vatican. After the Risorgimento, the attitude of the Vatican to the new nation was one of suspicion. The Vatican demanded from its devotees a veto of the new-born Italian state. Catholics were urged not to participate in elections (on pain of excommunication), and were warned in apocalyptic terms of the dangers of the lay state which was besieging the ‘saintly seat’. Until 1920, the papacy forbade foreign (Catholic) heads of state to visit Rome, fearing that it would give the Italian state undue recognition.
Only with Mussolini’s Lateran Pacts of 1929 were diplomatic relations established between the two states, allowing the two to begin their loving, sometimes suffocating, embrace. The Church’s collusion with Fascism barely seemed to affect its post-war prestige (apart from the agreement with Mussolini, there had been a Concordat with the Nazi regime, and Pope Pius XII remained eerily silent on the Holocaust). A former Vatican librarian, Alcide De Gasperi, became the leader of the newly formed Christian Democratic party which duly won the vital 1948 election. (Alcide De Gasperi’s wily young secretary was Giulio Andreotti; an old joke went that when De Gasperi went into the church and closed his eyes to pray to God, Andreotti got up and went to sort things out with the priest.) Other Catholic organisations like Azione Cattolica (which by 1954 had a membership of three million) were to provide other historic leaders of the Christian Democrats like Aldo Moro.
The intricate system of spiritual blackmail and bribery (excommunication of Communist voters, for example, was announced in 1948) has meant that the Catholic church has since then always been able to nudge and knead Italian political life. Traditionally, for example, Madonnas started weeping around election time, especially if it looked as if the left was on the brink of victory. In 1948 in Naples, when the Communist party looked likely to assume power, no fewer than 36 Madonnas began to shed tears. It’s a good example of the strange, clandestine control the Catholic Church has over Italian politics, of its uncanny ability to let the interior, spiritual side of life well-up and overflow into the purely political. Although abortion and divorce were tortuously legalised in the 1970s, there are still strange laws that hint at the reach of the Catholic Church. Premarital contracts are illegal. A percentage of income tax (eight lire for every thousand) can be directly offered to the Church (although you’re now allowed to specify alternative destinations). Until 2001, blood donors had to sign a clause of ‘non-homosexuality,’ a law that was necessitated more by morals than anything medical.
The Vatican, in fact, is viewed by even the most devout Catholics as a country of purple finery, of power and prestige which seems the antithesis of Christianity. In 1563, the Venetian ambassador to Rome described the atmosphere of the Vatican: ‘Here adulation is dressed up as honesty, a con as courtesy. Every vice appears masked. Simulation is the soul of the court…’ It’s a judgement that has been repeatedly echoed. Free-masonry (what John Paul II’s predecessor, Paul VI, called the ‘smoke of Satan… penetrating and fogging the temple of God…’) is, apparently, ubiquitous. According to anonymous priests who recently published an insider’s critique of the Vatican, ‘pretence in the Vatican becomes second nature, which has the end of dominating the first [nature]. The hypocrites are flatterers and tutors of all the faked virtues, whilst they defame and persecute the truth’.
The Vatican, in fact, had by the 1980s become a willing protagonist in Italy’s post-war scandal par excellence. A suave American bishop from Chicago, Paul Marcinkus, had risen to the top of the Vatican’s ‘bank,’ the so-called Institute for Religious Works (the ‘Istituto per le Opere Religiose,’ or IOR). Roberto Calvi, another ambitious banker, had meanwhile risen through the ranks of the Banco Ambrosiano in Milan. It was traditionally a bank for Catholic investors; even the name was taken from Milan’s patron saint. When the two were introduced by a Sicilian tax expert, Michele Sindona, they worked out an intricate banking scam in which the Vatican would be the conduit for the exportation of huge sums of capital. The IOR’s secrecy, as well as the respectable front it offered Ambrosiano, made it the ideal accomplice.
Throughout the 1970s, Calvi shifted billions of lire into offshore accounts in Luxembourg, Nicaragua, Peru and Nassau. The transactions were so complicated that when the money returned to Italy, propping up shares in the Banco Ambrosiano or falsely inflating other investments, the provenance was never certain and no one could prove that the IOR and Calvi were simply engaged in a very profitable paper-chase. By the late 1970s, the bank had debts of $1300 million to businesses that were little more than addresses in the Caribbean. As the sums loaned became ever-larger, the Bank of Italy – which oversaw the 1,060 banks on the peninsula – began to investigate. The businesses of Michele Sindona, the Sicilian tax expert, were already creaking, as many began to suspect that his ‘golden touch’ was nothing more than fals
e-accounting and spurious share issues. The man sent in to study Sindona’s accounts, Giorgio Ambrosoli, was first threatened, then murdered in July 1979. The man sent to investigate Calvi’s own bank, Emilio Alessandrini, was also murdered by a terrorist outfit (Alessandrini was also linked to the investigations into Piazza Fontana, having been one of the first to incriminate Pino Rauti and his Ordine Nuovo). There was also an attempt to frame managers at the Bank of Italy, and a new governor, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was chosen to head the difficult, and dangerous, investigative operation.
Magistrates investigating the murder of Ambrosoli and the strange, faked kidnapping of Michele Sindona kept coming across references to one Licio Gelli. Gelli was a former Fascist, having fought in Mussolini’s volunteers in his teens, and was to become – alongside Andreotti – the most mysterious figure of post-war Italy. One journalist described him with the following, evocative words:
[Gelli] understands more than he lets on, he’s courteous, metaphorical, allusive, slippery. He weighs his words, doesn’t raise his voice, he measures his gestures. Nothing seems to upset him… never have we been caught up in an enigma more enigmatic, in a sibyl more sibylline.4
The investigating magistrates decided to raid his various addresses: his suite at the Excelsior hotel in Rome, his Villa in Arezzo, an old business address in Frosinone, and the Giole textile factory in Castiglion Fibocchi. At the latter, a safe was found containing a mass of documents and a list of 950 names: members of what emerged as the register of Propaganda Due (P2), a masonic lodge that included 52 officials of the Carabinieri, 50 army officers, 37 members of the Treasury Police, five government ministers, 38 members of parliament, fourteen judges, ten banking presidents and various journalists and editors. In short, the most powerful men in Italy appeared linked into a secretive, occasionally murderous, organisation whose manifesto was called ‘A Plan for the Rebirth of Democracy’. That manifesto, discovered in the briefcase of Gelli’s daughter at Rome airport, included a rewriting of the Italian constitution, control of the mass media, the removal of parliamentary immunity and the suspension of union activity. Gelli was the ‘venerable maestro’ of a masonic lodge that seemed to link, albeit without explanation, coups and bombings and murders throughout the 1970s.
The startling revelations about P2 seemed to explain much about the underbelly of Italian life. It was an event that, in the words of one historian, ‘touched one of the deepest constants in post-war Italy, and one that it is most difficult to write about with any degree of historical certainty. Behind the surface of Italian democracy lay a secret history, made up of hidden associations, contacts and even conspiracies, some farcical and others more serious’. 5 The discovery of P2 was a moment that, as it was poetically described to me by one politician, was like the effect of approaching and grasping the aerial of a cheap television: suddenly the interference and blurred picture comes into focus, and you can finally see, hear and understand what has been going on. Retrospectively, it was possible to see connections between cases, and understand various mysteries. It began to look as if the paranoia about a parallel state, a shadow government that controlled banking, business and the media, might not have been misplaced after all. Not for the first time, the Italian media was caught up in, rather than just reporting, the news: the Rizzoli family, owners of the Corriere della Sera and at the time a quarter of all other Italian newspapers, was heavily compromised by its proximity, and that of its journalists, to P2.
Recent revisionism of P2 in Italy has suggested that the aspirations of the lodge were purely financial, and that very few of those involved knew of the lodge’s more sinister operations. Others suggest that the whole lodge, looking so sinister from the outside, was, from the inside, a chimera that many ‘P2ers’ didn’t even realise they had joined. Whatever the truth, the traces of Gelli and his P2 are evident in every iconic crime from Borghese’s ‘coup’ of 1970 until the Bologna bombing of 1980, which claimed 85 lives. The subsequent parliamentary enquiry wrote: ‘This committee has reached the reasoned conclusion, shared by several courts, that the lodge … established on-going links with subversive groups and organisations, instigating and countenancing their criminal purposes.’6 Terrorist groups had been prompted and nudged, the report said, by P2.
As for the Banco Ambrosiano, as the investigative net closed in on Calvi, the rogue banker, he escaped to London. There he was found hanged under Blackfriars bridge in June 1982. Calvi’s secretary, Graziella Corrocher, had also fallen to her death in what, by contrast, appeared a genuine suicide. When Sindona was arrested and imprisoned he was passed a poisoned coffee by ‘ignoti,’ unknowns, an act that only fulfilled his prediction that he would be murdered in prison. The Banco Ambrosiano, saddled with epic debts and no returns, duly collapsed. The most obvious beneficiaries of the whole affair were the Vatican and the political parties. There was no major political party that wasn’t on Calvi’s pay-roll: the parties – the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Communists – received as much as 88 billion lire from him throughout the 1970s. Craxi’s name, and the number of his Swiss bank account credited with $7 million by Calvi, was amongst Gelli’s documents. The Vatican, for its part, displayed a reticence to excuse or even explain itself. The creditors asked Paul Marcinkus, the American bishop, for a return on their investment, but were met with only silence. The IOR, responsible for creaming off millions in mysterious deals, washed its hands of the dirty affair.
I mention the whole episode not because it’s in any way representative of Italy or Catholicism, but because three of the sub-plots from the ‘Calvi case’ and P2 all re-emerged onto the scene twenty years to the day after the shooting of John Paul II: it was 13 May 2001, the day of the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. The noble banker from the Bank of Italy, a man who had fought as a partisan in the 1940s before becoming the Prime Minister in the 1990s, was by then President of the Republic. Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was, on this election day, expected to oversee the smooth, constitutional handover of power. The man expected to become Prime Minister was once on the roll-call of P2 members, and is the epitome of the lodge’s avowed intention to ‘rebaptise Italian democracy’ through control of the mass media and the rewriting of the constitution: Silvio Berlusconi. Meanwhile the Pope, twenty years after the shooting, is celebrating mass in St Peters.
In the morning’s newspapers I see that the son of Roberto Calvi is now claiming that his father had confided in the Pope. Calvi, before his ‘suicide’ in London, had told his son that he had spoken with John Paul II, and that the shooting of the Pope was organised by the same people who were hounding and threatening Calvi himself. The Vatican was so intimately involved with Calvi, went the son’s theory, that the Pope himself almost became another victim of the banking fiasco and its masonic connections. The entire story was, as ever, so sinister, so confusing and secretive, that I just shrugged and decided to ignore the whole, sordid affair in favour of something ‘simpler’: the General Election.
References - 7 Miracles and Mysteries
1 Quoted in John Cornwell, Breaking Faith (London, 2001)
2 Henry James Letters. 4 Volumes. Ed. by Leon Edel (Cambridge USA, 1984)
3 Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, Ed. by Kate Flint (London, 1998)
4 Espresso (number 40, 1981)
5 Paul Ginsborg, Italy and Its Discontents (London, 2001)
6 Tina Anselmi, Commissione Parlamentare d’Inchiesta sulla Loggia Massonica P2 (Rome, 1984)
8
An Italian Story
In any self-respecting democracy it would be unthinkable that the man assumed to be on the verge of being elected Prime Minister would recently have come under investigation for, among other things, money-laundering, complicity in murder, connections with the Mafia, tax evasion and the bribing of politicians, judges and the tax-police. But this country is Italy…
The Economist
Three months before the General Election, the last Queen of Italy had been laid to rest. It was the beginning of Februar
y 2001, and the ceremony was taking place at Hautecombe, in France, because the male line of the Italian royal family – the Principi Savoia – were still barred from entering Italy. They had been exiles ever since the 1946 referendum in which the country voted to become a republic. Prior to that, Maria Josè, the matriarch then being mourned, was Queen of Italy for little more than a month.
Her funeral was the occasion for the Savoia’s press relations to go into overdrive: the family wanted to return to Italy, and the funeral, just a few months before a General Election, was the perfect opportunity to publicise their case. It was a bizarre spectacle. Most of European royalty, bar the Windsors, turned out in support: the Bourbons from Spain, the Romanovs, the Prince of Monaco, Luxembourg’s Grand Duke and Duchess. Outside the church there was a huge screen conveying the service to the gathering of a few hundred Italian royalists who had arrived from Turin and Milan. Some were singing the March of the Savoia: ‘Sound glad trumpets, beat the drums: vivailrè, vivailrè!’
