The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia (15 page)

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one
claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they
shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord
Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were
no needy persons among them. For from time to time
those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the
money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet,
and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.

Acts 4:32-35

he great achievements of Pius XI, Pius XII, and Bernardino
were almost undone by the election of Angelo Roncalli as Pope John XXIII. The son of dirt farmers, Roncalli represented, as the daughter of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev pointed
out, a "genuine socialist" with "the hands of a peasant."' In 1892, at the age of eleven he entered a minor seminary and twelve years later
was ordained a priest. In 1918, after serving as a chaplain, Roncalli
was assigned to teach church history at the Pontifical Lateran Seminary in Rome. He was dismissed from this position because of his
Communist sympathies and modernist ideas, including approval of
"mixed marriages" (the marriage between Catholics and nonCatholics). The so-called pink priest came to serve as a letter copier
in the Oriental Congregation of the Holy See before receiving a
commission to serve as the apostolic visitor to Bulgaria-a post that
required he be made a bishop.2

At the close of World War II, Roncalli was sent to Paris as papal
nuncio, where he became close friends with French President Vincent
Auriol; Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French Communists; and
Edouard Herriot, leader of the Radical Party. Thorez had sent a
glowing report about Roncalli to the Kremlin. Roncalli was an ideal
prelate, Thorez wrote to the Soviet officials, he understood Marxism
like a Marxist, and if the Communist Party had not been sponsoring
a program of militant atheism, he might have been the best "Christian comrade" in the Roman Catholic Church.-'

When Pius XII condemned and disbanded pro-Communist
clerics, Roncalli protested the condemnation in a private audience
with the Holy Father and then encouraged the worker-priests to go
about their political business but "not too openly."

In 1948, when Pius XII was threatening any prelate who supported Communism, Roncalli, now serving as the Vatican's first permanent observer at the United Nations, established close ties with
Palmi Togliatti and other members of the Italian Communist Party.
The matter of the "pink priest" could no longer be ignored, especially since Togliatti informed Soviet officials that Roncalli would be
the "ideal man" to establish a "working compromise" between the
Church and Communism.4

In 1954 Count Della Torre, editor of the Vatican newspaper
L'Osservatore Romano, warned Pius XII of Roncalli's Communist
sympathies. Other members of the "Black Nobility" expressed similar
concerns.5

Nor did Roncalli escape the attention of the FBI and CIA. The agencies began to accumulate thick files on him and the questionable
activities of other "progressives" within the Vatican, including Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Paul VI).

At the instigation of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
and CIA director Allan Dulles, Cardinal Francis Spellman of the
Archdiocese of New York met with Pius XII to "leak" confidential
information and to ask for Roncalli's removal from the Vatican. The
removal, it was agreed, would have to be conducted with considerable tact and diplomacy. Pius XII complied by elevating Roncalli to
the college of cardinals and transferring him to the Patriarchate of
Venice, where it was hoped the troublesome Roncalli, at the age of
seventy-two, would spend his remaining years in "pastoral work."6
Similarly, as a result of the meeting, Monsignor Giovanni Montini
was released from his secretarial duties at the Vatican and sent as an
archbishop to Milan, where he had scant hope of obtaining a red hat.

Pius XII had appointed Cardinal Guiseppe Siri as his desired successor.' Siri was rabidly anti-Communist, an intransigent traditionalist
in matters of church doctrine, and a skilled bureaucrat who had been
personally trained in the intricacies of Vatican finances by Bernardino
Nogara. Moreover, Sin had the support of a group of cardinals known
as "the Pentagon." The group included Cardinals Canali, Pizzardo,
Mucara, Ottaviani, Mimmi, and Spellman. Few paid heed to the formation of a progressive or anti-Pentagon group composed of the
Polish primate Wyszynski, the Indian cardinal Garcias, the French cardinals, Cardinal Lercaro, and Roncalli. The progressives were concerned about the rigidly of Pius XII's regime, including the centralization of all power and authority in the person of the pope, the
unwillingness to initiate reform, and the crusading anti-Communism
that was creating a chasm between the east and the west.

In 1958, when the cardinals were locked away in the Sistine
Chapel to elect a new pope, mysterious events began to unfold. On
the third ballot, Sin, according to FBI sources, obtained the necessary votes and was elected as Pope Gregory XVII.8 White smoke
poured from the chimney of the chapel to inform the faithful that a
new pope had been chosen. The news was announced with joy at
6 P.M. on Vatican radio. The announcer said, "The smoke is white. ... There is absolutely no doubt. A pope has been elected."9 The
Palatine and Swiss Guards were alerted. The former were summoned
from their barracks and ordered to report to St. Peter's Basilica for
the announcement of the name of the Holy Father. Thousands gathered beneath the windows of the apostolic palace waiting to receive
the blessing of the new pope.

But the new pope failed to appear. Question began to arise
whether the smoke was white or gray. To quell such doubts, Monsignor Santaro, secretary of the Conclave of Cardinals, informed the
press that the smoke, indeed, had been white and that a new pope
had been elected. The waiting continued. By evening Vatican radio
announced that the results remained uncertain. On October 27,
1958, the Houston Post headlined: "Cardinals Fail to elect pope in 4
Ballots: Mix-Up in Smoke Signals Cause False Reports."10

But the reports had been valid. On the fourth ballot, according to
FBI sources, Siri again obtained the necessary votes and was elected
supreme pontiff. But the French cardinals annulled the results,
claiming that the election would cause widespread riots and the assassination of several prominent bishops behind the Iron Curtain. i i

The cardinals opted to elect Cardinal Frederico Tedischini as a
"transitional pope," but Tedischini was too ill to accept the position.

Finally, on the third day of balloting, Roncalli received the necessary support to become Pope John XXIII. The conservative cardinals
believed that Roncalli, at the age of seventy-eight, was too old to
wreak havoc within the Vatican and would only serve as a "guardian
pope" until the next conclave. They were mistaken.

John XXIII's first act as pope was to appoint Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini, his fellow "progressive" who had been
"exiled" to the North of Italy, as a cardinal. He next appointed
twenty-three additional cardinals to ward off any attempt by the
"ultras" (as the new pope called the old guard) to regain control of
the Vatican. Many of the new cardinals were well known for their
leftist sentiments; others were from Third World countries. 12
Returning to the United States from the conclave, Cardinal Spellman
announced his disdain of the new pope by saying: "He's no Pope. He
should be selling bananas." 13

John XXIII began to purge all of those who had ties with Pius
XII. Mother Pasqualina, who had looked after Pius XII for more than
thirty years, was ordered to vacate her living quarters within the papal
palace in a matter of hours. The "pestilential rats"-the Jesuits who
had been prominent in the Vatican during Pius XII's nineteen-year
reign-were set to flight. Count Della Torre, who served as editor of
the official Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, was given the
sack and ordered to report to the Vatican Library, where he spent his
remaining days "roaming aimlessly like a nostalgic ghost." And the
two nephews of Pius XII who served as directors of the Vatican Bank
were forced to accept early retirement.14

John XXIII proceeded to open dialogue first with the Socialists
and then with the Communists, assuring them of his support of social
reforms. He was as good as his word. In May 1961 he published his
first famous encyclical Mater et Magistra, which reviewed the development of social doctrine from the time of Pope Leo XIII to the
Cold War. With one stroke of the pen, he placed the Church on the
side of the leftist reformers, insisting that the Church must be on the
cutting edge of social change and economic reform. To the shock of
traditionalists, he endorsed the process of "socialization," calling for
a breakdown of class distinctions, the distribution of goods according
to the "norms of justice," and the elimination of private property.'5
To some it represented a Catholic Communist Manifesto. In New
York, conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. quipped, "Mater, yes;
Magistra, no." Two years later John XXIII issued an even more radical encyclical, Pacem in Terris, that called for a rapprochement
between Catholics and Communists and the application of Marxist
dialectics to Christian teaching." In accordance with this decree, the
pope invited Nikita Khrushchev to the Vatican and received Soviet
officials, including the editor of Izvestia, in private audience.

The effects of such measures were felt throughout the world. In
Latin America the amalgamation of Christianity with Marxism
resulted in a movement called Liberation Theology that threatened
the social order everywhere south of the United States.

During an interview John XXIII opened a window of his study
and told reporters that he had decided to call an ecumenical council to permit fresh air to flow through the "stifling confines" of the
Roman Catholic Church.'? The council, known as Vatican II, would
result in the abandonment of ancient traditions, the relaxation of
canon law, and the translation of the Latin liturgy into vernacular
languages. All of this would take place for the sake of what the old
pope called aggiornamento or "updating." "We are not born to be
museum keepers," he once told the Curia, "but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life."18 The revolution initiated by the "caretaker"
pope became so devastating that a prominent Catholic cleric
lamented: "Four hundred years of history-all the accomplishments
of the Council of Trent-have been destroyed in four years." 19

But in many ways the most troublesome of John's reforms was his
refusal to provide funding to the Christian Democracy Party.
Overnight, the political structure of Italy began to change. To maintain
control of the government amidst the rising number of Italian Communists, the Christian Democrats formed a coalition with the Socialists-a measure that was called the apertura alla sinistra, the "opening
to the left."20 This opening resulted in the government of Aldo Moro,
the new leader of the Christian Democrats, who chose as his deputy
prime minister Pietro Nenni, the old leader of the Socialist Party.

By 1963 the Moro government was forced to make an alliance
with Luigi Longo, the leader of the Italian Communists. The Roman
Catholic Church had lost its control of the Italian government. The
terms of the concordat with Mussolini were now subject to scrutiny
and change. Of all John's changes and reforms, his refusal to provide
funding to the Christian Democrats proved to be the most significant
for the future of the Vatican, Inc. It gave rise not only to "the
opening of the left" within the Italian government but also to the
most sinister of all developments: the marriage of Holy Mother
Church to the Mafia.