Authors: David Yallop
Marcinkus conceded that he had been involved with Mario Foligni, without doubt one of the principal figures in the billion dollar swindle, on at least two business ventures. The first concerned a 100 million dollar investment scheme that did not come to fruition. The second was a 300 million dollar deal involving Foligni and the Italian industrialist Carlo Pesenti. That too had aborted, but as Marcinkus told his convoluted tale he was at pains to drag in Benelli’s name. Apart from demonstrating that his ego had been bruised because Benelli had asked Pope Paul to consider the 300 million dollar deal and Marcinkus
clearly believed that no one should talk to the Pope about money but him, Marcinkus also attempted to link Benelli and Foligni, presumably working on the law of guilt by association. In view of the subsequent activities of Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, both close friends of Marcinkus, it would be interesting to know if Marcinkus still holds to this dubious legal tenet.
What Marcinkus neglected to explain, perhaps because he was not asked to, was why he was even prepared to consider the 300 million dollar deal involving Foligni, some eight months after Foligni had unloaded 1.5 million dollars’ worth of fake securities in a Swiss Bank and some six months after he had unloaded 2.5 million dollars’ worth of phoney bonds in the Banco di Roma. As President of the Vatican Bank it is inconceivable that Marcinkus was the only head of a bank in Europe not to know of these criminal activities.
At the end of a long interrogation, Marcinkus maintained total innocence and disclaimed all knowledge. He happily accepted a list of the counterfeit bonds and said he would keep his eye open for them.
A variety of people were eventually found guilty of involvement in the billion dollar swindle. With regard to the allegations that Bishop Paul Marcinkus was involved, Attorney William Aronwald told me:
The most that could be said is that we were satisfied that the investigation had not disclosed sufficiently credible evidence to prove or disprove the allegation. Consequently since we were not morally satisfied ourselves that there was anything wrong, or that Marcinkus or anyone else in the Vatican had done anything wrong, it would have been improper of us to try to grab some headlines.
It is abundantly clear that what seriously restricted this investigation was not the lack of will of the United States investigators. They tried hard, very hard. It would later be alleged that they were themselves part of a giant coverup,
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that they had merely gone through the motions of an enquiry. This is nonsense and shows total ignorance of the very real problems that are posed when an investigation which begins in one country has to be continued inside another. The Vatican City is an independent State. That Lynch and Aronwald and the men from the FBI got inside the Vatican gates at all is a tribute to their tenacity. One cannot go rushing over the Tiber like a TV New York
cop, armed with a .45 gun, search warrants, authority to hold and question witnesses and the many other legal devices that can be used within the United States.
If Vatican City were part of the United States then doubtless all members of the Curia working in the Sacra Congregazione Dei Religiosi would have been interrogated in depth. Fingerprints would have been taken. Forensic tests on all typewriters within the Congregation would have been made. If all that could have been done the question of Bishop Marcinkus’s guilt or innocence might have been resolved. The fact that the United States Government took the evidence seriously enough to risk a very delicate political situation is illuminating in itself. As William Aronwald said to me, ‘We were not about to waste that amount of taxpayers’ money unless we took the evidence very seriously indeed. At the end of the investigation the case against Marcinkus had to be filed for lack of evidence that might have convinced a jury.’
The question therefore remains unanswered. Who was the customer who ordered the counterfeit bonds? Based on all the available official evidence it is possible to draw only two conclusions. Each is bizarre. Leopold Ledl and Mario Foligni were planning to steal from the American Mafia a huge fortune in counterfeit bonds, having first conned the Mafia into going to the very considerable expense of creating the bonds. This particular section of the Mafia had a number of members who killed or maimed people who they merely imagined had insulted them. If this is the real reason then Ledl and Foligni were seeking an unusual form of suicide. The other conclusion is that the 950 million dollars’ worth of counterfeit bonds were destined for the Vatican.
In Venice, Albino Luciani continued to wear the robes that had been left by his predecessor, Cardinal Urbani. Throughout the entire period of his Patriarchship he refused to buy new ones, preferring instead to have the nuns who looked after him mend and re-mend. Indeed he wore the robes of Cardinal and Patriarch rarely, preferring his simple priest’s cassock.
His personal humility often created interesting situations. Motoring through Germany in 1975 with Father Senigaglia, the Cardinal arrived at the town of Aachen. Luciani particularly wanted to pray at a very ancient altar in the main church. Senigaglia watched as Luciani was told in rather a peremptory manner by the Church officials that the altar was closed and he should return another day. Back in the car Luciani translated the conversation he had had for Senigaglia’s benefit. Enraged, Senigaglia
erupted from the car, ran to the church and gave the dignitaries a burst of Italian. They understood enough to know that he was declaring that the little priest they had turned away was the Patriarch of Venice. It was now Luciani’s turn to get angry with his secretary as he was almost dragged from the car by the German priests. As Luciani entered the church one of the still apologetic priests murmured to him, ‘Eminence, a little bit of red, at least, could be useful.’
On another occasion in Venice, Luciani was attending a conference on ecology. He became deeply involved in conversation with one of the participants. Wishing to continue the dialogue he invited the ecologist to call on him at his home. ‘Where do you live?’ asked the ecologist. ‘Just next door to St Mark’s,’ responded Luciani. ‘Do you mean the Patriarch’s Palace?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And whom do I ask for?’ ‘Ask for the Patriarch.’
Underneath his humility and gentleness was a man who, by his environment and his vocation, was exceptionally strong. Neither to the left nor the right, he refused to become involved with the warring factions in Rome. The power plays inside the Vatican left Luciani on occasions puzzled as to why some of these men had become priests at all. In an Easter sermon of 1976 he observed:
Some are in the Church only as troublemakers. They are like the employee who first moved heaven and earth to get into the firm but once he had the job was perpetually restless and became a pestilential hair shirt on the skin of his colleagues and his superiors. Yes, some people seem only to look at the sun in order to find stains on it.
His desire to achieve a new synthesis by taking what in his view was right from both sides led him into considerable conflict in Venice. The issue of divorce is an example.
In Italy in the mid-1970s divorce was legal in the eyes of the State but unacceptable in the eyes of the Church. A move began to test the issue again through a referendum. Luciani was deeply opposed to the referendum simply because he was convinced it would split the Church and result in a majority committing themselves at the polling booths to a decision that the divorce laws should remain unchanged. If that happened it would be an official defeat for the Roman Catholic Church in the country it traditionally claimed as its own.
Benelli took the opposite view. He was convinced that the Church would win if there was a referendum.
The debate, not only within the Church but throughout Italy, reached an intense level. Shortly before the referendum took place, FUCI, a student group organized by a priest in Venice, sent a forty-page document to every bishop in the Veneto region. In it was a powerful argument supporting the pro-divorce position. Albino Luciani read the document carefully, considered for a while, then made national headlines by apparently disbanding the student group. In the Church it was seen by many as an act of courage. In the country commentators seized upon Luciani’s action as yet another example of the bigotry of the Catholic hierarchy.
What had outraged Luciani was not the pro-divorce statements but the fact that to buttress their arguments the group had quoted extensively from a wide variety of church authorities, leading theologians and a number of Vatican Council II documents. To use the latter in such a way was to Luciani a perversion of Church teaching. He had been there at the birth
of Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes
and
Dignitatis Humanae.
Error might well have rights in the modern Church but in Venice 1974 for Luciani there was still a limitation to those rights. Thus to see a quotation from
Dignitatis Humanae
that extolled the rights of the individual ‘Protecting and promoting the inviolable rights of man is the essential duty of every civil power. The civil power must therefore guarantee to every citizen, through just laws and through other suitable means, the effective protection of religious liberty’, followed by the statement:
‘On other occasions the Church has found itself confronted by serious situations in society against which the only reasonable possibility was obviously not the use of repressive methods but the adoption of moral criteria and juridical methods which favoured the only good which was then historically possible: the lesser evil. Thus Christian morality adopted the theory of the just war; thus the Church allowed the legalization of prostitution (even in the Papal States), while obviously it remained forbidden on a moral level. And so also for divorce . . .’
To see such statements juxtaposed in a plea that the Church take a liberal view on divorce for the sake of expediency was unacceptable to Luciani. Obviously his beloved Vatican Council II teachings, like the Bible, could be taken to prove and justify any position. Luciani was aware that as he was head of the Bishops’ Council for the Veneto region, the Italian public would consider the statement official policy and then be faced with the dilemma of whether they should follow the bishops of the Veneto region or the bishops in the rest of Italy. In fact
he did not disband the student group as is generally thought. He used a technique that was central to his philosophy. He firmly believed that you could radically alter power groups by identifying the precise centre of power and removing it. So he simply removed the priest who was advising the student group.
In reality, as Father Mario Senigaglia confirmed to me, Luciani’s personal view on divorce would have surprised his critics:
It was more enlightened than popular comment would have it. He could and did accept divorcees. He also easily accepted others who were living in what the Church calls ‘sin’. What outraged him was the biblical justification.
As Luciani had prophesied, the referendum resulted in a majority for the pro-divorce lobby. It left a split Church, a Pope who publicly expressed his amazement and incredulity at the result, and a dilemma for those who had to reconcile the differences between Church and State.
Luciani’s own dilemma was that he was committed to an unswerving obedience to the Papacy. Often the Pope would take a different position from that held by the Patriarch of Venice. When that position became public, Luciani felt it his duty publicly to support it. What he did on a one-to-one basis with members of his diocese frequently bore no resemblance to the Vatican line. By the mid-1970s he had moved even further towards a liberal position on birth control. This man, who upon the announcement of
Humanae Vitae
had allegedly declared ‘Rome has spoken. The case is closed,’ clearly felt that the case was far from closed.
When his young secretary Father Mario Senigaglia discussed with Luciani, with whom he had developed an almost father-son relationship, different moral cases involving parishioners, Luciani always approved the liberal view that Senigaglia took. Senigaglia said to me, ‘He was a very understanding man. Very many times I would hear him say to couples. “We have made of sex the only sin when in fact it is linked to human weakness and frailty and is therefore perhaps the least of sins”.’
It is clear that Albino Luciani did not want for critics in Venice. Some considered that he revealed a nostalgia for the past rather than a desire for change. Some labelled him to the right, others to the left. Others saw his humility and gentleness as mere weakness. Perhaps posterity should judge the man on what he actually said rather than on what others thought he should have said.
On violence:
Strip God away from the hearts of men, tell children that sin is only a fairy tale invented by their grandparents to make them good, publish elementary school texts that ignore God and scoff at authority, and then don’t be surprised at what is happening. Education alone is not enough! Victor Hugo wrote that one more school means one less prison. Would that that were so today!
On Israel:
The church must also think of the Christian minorities who live in Arab countries. She cannot abandon them to fortune . . . for me personally, there is no doubt that a special tie exists between the people of Israel and Palestine. But the Holy Father, even if he wanted to, could not say that Palestine belongs to the Jews, since this would be to make a political judgment.