Vatican Bank

THE VATICAN Bank scandal is one of those affairs which will not fade away and still haunts the media, because the secrecy of the authorities (in this case, especially of the independent Vatican state) provides the breeding ground for conspiracy theories of all kinds. As time goes by, fact, semifact, fiction, and pure nonsense become inextricable. In the beginning of the Vatican Bank scandal some major factors linked together: unprofessional management by Catholic clergy not trained for the high-risk banking business, a profit orientation of a Catholic institution not bound by the high moral standards proclaimed by the Catholic church, criminal elements within and outside the bank, and last, but not least, the chaotic Italian political system since World War II.

To get to the indisputable core of the scandal, one has to focus on Roberto Calvi, president of the Banco Ambrosiano, and on Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (sometimes referred as Istituto per le Opere Religiose; the Vatican bank). The third person was a certain Italian financier and banker, Michele Sindona, who had strong Italian Mafia links.

These three persons interacted financially on a large scale, the details of those operations still remain a mystery. Disaster happened when high-risk currency deals by Calvi failed in the early 1980s and the Italian National Bank had to intervene. On June 18, 1982, Calvi was found hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge in London, England; Archbishop Marcinkus went into exile within the borders of Vatican City (or state), which was extraterritorial for the Italian police and judiciary. The financial collapse and the loss of money for the Vatican (and others) was gigantic and involved not only institutions in the Vatican state and Italy, but worldwide (especially in distant tax safe-havens in exotic places). Although judicial investigations in several countries and parliamentary inquiries in Italy tried to get a clear picture, the special status of the Vatican as a sovereign entity hindered a proper and thorough clearing-up of the mess.

The conspiracy theories came in, which cannot be dismissed out of hand: The most influential book on this subject was published by the journalist David A. Yallop in 1984. Yallop linked the Vatican Bank scandal directly to the sudden death of Pope John Paul I after only 33 days in office in 1978.

He claimed that John Paul I was murdered, because this new Pope was on the way to get rid of Marcinkus as head of the financial operations of the Vatican, and because he would have discovered the improper deals with elements of the Mafia via Calvi and Sindona, which were at least tolerated by Marcinkus. The background for Yallop's highly[Page 846] speculative story is the political situation in Italy since the late 1940s: Faced with a large Italian Communist Party, the United States, during the Cold War period, fostered all sorts of anti-communist groups, including former personalities of the fascist Benito Mussolini rule (such as Prince Junio Borghese).

The Italian democracy was riddled for decades not only by Mafia crimes, but also by attempted coups from the military and intelligence community, and by terrorism of the extreme left and the extreme right. The main player of the rightwing anti-democracy plot(s) in the 1970s was Licio Gelli and his secret organization Propaganda 2, which was outlawed when it was discovered by chance by the authorities. A main part of the argument of Yallop is the link between Italian politics, Gelli, Sindona, Calvi and the Vatican, which led by his speculation to the murder of a Pope.

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