Dark Mysteries of the Vatican (10 page)

“The Cardinals elected Eugenio Pacelli the 262nd Pope on his sixty-third birthday, March 2, 1939. He received sixty-one out of the sixty-two votes because he did not vote for himself, and was elected Pontiff. After serving the Church under four Popes (Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Benedict XV and Pius XI) for almost twenty years, Eugenio Pacelli took the name of Pius XII….

“Immediately after his election, Pius XII issued a call for a peace conference of European leaders. Documents show that in a last minute bid to avert bloodshed, the Pope called for a conference involving Italy, France, England, Germany and Poland. Pius XII’s peace plan was based on five points: the defense of small nations, the right to life, disarmament, some new kind of League of Nations, and a plea for the moral principles of justice and love…. Pius XII then met with the German Cardinals who had been present in the recent conclave…. These meetings provided him direct proof and information that motivated the content of his first encyclical,
Summi pontificatus
. Dated October 20, 1939, this encyclical was a strong attack on totalitarianism. In it, Pius XII singled out governments, who by their deification of the state, imperiled the spirit of humanity. He spoke about restoring the foundation of human society to its origin in natural law, to its source in Christ, the only true ruler of all men and women of all nations and races.

“Pius XII reprimanded, “What age has been, for all its technical and purely civic progress, more tormented than ours by spiritual emptiness and deep-felt interior poverty?” The world had abandoned Christ’s cross for another [the Swastika] which brings only death….

“On August 24, 1939, he gave each papal representative the text of a speech asking them to convey it to their respective governments. That evening he read the speech to the world [on radio]: ‘The danger is imminent, but there is still time. Nothing is lost with peace; all can be lost with war. Let men return to mutual understanding! Let them begin negotiations anew, conferring with good will and with respect for reciprocal rights.’”

Mostly confined to Vatican City throughout World War II by the occupying Germans, “Pope Pius XII was almost universally regarded as a saintly man, a scholar, a man of peace, and a tower of strength.” After the war, he became the first pontiff to appear on television. When he died on October 9, 1958, the future Israeli prime minister Golda Meir said, “When fearful martyrdom came to our people, the voice of the Pope was raised for its victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out about great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.”

The Vatican newspaper
L’osservatore Romano
described his funeral as the greatest in the long history of Rome, surpassing even that of Julius Caesar. Because the body had not been properly embalmed, it began to decompose while it lay in state in St. Peter’s. As the flesh discolored, the corpse emitted such strong odors that one of the Swiss Guards fainted.

The smells and discoloration and the fact that Pius XII had been a regular exerciser and was in good health resulted in the belief by conspiracy theorists that he had been poisoned. A week before his death, he complained of gastric pain and hiccups. He struggled back into his stringent schedule, but one day as his doctor was examining him he suddenly cried in alarm, “Dio mio, non ci vedo!” (My God, I cannot see!) It was a stroke. With his vision rapidly restored, he summoned his secretary of state, Angelo Dell’Acqua, and demanded, “Why have the [papal] audiences been canceled?” He received Holy Communion and Extreme Unction from his German Jesuit secretary, Father Robert Leiber, but he looked at the thermometer when his temperature was being taken, and said, “Non é grave” (It’s not bad) when he saw it read 99°. That night he drank a glass of red wine and called for a recording of Beethoven’s First Symphony. At 7:30 the next morning, a second stroke left him unconscious. It took him 20 hours to die. By Vatican custom, there was no autopsy.

Later, as assertions were made that Pius XII had collaborated with the Nazis, and had done little to aid Jews, demands were raised that the Vatican open its sealed archives on Pius XII’s wartime years. These requests intensified after John Paul II commenced the process to add Pius XII to the catalog of saints.

Perhaps contained in the Vatican archives are documents to shed some light on the relationship between the Holy See and the bosses of organized crime. Because La Cosa Nostra originated in Sicily and spread its tentacles to the United States and around the globe, alleged dealings between minions of the criminal underworld and the Catholic Church have been the subject of movies, such as
The Godfather
and its sequels and imitators, and almost countless books. Mystery novelist Donna Leon, best known for her subtle and enduring fictional Commissario Guido Brunetti detective series, set in Venice, once asked, “What did Italy do to deserve to have both the Vatican and the Mafia?”

In the nonfiction
The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder and the Mafia
, Paul L. Williams traced the origin of alleged links between Vatican and Mafia to the deal in 1929 between the Holy See and Mussolini. Through the Lateran Treaty, the Church in Rome received money, tax-free property rights, status as a sovereign state, and the protection of Mussolini’s Fascist government. This resulted in the Vatican being largely insulated against interference from the Nazis during the German occupation of Italy during World War II, described by authors Mark Aarons and John Loftus in
Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and Swiss Banks
.

A dramatic example of the Vatican-Mafia alliance [in 1934] involved the venerated cathedral of Naples. Its patron saint, San Gennaro (St. Januarius), Bishop of Beneventum was martyred about 305 A. D. In the Cathedral’s treasure chapel were an altar of solid silver, “a silver bust believed to contain San Gennaro’s head, and a reliquary with two vials of what was supposed to be his blood. [During] the feast of San Gennaro, into the Cathedral thronged clergy, civil officials, and throngs of pious Neapolitans. Bearing aloft the reliquary, a priest brought it before the silver case containing the head” and turned it upside down to exhibit a vial containing an opaque, solid mass. “After an hour of prayers the people beheld the dark mass grow soft, turn red, increase in volume, and bubble into a liquid. “Il miracolo e fatto!” (The miracle is made) cried the officiant. The choir sang a “Te Deum.” The worshippers then scrambled up to the altar rail to kiss the reliquary.

This ritual usually occurred eighteen times a year.
Time
magazine reported that in 1969, “San Gennaro (St. Januarius) was dropped from the Vatican’s official church calendar, along with St. Christopher and other saints whose existence was in doubt…. Among other things the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples…persuaded the congregation of the cathedral to refrain from roaring approval when the liquid bubbled…. An encyclopedia labeled the San Gennaro miracles a ‘residue of paganized Christianity which the church has not managed to remove from Neapolitan usage.’ That was enough to bring the blood of all Naples to a boil. San Gennaro, a newspaper editorial proclaimed, was ‘not just the patron but the godfather of Naples.’…[Neapolitans] have been through it all before. In 1750 one iconoclast sought to discredit the ‘Miracle’ of San Gennaro as a mixture gold-affecting mercury and sulphide of mercury. In 1890 an Italian professor got results from a concoction of chocolate, water, sugar, casein, milk serum and salt. Even the Vatican’s doubts did not daunt the Neapolitans. After San Gennaro lost his place on the church calendar, a fervent follower scrawled on the saint’s altar in the cathedral, ‘San Gennaro, don’t give a damn.’”

In World War II, as American forces moved from invasion beaches at Salerno toward Naples, “the Vatican, having heard rumors that the retreating Germans…had made plans to melt down the silver of the altar of St. Januarius to pay for their occupation of southern Italy, contacted the Mafia and asked for their cooperation…. The Mafia…, also immensely religious, accepted the Vatican’s proposal with pious alacrity.” Because they had been cooperating with the Germans since the occupation began, they were permitted to transport” food and black-market items from Naples to Rome. “The result was that the silver of the altar was transported in Mafia trucks to the very entrance of the Vatican where it was safely deposited.”

Residing in Naples at this time was American organized crime figure Vito Genovese, who had been deported from the United States in a crackdown on crime that landed Genovese’s boss, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, in prison. When the U.S. Army occupied Naples, it learned that its task would be easier if it had the help of Genovese and the Neapolitan mafiosi. Michele Sindona was among the Italians who also learned that to do business in Naples in 1943, Genovese was the man to see. Michele Sindona, a Sicilian, who was the future associate of Roberto Calvi in the Vatican bank scandal, “studied law and during the war became involved in the lemon business.” According to Luigi DiFonzo’s biography of Sindona, “he needed to purchase a truck to transport lemons. To accomplish this, Michele Sindona needed the protection of the Mafia because it had control of the produce industry and could supply him with the documents he needed to present to the border patrols. Help came from a local bishop….[He] got in touch with Geneovese.” The result was not only a truck, but “forged papers and a safe route to do business.”

Twenty years later, investigations into the Roberto Calvi murder revealed a flow of money from the Sicilian Corleone Mafia family (the real one, not the one in
The Godfather
) to Sindona and the Vatican bank. In an instance of fiction following life, in
The Godfather Part III
, Michael Corleone attempted to garner respectability and wealth through legitimate enterprise by seeking to buy the Vatican’s shares in a global real estate holding company, of which one fourth was controlled by the Vatican. He negotiated a transfer of $600 million to the Vatican Bank with Archbishop Gilday, who had plunged the Holy See into debt through poor management and corruption.

While movie makers have provided entertainment by implicating a cinematic Vatican in conspiracies and historians have delved into Vatican archives in the years before World War II, the Holy See has declined to open them for the remainder of Pope Pius XII’s reign (1932–58). Repeatedly urged by researchers to do so, the Vatican says some are closed for organizational reasons, but that most of the significant documentation regarding Pius XII is already available to scholars.

Pressure to make the files public has come primarily from Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors. “Until the Vatican’s secret archives are declassified, Pius’s record vis-a-vis Jews will continue to be shrouded and a source of controversy and contention,” said ADL [Anti-Defamation League] director Abraham Foxman. “We strongly urge the Vatican to make full and complete access to the archives of this period its highest priority and call on all interested parties to assist.”

Although the Vatican archives for the World War II period remain secret, other sources have revealed that the Vatican, sometimes in cooperation with the U.S. government, assisted Nazi war criminals to escape. They went from Europe and made their way to countries in South America, especially to Argentina, following a route that became known as the Rat Line.

S
ix decades after the end of World War II, a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco claimed that “atrocities carried out by the Nazi puppet government of Ante (Anton) Pavelic, head of the ‘Catholic State of Croatia,’” had been done with the complicity of Vatican officials. “The Pavelic regime was typical of political movements that sprang up throughout Europe and had the support of so-called ‘Clerical Fascism,’—an amalgam of orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, anti-Semitism, and authoritarian politics. These groups enjoyed assistance of both the government in Italy under Mussolini, Nazi Germany’s ‘Ausland’ department, which assisted like-minded movements” beyond Germany, and some Catholic clergy in and out of the Vatican.

“In Croatia, Pavelic’s terrorists received critical funding in 1939 from Mussolini, and with the help of Archbishop A. Stepinac, to establish the Croat Separatist Movement and eventually seize power.” Under Ustashi, [the secret police] a reign of terror fell “upon Jews, Orthodox Serbs who refused to convert to Catholicism, and political dissidents. Pavelic’s government operated death camps, and extorted a fortune in gold and other valuables, much from Jews who were shipped to work in extermination camps in Germany. The Ustashi had the support of the Catholic Church (Archbishop Stepanic was the group’s official “chaplain,” he gave his blessing to the Pavelic regime), and especially the Croatian Franciscans. The San Francisco lawsuit charged that the Catholic order ‘engaged in far ranging crimes including genocide [and] funding the reestablishment of the Croatian Nazi movement in South America in the 1950s.’”

The involvement of Croatian Catholics in creating an escape route for Nazis after the war was documented by American intelligence agents. Their records were preserved in the archives of the postwar Central Intelligence Agency. One of these declassified files was that of a priest, Krunoslav Stjepan Draganovic. It noted that he was born in Brcko, Bosnia. “Ordained a priest, he served in Sarajevo from 1930 to 1932. During this period he came in direct contact with Dr. Ivan Saric, the Catholic Archbishop of Bosnia.” The CIA file noted that the archbishop was “perhaps the most rabid opponent of the Orthodox Serbs and the Yugoslav Royal family, which is of Serbian origin, and a vociferous champion of the Independent State of Greater Croatia (which would include all of Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina).”

“It was under the auspices of Archbishop Saric that he [Draganovic] was sent to Rome in 1932 to attend the Instituto Orientale Ponteficio…. He obtained his doctorate in 1935 and returned to Sarajevo, where he acted as secretary to Archbishop Saric from 1935 through 1940. In February 1941 he taught Ecclesiastical History at the University of Zagreb, Croatia.

“There were conflicting reports regarding subject’s [Draganovic] activities during the period from April 1941 to August 1943. According to some accounts, shortly after the Independent State of Croatia was established in April 1941 by Ante Pavelic,…via support and approval of Nazi Germany, Subject became a leading figure in the Office for Colonization,…engaged in claiming the property of Orthodox Serbs in Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Croatia” in order to distribute the property to the Ustashas (military units). “Other reports identified him as a member of a committee that forcibly converted thousands of Serbians from the Serbian Orthodox to the Roman Catholic Church. (As a result of opposition to such forcible conversions, several hundred thousand Serbs living on the territory of the Independent Croatian State reportedly died at the hands of the Ustasha…. This resulted in many Serbs, and even many Croats who were opposed to such inhuman methods, joining the Partisan guerrilla units to fight both the Germans and the Croat State.)…

“Many Serbs living outside Yugoslavia accused [Draganovic] of being personally responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 Serbs from Croatia, killed by the Ustashas as a part of their drive to exterminate the Serbs living in Croatia.”

The CIA file noted, “Subject has denied these charges, as well as the charge that he was Military Chaplain of the Domobran and Ustasha military units…. According to his own statements, Subject was instrumental in setting up a Croat-Slovene Committee for the Relief of Slovene Refugees in Zagreb in the fall of 1941, and became president of the Committee. Subject evidently became involved in mid-1943 in a feud with Eugen (aka [illegible]) Kvaternik, a major figure in the Government of Croatia and a close associate of…Ante Pavelic, the head of the Croatian State. He called Kvternik ‘a madman and a lunatic.’ This resulted in his ‘being kicked upstairs,’ which is to say, in August 1943 he went to Italy to represent the Croatian Red Cross on a mission to secure the release from camps or otherwise help Yugoslav internees. His sponsor was the…Archbishop of Zagreb. He returned to Zagreb at the end of 1943, but returned to Rome in January 1944, and was still in Italy when the Croatian State collapsed in mid-1945 at about the same time as the war ended in Europe.

“He continued to represent the Croatian Red Cross, but was also regarded as an unofficial Charge d’affairs of the Croatian State at the Vatican. Thus, when the Croatian State collapsed, he was in the ideal position to help the many Ustasha who fled Yugoslavia, and as Secretary of an organization known as the ‘Confraternite Croata’ in Italy he issued identity papers with false names to many Croats, primarily Ustasha who were considered to be war criminals, and is the individual most responsible for making it possible for the Ustasha to emigrate overseas, primarily to Argentina, but also to Chile, Venezuela, Australia, Canada and even the United States….

“He [Draganovic] was alleged to have provided some German Nazi war criminals with identity cards with false Croatian names, thus enabling the Nazis to emigrate from Europe and avoid standing trial in Germany…. Subject’s activities in Rome were conducted from the Ecclesiastical College of San Girolamo degli Illirici,…a college sponsored by the Vatican and used by young Croatian Catholic priests as their home in Rome while pursuing various courses of study. It also became the sponsor of the San Girolamo Asylum for the Ustasha and other Croat emigres in Rome….

“Subject claimed credit for helping in the release of more than 10,000 Yugoslav internees in Italy during 1943, 1944 and early 1945. In 1949, he went to Argentina in the company of the late Ante Pavelic, but he returned to Rome shortly thereafter. In 1950 he was known to be using a Diplomatic Passport, issued by the Vatican.” “The Vatican steadfastly denied involvement in any of this, including the acquisition of Ustashi gold and other pilfered assets.”

With the end of World War II in sight, the Vatican became the hub of traffic in counterfeit identity papers, forged travel documents, passports, and money to assist Nazis and collaborators seeking to escape capture by the Allies. Rome also became the start of a conduit to freedom for ex-Nazis and known anticommunists deemed potentially valuable in a postwar confrontation that was expected to arise between a godless empire ruled from the Kremlin in Moscow and the nations of Christendom.

To what extent Pope Pius XII and the Vatican bureaucracy were involved in the exodus of high-and low-level Nazis and other wanted men remains sealed in the secret archives. As a result, documenting the escape mechanism and route has been left to historians, investigative authors, and Jewish organizations that track down war criminals. To varying degrees, they have all found pointers to the Vatican.

“When it became apparent that war criminals Klaus Barbie, Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Mueller, Franz Stangl, and a whole list of others had escaped,” the central figure in aiding them was Bishop Alois Hudal. The Rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, he had “served as Commissioner for the Episcopate for German-speaking Catholics in Italy, as well as Father Confessor to Rome’s large German community.” Born in Graz, Austria, in 1885, he studied theology (1904–08) and was ordained to the priesthood In 1911, he earned a doctorate in Theology in Graz and entered the Teutonic College of Santa Maria dell’Anima (Anima) in Rome where he was a chaplain (1911–13) and took courses in the Old Testament at the Biblical Institute. In World War I he served as an assistant military chaplain and published his sermons to the soldiers,
Soldatenpredigten
, in which he expressed the idea that “loyalty to the flag is loyalty to God.” In 1923 he was nominated as rector of Anima. In 1930 he was appointed a consultant to the Holy Office. In 1937, he published a book titled
The Foundations of National Socialism
, in which he gave enthusiastic endorsement of Hitler. When Pope Pius XI and future Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) expressed disapproval of the book, they broke off all contacts with Hudal. Having once been a popular and influential guest in the Vatican, he suddenly found himself in isolation in the Anima College while Mussolini became Hitler’s World War II ally.

Still in the post of rector at Anima when the war ended, Hudal was suddenly thrust into a position to provide assistance to war refugees in detainment camps because of an agreement by the Allies to a request by Pope Pius XII. His Holiness had asked that a representative of the Vatican be allowed to render “normal religious assistance to Catholic prisoners as well as to exercise that mission of charity proper to the Church by bringing some comfort to those in affliction.” The permission was conveyed to the Vatican by President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Personal Representative to the Pope.” A few weeks later, the Vatican asked that a representative be permitted to visit “the German speaking civil internees in Italy.” The request named the Holy See’s “Spiritual Director of the German people resident in Italy,” Bishop Hudal.

Describing this as a “very peculiar request,” Mark Aarons and John Loftus, authors of
Unholy Trinity
, found it “astonishing that the Holy See singled out the most notorious pro-Nazi Bishop in Rome for this extremely sensitive mission, when it was well known that these ‘civilian’ camps were teeming with fugitive Nazis who had discarded uniforms and were hiding among legitimate fugitives.”

As the existence of a bishop in Rome who was able to aid displaced persons became known throughout refugee camps, word spread among ex-Nazis that he was sympathetic to their plight, and that Hudal had the means to facilitate their escape. Among documentation he could supply were a Vatican identity card and Red Cross papers, along with travel passes and visas.

According to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, the rat line that Bishop Hudal ran facilitated escapes for Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the “final solution of the Jewish problem” by extermination in death camps; Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka camp; Alois Brunner, deputy commandant of Sobibor; Gustav Wagner, deputy commandant of Sobibor; and Walter Rauff, a friend of Hudal, who had been an ambitious SS officer who oversaw a development program for mobile gas vans.

In Gitta Sereny’s book
Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience
, based on seventy hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, he described “how Bishop Hudal had been expecting Stangl…and that he was arranging passports, an exit visa, and work permits for South America. Hudal arranged Stangl’s sleeping quarters, transportation, via by car, plane, and ship and seemed to have ample money for…bribes and emergencies that might arise.” Stangl and other “Nazi fugitives could obtain an identity card from Hudal and apply to the office of the International Red Cross for a passport. If, however, a fugitive Nazi had functioned in some capacity in the murder of Jews, then an intermediary would be sent to the Red Cross office to obtain the needed documents, because there were dozens of Jews in the office every day…. The danger was acute that a Jewish survivor might recognize a former concentration camp official…. Once fugitives had obtained new identification, they could safely venture to a soup kitchen run by the Vatican, Red Cross, or the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Association,” then mingle with other refugees and move around Rome until time came for them to begin a circuitous route to a foreign destination, usually in South America and primarily in Argentina.

Regarding the rat line, Bishop Hudal and Father Draganovic, the official Vatican historian, Father Robert Graham, asserted, “Just because he’s [Draganovic] a priest doesn’t mean he represents the Vatican. It was his own operation. He’s not the Vatican.”

In October 1946, a Treasury Department official, Pearson Bigelow, informed the department’s director of monetary research that pro-Nazi Croatian fascists had removed valuables worth $240 million at current rates from Yugoslavia at the end of the war. The declassified document, dated October 21, 1946, said, “Approximately 200 million Swiss francs was originally held in the Vatican for safe-keeping.”

Other documents established that Bigelow received reliable information from the OSS on Nazi wealth held in specific Swiss bank accounts. The Bigelow memo quoted a “reliable source in Italy” “as saying the Ustasha organization, the Nazi-installed government of Croatia during the war, had removed 350 million Swiss francs from Yugoslavian funds it had confiscated. The memo said 150 million Swiss francs were impounded by British authorities at the Austria-Swiss border and the balance was held in the Vatican,…and that rumors said that a considerable portion of Vatican-held money was sent to Spain and Argentina through a Vatican pipeline.”

Fifty years later after a conference in London on the topic of Nazi gold that might have gone to the Vatican bank, “the Vatican’s chief spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls,…commented, “As far as gold taken by Nazis in Croatia, research in the Vatican archives confirms that there is no existence of documents relating to this, thus ruling out any supposed transaction on the part of the Holy See.”

Steadfastly denying reports that it had stored money and gold for Croatian fascists after World War II, the Vatican said it had no plans to open its archives for the period, and that a search of the archives confirmed no documents existed relating to any “supposed” gold transaction “on the part of the Holy See.”

“A lawsuit was filed in Federal Court in San Francisco in November 1999. The plaintiffs were concentration camp survivors of Serb, Ukrainian, Jewish, background and their relatives, as well as organizations representing over 300,000 Holocaust victims and their heirs. The plaintiffs sought an accounting and restitution of gold in the Ustasha Treasury that, according to the U.S. State Department was illicitly transferred to the Vatican, the Franciscan Order and other banks after the end of the war. Defendants included the Vatican Bank and Franciscan Order. These defendants combined to conceal assets looted by the Croatian Nazis from concentration camp victims, Serbs, Jews, Roma [gypises] and others between 1941 and 1945.”