‘Vatican Spies’: faith, secrecy and scandal 

Clandestine priests smuggled into England, hunted by spies from the royal court and martyred are prominent within English Catholic memory of the 16 th and early 17 th century.  Priest-holes, the pejorative term “jesuitical”, and the exclusion of Catholics from succession to the throne, remain a minor remnant of that time.  In the 20 th century, Nazi rule, Communism and the military dictatorships of Latin America,  evoke similar memories of spies, clandestine missionaries and martyrdom.  Plus ça change .

Yvonnick Denoël’s book Vatican Spies: From the Second World War to Pope Francis (Hurst, £25), covers the period from 1945 to 2023. The author is a French journalist who has written books about intelligence services, including the CIA, Mossad and MI6.  But this new book is not just about Vatican spies, as the title suggests, but also covers other newsworthy elements of recent Church history — a discreditable litany of scandals. 

As a historian of the Church, Denoël leaves much to be desired. We get, for example,  three pages on Rwandan history and the 1994 genocide. But no mention of Pope John Paul II’s repeated passionate appeals, just three days after the massacres began: “Everywhere hatred, revenge, fratricidal killing.  In the name of Christ we beg you, lay down your arms.”  Nothing, either, about the Nuncio (Papal ambassador) in Kigali, Monsignor Giuseppe Bertello, who supported Rwandan human rights organisations and had alerted the Pope to the danger. There’s plenty of detail about the complicity of the local Church.  But what has this got to do with the Vatican and spies?

Denoël does provide many vignettes and longer, indigestible accounts of agents of intelligence services trying to extract  information from the Vatican, cardinals and Curial officials, bishops, priests, lay Catholics and Catholic organisations.  Many of his clerical dramatis personae have dodgy friends and  vulnerabilities to manipulation: ambition, sometimes homosexuality and, in certain instances, strong ideological or political sentiments.   Several show considerable courage or, at least,  tolerance of high levels of risk.  At 434 pages, you‘d need a spy’s training to remember all the names.

Denoël expands the definition of spies to mean not only handlers and agents, and their spying: for example, bugs in the office of Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Vatican Secretary of State during the War, (phones tapped also).  Spying is treated in the generic sense of activities involving collection of sensitive  information through cultivation of personal relationships, or picked up in the course of their work by Curial officials and Nuncios.  And there is no doubt that Church officials did pass on information to Governments and, inadvertently or deliberately, to people who were intelligence agents.

Vatican Spies has no strong overarching themes beyond fear of, and reaction to, communism and money as the root of all evil.  Denoël justifiably points the finger at the Vatican’s management of its bank, the IOR or Instituto per le Opere di Religione (the works of religion — for which, too often, read money-laundering).  Alongside good works, over the years the IOR has served the Mafia, the sinister P2 Italian Masonic Lodge, and the CIA .  Chronic incompetence, naivete or illicit financial benefit?  All of the above. 

The larger-than-life American Monsignor, later Archbishop, Paul Marcinkus, who was IOR President from 1971-1989, weathering several scandals, owed his career to the then Archbishop Montini, later Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), whose pastoral work in Milan he assisted financially.  Marcinkus was also director of the Nassau, Bahamas, Banco Ambrosiano Overseas of which the IOR was the main shareholder.  Its chairman was Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge (definitely not suicide) when the bank collapsed in 1982.  Enough to make St. Ambrose turn in his grave. 

In 1969 Pope Paul VI asked the Sicilian tax lawyer and banker, Michele Sindona, another benefactor from his Milan days, to liaise with Marcinkus in investing  Vatican money offshore to avoid Italian tax.  Unfortunately, New York Mafia boss Gambino’s heroin profits were also involved and Sindona went to prison, where he died of cyanide in his coffee.  Only under Pope Francis have serious inroads into cleaning up this inglorious Augean stable made much progress.

The glory days for undercover work in the Vatican were the nine months of Nazi occupation of Rome, from October 1943 to June 1944. With help from inside the Vatican, Allied troops were given sanctuary.  A former Irish boxer from Cork, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, confined in the Vatican to avoid arrest, organised an extensive rescue network supported by the British Ambassador, Francis D’Arcy Osborne. The American Cardinal Eugene Spellman acted as a US intelligence asset, funneling in money to help.  When the deportation of 1,259 Jews from Rome to Auschwitz began on 15 October 1943, the Vatican Secretary of State,  Cardinal Luigi Maglione, protested to the German Ambassador.  The Vatican ordered Rome’s 100 convents and 45 monasteries to provide sanctuary; they hid 6,000 out of the capital’s 8,000 Jews, some in churches and some in the Vatican itself. Meanwhile the Gestapo worked to infiltrate these Catholic networks.

There were, of course, exceptions to this risky support for Allied forces and Jews.   Some in leadership positions were pro-German.  At the end of the war,  Pius XII (Pope 1939-1958) appointed the rector of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, the pro-Nazi Bishop Alois Hudal of Graz, to ensure pastoral care of Germans interned in Italy.  But the care included organizing “ratlines” — escape routes for Nazi war criminals to Argentina.  Like those O’Flaherty saved from Nazi capture, most were hidden  in Church properties.  The Americans weren’t bothered. By late 1944, their mistrust of the Soviet Union was becoming dominant. 

The key is the Vatican’s fear of, and enmity towards, Communism, a theological dimension of the Cold War. In Poland, from 1945-1953 some 2,200 priests were deported, imprisoned or executed. (Over 1,800 had already died in Nazi concentration camps).  As the  Communist government established itself in China, out of the 3,000 priests in 1949 some 500 were expelled, 500 imprisoned and 200 were executed. These experiences weighed heavily on successive Popes and directed ongoing diplomatic priorities.  

During the Cold War, the CIA — fearing that the Italian Communist Party would win the 1948 elections and supporting  Pius XII’s perennial attempts to infiltrate priests into Soviet-controlled eastern Europe — were close collaborators with the Vatican, if not acknowledged allies.  James Angleton, CIA station chief in Rome during the war,  brought $10 million in sacks partly for Monsignor Montini (later Paul VI) to deposit in the IOR, financing the  Vatican’s contribution to a massive political campaign for the Italian Christian Democrats organised by the Church.

Pope St John XXIII’s Ostpolitik of detente, his warmth towards Khrushchev’s family,  was a new approach to an old problem.  It worried the Americans.   But the Polish Pope, St John Paul II (1958-2005), who embodied the struggle between Catholicism and Communism, offered opportunities, though JFK had avoided emphasizing his Catholic identity.  John Paul II did not cause the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he contributed towards it bravely and skilfully.  In the 1980s, according to Tomas Turowski, Polish ambassador to the Vatican: “There were more spies in the Vatican than in the James Bond films.”

The Catholic Church is a global communications network.  Information flows through it to journalists, NGOs and Governments, sometimes for the common good.  So, in Denoël’s sense, many Catholics are spies…. and a few are spies in the usual sense.  While working undercover for the Swedish Government against the apartheid regime in the 1980s, I had smuggled into South Africa a debugging device for the non-violent political coalition, the United Democratic Front. It featured “agricultural equipment”.  Well, it equipped them to get rid of bugs.  

Vatican Spies puts Church leadership in a discreditable light. The book is a potential arsenal for anti-Catholicism. But, in the words of the Mass: “Look not on our sins but on the Faith of Your Church”.  

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