The Dark Heart of Italy (25 page)

The third ‘secret’ was written down in the 1940s, but remained
unrevealed for the entirety of the remaining twentieth century. Only
in 2000, at the ceremony in which two of the Portuguese peasant
children – Francisco
Marto
and his sister
Jacinta
– were beatified,
did John Paul II make the third secret public: speaking of the killing
of a ‘white bishop’ by enemies of the faith, it was interpreted as a prediction
of the assassination attempt against the Pope himself. The
shooting had occurred in 1981, on the day the Church calls the Feast
of Our Lady of Fatima. Karol
Wojtyla
, with his grey hair and white
cassock, was being driven slowly through the crowds outside St
Peter’s
. A Turk,
Mehmet
Ali
Agca
, stepped forward and fired. The
Pope (the first non-Italian pontificate since 1523) collapsed, apparently
whispering ‘Mary, mother of mine’ as his entourage rushed
towards him. The Pope, though, has never shown any interest in
who, apart from
Agca
, was responsible for the shooting. Rather,
he’s constantly emphasised who it was who saved him: ‘One hand
shot, another hand guided the bullet,’ he once said. On the first
anniversary of the shooting he went to Fatima to give thanks to the
Virgin and place the actual bullet in her crown
.

John Paul II is, few doubt it, an honest and humble figure besieged
by the realpolitik of the Vatican. He genuinely seems to fight, with
shrewd political calculation, for religious causes which, inevitably,
spill over into the temporal. He has always urged peaceful resolutions.
He has acknowledged Judaism as
Christianity’s
‘older brother’.
Under his command, the Catholic church has also partially apologised
for its own intolerance during the Counter-Reformation. Now a
bowed figure shaking with
Parkinson’s
, he still relentlessly travels the
world, angrily admonishing those who fail to heed his slurred words.
He has sometimes tried to promote the unity of Christianity and
urge
ecumenicalism
. Against the wishes of both the Catholic hierarchy
and the Greek Orthodox church, he visited Greece in
2001
and pleaded
that the ‘Western Church’ and the ‘Eastern Church’ become the left
and right lungs of a united Christianity. He also apologised for the
horrors committed by Catholics against the Orthodox church during
the Fourth crusade. That brave decision to apologise was seen as a
wooing of not only the Greek Orthodox church but also the Russian
one. As a Pole who suffered under Soviet rule, in 1984 he dedicated
the Soviet Union to the Immaculate Heart of Mary (as was commanded
by the Virgin in the revelations at Fatima). He has publicly
made it his dying ambition to be admitted to Russia, though has so
far achieved it only via satellite
.

Critics of John Paul II claim that he is like a Pope from the
Middle Ages. He has actively promoted the Catholicism of interventionist
saints and miracle-workers. During his pontificate he has
beatified more people (798) and made more saints (280) than were
given the honour during the previous five centuries. He has also
halved the number of miracles necessary to make a saint. Padre
Pio’s double-quick procession to sainthood was announced only
two years after the beatification. Such criticisms, though, are
unthinkable within Italy. The country now identifies so wholeheartedly
with its pontiff that it’s hard to imagine that the Vatican
and its papacy were once the enemies of the Italian state. In fact,
the lack of Italian patriotism is probably in large part thanks to
the hostility of that other country called the Vatican. After the
Risorgimento, the attitude of the Vatican to the new nation was
one of suspicion. The Vatican demanded from its devotees a veto of
the new-born Italian state. Catholics were urged not to participate
in elections (on pain of excommunication), and were warned in
apocalyptic terms of the dangers of the lay state which was besieging
the ‘saintly seat’. Until 1920, the papacy forbade foreign (Catholic)
heads of state to visit Rome, fearing that it would give the Italian
state undue recognition
.

Only with Mussolini’s
Lateran
Pacts of 1929 were diplomatic relations
established between the two states, allowing the two to begin
their loving, sometimes suffocating, embrace. The Church’s collusion
with Fascism barely seemed to affect its post-war prestige (apart
from the agreement with Mussolini, there had been a Concordat
with the Nazi regime, and Pope Pius XII remained eerily silent on
the Holocaust). A former Vatican librarian,
Alcide
De
Gasperi
,
became the leader of the newly formed Christian Democratic party
which duly won the vital 1948 election. (
Alcide
De
Gasperi’s
wily
young secretary was Giulio Andreotti; an old joke went that when
De
Gasperi
went into the church and closed his eyes to pray to God,
Andreotti got up and went to sort things out with the priest.) Other
Catholic organisations like
Azione
Cattolica
(which by 1954 had a
membership of three million) were to provide other historic leaders
of the Christian Democrats like Aldo Moro
.

The intricate system of spiritual blackmail and bribery (excommunication
of Communist voters, for example, was announced in
1948) has meant that the Catholic church has since then always been
able to nudge and knead Italian political life. Traditionally, for
example, Madonnas started weeping around election time, especially
if it looked as if the left was on the brink of victory. In 1948 in Naples,
when the Communist party looked likely to assume power, no fewer
than 36 Madonnas began to shed tears. It’s a good example of the
strange, clandestine control the Catholic Church has over Italian
politics, of its uncanny ability to let the interior, spiritual side of life
well-up and overflow into the purely political. Although abortion
and divorce were tortuously legalised in the
1970s
, there are still
strange laws that hint at the reach of the Catholic Church. Premarital
contracts are illegal. A percentage of income tax (eight lire
for every thousand) can be directly offered to the Church (although
you’re now allowed to specify alternative destinations). Until
2001
,
blood donors had to sign a clause of ‘non-
homosexuality,’ a law that
was necessitated more by morals than anything medical
.

The Vatican, in fact, is viewed by even the most devout Catholics
as a country of purple finery, of power and prestige which seems the
antithesis of Christianity. In 1563, the Venetian ambassador to Rome
described the atmosphere of the Vatican: ‘Here adulation is dressed
up as honesty, a con as courtesy. Every vice appears masked.
Simulation is the soul of the court…’ It’s a judgement that has been
repeatedly echoed. Free-masonry (what John Paul
II’s
predecessor,
Paul VI, called the ‘smoke of Satan… penetrating and fogging the
temple of God…’) is, apparently, ubiquitous. According to anonymous
priests who recently published an
insider’s
critique of the
Vatican, ‘pretence in the Vatican becomes second nature, which has
the end of dominating the first [nature]. The hypocrites are flatterers
and tutors of all the faked virtues, whilst they defame and persecute
the truth’
.

The Vatican, in fact, had by the 1980s become a willing protagonist
in Italy’s post-war scandal par excellence. A suave American
bishop from Chicago, Paul
Marcinkus
, had risen to the top of the
Vatican’s
‘bank,’ the so-called Institute for Religious Works (the
‘Istituto per le Opere Religiose,’ or IOR). Roberto Calvi, another
ambitious banker, had meanwhile risen through the ranks of the
Banco Ambrosiano in Milan. It was traditionally a bank for
Catholic investors; even the name was taken from Milan’s patron
saint. When the two were introduced by a Sicilian tax expert,
Michele Sindona, they worked out an intricate banking scam in
which the Vatican would be the conduit for the exportation of huge
sums of capital. The
IOR’s
secrecy, as well as the respectable front it
offered Ambrosiano, made it the ideal accomplice
.

Throughout the
1970s
, Calvi shifted billions of lire into offshore
accounts in Luxembourg, Nicaragua, Peru and Nassau. The transactions
were so complicated that when the money returned to Italy,
propping up shares in the Banco Ambrosiano or falsely inflating
other investments, the provenance was never certain and no one
could prove that the IOR and Calvi were simply engaged in a very
profitable paper-chase. By the late
1970s
, the bank had debts of $1300
million to businesses that were little more than addresses in the
Caribbean. As the sums loaned became ever-larger, the Bank of Italy
– which oversaw the
1
,060 banks on the peninsula – began to investigate.
The businesses of Michele Sindona, the Sicilian tax expert,
were already creaking, as many began to suspect that his ‘golden
touch’ was nothing more than false-accounting and spurious share
issues. The man sent in to study
Sindona’s
accounts, Giorgio
Ambrosoli
, was first threatened, then murdered in July 1979. The
man sent to investigate Calvi’s own bank, Emilio
Alessandrini
, was
also murdered by a terrorist outfit (
Alessandrini
was also linked to
the investigations into Piazza Fontana, having been one of the first
to incriminate Pino Rauti and his Ordine Nuovo). There was
also an attempt to frame managers at the Bank of Italy, and a new
governor, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was chosen to head the difficult,
and dangerous, investigative operation
.

Magistrates investigating the murder of
Ambrosoli
and the
strange, faked kidnapping of Michele Sindona kept coming across
references to one Licio Gelli. Gelli was a former Fascist, having
fought in Mussolini’s volunteers in his teens, and was to become –
alongside Andreotti – the most mysterious figure of post-war Italy.
One journalist described him with the following, evocative words
:

The investigating magistrates decided to raid his various addresses:
his suite at the Excelsior hotel in Rome, his Villa in
Arezzo
, an old
business address in
Frosinone
, and the
Giole
textile factory in
Castiglion
Fibocchi
. At the latter, a safe was found containing a mass
of documents and a list of 950 names: members of what emerged as
the register of
Propaganda
Due
(P2), a masonic lodge that included
52 officials of the Carabinieri, 50 army officers, 37 members of the
Treasury Police, five government ministers, 38 members of parliament,
fourteen judges, ten banking presidents and various journalists
and editors. In short, the most powerful men in Italy appeared
linked into a secretive, occasionally murderous, organisation whose
manifesto was called ‘A Plan for the Rebirth of Democracy’. That
manifesto, discovered in the briefcase of
Gelli’s
daughter at Rome
airport, included a rewriting of the Italian constitution, control of
the mass media, the removal of parliamentary immunity and the
suspension of union activity. Gelli was the ‘venerable maestro’ of a
masonic lodge that seemed to link, albeit without explanation, coups
and bombings and murders throughout the
1970s
.

The startling revelations about P2 seemed to explain much about
the underbelly of Italian life. It was an event that, in the words of one
historian, ‘touched one of the deepest constants in post-war Italy,
and one that it is most difficult to write about with any degree of
historical certainty. Behind the surface of Italian democracy lay a
secret history, made up of hidden associations, contacts and even
conspiracies, some farcical and others more serious’.
5
The discovery
of P2 was a moment that, as it was poetically described to me by one
politician, was like the effect of approaching and grasping the aerial
of a cheap television: suddenly the interference and blurred picture
comes into focus, and you can finally see, hear and understand what
has been going on. Retrospectively, it was possible to see connections
between cases, and understand various mysteries. It began to look as
if the paranoia about a parallel state, a shadow government that
controlled banking, business and the media, might not have been
misplaced after all. Not for the first time, the Italian media was
caught up in, rather than just reporting, the news: the
Rizzoli
family,
owners of the Corriere della Sera and at the time a quarter of all
other Italian newspapers, was heavily compromised by its proximity,
and that of its journalists, to P2
.