“Your avarice has plunged the world into the dark shadow of spiritual desolation, trampling down good men so that you might exalt evil-doers. Of shepherds like you did St. John the Evangelist write in his vision of the Apocalypse, revealing you to be that Great Harlot who sits upon the many waters committing fornication with the kings of the earth; she, the seven-headed Beast, whose ten horns thunder forth her vain glory, deceiving her divine spouse with her false virtue. Of gold and silver you have made your god, no differently than does the idolater, save that he worships but one abomination and you one hundred. Ah Constantine! to so much wickedness did you give birth when you conferred temporal power and wealth upon the Holy Father.”
Dante, Inferno, xix, 104-117
Moved by the spirit of poetic prophecy, Dante “chants” these words to the infernal shade of Pope Nicholas III, [1] who held the Keys of St. Peter during a period of great schisms in the Church (1277-1280 A.D.). It was a time of ruthless struggle between the French and the Italians for domination of the Holy See. Indeed, Nicholas himself had, in his efforts to undermine Charles of Anjou, played a most foul role in the notorious massacre known as the “Sicilian Vespers”, in which 8,000 Frenchmen perished.[2] Understandably, then, Dante envisioned Nicholas among the wretched denizens of that precinct of Hell where the sinners are buried face-down in a hole with only their lower bodies protruding. Such was the punishment meted out to assassins under the law of 13th Century Florence.
In Dante’s turbulent times, assassination was an often-times effective instrument of Vatican policy and a not-infrequent factor in the papal succession itself. Before we hasten to banish these sinister practices to the back pages of ecclesiastical history, however, we might do well to first recall the mysterious death of Pope John Paul I in 1978, or the shooting of John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square in 1981. We might do well to entertain at least the possibility that the assassin’s hand, though now perhaps hidden in the shadows, is still poised to strike at the heart of the Holy See.
Though most assuredly the greatest poet of the Roman Church, Dante did not flinch from equating the criminally degraded Papacy of his day with the Scriptural Mother of Abominations, “drunken with the blood of the Martyrs”.[3] After all, did not the Popes owe their temporal authority to the Caesars of Rome? The Caesars whose provincial governor had ordered the Crucifixion of Christ? The Caesars who had martyred countless of Christ’s disciples, including Saints Peter and Paul? And yet, alas, had not these same Caesars dispensed, from the hand of the Emperor Constantine the Great, a portion of their dominion to the Roman Pontiff? If the Church is the mystical Bride of Christ, then had not the Bride lain down in the carnal embrace of her divine Husband’s butcher and made of herself the Great Harlot?
So inured to evil has the general opinion of mankind become that it finds nothing at all incongruous in the opulent power of the modern Papacy. Yet those who would call themselves Christians must marvel at the vast moral gulf which divides their Prophet ― who in the wilderness of Jordan spurned the Tempter’s offer of worldly kingdoms ― from his Vicars, whose white robes are sprinkled with the blood they have wantonly spilled in the furious pursuit of power and riches.[4] And if, like Dante, we summon the vision to peer down into the profound spiritual abyss into which the Holy See has descended, must we not also recognize that we are living in the Time of Tribulation? Can we not sense the onset of that Time of whose coming Christ forewarned his Apostles, when mankind should behold the “abomination spoken of by Daniel” standing in the Holy Place?[5]
The great Jewish prophets did not shrink from preaching against the spiritual harlotry of the priesthood of their own day. Among them, Daniel dared to pronounce the doom of the Mother of Abominations and to foretell her fall after a span of “70 weeks” from the time when God established His Covenant with Moses.[6] According to Biblical scholars, Moses first heard the voice of Yahweh in the burning bush approximately 1500 years before the birth of Christ.[7] Daniel’s “week” signifies the Sacred Week ordained by Yahweh on Mt. Sinai ― a “week” consisting of 50 years, with the 50th consecrated as a JubileeYear.[8] It follows, therefore, that Daniel’s “70 weeks” amount to 70 times 50, or 3500 years, which places the fall of the Great Harlot in the beginning of the 21st Century.
In another of his visions, Daniel reveals that the great Hebrew redemptive cycle would unfold in “a time, [two] times and half [a time]”,[9] with a “time” corresponding to one millennium. Hence, a period of 3500 years is again indicated, commencing with the Sinai Covenant about 1500 B.C. and ending in our own time with the ouster of the Abomination from the Holy Place which she has rendered desolate. In the same Scriptural passage, Daniel informs us that the prophesied cleansing of the Holy Place will begin 1290 “days”, i.e. years, after the Abomination establishes herself there, and will be completed within 45 “days”/years thereafter.[10] Consequently, if the consummation of this cleansing coincides with the Millennial Jubilee of 2000 A.D., Daniel must have been pointing back to the year 666 A.D. as the historical root of the Church’s spiritual crisis.
Of course, this date corresponds remarkably with the ill-famed number 666 associated with the Beast of Revelation, whose monstrous features ― seven heads and ten horns ― match those of the “fourth beast” of Daniel’s apocalyptic dream. At the time of his dream, Daniel and his people were captives in Babylon under the reign of King Belshazzar. The young prophet envisioned a succession of earthly Empires, portrayed as a series of four strange beasts, representing, in turn, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome. The “fourth beast”, then, is none other than the Roman Empire, and Daniel clearly sees this Empire, or some significant vestige of it, surviving into the 21st Century.[11] In fact, Daniel foresees an interval of 2300 “days”/years from the conquest of the Holy Land by the third beast ― the Goat, symbolic of the empire of Alexander the Great ― to the cleansing of the Sanctuary. Since Alexander ‘s army entered Palestine in 332 B.C., this chronology once more puts the period of the cleansing in the decades leading up to the Millennium year 2000.[12]
The prophesied “cleansing” is necessary because the “Holy Place” has been corrupted by temporal power and wealth At some point in history, the Pontiffs stepped out of the Shoes of the Fisherman, so to speak, and into the shoes of the very Roman Emperors who had supposedly crucified the Fisherman. While Dante in the Inferno spoke of the so-called “Donation of Constantine” as the source of the Papacy’s temporal sway in Rome, modern historians generally view the “Donation” as a forgery created by the Vatican to legitimize a naked power grab which actually took place two centuries after Constantine’s reign.[13]
Up until the middle of the 7th Century, the sovereignty over Rome remained in the hands of the “Byzantine” Roman Emperor, who ruled Italy through his Exarch in Ravenna. It was at that time that the Pontiffs began to subvert the Emperor’s control by allying themselves with the invading Lombards in Italy and Croats in Dalmatia[14], whose kings they baptized as “Roman” Catholics, as distinguished from “Orthodox” Christians. The last Byzantine Emperor to visit Rome as its recognized sovereign was Constans II in 663 A.D. After his reception in Rome, the Emperor journeyed on to Sicily, where he was murdered in the year 668 A.D. under circumstances suggestive of an ecclesiastical plot.[15] We may plausibly speculate, therefore, that the Vatican’s first resort to assassination, and its original appropriation of the scepter of the ancient Caesars, occurred when it became involved in the conspiracy to kill the Roman Emperor. Such a conspiracy might have been hatched in the benighted year of 666 A.D. ― a year which figures so mysteriously in Daniel’s prophecy and in the “number” of the Beast.[16]
Having thus traced the intertwining threads of prophecy back from the infernal visions of Dante to the apocalyptic dreams of Daniel, we can already perceive a common theme of assassination as the outward manifestation of the spiritual cancer which afflicts the hierarchy of the Church. Let us now explore how this theme may relate to the Papal succession in the critical Time of Tribulation ― that is, in the last three decades of the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st Century. This inquiry leads us first to the enigmatic writings of yet another seer who appeared at the beginning of the Second Millennium: the 12th Century Saint Malachy.
Born in the first century of the Second Millennium (1095 A.D.), Malachy O’Morgair was a holy man, reputed to have had miraculous powers of healing, levitation and clairvoyance. After being named Archbishop of Armagh in 1137 A.D., he embarked upon a difficult pilgrimage from his native Ireland to Rome to confer with Pope Innocent II.[17] When he caught his first glimpse of the seven hills of the Eternal City, Malachy fell into an ecstatic trance. In this trance, he witnessed a procession of popes, beginning with Celestine II, the successor to Innocent II, and extending to the last of the line, who bore the title “Peter of Rome”. After emerging from this trance, Malachy recorded a brief descriptive “motto” for each of the popes he had seen in his vision and presented them to Innocent II at their meeting. Although the Church would, after Malachy’s death, affirm his miraculous works and canonize him as the first Irish saint,[18] his prophecies would lie neglected and forgotten in the papal archives for over 450 years before being rediscovered and published. Even to this day, “official” Vatican scholars deny the authenticity of St. Malachy=s prophecies.
Nonetheless, St. Malachy’s descriptions have proven to be uncannily appropriate for each of the popes in the centuries since his death, with each characterization simultaneously revealing something both personal and prophetic about the corresponding pontiff. Thus, the first pope of the 20th Century, Leo XIII (1878-1903) was styled “Lumen in Caelo”, or “Light in the Sky”. On the personal level, this is a reference to the comet pictured in Leo=s coat-of-arms. From the historical perspective, his pontificate inaugurated the 20th Century ― a century prophesied to be followed by the Advent of Christ as a great Light appearing in the clouds. Malachy names the first of the final five popes “Pastor et Nauta”, “Pastor and Mariner”. This title describes Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) personally as the former Patriarch of maritime Venice, and historically as the pontiff whose reign ushers in the four decades during which the apocalyptic Beast will emerge “from the sea”.[19] His successor Pope Paul VI (1963-1978) was dubbed “Flos Florum”, or the “Flower of Flowers”, a fitting title in view the fleur-de-lys motif of his papal coat-of-arms, as well as the theme of his historic encyclical Humanae Vitae, which defined the Church’s position on procreation.
To the papacy of John Paul I, cut short by his mysterious death after only a month, St. Malachy applies the positively clairvoyant phrase “De Medietate Lunae”, that is, “Of the Half Moon”. The birth of this gentle “smiling Pontiff” ― on “Half Moon Street” in the village of Forno di Canale ― occurred under the half Moon of October 17, 1912. His election to the papal throne coincided exactly with the half Moon of August 26, 1978, and his mysterious death followed soon after the next month=s half Moon. Just as the half Moon has a “dark side”, moreover, the death of John Paul I would reveal the presence of dark forces at work within the Church. Indeed, in its symbolic sense, the half Moon represents a turning point in the battle of Light versus Darkness. When the Light is prevailing, the waxing half Moon precedes the full Moon by a week. On the other hand, the waning half Moon signifies the ascendancy of Darkness leading to the new Moon ― the phase of the Moon during which solar eclipses occur. Remarkably, the abbreviated papal reign of John Paul I was bracketed by waning half Moons and was followed by the election of the Pope who Malachy dubs “De Labore Solis” ― the “Of the Eclipse of the Sun”! While this ominous title evidently bodes ill for the destiny of the Holy See, even more incredible is its individual relevance to John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyla during the solar eclipse of May 18, 1920!
It bears noting that the eclipse of the Sun has frequently figured as a “celestial sign” in apocalyptic prophecies. Such eclipses were, judging by the astronomical orientation of Stonehenge and other megalithic sites, an evident preoccupation of prehistoric humanity.[20] Moreover, the metaphysics of ancient Egypt associated the eclipse of the Sun with the “second death” ― that most-dreaded punishment of the unjustified dead condemned to spiritual annihilation.[21] This notion of the “second death” also finds its way into the Scriptural scenario of the Last Judgment and the Lake of Fire, in which are consumed the resurrected bodies of those who have betrayed the Holy Spirit and have accepted the mark of the Beast.[22] In all of this imagery, we should comprehend the unfolding of the “cleansing” process foretold by Daniel. As we shall see, this “cleansing” involves an utter transformation of the material basis of the universe ― quite literally a “new Heaven and a new Earth” ― in which only those whose beings remain rooted in the Spirit may hope to negotiate the Great Transition.
In connection with the Irish Saint’s chosen emblem for Pope John Paul II, we should also consider the dual nature of eclipses, which always occur in complementary lunar/solar pairs. A lunar eclipse can only happen when the Moon is full and must always be matched with a solar eclipse when the Moon is new. Given this inherent coupling of lunar and solar eclipses, a parallel symbolic bond is implied between the current “solar” Pope John Paul and his predecessor of the same name, who is associated with the Moon in Malachy’s prophecy. In fact, the 33-day reign of John Paul I was punctuated at its midpoint by a lunar eclipse, which occurred on September 16, 1978 and was visible in Rome. Hence, there would appear to be a strong linkage between the destinies of these two Popes. We are strongly drawn to the hypothesis that any inquiry into the fate of John Paul II ― the Pontiff of the solar eclipse per St. Malachy’s vision ― must begin with a scrutiny of his predecessor=s brief reign, marked by the lunar eclipse. Accordingly, the path of prophecy now leads us to inquire into the death of John Paul I.[23]
To understand the forces at work in the sudden death of Pope John Paul I in 1978 , we should first back up a bit in time to the 19th Century, when the Church was stripped of its sovereign power in the Papal States by the Italian national revolution. As a result, after 1870 the Pope became the pathetic “Prisoner of the Vatican” ― a “prisoner” who was, however, forever intriguing to restore his lost domains. Perhaps to compensate for the loss of his earthly kingdom, Pope Pius IX (1846-1878) convoked Vatican Council I with the purpose of proclaiming his doctrine of “Papal Infallibility”, which would replace the temporal tyranny of the defunct Vatican monarchy with the spiritual tyranny of the “Infallible See”.[24] Quite tragically, this turn toward authoritarian and revanchist politics on the part of the Church was to play no small part in the onset of fascism in the early 20th Century.[25]
For his despicable role in delivering the Italian nation into the bloody hands of Benito Mussolini, Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) received considerably more than Iscariot’s thirty pieces of silver. In exchange for propping up the faltering Fascist regime, the Vatican got the equivalent of $80 million ($775 million in today’s dollars) and restoration of its sovereignty in Vatican City under the terms of the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Thus had the Papacy evolved from the avaricious harlot of the Caesars to the contemptible whore of “Il Duce”. Pius and his successors would exploit this latter-day “Donation of Constantine” to create a “Vatican Bank”, effectively beyond the reach of any regulation by secular authorities, and hence uniquely suited to the nefarious work of tax evasion and money laundering in which it later became enmeshed.
By 1958 Pope John XXIII would inherit the helm of a sovereign power which was as monolithic and mindlessly dogmatic as Stalin’s Comintern. Under the totalitarian doctrine laid down by Vatican Council I, any deviation from the Pope’s moral teaching was, by definition, “error” ― and expressions of “error” were not to be granted the privilege of toleration. Sacrificing his own health in the process, John XXIII struggled mightily to pull together the reformist Vatican Council II in the face of fierce opposition by conservatives, who feared that any relaxation of papal absolutism would undermine the entire Vatican edifice. To some degree, the conservatives proved right, for the free thought which Vatican Council II had encouraged did not stop with the Council’s largely symbolic reforms of the Catholic liturgy, but proceeded on to challenge the entire worldly edifice of power and wealth which the modern Church hierarchy had erected.
After the death of John XXIII in 1963, the deadlock between conservatives and reformers in the College of Cardinals resulted in the election of a vacillating “Hamlet” in Pope Paul VI, who would agonize for five years over the question of the morality of artificial birth control. During this time, Paul would be subjected to immense pressure from the old guard in the Vatican=s governing body, which is called the “Curia”.[26] No sooner had John XXIII died, but the Curia began battling to turn back the liberalizing tide of his Vatican Council II and return the Church to its sexually repressive, authoritarian mold.[27] In the course of his soul-searching, Paul VI called upon the advice of the gentle, scholarly Cardinal of Venice, Albino Luciani, who provided the Pontiff with a compelling theological argument for the Church’s honorable retreat from its fatuous incursion into the boudoirs of its faithful. When his irresolute Pontiff ultimately bowed to the relentless lobbying campaign of the conservatives and opted to ignore Luciani’s learned thesis, the Cardinal’s sense of honor and loyalty would not permit him to join in the chorus of derision which greeted the release of Paul’s Humanae Vitae in July 1968. Ironically, this principled refusal to openly criticize the Papacy’s anti-contraception crusade led to the false perception of Albino Luciani as a conservative among the Cardinal electors who convened after the death of Paul VI in August of 1978.
When the conclave assembled in the wake of Paul’s death, it was deeply divided between those who sought to move forward with the reformist agenda of Vatican Council II, on one side, and those who yearned for a return to the comforting certainty of the rigid dogma they had known before Pope John XXIII. As fate would have it, the conservatives’ prospects of electing their candidate had been considerably dimmed by an amendment to the electoral procedure, enacted by Paul VI, which disenfranchised those Cardinals over 80 years of age. Unable to install one of their own as Pope, the conservatives at the conclave resorted to a strategy of blocking the election of the leading progressive candidate and hoping that an acceptable “dark horse” candidate would emerge from the deadlock. Cardinal Luciani’s simple, self-effacing demeanor, and his apparent readiness to subordinate his own viewpoints in obedience to higher authority, as evidenced by his response to Humanae Vitae, made him appeal to the conservative Curia as a perfect compromise candidate. Luciani, they believed, would make a pope who they could effectively control.
Once elected, however, the new Pope began to display the brilliant mind and puckish charisma which had been concealed behind his former reticent reserve. Not awed in the least by his exalted station, John Paul I immediately threw himself into an all-out effort to revolutionize the Papacy: to return it to its spiritual origins, to the message of the Gospels. At his coronation, he refused to be carried on the papal sedan chair sedia gestatoria or to wear the jewel-encrusted tiara. He instructed the Curia’s Secretary of State not to invite the leaders of the military juntas in Argentina, Chile and Paraguay to his inaugural Mass.[28] He refused to follow the scripts prepared for him by the Curia at his audiences and press conferences, where he was emphatic in announcing that his pontificate would see to the withdrawal of the Church from its involvement in “purely temporal ... and political affairs”.[29] Totally exasperated by the new Pontiff’s unexpected independence, the Curia actually began to censor the Pope=s ex tempora remarks from the Vatican’s daily newspaper, particularly when he began to express his views on contraception and his willingness to reverse the proscriptive stance of Humanae Vitae.
While Albino Luciani proved to be an irritant to the Curia in many ways, he made himself their absolute nemesis when he began to delve into the Vatican Bank’s insidious dealings, which dated back to the reign of his predecessor. In 1968, the same year in which he had hung the albatross of Humanae Vitae around the Church’s neck, Pope Paul VI had taken into his confidence a flamboyant Sicilian financier named Michele Sindona. Sindona’s spectacular rise from veritable rags to control of a vast international banking empire was due, in part, to an extraordinary business instinct and mental acumen combined with a mesmerizing charm. But, despite his considerable natural gifts, Sindona would never have vaulted from the teeming streets of Messina to the board rooms of Milan without the support of his patrons in the Mafia and in “P2”, a secret Masonic society controlled by one Licio Gelli. Gelli, the secret society’s “Grand Master”, had assembled a network of far-right-wing military and political figures that functioned as a “state within a state” in Italy and several Latin American countries. Relying on bribery, extortion, and, when necessary, assassination and terrorism[30] to expand his web of power, Gelli financed his empire through the systematic plunder of a growing string of banks acquired by his associate Roberto Calvi. With the “help” of Gelli and Calvi, Sindona gained control of a group of some of the oldest and most prestigious financial institutions in Italy and Switzerland, including several banks in which the Vatican held an interest.
Nicknamed the “Shark”, Sindona almost overnight became the toast of the international banking community and the subject of adoring accolades by Fortune and Time magazines. He quickly earned the reputation of taking over venerable but failing banking houses and miraculously turning them around ― not only into the black, but literally into cash cornucopias. When his house of cards finally collapsed in 1974, in what became known in Italy as “Il Crack Sindona”, prosecutors soon discovered the secret of the Shark’s “magic touch” ― massive infusions of drug money from the Gambino family which Sindona’s banks assiduously “laundered”. In order to pay back his P2 patrons Gelli and Calvi, moreover, the Shark had embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars from the banks he controlled. Soon after his financial debacle, Sindona fled to the U.S., where he felt he could rely on the protection of his old friend, then-President Richard Nixon. Unfortunately for the Shark, the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. “Coincidentally” within weeks thereafter Federal auditors discovered a huge “hole” in the assets of Franklin National Bank, which was part of the Sindona empire.[31] Indicted in both the U.S. and Italy for bank fraud and embezzlement, Michele Sindona would later order the contract killing of a key prosecution witness, for whose murder an Italian court ultimately convicted him in 1986.
This was the man to whom Paul VI turned for financial advice in 1968 when the government in Rome abolished the Vatican’s tax exemption for income from Italian investments. Fearing embarrassment from the public disclosure of the enormity of its financial portfolio which tax filings would reveal, the Vatican opted to divest most of its domestic assets ― preferably at an attractive price. An attractive price ― actually double the market value of the Vatican’s portfolio ― is exactly what the Shark had to offer, since his patrons in the Gambino family were more than willingly to exchange the “dirty” proceeds of their heroin trade for “clean” assets at a two-to-one rate. Of course, the Holy See was not expected to deal directly with the Mafia Dons whose blood money they would receive. Instead, the Shark would set up a shell corporation for the single task of acting as the conduit for the Gambino money ― a corporation he would name Mabusi, an acronym composed of the first two letters from the first, middle and last names of his son Marco.[32]
With his extraordinary mind and innocent fearlessness, Pope John Paul I was able to penetrate to the heart of this shameful labyrinth of corruption and to identify Sindona’s key accomplices inside the Vatican within weeks of his coronation. On the evening of September 28, 1978, he called Cardinal Villot, the leader of the powerful Curia, to his private study to discuss certain “changes” which the Pope proposed to make public on the following day. During the two-hour discussion that followed, Villot was to discover, to his chagrin, the true mettle of the enigmatic man he had once assessed to be a simple fool. Among those whose “resignations” would be accepted by the Pontiff the following day were Villot himself, as well as the head of the Vatican Bank and several other members of the Curia who were implicated in the activities of Sindona and P2. Moreover, Villot was told that John Paul I would also announce plans for a meeting on October 24th with an American delegation to discuss a reconsideration of the Church’s position on birth control.[33]
While the new Pope was preparing to blow the cover off of the simmering Vatican Bank scandal and sever the Holy See’s Gordian financial entwinement with the banking houses of Signores Sindona and Calvi, these latter two gentlemen were in dire need of the Vatican’s continued complicity. In the autumn of 1978, Italian bank examiners were closing in on proof of the $400 million in embezzled assets which Sindona and Calvi had spirited away either into their own pockets or to support the sinister work of their Masonic Master Gelli and his P2 lodge. The only real gap in the chain of evidence needed to send all of these gentlemen packing off to prison was in the hands of the Vatican Bank, and Papa Luciani was now poised to surrender that card to the authorities. While Sindona’s high-priced New York lawyers[34] had successfully fought off Italy’s extradition efforts since Il Crack four years earlier, the exposure of the Shark’s Vatican dealings would have unceremoniously dispatched him from the Manhattan cocktail circuit into a Milanese lockup. Sindona’s desperation to avoid such a fate had already motivated him to put out “contracts”, through the Gambino family, on witnesses against him in the extradition proceedings, as well as on the assistant U.S. Attorney who was prosecuting the case.
Accordingly, when Pope John Paul I retired to his bedroom on the evening of September 28, 1978, clutching in his hands the momentous missives which would expose the Vatican’s shameful financial flirtation with the Mafia and purge the Curia of those responsible, a number of very ruthless individuals had a great interest in seeing to it that he would never awaken to issue these directives. Among them were Signores Sindona, Calvi, and Gelli ― with the latter having the allegiance, if through no other means than blackmail, of the 120 freemasons in the Roman Curia.[35] Indeed, the new Pope had recently received, from a disillusioned former member of P2, a list of the Curial freemasons, which included the names of Cardinal Villot and Bishop Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican Bank. His planned purge targeted many of them for transfer or forced retirement. But the purge would never come.
Beyond the identifiable group within the Curia which had much to lose by the continued reign of Papa Luciani, there was a more shadowy entity which had much to gain by the premature termination of his papacy. Opus Dei was, and remains today, perhaps the most obscure yet influential “sect” within the Church. A secret society with fascist tendencies like P2, Opus Dei has followed the historical pattern of the Jesuit order in striving to recruit individuals who hold positions of power in government, business, the media, or academia. The “work of God” which these recruits are then enjoined to achieve does not involve resistance to the corruption and spiritual vacuity which characterize these worldly institutions. Rather it aims for personal advancement within these institutions as a means of expanding the power of those at the apex of the sect’s rigidly hierarchal pyramid. Seen through the prism of this cynical scheme of aggrandizement parading as “theology”, any philosophy which advocates fundamental changes in the traditional institutions of Family, Property, and the State, opposes God’s designs for mankind ― designs which include, naturally, the ever greater glory of Opus Dei itself. Given this ultra-conservative perspective, we might well expect to find Opus Dei in the front line of the Church’s assault on all forms of family-planning and population control. And in fact, the only thing higher on their agenda would be putting one of their own on the papal throne. As destiny would have it, Opus Dei was poised to achieve both of these goals by the untimely death of Pope John Paul I.[36]
In the predawn hours of September 29, 1978, the Pope’s housekeeper knocked at his bedroom door, as she always did, promptly at 4:30 a.m. Hearing no response within, she left him a cup of coffee and returned fifteen minutes later to find him still not stirring, which was totally at odds with his punctual routine. When she entered his bed chamber, she gasped to discover the Pope propped up in bed, still clutching his papers from the night before, his face contorted in the grimace of death. On the night table beside him lay an opened bottle of Effortil, a medication which the Pontiff took for his low blood pressure. Before expiring he had apparently vomited. The housekeeper immediately notified the papal chamberlain, or camerlengo, Cardinal Villot, whose first response to the news was to summon the morticians ― before verifying the death himself or calling the Vatican physician to examine the body. Villot arrived in the Pope’s room at 5:00 a.m. and quickly gathered up the crucial papers, the Effortil bottle, and several personal items which were soiled with vomit. None of these articles would ever be seen again.
Although the Vatican claimed that its house physician examined the body and determined myocardial infarction to be the cause of death, no death certificate for Pope John Paul I has been made public to this day. Although Italian law requires a waiting period of at least 24 hours before a body may be embalmed, Cardinal Villot had the body of Albino Luciani prepared for burial less than 12 hours after his death. Although the Vatican refused to allow an autopsy on the basis of an alleged prohibition against it in canon law, the Italian press pointed out that an autopsy had in fact been performed on one of the Pope’s predecessors, Pius VIII. Although the conventional procedure for embalming a body requires that the blood first be drained and certain internal organs removed, not a drop of blood or a shred tissue was removed from the corpse of Papa Luciani ― and hence none were available to test for the presence of poison.
After being elected as Luciani’s successor, Karol Wojtyla would honor him in name only. None of the initiatives which John Paul I had been poised to take with respect to the Vatican Bank, the freemasons in the Curia, or the revision of Humanae Vitae, would ever see the light of day under Pope John Paul II. To the contrary, soon after his election Papa Wojtyla promoted the corrupt head of the Vatican Bank. Bishop Marcinkus had, after all, well served Wojtyla’s pet cause by diverting some $100 million of laundered Mafia money to the Polish Church to help underwrite their campaign against the Communist government. With the Vatican=s continued cooperation, Sindona and Calvi extended their orgy of plunder and remained at liberty for several more years, during which time a number of potential prosecution witnesses were gunned down by contract killers. In fact, when Sindona was finally indicted in the U.S. for bank fraud in connection with the Franklin National failure, the Vatican offered to provide character testimony in his defense!
As for Opus Dei, though John Paul II is not actually a member of the sect, he has often functioned indistinguishably from one. Indeed, soon after recovering from his own brush with assassination, the Pope issued an unprecedented decree granting Opus Dei official status as a “personal prelature” within the Church ― the equivalent of recognizing the sect as a “church within the Church”.[37] And as for persevering doggedly in the policy of antagonism to contraception, abortion, homosexuality and women’s rights, the current Pope is certainly all that Opus Dei could have hoped for, and more. Beyond that, Papa Wojtyla has, through his appointments to the College of Cardinals, seen to it that the electors who will chose his successor are very receptive to the ultra-conservative ideology and moral absolutism of Opus Dei. Ironically, the ominous drive of Opus Dei toward complete supremacy in Vatican City seems to face only one formidable obstacle at this point in history. Opposing them are the Jesuits, whose once-secretive organization formed the model for Opus Dei, but who have gravitated in recent decades toward the more progressive wing of the Church’s theological spectrum. The historical irony here lies in the fact that the roots of the Society of Jesus and Opus Dei are so similar. Both emerged out of a cultural background of militarized, autocratic Spanish societies: 16th Century colonialism on the one hand and Franco’s fascism on the other.[38]