Do Popes Run A Secret Network Of ‘Spies’?
(ANALYSIS) The Religion Guy’s Answer: There’s ample chatter about how Leo XIV, as the first Pope born and raised in the United States, might be affected by his background. (He is simultaneously a citizen of Peru, where he was a long-term missionary and bishop. Here are some of The Guy’s thoughts on that, posted at Religion Unplugged.
Leo’s elevation broke the longstanding rule of thumb that no American, as a citizen of a superpower, could or even should become pope. But that did not trouble the College of Cardinals in May, and leading up to his election Cardinal Robert Prevost felt free to critique current American policies.
However, in recent history there’s been close, significant, and often clandestine cooperation between the U.S. government and the papacy. There were the complex involvements during World War Two, joint postwar efforts against rising Communism within Italy and, most dramatically,
Pope John Paul II’s role in toppling European Communism and ending the Cold War, in league with U.S. President Reagan. That tie was symbolized by America’s diplomatic recognition of the Holy See in 1984, a step long shunned by the heavily Protestant nation.
World-historical intrigue
Those situations are one aspect of the fascinating world-historical intrigue explored in “Vatican Spies: From the Second World War to Pope Francis” by Yvonnick Denoël, a researcher in France (translated by Alan McKay; U.S. distribution by Oxford University Press). The book also compiles elaborate detail on Vatican financial dealings and scandals that this article will bypass.
Denoël spent years scouring archives (little made available by the Vatican) and newsroom morgues, interviewing insiders, and adding well-informed supposition with a sprinkling of gossip. He is usually careful to distinguish between established facts and undocumented probabilities.
Let’s take a major example, the brazen and nearly successful 1981 assassination attempt against John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. He finds it reasonable that if the Soviet Union’s KGB did not order the hit, it at least would have known about the plot in advance and did not prevent it. Meanwhile, he notes the bizarre detail that the would-be assassin attended military training with Turkey’s Grey Wolves, a paramilitary faction backed by America’s CIA.
There are indications that beginning around 1983 the CIA undertook a concerted campaign to help the uprising by the Solidarity union in the Pope’s Poland. The next year, the Soviet KGB summoned an extraordinary conference on how to counter activities by John Paul’s Vatican to subvert Communist control in Soviet satellites. Attending delegates came from the secret services of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and of course Poland.
$ at hundreds of millions?
By 1989, when Poland’s Soviet puppet regime collapsed, an estimated $33 million had been spent on this cause by the CIA, the AFL-CIO, and National Endowment for Democracy.
There are no sources from which to estimate the help “given directly” through John Paul’s Vatican, we’re told, but Denoël figures it must have been “some hundreds of millions of dollars.” One clue: Poland secret police archives list the confiscation of 48 anti-Communist underground presses and 6.4 million publications over seven years.
There’s special interest in how Denoël assesses the wartime performance of Pope Pius XII, who is regularly denounced because he did not publicly condemn the Nazis’ campaign to wipe out European Jewry. Denoël reports the Pope knew about Nazi extermination plans from intelligence reports as early as the spring of 1942.
He hesitated to speak out from understandable fears this would worsen persecution of Catholics. Plus he harbored an idealistic but doomed hope he could mediate a truce by remaining neutral toward Germany. As historian Michael Phayer sees it, Pius’s delusion sacrificed moral credibility to diplomatic ambition.
It’s largely forgotten that Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, was among the Pius’s two or three closest advisors. Another significant wartime figure was the Vatican ambassador in Turkey, Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII. His canonization file says Roncalli was instrumental in providing temporary baptism certificates that helped some 24,000 Jews escape Nazi wrath in neutral Turkey. Roncalli befriended German ambassador Franz von Papen, who apparently “looked the other way” regarding this underground activity. Roncalli also passed to Pius intelligence leaked by Papen about German military officers who sought to overthrow Hitler and then reach a peace deal with the Allies.
Pius’s Vatican could take credit for local heroism. Vatican City was a vulnerable but independent island within an Italy ruled by Fascists and then Nazis. At the war’s start Rome’s Jewish population was 8,000.
When Allied troops freed Rome, a remarkable 4,718 Jews were found living in Vatican City or a network of some 150 convents and monasteries. Catholic operatives also shielded thousands of Allied soldiers and refugees from the Germans. But unforgivable is Denoël’s contention that Pius and Montini surely knew about Catholics who helped certain German war criminals escape to South America after the war.
Amateurs vs. Trained Professionals
As Denoël freely admits, it’s inevitable that much about church spycraft is unknown, and much will forever remain so. The clergy and lay members working for church causes have mostly been informal amateurs, not professionally trained “spies” as we think of that word. A famous example was New York Archbishop Francis Spellman, FDR’s peripatetic go-between with the Vatican and world leaders during World War Two. The Catholic operatives were pitted against Nazi and Communist experts who infiltrated the Vatican and undercut its interests everywhere possible.
Uniquely among world religions, Catholicism’s popes lead not only a massive international network of congregations and ministries but an independent, sovereign political entity, the Vatican City State. This micro-monarchy with 673 citizens maintains diplomatic relations with 184 countries, of which 90 maintain embassies to the Holy See in Rome. The ambassadors (“nuncios”) and other staff representatives dispatched overseas by the Vatican have church duties, especially the secretive monitoring of potential bishop candidates for future appointment by the pope.
But whether we should consider them “spies,” they naturally gather intelligence on the host countries and other diplomatic buzz, while other Catholics handle assorted private assignments from the Holy See.
We’ll see how all this now plays out with the American pope. The fact that this week Leo made the first papal phone call with Russian’s Vladimir Putin since his invasion to discuss peace efforts with Ukraine indicates that he intends to be active on the geopolitical scene. Such efforts can be thorny, as with Pope Francis’s well-meaning pleas for peace that partisans in Ukraine and Israel felt were improper violations of church neutrality.
One of Leo’s early activities after the election was an address to the assembled diplomatic corps assigned to the Vatican. He stated that their presence is “a visible sign of your countries’ respect for the Apostolic See” and fits the aspiration of himself and his church to embrace all people on earth, “who need and yearn for truth, justice and peace.” Then came words to ponder: “The church can never be exempted from speaking the truth about humanity and the world, resorting whenever necessary to blunt language that may initially create misunderstanding.”
This article has been republished courtesy of Patheos.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.