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by David G. Guyatt
Nexus Magazine, Volume 7, Number 5
August-September 2000
from Whale Website
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In its zeal to stamp out communism, the Vatican set up alliances during World War II with various secret societies, fascist groups and spying agencies and has maintained these networks ever since.
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Contents
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4115643145370367260&q=Eric+Phelps&total=209&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
http://www.ronpaulwarroom.com/?p=8841
THE MAFIA, THE CIA, AND THE VATICAN’S INTELLIGENCE APPARATUS
Albert Vincent Carone is one of those people who spent his life dancing between raindrops and turning invisible wherever a shadow lingered. He existed and also didn’t exist. Al Carone–unlike his near namesake, Al Capone–truly was a paradox wrapped in a mystery concealed behind an enigma.
Carone was a detective in the New York Police Department, but this didn’t stop him from becoming a “made” man in the Genovese crime family. He knew all the leading Mafiosi of his day, including Vito Genovese, Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante, Joe Colombo and Pauley Castellano amongst others. To Carone’s daughter, Dee, they were all known as “Uncle”. When she got married, her father arranged two different reception rooms to separate the Mob guests from the NYPD guests. But this was more window-dressing than anything else. One of Carone’s principal functions in the NYPD was to act as the “bagman” in protecting shipments of CIA drugs to the various Mafia families.
Carone died in 1990 under mysterious circumstances. This followed a period of great personal disenchantment with his life, following a secretive mission to Mexico in 1985 when a large number of innocent women and children died unnecessarily. His death was horrific, reports Mike Ruppert, editor of From The Wilderness newsletter, who has investigated Carone’s life story and written a special report on it (see acknowledgements).
Meanwhile, another “Uncle” was Bill Casey, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Reagan Administration. Casey had been with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. During the 1970s, he became Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which regulates the US investment industry. During his tenure in that role, Casey used Carone as a “cut out” to pass sensitive insider information to Mob capo Pauley Castellano, says his daughter, Dee.
Carone was also a Full Colonel in the US Army, where he had operated in the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corp (CIC). Unsurprisingly, in view of his close friendship with Bill Casey, he was also a covert operative for the CIA. But that wasn’t half of it. Carone was also a Grand Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), which historically has been the military arm of the Vatican and is regarded as a separate State with full powers of statehood, including issuing its own diplomatic passports.
In more recent decades SMOM has acted as a funding conduit, a black market gold channel and money laundry for the CIA, amongst others, and is known to act as the Vatican’s intelligence arm. It was alleged to be involved in, for example, the disappearance of Russia’s gold reserves–over 2,000 metric tonnes–which vanished during 1991, around the time that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev was ousted from office.
Malta knighthoods are awarded to many leading individuals who are part of the military and intelligence community. The CIA’s Bill Casey, for example, was a Knight of Malta. Former NATO General and later US Secretary of State Alexander Haig is also a Malta Knight. Another is General Vernon Walters, the former Deputy Director of the CIA under DCI George Bush, and later appointed a roving ambassador during the Reagan Administration. The legendary head of the OSS (the WWII precursor of the CIA), “Wild” Bill Donovan, was made a Knight along with his wartime compatriot and later CIA Chief of Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton.
And John McCone, another prominent member of the US “spook” agency, was also distinguished with a Malta knighthood. The list goes on. Most interesting is Reinhard Gehlen, the former Nazi intelligence expert recruited by the US in 1945-46 to head the Gehlen Org–a secret, German-based intelligence arm of the United States that was composed of former SS and Gestapo agents, many of whom, including Klaus Barbie, were wanted Nazi war criminals. The foregoing names amount to a listing of some of the most powerful and influential members of the Western intelligence community over the last five decades.
One Vatican group that has extremely close ties to the Knights of Malta is the ultra-right-wing Opus Dei. This is an immensely powerful faction in the Vatican today, and its public “do good” activities eclipse a plethora of the darkest political and financial machinations known to man. It will not come as a surprise, perhaps, that Carone was closely associated with Opus Dei and, in particular, with a covert operation that had its origin back in 1944. This was Operation Amadeus.
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FROM RATLINES TO DRUG SMUGGLING ROUTES
This highly secretive operation was part of the Operation Sunrise negotiations conducted between Allen Dulles–the then senior wartime OSS officer in Switzerland, but later to become the Director of the CIA–and SS General Karl Wolff. This debonair and well-connected SS officer commanded the SS and Gestapo contingents in Italy at the time.
The result of these negotiations (at least those parts that are now known about) was an agreement affording amnesty to an extensive roster of SS-Gestapo forces, in exchange for their agreement to shift their allegiance to the West in the pre-planned, covert battle aimed at defeating the Soviet communist “menace”–in other words, the “Cold War”.
One spin-off of these Dulles-Wolff arrangements were the Vatican-run “ratlines” that aided wanted Nazi war criminals to slink to safety. Tens of thousands of SS and other Nazis escaped capture as a result of the ratlines. These included such figures as Franz Stangl, commandant at Treblinka extermination camp, and his friend Gustav Wagner, who ran the Sobibor death camp. Others to escape in this manner included Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. Eichmann was later captured by Israeli intelligence agents, smuggled to Tel Aviv where he stood trial and was eventually executed. In comparison, Dr Joseph Mengele–known as “the White Angel”, a war criminal wanted for his cruel and inhuman experiments on death camp inmates at Auschwitz–escaped to Argentina and lived a long life.
Operation Amadeus was exclusively concerned with the flight of SS and Nazi war criminals to the South American continent and their later ferocious covert actions against the indigenous populations justified under the banner of “anti-communism”. One individual engaged in Amadeus activities was former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, known to the world as “the Butcher of Lyon”.
The principal means of funding Operation Amadeus activities was the hugely profitable narcotics business. Large stocks of SS morphia had been smuggled out of Europe and into “Catholic” South America at the end of the War in accordance with the Sunrise agreement. The morphia was accompanied by looted SS gold and large quantities of counterfeit British banknotes, forged in concentration camps by captive but skilled counterfeiters as part of an SS scheme known as Operation Bernhardt.
The escape “lines” used to move wanted men around South America, away from the prying eyes of Israeli agents, also proved ideal as smuggling routes for drugs. Decades later, the stocks of heroin smuggled into the United States for distribution by the CIA-protected Mafia would be complemented with locally grown cocaine.
One of the figures to emerge into the spotlight during the 1980s who was deeply involved in this narcotics traffic was Colonel Oliver North, who authorized the exchange of guns for drugs to finance Contra operations. Oliver North was known to Al Carone under his “work” name, “John Caffrey“. This was the time when Carone was engaged in CIA-controlled cocaine transactions with Joe “Pickles” Percilia, a member of the Colombo crime family.
These curious and usually concealed connections between governments (in the form of the military and intelligence community), organized crime, the Vatican and Nazi war criminals have some significant history. Not least was the secret agreement reached between US Naval Intelligence officers and Mafia don Charles “Lucky” Luciano during World War II. This resulted in the Mafia’s decision to aid and assist the Allies by contacting Mob figure Vito Genovese in 1943 to prepare the way for the Allied landing in Sicily. As earlier outlined, it was primarily those SS-Gestapo units located in Italy under command of SS General Wolff that were initially concerned in the Operation Sunrise negotiations.
And while large numbers of former Nazis were fleeing south to fight the communist menace in Latin America–and, more importantly, to profit personally from their involvement in the lucrative drug and gun business–in Europe, the spadework was being laid to overthrow or thwart democratically elected governments via a network of fascist-manned “Stay Behind units”, organized under the aegis of Operation Gladio. Not surprisingly, this would also lead to certain involved figures making personal fortunes out of other people’s misery–a circumstance that is so commonplace it is barely worth mentioning.
These neo-fascist activities would come to prominence in the early 1980s following the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the death of Italian banker Roberto Calvi, who was “suicided” and left hanging under London’s Blackfriars Bridge. This would lead to sensational disclosures about the role of the Vatican Bank, the IOR, in Calvi’s financial empire and would quickly grow to include the activities of Mafia financier Michele Sindona–whose activities, in turn, would implicate leading blue-blood banks in Europe and America in Mafia activities. Both Sindona and Calvi were close to Opus Dei, which lost around $55 million when Sindona’s empire crashed. According to his family, Roberto Calvi was deeply engrossed in helping Opus Dei take control of the IOR when he was killed.
Meanwhile, both Calvi and Sindona were members of the secretive Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge, which is said to have been a “parallel government” in waiting and which planned to effect a coup d’état in Italy following a Communist Party victory at the polls.
P2 was run by former Italian fascist and member of the Nazi SS, Licio Gelli–dubbed “the Puppet Master” by the Italian press. Gelli’s connections to the ultra-hard-right and fascists in Europe and Latin America were extensive. In fact, he had been deeply involved in establishing the Vatican-run ratlines that aided the worst Nazi war criminals to escape Allied justice at the end of WWII. All told, an estimated 50,000 Nazis were helped to freedom.
Gelli had numerous powerful friends, including former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He was also a personal friend of Argentina’s General Juan Perón, and his close associations with Argentina would later lead him to be a key figure in shipping a supply of French Exocet missiles to sink British Task Force ships during the Falklands War. In this endeavour he worked closely with Ronald R. Rewald, founder of the Hawaiian-based financial institution Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong–a CIA proprietary company and forerunner of the CIA-owned Nugan Hand Bank.
The involvement of a CIA front company engaged in financing and providing weapons to be used against a key American ally (Britain) with the wholehearted public support of the US Government may seem somewhat duplicitous. However, in the world of “black ops”, “friends” and “enemies” are interchangeable words and working both sides of the fence is accepted practice.
In terms of hierarchy, Gelli reported to Umberto Ortolani, described by one writer as “the great Vatican door-opener” and “secret chamberlain of the papal household”. In addition to his P2 connections, Ortolani is also a member of the inner council of the Knights of Malta and has military intelligence connections that date back to WWII.
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THE OCTOPUS AND THE SPIDER
There are numerous other masonic groups and secret societies in Europe which move in and out of focus at various times. Almost all of them are Catholic in nature.
One of these is the Priory of Sion (Prieuré de Sion)–a secretive order that first came to public attention via the best-selling book, The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail, published in 1982. The Priory is closely connected with the alleged treasure of Solomon which is said to have found its way to the small village of Rennes-le-Château in southwestern France, where it is said to have been buried by the Knights Templars, forerunners of the Knights of Malta.
The Priory, whose headquarters were located at Annemasse, near Geneva on the Swiss border, are styled as the “guardians” of Solomon’s treasure, but, most interestingly, they have numerous subterranean connections to fascists and those on the far right that date back to WWII. Meanwhile, it has to be noted in passing that Annemasse is said to have been the centre for the anti-communist Stay Behind units of Operation Gladio.
If this is not intriguing enough, another fact stretches coincidence to the point of bursting. In recent years, the Priory of Sion has moved its headquarters to Barcelona and now boasts a Spanish Grand Master. This, one could conclude, is to enable it to be physically closer to the historical heartland of Opus Dei, which was founded in Spain in 1928.
If Otto Skorzeny was a leading force in running the SS Brotherhood escape routes–Der Spinne, the Spider–after the war, and SS General Karl Wolff was the lead negotiator with OSS Swiss Chief, Allen Dulles, then another Nazi, Walter Rauff, head of the Milan SD, was one of two liaisons with the Vatican involved in the establishment of the Nazi-smuggling system. Earlier in his career, Rauff had overseen the development of the Nazis’ mobile gas vans, known as “Black Ravens”, which gassed to death around 100,000 Jews, mostly women and children, by pumping exhaust fumes into the back of an hermetically sealed van.
Another important link between the Vatican and SS escape routes was Friedrich Schwendt, who was also the man in charge of laundering forged SS banknotes. Before WWII, Schwendt was an international arms dealer who shipped weapons to China and Russia. He was also the investment manager of the family fortune of his first wife’s aunt, Baroness Gemmingen-Guttenberg, of the vastly wealthy Argentina-based Bunge family, of the massive transnational firm Bunge Corporation that is also known as “the Octopus“.
This title is interesting, for it may connect to the so-called “Octopus” that ties in to murdered freelance journalist Danny Casolaro, who at the time of his death in 1991 was investigating a number of high-level illegalities including the theft by the Department of Justice of a “tracking” computer program known as “PROMIS“. Casolaro was writing a book about what he had discovered. He originally titled it “Behold, A Pale Horse“, but later modified it to “The Octopus“. In a draft page of the book, he described this group as an “international cabal whose freelance services covered parochial political intrigue, espionage, sophisticated weapon technologies that included biotoxins, drug trafficking, money laundering and murder-for-hire”. Casolaro further stated that this cabal was “spawned thirty years ago in the shadow of the Cold War”.
After Casolaro’s death, journalist Carol Marshall (a pen name) followed up his investigation and wrote an (as yet) unpublished manuscript, titled “The Last Circle“. In this, Marshall describes her investigation of Robert Booth Nichols–one of the central figures of the Octopus, whom she describes as being part of a secretive group known as “the Chosen Ones” and who wore “skull and crossbones rings and shared a common interest, if you could call it that, in the old German SS occultism, its tribal and inner circle rites”.
During her continuing investigation into the Octopus, Marshall found that the SS occultism outlined above was connected to Lt. Col. if(screen) { topPos=0; leftPos=0; } // Open full page // // Open to size // var newWin1=null; function getPage(thePage,wt,ht) { leftPos= (screen.width-wt)/2; topPos = (screen.height-ht)/2; if ( newWin1 && !newWin1.closed ) { newWin1.close(); } newWin1 = window.open(thePage,’aWin’,'toolbars=no, resizeable=no,scrollbars=yes,left=’+leftPos+’,top=’+topPos+’,width=’+wt+’,height=’+ht); } Michael A. Aquino, a former US Green Beret who is a self-professed Satanist and who held a Top Secret security clearance for his work in military intelligence and on classified psychological warfare matters. Aquino officiated at SS black-magic ceremonies held at Wewelsburg, the castle once used by SS chief Heinrich Himmler to create an SS order of Teutonic knights based on the Knights Templars.
The foregoing connections lend themselves to a larger picture of global, interlocking, right-wing fascist groupings that operate in the shadow-land of deniable military and intelligence operations associated with profit during WWII and, later, throughout the Cold War.
 In this respect, it is intriguing to note that the Priory of Sion, one of the foremost Catholic groups under discussion, uses as a symbol something that is variously described as an octopus or a spider (araignée) on its documents. The Priory’s association with the octopus could easily relate to the so-called Octopus described above, where organized crime works hand in glove with operatives from US intelligence and the military. If one decides, on the other hand, that the Priory symbol is a spider, there is the intriguing notion of the Vatican-run Nazi escape lines of Austrian Catholic Otto Skorzeny and his SS Brotherhood’s Der Spinne (the Spider).
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THE BUSINESS OF GOD
Al Carone was, as mentioned earlier, a “made” man of the Genovese Mob in addition to his other associations. It is curious, therefore, to note that one of the leading lights of the Octopus, according to writer Carol Marshall, was ultra-right-wing oil tycoon Clint Murchison, owner of the Dallas Cowboys football team. Murchison’s oil company, Murchison Oil Lease Company, was 20 per cent owned by Gerardo Catena, the chief lieutenant of the Genovese crime family.
Throughout the Second World War and thereafter there was, according to author Charles Higham in his book, Trading With The Enemy, a,
“general agreement of certain major figures of American, British and German commerce to continue their relations and associations after Pearl Harbor”.
Higham adds that he also learned that “certain figures of the warring governments had arranged to assist in this [activity]“.
Higham’s subsequent research proved that this high cabal–which he dubbed “the Fraternity“–not only existed but benefited handsomely throughout WWII. This led the author to ask:
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What would have happened if millions of Americans and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey managers shipped the enemy’s fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel?
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Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars’ worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan?
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Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan?
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Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler’s communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London?
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Or that ITT built the Focke-Wulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops?
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Or that crucial ball-bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the Vice-Chairman of the US War Production Board, in partnership with Göring’s cousin in Philadelphia, when American forces were desperately short of them?
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Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?
Higham’s “Fraternity” has similar characteristics to the so-called “Octopus“, and also shows certain similarities to Colonel Oliver North’s “Enterprise“. All have engaged in the most dubious and illegal activities for profit, and all operate hand in glove with organized crime. All lean so far to the right, ideologically speaking, that the word “fascist” can be used without reservation. Meanwhile, none of them cares very much for the woes of humanity and, indeed, they appear committed to stomping on ethics and moral values wherever they meet them.
The octopus–or “Oct Opus“, as one European documentary film producer renders the spelling when referring to Opus Dei (which began life on 2 October 1928)–has eight arms that surround its mouth (ensuring a constant supply of food) and three hearts, and is therefore not prone to starving or dying. But it can also be identified by these oddities. Opus Dei, the group that is now in control of the Vatican, is undoubtedly one arm of this global criminal network, in this writer’s view.
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Or are the three hearts of the octopus more vital to identify?
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Could they be analogous to the “Church, State and Mafia, the forces that prevail beneath the play of the shadows of the world”
(as described by Nick Tosches in his book, Power On Earth, which tells the life story of murdered Mafia financier Michele Sindona)?
There is yet another interesting twist to this accumulation of associations: Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands. The Prince was the founding chairman of the publicity-shy Western power elite, the Bilderbergers. This shadowy and secretive group meets over a weekend in May/June each year, under an almost total media blackout. Powerful and very influential figures from the world of banking, business, politics, the media, trades unions and academia are invited. Included regularly, for example, are Dr Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and Italy’s “king-maker”, Gianni Agnelli. The first meeting took place in May 1954.
This, strangely, was the same year that Prince Bernhard became head of the Johanitter Orde in Nederland, one of four orders that make up the Chivalric Alliance of Orders of Saint John (Alliance de Chevalerie des Hospitaliers de Saint Jean de Jérusalem). The stated purpose of these four, known as “the Alliance“–which is composed of northern European nations Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and Great Britain, the latter being an ancient order known as “the Most Venerable Order”–is “to reduce to silence the enemies of Christ“. The headquarters of the Alliance are located in Switzerland.
These are Protestant orders rather than Catholic, but it is of significance that, on 26 November 1963, the Alliance was,
“consolidated with the signing of a joint declaration between the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the Most Venerable Order, at St John’s Gate, London, by the Grand Chancellor of the SMOM, the Prince of Resuttano, and Lord Wakehurst, Lord Prior of the Most Venerable Order“.
In other words, the Catholic and Protestant orders bound themselves to work together to “silence the enemies of Christ“–a clear reference to communism.
Interestingly, it has been suggested that the Knights Templars were “infected” with the Johannite or Mandaean heresy that denounced Jesus as a “false prophet” and in his place recognized John the Baptist as the true Messiah. Meanwhile, two early Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion are said to have had Johannite tendencies: Leonardo Da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton. Notwithstanding that, the famous founder of the Knights Templars, Hughes de Payens, has been accused by the Vatican of being a Johannite.
Leaving aside this brief foray into esoteric history, it is as well to note that Prince Bernhard, in addition to his Bilderberg role and as head of the Dutch Johannite Order, was also an honorary member of Himmler’s SS and worked in NW7, the global intelligence arm of I.G. Farben which acted in the interests of the Nazi cause. The activities of NW7 in Latin America before, during and after World War II are deeply interwoven in this story.
In facilitating and aligning itself with many of the foregoing activities, the Vatican aimed to help eradicate a communist ideology that despised Christianity. Opus Dei and a host of other Catholic-cum-fascist secret groups engaged in a litany of murder, money laundering, drug peddling, arms trafficking, concealment of WWII loot, embezzlement, manipulation of financial markets and many other consummate illegalities. The purpose of all these activities was, arguably, to allow the Vatican to remain the spiritual bulwark of the Christian West.
But if such business is the business of a Church preaching of a God in Heaven, then Caesar on Earth had better watch out. A new landlord has fallen into town.
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Acknowledgements
In preparing this essay, I drew upon an indispensable group of published/unpublished work and sources, as follows:
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The full account of the unique story of Al Carone, by Mike Ruppert (available to order online at www.copvcia.com).
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Trading With The Enemy, by Charles Higham (St Edmundsbury Press, Suffolk, UK, 1983).
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Their Kingdom Come, by Robert Hutchison (St Martin’s Press, New York, 1997).
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Web of Gold, by Guy Patton and Robin Mackness (Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 2000).
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Ratlines, by Mark Aarons and John Loftus (Mandarin, London, 1991).
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The Bormann Brotherhood, by William Stevenson (Arthur Baker, London, 1973).
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Unpublished manuscript by Peter Dale Scott on Barbie, Dulles and Operation Sunrise. It details how the OSS-SS preserved each other while serving their true masters: transnational corporations.
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The Last Circle, an unpublished manuscript by Carol Marshall, which investigates the so-called “Octopus“.
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My thanks also go to Catherine Austin Fitts (www.solari.com) for her invaluable help.
The Criminal History of the Papacy
Part 1 of 3
Extracted from Nexus Magazine
Volume 14, Number 1
(December 2006 - January 2007)
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The papal office has an unparalleled record of corruption and criminality over the centuries, and the true history of the popes is one of scandals, cruelty, debauchery, reigns of terror, warfare and moral depravity.
Author’s Note:
Some of the dates for the popes and events in papal history are estimates; even the Church admits as much. The dates were further complicated by the changes made to the Julian calendar by Pope Gregory XIII (pope 1572—85) in 1582.
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Most Catholics go through life and never hear a word of reproach for any pope or member of the clergy. Yet the recorded history of the lives of the clerical hierarchy bears no resemblance to its modern-day portrayal, and the true stories of the popes in particular are among the most misrepresented in religious history.
The Catholic historian and Archbishop of New York, John Cardinal Farley (d. c. 1916), subtly admitted that the,
“old legends of their dissolute lives may be partly true… that they didn’t sternly insist upon sexual virtue and injustice was a general license of the papal court, but it is probable that moral improvement was at the vanguard of their thinking”
(Catholic Encyclopedia, Pecci ed., 1897, iii, p. 207).
The real character of the popes as a rule has been so falsely represented that many people don’t know that so many popes were not only decadent but were also the most savage and perfidious of military strategists ever known.
Cardinal Farley added this comment:
“The popes were temporal rulers of the civil territory and they naturally had recourse to force the re-establishment or extend the States of the Church until the conclusion of peace was confirmed … their attempts to purify particularly the Duchy of Rome caused them considerable distress and the need to resort to violence, but always on the side of mercy … lives were lost in the service of truth but the legal basis for the Christian Church to hold and transmit properties for the benefit of revenues was given to them [the popes] by Emperor Constantine in 312.”
(Catholic Encyclopedia, Pecci ed., ii, pp. 157—169)
The comments of the cardinal warrant our attention, for within them rests a little-known story of the leaders of the Christian religion and reveals that today’s presentation of popes as incorruptible moral oracles is untrue. The hidden history of doctrinal foundations that permitted a papal alliance with conflict and licentiousness, and to what degree decadence among the clergy is “partly true”, provides for an extraordinary story—one that has no precedent or parallel in the history of world religions.
In the preface to an official papal record commissioned for publication by the Holy See, called The Popes: A Concise Biographical History, the Christian reader is tactfully prepared for some upcoming and unpleasant facts about popes with this apologetic admission:
“Some Catholics may find surprises when they read the papal biographies in this book. The part we are accustomed to think of the pope playing in the Church may need a little adjustment.”
(The Popes: A Concise Biographical History, Eric John, ed., Burns & Oates, Publishers to the Holy See, London, 1964, p. 19, published under the imprimatur of Georgius L. Craven)
This comment provides readers with a note of caution in dealing with papal history, but in this biographical history the Holy See did not think it prudent to publish full details of the true nature of the papal court.
Its real history is intermingled with,
“centuries of trafficking in ecclesiastical appointments, deceit, scandals, immorality, aggression, frauds, murder and cruelty, and the true disposition of the popes is knowingly falsely presented by the Church today”
(A History of the Popes, Dr Joseph McCabe [1867—1955], C. A. Watts & Co., London, 1939).
For centuries, the Church maintained a comprehensive account of the lives of the popes who, up until the 11th century, called themselves “ecumenical patriarchs”, and amazing excesses are recorded. Official Catholic records provide extraordinary confessions of wickedness in the whole Christian clergy, and the implications surrounding this knowledge begin to assume major new proportions when considered in light of the central Church claim of unquestionable piety in the clerical hierarchy.
The editorial committees of the Catholic Encyclopedia claim that their volumes are “the exponent of Catholic truth” (preface), and what is presented in this overview is assembled primarily from those records and without prejudice. In the same spirit, we also have available several papal diaries, letters and reports from foreign ambassadors at the Holy See to their governments, monastic documents, senatorial Roman records as well as access to the official and ancient registers of the ecclesiastical courts of London.
Also of great help in this investigation was the availability of an original version of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, a tome that Pope Clement XIII (1758—69) ordered destroyed immediately after its publication in 1759. These documents uniformly report a condition of centuries of extraordinary debasement in the papal hierarchy and, when considered in conjunction with the circumstances of their production, their contents can only be classed as astounding. The pretended holiness and piety of popes as publicly presented today is not represented in the records of history, and that provides proof of the dishonesty of the Church’s own portrayal.
Pious Catholic historian and author Bishop Frotheringham extended this summary of Christian leaders up to his time:
“Many of the popes were men of the most abandoned lives. Some were magicians (occultists); others were noted for sedition, war, slaughter and profligacy of manners, for avarice and simony. Others were not even members of Christ, but the basest of criminals and enemies of all godliness. Some were children of their father, the Devil; most were men of blood; some were not even priests. Others were heretics. If the pope be a heretic, he is ipso facto no pope.”
(The Cradle of Christ, Bishop Frotheringham, 1877; see also Catholic Encyclopedia, xii, pp. 700-703, passim, published under the imprimatur of Archbishop Farley)
And heretics they were, with many popes publicly admitting disbelief in the Gospel story, as we shall see. These facts are well known to Catholic historians who dishonestly tell their readers that the popes were virtuous and competent men with “soaring religious minds” (The Papacy, George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd, London, 1964). The reality of the matter is that they were intent only upon their own interests, not those of God, and cultivated a system of papal vice more assiduously than Catholic writers of Church history dare to reveal openly.
They were resented by the laity and, when better economic conditions awakened the minds of a developing European middle class, there was widespread rebellion against them. Christian records show that popes were clearly a long way removed from the modern-day presentation of their character, and in trying to portray them with a pious past the Church developed a doctrinal facade that brazenly and deceptively presents them as devout.
With the late-20th-century model of the papacy in one’s mind, it is difficult to imagine what it would have been like in the 16th or 14th centuries, let alone the 10th or the eighth. The now-called expounders of “Christian virtue” were brutal killers, and “crimes against the faith were high treason, and as such were punishable with death” (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., xiv, p. 768). Popes waded through rivers of blood to attain their earthly objectives and many personally led their episcopal militia into the field of battle.
The Church ordered its “secular arm” to force its dogma upon humanity by “mass murder” (The Extermination of the Cathars, Simonde de Sismondi, 1826), and “the clergy, discharging in each district the functions of local state officials, seem never to have quite regained the religious spirit” (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., i, p. 507). Apologetic contributors to Christian history vainly try to portray an air of sophistry about a papal past that scandalized Europe for centuries and one that is clearly unsophisticated and primitive.
As the line of popes begins obscurely, we shall begin our assessment in the year 896 when “a body of nobles with swinish and brutal lusts, many of whom could not write even their own names” (Annals of Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims; pub. c. 905), captured the papacy and drew it to a close 631 years later in 1527 when, under the subterfuges of Pope Clement VII (1523—1534), Rome fell to the army of Emperor Charles V.
In this brief evaluation of just a few popes of these centuries, we read:
“On the death of Pope Formosus (896) there began for the papacy a time of the deepest humiliation, such as it has never been experienced before or since. After the successor of Formosus, Boniface VI, had ruled only fifteen days, Stephen VII [VI] was raised to the papal chair. In his blind rage, Stephen not only abused the memory of Formosus but also treated his body with indignity. Pope Stephen was strangled in prison in the summer of 897, and the six following popes (to 904) owed their elevation to the struggles of the rival political parties. Christophorus, the last of them, was overthrown by Sergius III (904—911).”
(Catholic Encyclopedia, ii, p. 147)
Such periods of “deepest humiliation” to the papacy were quite recurrent, and have been even into the 21st century when the extent of priesthood paedophilia was publicly exposed (Apology of Pope John Paul II, March 2002). It was Pope Stephen VII (VI), “a gouty and gluttonous old priest” (Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, c. 922—972), who ordered the rotting corpse of Pope Formosus to be exhumed from its grave of eight months, tied upright in a chair and put on trial for transgressions of the canons. In front of his putrefying body and dressed in purple and gold regalia stood the pope, his bishops, the nobles of Rome and Lamberto of Tuscany.
The “trial” was a grotesque and obscene farce. The pope paced backwards and forwards and shrieked at the corpse, declaring it guilty. A deacon, standing beside the decomposing body of the ex-pope, answered on its behalf. In this macabre incident, today piously called the “Cadaver Synod”, the deceased pope was duly condemned, stripped of his vestments, three fingers cut from his right hand and his remains dumped into the River Tiber.
“In this disgusting business, he [Pope Stephen VII (VI)] cannot be excused for what followed. In declaring the dead pope deposed he also annulled all his acts, including his ordinations. His grim and grisly role provoked a violent reaction in Rome, and in late July or early August Pope Stephen was imprisoned and later strangled.”
(The Popes: A Concise Biographical History, ibid., p. 160)
Morbid in its realism, the mental limitations of ancient popes is thus shown. From these and similar displays, we understand why the monks at the Eulogomenopolis monastery, today called Monte Cassino, described the Asinarian Station (later renamed the Lateran Palace) as “an abode of wrath, a charnel-house… a place of exotic vice and crime”.
The Unholy Reign of the Whores
Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, whose Antapodosis treats papal history from 886 to 950, left a remarkable picture of the vice of the popes and their episcopal colleagues, maybe with a little jealousy:
“They hunted on horses with gold trappings, had rich banquets with dancing girls when the hunt was over, and retired with these shameless whores to beds with silk sheets and gold-embroidered covers. All the Roman bishops were married, and their wives made silk dresses out of the sacred vestments.”
Their lovers were the leading noble ladies of the city, and “two voluptuous Imperial women”, Theodora and her daughter Marozia, “ruled the papacy of the tenth century” (Antapodosis, ibid.). Renowned Vatican historian Cardinal Caesar Baronius (1538—1607) called it the “Rule of the Whores“, which “really gave place to the even more scandalous rule of the whoremongers” (Annales Ecclesiastici, folio iii, Antwerp, 1597).
All that Bishop Liutprand reveals in detail about Theodora is that she compelled a handsome young priest to reciprocate her passion for him and had him appointed Archbishop of Ravenna. Later, Theodora summoned her archiepiscopal lover from Ravenna and made him Pope John X (pope 914—928, d. 928).
John X is chiefly remembered as a military commander. He took to the field in person against the Saracens and defeated them. He indulged in nepotism, or the enrichment of his family, and his conduct prepared the way for a deeper degradation of the papacy. He invited the Hungarians, who at this time were still half-civilized Asiatics, to come and fight his enemies and thus he brought a new and terrible plague upon his country.
He had no principles in his diplomatic, political or private conduct. He spurned Theodora and enticed the charming young daughter of Hugh of Provence into his papal bedroom. Spurned, Theodora then married Guido, Marquis of Tuscany, and together they carried out a coup d’état against John X. Theodora died suddenly by suspected poisoning, and John X entered into a bitter quarrel with Marozia and the leading nobles of Rome. John had brought his brother Peter to Rome, raised him to the rank of nobility, and heaped upon him the profitable offices which the elder nobles had come to regard as their preserve. It was an internal struggle for power.
The nobles, led by Marozia, drove Peter, Pope John and their troops from the city. The pope and his brother increased their army and returned to Rome, but a body of Marozia’s men cut their way into the Lateran Palace and murdered Peter before the pope’s eyes. John was captured, declared deposed in May 928 and smothered to death with a pillow in the Castel Sant’ Angelo.
Marozia and her faction then appointed Leo VI (928) the new pope, but replaced him seven months later with Stephen VIII (VII). He ruled for two years and then Marozia gave the papacy to her son, John XI (c. 910—936; pope 931—35). He was illegitimately fathered by Pope Sergius III, as “confirmed by Flodoard, a reliable contemporary writer” (The Popes: A Concise Biographical History, ibid., p. 162).
Sergius had previously taken the papacy by force with the help of Marozia’s mother, Theodora. Both Theodora and Sergius took a leading part in the earlier outrage on the corpse of Formosus, and Sergius was later accused of murdering his two predecessors. The Church defended itself, but in doing so revealed that he wasn’t the only pope sexually involved with Marozia:
“It is commonly believed that Pope Sergius, although a middle-aged man, formed a union with the young Marozia and by her had a son, the future Pope John XI. Most of the information we have on the career of Marozia and the Roman scandals in which she and a series of popes were involved is derived from hostile sources and may be exaggerated.”
(The Popes: A Concise Biographical History, ibid.)
With sacerdotal dictatorship, Marozia ruled Christianity for several decades from the papal castle near St Peter’s, and dealt with everything Christian except routine matters. She could not sign her own name, yet she was the head of the Christian Church—a fact known to historians who have at least an elementary acquaintance with the papal record. She was amorously aggressive, callous, densely ignorant and completely unscrupulous. She appointed ruthless warrior-bishops to strengthen her factions, and she triumphed in her rule over opponents.
To translate the words of the Roman people literally, they called her “the Popes’ whore” (plural) and she was directly responsible for selecting and installing at least four popes. Modern-day apologists say her promotions were “scandalous”, but those popes are now accepted by the Church as “legitimate” successors of St Peter. At the time, however, large bodies of good folk deeply resented the obscene farce the papal religion had become and turned upon it with disdain and anger.
Later in his papacy, Pope John XI took ill and Marozia temporarily installed an elderly monk in the papal chair. He subsequently refused to resign and was forcibly removed to a prison cell to be starved to death. John XI then resumed his position and exhausted his remaining wealth hiring soldiers to restore order in Rome. The city was heavy with a feeling of revolt against the Church and the appalling clerical morals that existed throughout Italy. John XI then set out to recover and secure the rich temporal domains of the papacy, but in 936 he died. Thus, in this condensed description, we learn with amazement of the days when loose women ruled the Holy See and a Christian doctrine had not yet been developed.
The Papacy Sold amidst New Depths of Wickedness
As incredible as it may seem, the papacy then sank to a lower depth of wickedness and remained in this condition for nearly a thousand years. Christian historians airily brush aside the true nature of the popes, saying that they never regarded them as “impeccable” and ignoring the fact that they committed outrages against every standard of human decency.
Pope John XII (Octavian, c. 937—964, pope 955—964, The Popes, A Concise Biographical History, ibid., pp. 166-7) was another in the succession of impious popes and he opened his inglorious career by invoking pagan gods and goddesses as he flung the dice in gambling sessions. He toasted Satan during a drinking spree and put his notorious mistress/prostitute Marcia in charge of his brothel in the Lateran Palace (Antapodosis, ibid.).
He “liked to have around him a collection of Scarlet Women”, said the monk-chronicler Benedict of Soracte, and at his trial for the murder of an opponent his clergy swore on oath that he’d had incestuous relations with his sisters and had raped his nuns (Annals of Beneventum in the Monumenta Germaniae, v). He and his mistresses got so drunk at a banquet that they accidentally set fire to the building. It would be difficult to imagine a pontiff who was farther removed from saintliness, yet in an age when the average life of a pope was two years, he held the throne for 10 years.
However, his life came to a sudden and violent end when, according to pious chroniclers, he was killed by the Devil while raping a woman in a house in the suburbs. The truth is that the Holy Father was thrashed so severely by the enraged husband of the woman that he died of injuries eight days later. Emperor Otto then demanded that the clergy select a priest of respectable life to succeed John XII, but they could not find one.
The new pope, Leo VIII (963—965), was a layman drawn from the “civil service who was put through all clerical orders in one day” (ibid.). Leo VIII is reckoned by the modern-day Church to be “a true Pope”, but “his election is a puzzle”—one that canonists have not cared to unravel (ibid.).
The Catholic Encyclopedia gives additional accounts of papal debasement:
“The Popes ‘Benedict’ from the fourth to the ninth inclusive (IV—IX) belong to the darkest period of papal history… Benedict VI (973) was thrown into prison by the anti-pope Boniface VII (d. 983), and strangled by his orders in 974. Benedict VII was a layman and became pope by force, and drove out Boniface VII. Pope Benedict IX [c. 1012—1055/1065/1085; pope 1032—45, 1047, 1048] had long caused scandal to the Church by his disorderly life. His immediate successor, Pope Gregory VI [1044—46], had persuaded Benedict IX to resign the Chair of Peter, and to do so bestowed valuable possessions on him.”
(Catholic Encyclopedia, i, p. 31)
Anti-pope Boniface VII was described by Gerbert (to become Pope Sylvester II, 999—1003) as “a horrible monster that in criminality surpassed all the rest of mankind”, but the “scandal” of Pope Benedict IX deserves special mention. His name was Grottaferrata Teofilatto (Theophylact, in some records) and in 1032 he won the murderous scramble for the wealth of the papacy. He immediately excommunicated leaders who were hostile to him and quickly established a reign of terror. He officially opened the doors of “the palace of the popes” to homosexuals and turned it into an organized and profitable male brothel (The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Horace K. Mann, Kegan Paul, London, 1925).
His violent and licentious conduct provoked the Roman people, and in January 1044 the residents of the city elected John of Sabine, under the name of Pope Sylvester III, to replace him. But Sylvester was quickly driven out by Benedict’s brothers and fled for his life into the Sabine hills.
Benedict IX then sold the papacy to his godfather, Giovanni Graziano, who assumed the papal chair as Pope Gregory VI, but in 1047 Benedict reappeared and announced he was reclaiming the papacy.
The Church added that he was,
“…immoral… cruel and indifferent to spiritual things. The testimony to his depravity shows his disinterest in religious matters, and his disrespect for an ascetic life was well known. He was the worst pope since John XII”
(The Popes: A Concise Biographical History, ibid., p. 175).
Upon his death, undertakers refused to build him a coffin. He was surreptitiously buried in a cloth under the cover of darkness. Four succeeding popes then briefly held the papal position, and the following paragraph from the Catholic Encyclopedia is pregnant with evidence of the moral depravity of the entire priesthood:
“At the time of Leo IX’s election in 1049, according to the testimony of St Bruno, Bishop of Segni, ‘the whole Church was in wickedness, holiness had disappeared, justice had perished, and truth had been buried; Simon Magus was lording it over the Church, whose popes and bishops were given to luxury and fornication. The scientific and ascetic training of the popes left much to be desired, the moral standard of many being very low and the practice of celibacy not everywhere observed.
Bishops obtained their offices in irregular ways, whose lives and conversations are strangely at variance with their calling, who go through their duties not for Christ but for motives of worldly gain. The members of the clergy were in many places regarded with scorn, and their avaricious ideas, luxury and immorality rapidly gained ground at the centre of clerical life. When ecclesiastical authority grew weak at the fountain head, it necessarily decayed elsewhere. In proportion, as the papal authority lost the respect of many, resentment grew against both the Curia and the papacy.’”
(Catholic Encyclopedia, vi, pp. 793-4; xii, pp. 700-03, passim)
Pope Leo IX (b. 1002, d. 1054) was an unscrupulous adventurer who spent his pontificate touring Europe with a quota of armed knights and left the world worse than he found it. The Church called him,
“Lapsi” (lapsed), coyly admitting that “he defected from the faith… he fell away by actually offering sacrifice to the false gods (thurificati)… it is not known why he recanted his religion”
(Catholic Encyclopedia, Pecci ed., iii, p. 117).
St Peter Damian (1007—72), the fiercest censor of his age, unrolled a frightful picture of decay in clerical morality in the lurid pages of his Book of Gomorrah, a curious Christian record that remarkably survived centuries of Church cover-ups and book-burnings.
He said:
“A natural tendency to murder and brutalize appears with the popes. Nor do they have any inclination to conquer their abominable lust; many are seen to have employed into licentiousness for an occasion to the flesh, and hence, using this liberty of theirs, perpetrating every crime.”
After a lifetime of research into the lives of the popes, Lord Acton (1834—1902), English historian and founder-editor of The Cambridge Modern History, summarized the militarist papal attitude when he observed:
“The popes were not only murderers in the great style, but they also made murder a legal basis of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation.”
(The Cambridge Modern History, vol. 1, pp. 673-77)
Maybe they took their example from Jesus Christ who, after being made king, issued this murderous instruction:
“Bring my enemies here that did not wish me as king, and kill them in my presence”
(Gospel of Luke, 19:27, Mount Sinai Manuscript of the Bible, British Museum, MS 43725, 1934).
The Catholic Bible provides a softer approach:
“But those, my enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me”
(Luke 19:27).
Popes today do everything in their power to present Jesus as a harmless religious preacher and a prophet of peace, but carefully refrain from entering into discussion about this Gospel passage, one that nullifies everything that Christianity purports to represent.
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