“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
– Beckett, (1964 film)

VATICAN CITY – Certainty is the opposite of faith. One is belief in the absence of proof, blind trust in an invisible force that never exists beyond our own personal conviction. The former is plain to see, leaves no room for doubt and only a fool would refuse to acknowledge the weight of its reality.

Cardinal Giovanni Benelli was no fool and whatever faith remained in the man nicknamed “Vatican’s Kissinger” had all but vanished in the early morning hours of September 29, 1978. Albino Luciani, known only briefly to the world as Pope John Paul I, had been found dead in his chambers 33 days into his papacy. Inconsolable, the recently-appointed Archbishop of Florence retired to his quarters inside the opulent Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.

Benelli, the former Deputy Secretary of State for John Paul I’s predecessor, Paul VI, had been the first person Luciani had turned to upon discovering the fraudulent activities taking place at Banca Cattolica del Veneto seven years earlier, a modest financial institution which had been founded to serve the needs of the regional diocese.

Responding to complaints from local priests and bishops over sudden loan policy changes, Luciani, who was then serving as the reluctant Archbishop of Venice, embarked on a discrete investigation of the small bank. What he found was a Pandora’s box of greed and corruption that reached to the highest levels of power in the Vatican and extended across the international banking sector, state governments and the mafia. 

The Venetian Patriarch related his suspicions to Benelli who confirmed them. Banca Cattolica had been sold to a bag man for the Sicilian mafia by Msgr. Paul Marcinkus, the Chicago-born Director of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), colloquially known as the Vatican Bank. 

As Benelli rattled off the names of the conspirators, which included the Pope, and the unbelievable web of fraud and outright theft woven together by a seemingly untouchable group of Church insiders and their mobbed up cohorts, Luciani must have felt that he had inadvertently peered behind the vail of his own faith’s material structures and found a dark, soulless chasm staring back at him.

A few months after this meeting, Pope Paul VI himself paid Luciani a visit in Venice where he mentioned the “little local difficulty over finance” and offered to make a personal donation to alleviate the trouble. He made Luciani a Cardinal six months later and Benelli, who had advised against broaching the issues at the Veneto bank with the pontiff, travelled to see him soon after to reassure him that their previous conversation had not been forgotten.

Luciani realized something was very wrong in the halls of the Vatican. The son of a socialist labor organizer and a school teacher, he followed his religious vocation as many do, with a naïve understanding of the earthly realities governing an institution as ancient and powerful as the Roman Catholic Church. 

Always meticulous, it’s likely that Luciani had already begun to keep notes about the outrages Pope Paul VI’s deputy secretary of state continued to share with him, such as the billion-dollar counterfeit securities scandal involving Marcinkus and the Italian-American mafia that had brought US Department of Justice officials and two FBI agents to Benelli’s offices a few weeks before his visit.

During the conclave that would result in his election as Paul VI’s successor, Luciani is reported¹ to have muttered “no, please no” under his breath as the final tally of votes were counted. The higher Luciani climbed on the ladder of Church power, the more foreboding his demeanor and the heavier the load on his shoulders felt.

Saddled with the knowledge of how deep the rot in the Vatican reached and furnished with the names of the people directly involved, Luciani’s mandate to clean things up seemed to come from dissident elements within the Roman Curia like Benelli and other bishops, who appeared to place all their hopes on Luciani’s innate sense of justice.

He is said to have been clutching the explosive list of Vatican staff replacements in his hands when Sister Vincenza allegedly found his cadaver sitting up in bed with a morbid, teeth-bearing grin on his face. A dramatic detail that buttresses the theory that Luciani was murdered to keep him from exposing the IOR and its links to the mafia, but which has never been confirmed, like so many other mysteries surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I. 

Did Giovanni Benelli weep that morning because he had attempted to empower a leader to set the Church back on “its path” and failed, or did he weep because he was instrumental in setting up a murder on behalf of the true power behind the papal throne, as an example for anyone who might dare challenge it?

A Different Church

By the time Albino Luciani ascended to the papacy as John Paul I, the Roman Catholic Church had come under the near total sway of foreign secular interests emanating out of Washington and London through strategically deployed weapons of Cold War propaganda and counter-intelligence operations, which began targeting the Church hierarchy directly² in the lead up to the Second World War.

These interests managed to establish a foothold within the highest echelons of the Church in the 1960s, particularly after the Second Vatican Council³, when Liberation Theology was propagated throughout the so-called developing world spreading quasi-socialist ideas among the poorest segments of society in Latin America, especially.

Luciani, himself, was a strong advocate for the modernization of Church doctrine that characterized proponents of Liberation Theology around one uniquely controversial issue: Contraception. In fact, it was his stance on contraception that won him the support of many “third world” bishops and helped pave the way for his surprising victory over the Roman Curia’s favored candidate for the chair of St. Peter. 

Overpopulation, according to Luciani, was the principle limiting factor for social mobility among the world’s poor. The question of whether or not the Church should approve the use of a contraceptive pill had divided the institutional authorities, but it was Luciani who had provided one of the most well-researched and poignant argument in favor of the pill to Pope Paul VI, who would dictate the Church’s final judgement.

Some contend that it was his position on birth control⁴ and not his knowledge of the dark web of fraud and money laundering taking place at the Vatican Bank that really got him killed. Indeed, upon his unexpected rise to the apex of Catholicism, all evidence of his pro-pill stances was meticulously scrubbed by members of the Roman Curia, including the report Luciani had prepared for the commission tasked with weighing the matter in 1968.

In July of that year, Pope Paul VI published his decision in the encyclical Humanae Vitae⁵ categorically prohibiting the use of any kind of artificial birth control. The verdict caused a deep discontent in many bishops all over the world, who like Luciani, had hoped that the commission would see the potential social benefits of accessible forms of birth control.

When Luciani became Pope, his opinions on the matter were doctored by the Vatican and international press, falsely presenting him as a staunch conservative who had unequivocally backed his predecessor’s position on contraception. Days after the white smoke announced his triumph to the outside world, Pope John Paul I expressed his intentions to revisit the issue to his Secretary of State, Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot.

Specifically, the new pope revealed that he was willing to discuss Humanae Vitae with a group trying to gestate a meeting with the pontiff through the American embassy in Rome. Leading the delegation would have been US congressman James Scheuer, a member of Rockefeller’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future⁶and vice-chairman of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA); a UN agency focused on reproductive rights and health. 

Scheuer had become aware of Luciani’s seminal report on artificial birth control and sought to broach the Church on the issue in hopes of reversing Pope Paul VI’s dictum. Less than ten days before Pope John Paul I’s body was discovered by his long-time personal assistant, Villot and Luciani met privately to discuss the latter’s misgivings surrounding Humanae Vitae: “During the next forty-five minutes while you and I look forward with anticipation to our next meal,” the Pope told Villot, “a further thousand children will die of malnutrition.”

Arrangements for the meeting were handled very discretely by both Villot’s office and the US State Department in order to avoid unnecessary public backlash before it could take place. In addition, a major conference was scheduled to occur the following month in the city of Puebla, Mexico, that had been postponed due to Paul VI’s demise and intended to be a follow up to the historic Medellin conference, a.k.a. Second Episcopal Conference of Latin America, which had launched the tenets of Liberation Theology.

The French Cardinal’s opinions were diametrically opposed to Luciani’s in terms of birth control and liberal reforms, in general, along with most of the Roman Curia. He had been retained as Secretary of State by John Paul I as a matter of expediency, since Luciani was the most surprised of anyone that he had become the supreme leader of the Catholic Church and therefore his replacement was only a matter of time. 

Masonic Fingerprints

Villot was the first person to enter Pope John Paul I’s room after a horrified Sister Vicenza encountered the deathly visage. He proceeded to clean up the crime scene, removing the papers clutched in the dead pope’s hand, his reading glasses and the medicine bottles on his bedside table⁷. Villot also took letters from the pontiff’s desk and directed his assistants to have the Vatican’s embalming services arrive immediately.

The Secretary of State issued strict orders that the tragic news should not be made public until he determined it would. However, word had already slipped past his best attempts to control the narrative and John Paul I’s passing was known beyond the Vatican’s walls within minutes, seriously hampering Villot’s rush to dispose of any evidence of foul play.

On the previous afternoon, Villot and Luciani had held one of their many meetings together. This one, in particular, dealt with the Pope’s ongoing investigation into Paul Marcinkus and the Vatican Bank. Having already expressed his impression of Marcinkus to Villot when they first discussed the contraceptive pill days earlier, Luciani brought the hammer down on Marcinkus and instructed his Secretary of State to remove the IOR’s director that very day.

Luciani was moving quickly, which meant his enemies had to move quicker. One of the first people to witness a violation of Villot’s decree of silence over the Pope’s sudden death was Paul Marcinkus himself, who happened to be at the Vatican just an hour after Villot had tampered with the papal corpse. Informed by a Swiss Guard, Marcinkus stared blankly at the solider, who felt compelled to repeat the news a second time due to the Monsignor’s curiously vacant reaction⁹.

Marcinkus was only one of several changes Luciani intended to make at the IOR. The Vatican Bank’s scandals had long been reported in the Italian press and pressure had been building to do something about the rampant corruption that had obviously been reigning at the Church’s financial entity. Not only would Luciani not live to make them, but his successor – the much-lionized Pope John Paul II – made sure Marcinkus and company continued to head the IOR.

Both Villot and Marcinkus had motive and opportunity to assassinate Albino Luciani. Of the two, Villot had the most direct access to the Pope, while Marcinkus seemed to have the most urgent need to eliminate him. A murder conspiracy between them is plausible enough, but personal interests are insufficient to move forward with the killing of a figure as important as the pope, given the implications of mounting a successful cover up in its aftermath.

More than Marcinkus’ or Villot’s jobs had to be at stake for the poisoning of Pope John Paul I to occur as it most certainly did in the fall of 1978. Even the IOR’s organized crime partners and their political blackmail operations fail to account for the complete radio silence that followed Luciani’s 33-day papacy and the uninterrupted illicit market activities of the Vatican Bank and other entities of the most powerful socio-economic force in the world.

Introduction to

Breaking God’s Syndicate: Capital’s Long War to Replace the Roman Catholic Church

Behind Pope John Paul I’s homicide lie centuries of wars, factional skirmishes and foreign intrigues all vying for a piece of the Roman Catholic Church and its vast power. The most recent efforts to co-opt the Church have their origins in the Industrial Revolution and the advent of a proletarian class, that was to undergird the political paradigm of the modern nation state and post-mercantilist forms of capital accumulation.

Prior to the modern concepts that began gestating in eighteenth century Europe, national identity was a function of religious identity and Christendom reigned supreme over all other faiths. Competing denominations notwithstanding, the vast majority of the Western world was generationally tied to Christian spiritual traditions and with the two notable exceptions of Britain and Prussia, Roman Catholics comprised the overwhelming majority of Europe’s population¹⁰.

Catholicism greatly expanded its reach beyond Europe as well, through a long-standing agreement with the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns known as the real patronato – a kind of lease extended by the pope to these monarchies, granting them the ‘rights’ for colonial exploitation in exchange for development of missionary infrastructure on all newly ‘discovered’ territories and material support for the Church.

First established through the Romanus Pontifex¹¹ papal bull, the system of real patronato persisted for nearly four centuries, guaranteeing that Catholicism would also become the traditional heritage of millions more throughout their colonial territories, covering most of the North and South American continents, parts of Africa and even Asia.

Rival colonial enterprises emanating from the Protestant kingdoms of Europe were not only a century behind their Latin counterparts, but had no comparable missionary capabilities. Slavery, although certainly used by the Spanish and Portuguese, became a much more prominent and intrinsic feature of the British colonial system as a result. 

Whereas the Castilian monarchs, in particular, relied on the Church’s missionary work to indoctrinate native populations and coax them into serfdom, British colonists found that the only way they could compensate for the labor disadvantage was to lean into slavery as modus operandi to increase the productivity of its colonial possessions.

It didn’t take long for the moral degeneracy of a stripped-down, fully dehumanized labor market as that which emerged in the American colonies to scandalize British society itself and while members of the establishment continuously sought ways to justify it – notably in pseudo-scientific terms, like eugenics – alternatives were pursued in some intellectual circles of the Enlightenment, albeit heavily tinged with the racial justification doctrines of social Darwinism.

However, productive capacity always came down to an ability to command a sufficiently large pool of labor, and the vast majority of that potential labor pool happened to reside in the domains under Roman Catholic suzerainty. War against the pope’s temporal allies was a straightforward proposition for the Protestant powers. But, how do you break centuries-worth of religious programming?

When serfdom was abolished, first in Central and later in Eastern Europe, the millions of displaced peasants slated to find their way in the new factories and emerging labor markets were overwhelmingly Catholic, not to mention the millions more in Latin America’s newly independent colonies, making Rome into the largest stakeholder of the most critical resource of the incipient industrial order: Human capital. 

Over the following weeks, Silicon Icarus will explore this fundamental struggle, that underlies the shallow political discourse of our age beginning with one of the first direct manifestations of this root conflict, which erupted violently in Mexico, where the Roman Catholic Church, European powers and the burgeoning Anglo-American capitalist juggernaut all had a significant stake in the future of labor. 

PART I

[1 In God’s Name, Yallop]

[2 Masters of the Apocalypse: Holy Crown Doctrine, JFK, and the Cold War Rodeo – https://siliconicarus.org/2022/11/24/masters-of-the-apocalypse-holy-crown-doctrine-jfk-and-the-cold-war-rodeo-part-i-open/]

[3 Building the Impact Finance Regime: Nigeria’s Civil War and the Road to Cyber-Colonialism – https://siliconicarus.org/2022/08/16/building-the-impact-finance-regime-nigerias-civil-war-and-the-road-to-cyber-colonialism-part-i/]

[4 John Paul I and birth control: Rare audio recording shows he wanted change in church teaching before becoming pope – https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2022/06/23/pope-john-paul-birth-control-243227]

[5 Encyclical Letter Humanae Vitae of The Supreme Pontiff Paul Vi

To His Venerable Brothers, The Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops and Other Local Ordinaries in Peace and Communion With The Apostolic See, To The Clergy and Faithful of the Whole Catholic World, and To All Men of Good Will, On The Regulation Of Birth – https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html]

[6 The Report of The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future – https://www.population-security.org/rockefeller/001_population_growth_and_the_american_future.htm#The%20Commission]

[7 In God’s Name, Yallop]

[8 Ibid.]

[9 Ibid.]

[10 Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1830, Aston – https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam033/2002067618.pdf]

[11 Romanus Pontifex – https://www.papalencyclicals.net/nichol05/romanus-pontifex.htm]