Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised.
The Vatican in Rome is the world's smallest sovereign state, but with over a billion Catholic followers worldwide, from here the Pope presides over a powerful, lucrative and secretive religious empire. The whole of the Vatican and the Catholic Church is full of secrets because of what it's done over the last 2,000 years. Many of the greatest secrets the Vatican has tried to hide over the years are in ancient history, however, but modern.
There are persistent rumors about close links between the Vatican Bank and the Mafia. There are very serious allegations that during World War II, the Vatican collaborated with the Nazis. You can find actual documents that show that members of the Vatican helped Nazis escape. And surprisingly, it's claimed the Vatican operates a telescope to secretly search for aliens.
If they believe that Jesus Christ is going to return as an alien, wouldn't they want to use this telescope to try to make contact with him first? I would like to see a whistleblower come forward and tell the secrets they've been withholding. Then we could properly rewrite history.
Securely housed deep inside the Vatican are the Vatican Apostolic Archive, known until recently as the Vatican Secret Archive, containing the Catholic Church's most important and potentially controversial documents, including the private papers of every pope stretching back a thousand years. The Vatican Secret Archives or Archivum Secretum actually, genuinely only means private archives in Latin.
The word secret doesn't really come into it, but there's no doubt that an awful lot of what's in those vaults is most definitely secrets. There's 50 miles of shelving and you're only allowed to see certain parts because there's an awful lot in there in that 50 miles that I believe the Catholic Church doesn't want anyone to find out about. Scholars are allowed limited access to the secret archive.
But significantly, all Vatican documents and private papers of the Pope can only be accessed at least 70 years after the end of a Pope's reign. As a result, it's usually necessary to wait for three quarters of a century before there's any hope of finding out the secret truth about the Vatican's controversial scandals. The Vatican has to be one of the most secret organizations in the history of the world.
It guards its nasty little secrets, of which there are a great many, jealously. It has been alleged, for example, that the Vatican collaborated with the Nazis. The Vatican and some historians strongly dispute this. But until now, the truth has been hidden because the Vatican's documents, written during the Second World War, have remained inaccessible in the secret archive.
Pope Pius XII was pontiff during World War II and as such had a great deal of contact with the Nazi leadership as well as the Allied leadership. He officially maintained a position of neutrality, being in the Vatican in the absolute heart of fascist Italy. There's been great speculation over how much he did and did not appease the Nazis.
Some people say that in fact behind the scenes, Pope Pius XII and the Vatican secretly undermined the Nazi regime. In my opinion, I believe that the Pope and his cardinals were actually helping to save the lives of thousands of Jews by harboring them, hiding them in their churches, getting them out of the country, either out of Italy, out of other countries, and saving their lives.
Critics, however, have claimed the complete opposite, calling Pope Pius XII "Hitler's Pope." In particular, the very serious allegation has been made that the Pope was anti-Semitic and ignored evidence of the Holocaust. The fierce controversy about the Vatican's role during World War II continues to rage.
So in hope of showing that Pope Pius XII really was an anti-Nazi humanitarian, not a pro-Nazi collaborator, the current pontiff, the reforming Pope Francis, made the unusual decision to allow early access to the Vatican's wartime secret archive. Scholars were able to view these materials beginning in early 2020.
Pope Francis has just made a really exciting announcement that he is going to release nine years early the archives of Pope Pius XII, whose records may or may not contain evidence damning the Church and how it reacted to the Nazi threat. Did Pope Pius XII turn a blind eye to the Holocaust and the Nazis' policy of genocide? Or did he help save thousands of Jews?
Did the Vatican help leading Nazis escape justice after the end of World War II, as has been alleged? With access to the Vatican's wartime archive, historians should have clearer answers, although it could take scholars years to review and make conclusions from all the newly released materials.
There's this long-standing story that says the Vatican helped Nazis escape after the war. Why? Because a lot of Catholic priests were historically quite sympathetic to Nazism because they saw Nazism as being the only force in the world that could stand up to communism, which they thought represented an existential threat to the Catholic Church. So it was kind of like, you know, my enemy's enemy is my friend.
Because over the years in small Catholic archives scattered across Europe, historians have discovered startling evidence about what the Church did in 1945 after the Nazis lost the war.
I went to the archives of the Santa Maria dell'Anima, which is the Austrian church associated with the Vatican, and there you see the records of a man called Bishop Alois Hudal, Luigi Hudal. He was an Austrian nationalist, loved the Nazis, and you have got there
letters written to him by the lights of Franz Stangl. Now you may not know Franz Stangl, but he's one of the biggest mass murderers of the 20th century because he was the commandant of Treblinka extermination camp and under his time murdered an estimated 850,000 people. And he is writing to a bishop associated with the Vatican saying, "Please can you help me get out?"
If you're being vouched for by a bishop today, that still carries a lot of weight, doesn't it? And so a lot of these Nazis, they would make their way through what was the Third Reich, down over the Alps into Italy, and they would go to Rome, they would knock on the door of Bishop Houdal, and he would give them a Red Cross passport. Then they would take a boat to that most favored Nazi retirement destination, Argentina. Over the years, it has been alleged that the Vatican collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
This very controversial claim is strongly disputed by the Vatican and some historians. But in addition to evidence of key Nazi officials being helped to escape justice after the war, it's also claimed that the Vatican profited financially from the Nazi regime.
The Vatican are the most powerful and secretive country on the planet. Not only have they dished out the dogma for thousands of years to the faithful, just feeding them fairy tale under the guise of truth, but they are concealing documents and relics that would rewrite history.
Historian and author John Dickey is an expert on the secretive world of the Vatican, and in particular, the numerous financial scandals that have been linked to the organization. The Vatican City, the Vatican State, it's the smallest sovereign state in the world. But despite being so tiny in global scale, it wields huge influence, obviously culturally and spiritually, but also financially.
At the center of the Vatican's vast financial interests is the Vatican Bank, which in its current form was founded during World War II by Pope Pius XII.
What's termed the Vatican Bank is actually properly called the Institute for the Works of Religion. And it's a private bank, it's situated within the Vatican, and it's directly accountable to the Pope. Now, it's not the most transparent institution on the planet, it has to be said. So what its wealth is, we're not entirely sure. But given that the Catholic Church has been around for 2,000 years, I think it's fair to say that its assets are going to be considerable.
In fact, the current assets of the Vatican Bank have recently been estimated at significantly more than $5 billion. The Vatican Bank is not a bank like you and I would know where they lend money and you can get a mortgage. It houses and distributes money for religious and charitable works around the world. That's its publicly stated mission. Today, much of the Vatican's funds derive from charitable donations by loyal Catholics worldwide.
But during World War II, as a result of a controversial pact signed with the Nazis, the Vatican Bank received huge amounts of money from Hitler's regime, via a church tax on citizens of the Third Reich. There have also been allegations that much of the money and gold looted by the Nazis from the Jews and others in occupied Europe may have ended up in the vaults of the Vatican Bank. Perhaps the opening of Pope Pius' archive will reveal the truth about this too.
The Vatican Bank's history since World War II has been equally murky. There have been many major scandals, with allegations of massive corruption and money laundering.
The interesting thing about the whole story of the Vatican Bank, corruption, it's all mixed up with the Byzantine world of the Mafia and Italian politics. You can't imagine a more conspiratorial society in the world than Italy. The Italians are absolutely obsessed with conspiracy theory and they always assume, you know, the worst behind any story and they always assume that everybody is corrupt. You know, they're probably right.
In 1978, the 65-year-old Pope John Paul I mysteriously and suddenly died, just 33 days after he'd been elected. It was reported that he'd died naturally of a cardiac arrest, but ever since, conspiracy theorists have speculated that in fact he was murdered. Pope John Paul I allegedly died of a heart attack, but the problem is that he was big time trying to reform the Vatican.
The alleged murder of Pope John Paul I in 1978 subsequently inspired the plotline of the famous, apparently fictional movie Godfather III, a film which some claim is actually based on fact. At the center of the movie is this idea of the Mafia and the Vatican Bank in league with each other and a new pope coming in who wants to expose this corruption and then dies.
One remarkable theory claims that Pope John Paul I was murdered because he was planning to expose the criminal business practices between the Vatican Bank, Banco Ambrosiano, and the Mafia. Other, even more sensational allegations have been made against the Archbishop Marcinkus, the American head of the Vatican Bank at the time of the Pope's death.
In the best-selling 1980s book "In God's Name" by David Yalop, which covered the conspiracy theories around the death of John Paul I, Marcinkus was heavily implicated as being complicit in that crime. These remarkable allegations have recently been corroborated by a cousin of Archbishop Marcinkus, US mobster Anthony Raimondi, the nephew of infamous mafia gangster Lucky Luciano,
In 2019, Raimondi confessed that in 1978 he traveled to the Vatican to help his cousin the Archbishop poison John Paul I with cyanide in order to prevent the Pope from exposing the Vatican Bank's billion-dollar financial scam. Unsurprisingly, the Vatican vehemently denies that Pope John Paul I was murdered. What is the truth?
Perhaps John Paul I's private papers will contain decisive new evidence, but as the Vatican waits 70 years after a pope's reign before opening up their secret archive, the definitive truth, if it finally comes, won't be revealed until 2048.
Over the years, the Vatican has been embroiled in massive financial scandals.
During the 1970s and 80s in particular, corruption at the Vatican Bank is said to have occurred on a vast scale. It's even been alleged that in an attempt to hide the corruption, collusion between the Vatican and the Mafia led to murder. Historian John Dickey is in Rome to investigate the enduring mystery of the bizarre death of a financier so closely linked to the Vatican that he was nicknamed "God's Banker."
Roberto Calvi was an Italian banker, head of his bank, the Banco Ambrosiano. And in June 1982, he was found hanging by his neck under Blackfriars Bridge in London. And we still don't know whether he was murdered or whether he committed suicide. Everybody has their theories. But his story is a conspiracy theorist's dream. It's got all the ingredients.
You've got political corruption, high finance, mafia money, and then of course, last but not least, the Catholic Church. Initially, Roberto Calvi's death was accepted by the British police as suicide. But when other investigators and journalists started looking into the case, suspicions began to emerge. Calvi's body was discovered hanging from a rope from Blackfriars Bridge with bricks stuffed in his pocket.
But what doesn't add up here is that there were no scuff marks on his body that, you know, you would have seen him clambering up, absolutely no brick dust on his hands. And most damning, it is possible to reconstruct the tide of the time he was discovered and realize that a boat could have pulled up right at the foot of Blackfriars and hung him up in a seeming suicide scene.
One theory about why Robert Calvi died is that he was really in the pocket of both the Vatican Bank on the one hand and the mob on the other, and that perhaps he got squeezed between them in a deal gone bad. If Roberto Calvi's death was murder rather than suicide, then who killed him? The Mafia has always been the prime suspect, but over the years conspiracy theories have raged that the Vatican was also involved.
Banco Ambrosiano not only had contacts with the Mafia, but also the Vatican Bank owned a stake in Banco Ambrosiano. So in no time at all, all the headlines around the world were saying God's banker had been murdered in some dirty Vatican financing story. No one's ever been convicted for the murder, although five Mafia men were tried in Rome and acquitted. But suspicion has always remained that the Vatican was somehow involved.
Roberto Calvi's death officially remains a mystery to this day. If he didn't commit suicide, then was he killed to stop him from exposing sensational secrets? And if so, who killed him? To find out some possible answers, historian John Dickey is meeting investigative journalist Philip Willen, who has spent years trying to uncover the truth about the Calvi scandal.
Hello, Philip. Very nice to meet you. Pleasure. So, Philip, you've looked at the evidence in detail. Was Calvi suicided, as they say in Italian, or did he commit suicide? I think the first option is most likely the murder trial in Rome, which I followed. Didn't manage to convict people for his murder.
at all levels of the process, they did conclude that he was murdered or suicided, as you say, rather than committing suicide himself. One of the few things that the court, at the various levels of judgment, the Assize Court appeal and then the Court of Cassation, all the courts agreed was that
The claims that he laundered mafia money were believable and that was a fact. During the official investigation into the death of God's banker, the accounts of Banco Ambrosiano were examined. It was discovered that a huge amount of money, around a billion US dollars or more, had gone missing before Calvi died.
if mafia bosses or local crime bosses in Rome had entrusted their money to Calvi. And it's missing from the accounts. Sooner or later they would have been wanting to get it back. The death of Roberto Calvi from Banco Ambrosiano was a scandal for the Vatican. But the evidence that would come out during the investigation as to where the money allegedly went
would be even more shocking than the mysterious murder itself. Hello, I'm Violet Manners and welcome to Hidden Heritage, the podcast that brings you inside Great Britain's favourite destinations. From the same team that brought you the number one history podcast, Duchess, Hidden Heritage will uncover the fascinating stories behind the UK's brightest, shining hidden gems.
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Allegedly, over the years, the Vatican has been involved in numerous financial scandals, and none more sensational than the so-called Calvi affair. When the body of Roberto Calvi, head of the Italian Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982, initially it was thought to be suicide.
But evidence gradually emerged suggesting that Calvi, nicknamed "God's Banker" due to his very close links to the Vatican, may well have been murdered. As it's a fact that the Vatican and the Banco Ambrosiano were connected with some very dirty financial transactions,
and the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano was found murdered in very strange circumstances, one wonders exactly who had him killed. Exactly why Roberto Calvi was killed is not known, but many people speculate he was involved in the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul I. Perhaps this same group then turned on Calvi.
During the investigation into the death of God's banker, it was also discovered that just before he died, he tried to blackmail high-powered people who might fear being connected to his bank's illegal activities. Should it collapse as a result of its debts, Calvi wanted them to provide him with the missing money.
To find out more, historian John Dickey is meeting investigative journalist Philip Willen, who has spent years uncovering the truth about the scandal. I do personally think that he was murdered, and I do think that it probably was related to his blackmail attempts. He's desperately trying to save his financial empire, and he's threatening...
Anybody who he thinks he has dirt on, and that includes the Vatican, Archbishop Paul Malsinkas, the American head of the Vatican Bank. He writes letters, rather threatening letters, to the Pope himself. The reason for the attempted blackmail was because, as the Italian courts discovered, a significant amount of mafia money was laundered through the Vatican Bank, Banco Ambrosiano's main shareholder.
The key question for investigators was whether the Vatican Bank knew this. Although wrongdoing was never admitted, the Vatican Bank later paid over $200 million to Banco Ambrosiano's creditors, said to be in recognition of the Vatican Bank's "moral involvement" in the scandal. Another key question was where the missing money went.
Conspiracy theorists point to the fact that Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, an American, was head of the Vatican Bank throughout the 1970s and 80s. At this time, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the Church was being suppressed behind the Iron Curtain, so the interests of the CIA and the Vatican in fighting communism allegedly coincided.
The links aren't there to be seen completely in public. It's just that there are connections which are very damning. It's believed that the Vatican was channeling funds to, for example, the Contras in Nicaragua and Solidarity in Poland through the Banco Ambrosiano. In return for political protection, it's claimed that the mafia agreed to provide much of the money.
At that time, the Mafia was a potential ally in the war against communism. It was a conservative organization. It was, in many cases, linked to the Catholic Church. A lot of Mafia bosses were devout in their own way.
struggle against communism trumped any other consideration. And I think there was an extraordinary amount of flexibility of dealing with people that you disapproved of. You took their money and you used it for a good cause. In the letters of blackmail Roberto Calvi wrote just before his death, they are said to have threatened to reveal Banco Ambrosiano's many dirty secrets.
The Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia might all have feared the consequences. So if we assume that Calvi was murdered, there was a queue of people, effectively, who had an interest in wanting him silenced. We have the Mafia, we have the church hierarchy, we have politics. This whole system, the overlapping systems, we can say, are suddenly all pointed at Calvi.
Still to this day, the Calvi case remains unsolved. Perhaps hidden inside the Vatican Archive, there will be vital evidence that reveals the truth about this and many other Vatican scandals. The secret archive also contains fascinating details on the Vatican's more far-out practices. One such curiosity is why the Vatican operates a state-of-the-art astronomical observatory in Arizona.
Could it be they are searching the heavens for aliens? Curiously, the Vatican has for centuries operated an astronomical observatory studying the heavens. Detailed observation of the movement of the planets and stars began back in the 16th century, when Pope Gregory XIII had the so-called Gregorian Tower built at the Vatican in order to more accurately calculate the annual church calendar, such as the date of Easter.
People question why the Vatican has a telescope and a big observatory. It has done for hundreds of years. The answer is actually very simple. For centuries, the Church was based on a liturgical calendar that the Vatican had to calculate. And that calendar is based on the movement of the heavenly bodies and astronomy. Since the 1990s, however, the main Vatican observatory has been located not in Italy, but surprisingly, in the United States.
The Vatican long maintained an observatory and telescope in Rome. Now, as Rome grew and light pollution increased, this was no longer a viable place to do the best observations of the night sky. And so the Vatican acquired a location in Arizona and has established an absolutely state-of-the-art observatory out there.
Today, some people question why the Vatican built such a highly advanced, ultra-modern telescope on Arizona's Mount Graham. The religious calendar was accurately calculated centuries ago. Could it be that the Vatican Observatory has a secret agenda?
It's absolutely incredible that the Vatican has got its own telescope, huge telescope, in Arizona. Are they looking for extraterrestrials? Do they believe there are extraterrestrials? The Catholic Church can't believe that there are aliens because they've told us for 2,000 years that we are the only planet in the universe that has life on it. But there are legends that they do believe it.
According to conspiracy theorists, the Vatican Observatory on Mount Graham isn't really interested in using the telescope for astronomical reasons. They're actually looking for incoming UFOs. Josh Peck is an author who makes this highly controversial claim. You know, I believe that Mount Graham is one of the biggest secrets of the Vatican today.
And the reason that I think that is I don't think it's all about just the science. I believe that the Vatican believes that when Jesus returns, he will return as an alien being. And I believe that's really what part of what's going on with the telescope on Mount Graham is all about. If they believe that Jesus Christ is going to return as an alien, wouldn't they want to use this telescope to try to make contact with him first?
It's an astonishing claim that the Vatican believes an alien in a UFO might herald the second coming of Christ. The Jesuit priests who operate the Vatican Observatory, however, say that although they are intellectually curious about the nature of God's universe, the telescope is in reality used for more mainstream astronomical research. Staff astronomer Father Jean-Baptiste Kikwaya explains:
Intriguingly, one of Father Kikwaya's main interests is trying to spot potentially dangerous asteroids on a collision course with Earth.
If he happens to see one, its predicted trajectory can be analyzed in the telescope control room. It's very important. I don't know if you heard about asteroids destroying dinosaurs. So it's good to know when actually one asteroid will hit the Earth and where. What kind of damage actually is going to create.
Although it may seem surprising that Vatican astronomers are carrying out this kind of research, the Vatican Observatory is well regarded in a wide range of fields of study, as longtime University of Arizona astronomer Chris Impey explains: The Vatican Observatory, it's made significant contributions to the study of the center of galaxies.
Some galaxies are active and have something bizarre going on because of a black hole. Some are not so active, and yet ostensibly the galaxies are built the same way, so what's special about that? So they've done some surveys that relate to that. So they've contributed to a range of subjects. I mean, nothing at the...
foundational level that might merit Nobel Prize or that kind of level of discovery, but it's a major contribution to astronomy knowledge over the years. Despite the Vatican Observatory's scientific achievements, however, some people believe that their official research projects are just a cover story.
Officially, the telescope is there to monitor near-Earth objects and monitor the development of galaxies, the movement of stars and so on. In fact, all the things that observatories usually are there for. But conspiracy theories believe that the Catholic Church is really using it to look out for ETs, look out for aliens.
It's natural to wonder if Vatican astronomers are particularly interested in the idea of life out there because it would reflect somehow onto their religious tradition or their belief system. And indeed, they're as interested in it as any other astronomers that I meet. But as far as I know, they're not doing any particular projects in that regard. Also, their telescope isn't really well suited as a telescope to doing the kind of
exoplanet hunting or life detection that astronomers are doing elsewhere. Nonetheless, some people claim that the Vatican Observatory's research in detecting asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth has actually been designed to hide very different secret investigations.
Let's be honest, it's absolutely bizarre the Vatican has a telescope at all, let alone one that's pointed in deep space for purposes of identifying incoming life-threatening objects. Why is that their job? According to conspiracy theorists, the Vatican believes that Christ's second coming might be as an alien in a spaceship.
Allegedly, the official research of the Vatican's observatory in Arizona is a cover story. Instead of detecting faraway galaxies and asteroids on a collision course with Earth, it's claimed that in fact the Vatican Observatory is searching for incoming UFOs. Others strongly deny this. The fact there's a telescope doesn't mean that they're searching for aliens or they're trying to convert little green people. It just means that they're furthering their scientific work.
Astronomer Father Kikwaya, who leads the Vatican's official research project detecting incoming asteroids, dismisses the idea that he's secretly looking for alien spaceships and says there's no photographic or other evidence that they exist. If someone says, "I saw one in a circle, did you not take a picture of it?"
And then if you show me the picture and I'm convinced that, I mean, that is one, and then I will believe. So until now, I mean, people just talk about it, but nobody has taken a real picture of it. So, yeah. Yeah. Nevertheless, Father Kikwaya does accept that there is a good chance of life existing on other planets in the universe. There is truly, you know, a possibility of life beyond...
You know what we know. We don't have any scientific proof yet. But I mean, with what we know, with, you know, the size of the universe, with the number of planets we have now in the universe,
Longtime University of Arizona astronomer Chris Impey agrees.
I've heard what a series of three or four directors of the Vatican Observatory have said and thought about that. And, you know, they're probably in the same camp and situation as the average astronomer who's aware of the subject. They think it's entirely plausible that there's life in the universe.
They think it's even plausible that some of it could be intelligent, rival us or exceed us in intelligence. In fact, the Vatican recently hosted a global conference that brought together scholars from all different scientific disciplines to examine the question of whether there might be life beyond our solar system.
And I think it's tempting to imagine that as being anathema to a religious philosophy, but in fact it's not. You know, it's all about how humanity fits into the global plan of the world and the universe, and that is all part of God's plan as far as the church is concerned. You know, tomorrow we come really to realize that there is life elsewhere.
We can project that there are 10 or 15 billion habitable worlds, roughly Earth-like, in the Milky Way galaxy.
So that's that many places where there could be life. And also there's been time before the Earth formed, billions of years before the Earth formed, for those planets to have got started with life and the life to have evolved. So it's not ridiculous to hold a view that there's intelligent technological life out there. It's just that astronomers think we haven't encountered it yet, or it hasn't encountered us. Interestingly,
If mainstream astronomers do happen to encounter aliens, there is a plan about what action they should take.
Astronomers actually have a protocol of what you do if intelligent life is found. Who should be told first? Do you try and communicate back if you've received a message? If you find an artifact that you believe to be an alien artifact, what do you do with it? So astronomers have actually had to think about these things. So as for how the Vatican Observatory or the official Vatican Observatory
Church infrastructure would react to the discovery of life elsewhere, intelligent life. I don't know if they have a protocol. This came up at a conference. The director of the observatory was asked pretty much these questions and he said, "No, we don't have a particular protocol for that." Hidden deep inside the Vatican's secret archives, could there in fact be a secretive protocol describing how the Catholic Church will react if intelligent aliens are discovered?
and incredibly perhaps, also describing what actions the Pope will take if one of the aliens is thought to be the second coming of Jesus.
I do believe the world's a far stranger place than we give it credit for. And the Catholic Church, where there's smoke, there's fire. The Vatican's secret archives contain documents that they don't want the world to know, documents that have been suppressed because they would change the way we think about theology. That's why they call it the secret archives.
Apart from documents that might reveal the Vatican's alleged interest in aliens, the secret archive may well contain sensational answers to many of the most enduring Vatican controversies and scandals. I would like to see a whistleblower come forward and tell the truth about the Vatican and the secrets they've been withholding. Then we can properly rewrite history.
Will claims that the Vatican collaborated with the Nazis during World War II be proven or disproven as a result of the early opening of the Vatican's wartime archive? Historians now have their work cut out for them. And what secrets about Vatican corruption and mafia murders lie waiting to be discovered when Pope John Paul I's secret archive is finally opened in 2048?
Researchers can only hope that his archive is released early and the truth can be told.