Elevating De Bonis was not the clean sweep for which some had hoped. Vaticanologists did not know that Secretary of State Casaroli wanted an outsider to run the bank. The man on whom Casaroli had his eye was forty-nine-year-old Angelo Caloia, an economics professor at a Catholic university, as well as the CEO of Mediocredito Lombardo, a merchant bank. Caloia was a top Milanese Catholic financier, part of an elite group who had formed the Group for Culture, Ethics, and Finance. Their goal was to create an informal consortium of Catholic-dominated banks that earned profits without sacrificing their “Christian identity.” Together they were known as finanza bianca (white finance).1
Casaroli dispatched Monsignor Renato Dardozzi to see if Caloia might like the challenge of straightening out the IOR. Dardozzi, dressed in lay clothes, showed up one day at Caloia’s Milan office. He was so effusive in praising the Group for Culture, Ethics, and Finance that Caloia initially thought all the flattery was setting the groundwork to solicit a large donation. Instead, as the meeting drew to a close, Dardozzi surprised Caloia. “I came to tell you that we consider you the most suitable person to hold the office of the director general of the IOR. Even if I had any doubts, this meeting has dispelled them.”2
Caloia had no interest in the IOR posting. His professional and personal life revolved around Milan, where he lived with his wife and four children. He had no desire to move to Rome.
“The meeting ended rather coldly,” Caloia later recalled. “What I knew about the IOR I had only read in the newspapers. Did I have to be an instrument of God or the Devil to work there? In any case, I thought the matter was settled.”3
A few months later Dardozzi again showed up at Caloia’s office. This time he wore his clerical garb.4 There was no small talk.
“Professor, you are the man we need. There is no need to move to Rome, just help us to give a new structure to the IOR.”
Dardozzi explained that it had taken five difficult years to reach the point where the Pope was ready to replace Marcinkus. Casaroli had twice almost resigned over the standoff.5 Caloia would be the chairman of a small board of directors and the Vatican would provide any support he required.6 And he could commute between Milan and Rome, as his full-time presence at the Vatican was not required.
Caloia accepted in principle. “You have to obey the Holy Roman Church,” he later said. “I had a priest in front of me, who spoke to me as a priest. Personal problems had to fade into the background.”7
That kicked off a series of secret meetings at the Vatican between Caloia and Casaroli. “I went in disguise so no one would know about it,” recalls Caloia.8 Their discussions about the daunting task ahead were “frank.” Caloia said he even hoped to redraft the IOR’s charter drawn by Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara. He thought the bank’s scope and authority were too broad. Casaroli knew that would be no easy task since no church institution gave up power unless ordered to do so by the Pope.
By March 1989, Casaroli privately informed Marcinkus that he would remain at his post only until a replacement arrived.9 Somehow word leaked to reporters. Still, there was no formal announcement, leaving Vaticanologists puzzled. The bank seemed to be in limbo.10
The following month events in Italy gave some impetus to hurry Marcinkus’s exit. A public prosecutor, Pierluigi Dell’Osso, announced a new round of wide-ranging indictments against dozens of former Ambrosiano executives and associates. P2 chief Licio Gelli was among those charged. And Dell’Osso made it clear that he would have indicted Marcinkus if it were not for the previous court rulings that declared the archbishop exempt.11 Marcinkus had again proven what he told Fortune a couple of years earlier: “I may be a lousy banker but at least I’m not in jail.”12
To speed Caloia’s arrival, Cardinal Casaroli called the banker to his private study. Three other laymen were there: Theodor Pietzcker, a Deutsche Bank director; former UBS chairman Philippe de Weck; and Thomas Macioce, president of the U.S. retail chain Allied Stores, and a prominent member of the Order of the Knights of Malta.13 Casaroli proposed they all be part of an extraordinary supervisory panel of laymen empowered to supervise the IOR. Within a week, José Ángel Sánchez Asiaín, cochairman of the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya, was added as the fifth member (Caloia later noted that Sánchez Asiaín was selected as a nod to the growing influence of Hispanics in the church. “He was a very nice Basque, but his English was bizarre and I had to struggle hard to understand him.”)14
For the first time in the IOR’s history, a lay board—chaired by Caloia and with de Weck as vice president—oversaw the bank’s financial operations.15 Meanwhile, Marcinkus was still at the Vatican Bank. The transition was a stop-and-start affair. It took Caloia until March of the following year (1990) to get Giovanni Bodio, the number three executive at Caloia’s Mediocredito Lombardo, appointed as the IOR’s first lay director since Henri de Maillardoz in the 1960s.16
In late May, questions about how to speed up the transfer of power were again overshadowed by news of past bank scandals. The long-awaited criminal trial against thirty-five Ambrosiano defendants had started in Milan. Although the prosecutors had been blocked from charging Marcinkus, Mennini, and de Strobel, that did not prevent them from presenting extensive evidence about the Vatican Bank’s role. The IOR was treated as if it was as culpable as any of the accused in the defendant’s dock.17 (To the great consternation of the church, Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather III, released later that year, had a storyline based on the bank’s role in the Ambrosiano collapse; in the film, an archbishop in league with the Mafia is murdered in a Vatican stairwell, with his corpse replicating sixteenth-century Protestant images of the defeat of the Antichrist.)
Five months into the trial, Mennini and de Strobel resigned their bank postings and moved out of Vatican City. And to the relief of almost everyone, Marcinkus submitted his formal resignation to John Paul.
“I am very grateful to the Holy Father for having granted my request to retire from Vatican service and to return to the United States. The forty years that I have spent away from my diocese—in diplomatic service, working with the preparation and performance of Papal trips, serving the Institute for Works of Religion and the Governorate—have enriched my priesthood and given me a keener perception and deeper appreciation of the unity and universality of the Church. They have also confirmed my conviction about the necessity of pastoral work in the life of every priest. The ministry of the parish has always been my ambition and day after day I tried to be faithful to this vocation addressing every aspect of my work with pastoral spirit. Now that I am free from administrative responsibilities and returning to the U.S., I will be useful in those pastoral services that I will be given to perform, as are many other elderly priests of my diocese.”18
A few days later, Marcinkus told a reporter: “I have never done anything wrong. I would like to set the record straight.”19 Marcinkus’s exile was as an ordinary priest in the rather unremarkable parish of a retirement community in Sun City, Arizona. In his new diocese, no one was quite certain of why such a high-ranking Curia official had become their pastor. There was no dearth of misinformation. Marcinkus was “wanted in Rome for being associated with a bank robbery,” one local detective answered an Interpol inquiry in 2003.20
“He was a broken man but would never give his enemies the satisfaction of revealing that,” his friend U.S. diplomat Peter Murphy said.21
To The New York Times, Marcinkus said, “I think they were surprised when I told them I was leaving.”22 Many Vaticanologists had trouble believing that. “I have no doubt that I will be remembered as the villain in the Calvi affair.” That was something on which most agreed.I
I. Marcinkus died in 2006 at the age of eighty-four from complications from emphysema. He never gave a wide-ranging interview about his Vatican tenure once he returned to the States. When the author reached him by phone in November 2005, he said, “I have no interest in revisiting that time.” The author was not successful in finding Marcinkus’s personal papers and journals. In particular, the Chicago diocese never responded to written requests as to whether a published report that Marcinkus had left his personal diaries and papers to that diocese was correct. As for Marcinkus’s two lay colleagues, they also died without addressing the controversies that had tarnished the final years of their service. Mennini’s son Paolo is currently the chief of the Extraordinary Division at the Vatican’s APSA.23