By 2005, John Paul was battling persistent rumors that he was seriously ill. His private doctors had diagnosed him with Parkinson’s disease in 1994, but in keeping with its centuries-old tradition that any public discussion about the Pope’s health was inappropriate, the Vatican swore the physicians to secrecy. A decade earlier, the only manifestation of the degenerative neurological disease was a slight tremor in John Paul’s left arm and hand.1 Parkinson’s would over time prove a tremendous challenge. But John Paul insisted that his struggle stay private, even though performing his duties had become increasingly difficult, especially when it came to his trips abroad and demanding public appearances at the Vatican.2
Whenever he was not seen in public for a while, rumors swirled that he was gravely ill. The previous year an announcement that the eighty-three-year-old Pontiff had canceled his traditional Ash Wednesday service at the Basilica of St. Sabina to instead preside over a simpler Mass at St. Peter’s prompted two British bookmakers to offer odds on his likely successor. The favorite was Milan’s Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi.3 Not until it was clear that John Paul had survived the Easter services did the betting stop.
Few knew that John Paul considered his affliction the will of God. Since he was convinced that God had guided his fellow cardinals to select him as the Vicar of Christ, he thought himself Pope for life. There was no room in the Catholic Church, he told colleagues, for an honorary Pope.4 And resignation was unthinkable. Most Catholics agreed. “The idea of a pope retiring really has no precedent, and the continuity of the papacy depends upon the election of a new pope on the death of another,” wrote journalist James Murray.5 Sixty-five percent of Italians polled said the Pontiff should never resign, no matter how debilitating any end-of-life illness.6
Although his deteriorating health had not stopped him from sitting on the throne of St. Peter, it affected what happened inside the Vatican. Parkinson’s, coupled with chronic pain from other ailments, made it difficult for him to spend long hours in meetings or reading reports. U.S. diplomat Michael Hornblow said, “He was very energetic, but not a great administrator. I was told his inbox was a disaster.”7 Even as a bishop in Poland he never had a reputation as a micromanager. His illnesses meant that during the last decade of his Papacy he concentrated only on what mattered most to him. He spent tremendous time on his extraordinary international pilgrimages. After his Parkinson’s diagnosis, each trip out of Italy was more difficult. They required far more logistical planning (by the end of his Papacy, he tallied 104 foreign trips, more than all his predecessors combined). From 1994 until 2005, he made sixty foreign trips, including demanding ones to India, the Middle East, Africa, and two visits to the United States. For weeks before each one, John Paul prepared by studying up on the clerics and influential Catholics whom he would meet.
One of the things for which he no longer had time was any oversight of the Vatican Bank. Angelo Caloia was left alone to run the bank subject to the loose supervision of the IOR’s commission of cardinals and some advice from its lay directors. Caloia’s own ideas for bank reform were occasionally discussed, but there was no crisis that gave any urgency to convert them from the drawing board to practice. Despite Caloia’s good intentions, during the decade of John Paul’s declining health, the bank had yet to undergo any of the core institutional reforms that would mark the end of its role as an offshore banking haven.
There were some warning signs that the IOR’s apparent tranquillity was an illusion. In 2000, Italian police arrested twenty-one mobsters who were part of one of the first-ever online banking frauds, an electronic scheme to steal up to $900 million from Sicily’s central bank using pilfered computer files and passwords. Legal wiretaps had caught the mobsters boasting of accomplices inside the Vatican Bank. Police made the arrests before the theft was pulled off since “it would have been impossible for the Italian state to recover [the money]” if it had gotten inside the IOR.8 But as result of acting so fast, prosecutors could not determine who inside the Vatican Bank had been part of the conspiracy.
That same year, the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne published the results of an extensive study of international money laundering.9 The authors compared the banking systems of two hundred countries. The Vatican ranked in the top ten money laundering havens, behind Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Liechtenstein, but ahead of Singapore.10 Also, in 2000, the Vatican finished in the top ten “most attractive countries for money launderers” in another report, this time by the United Nations’ Congress on Economic and Social Issues.11 The following year, 2001, a report by the London Telegraph and the Inside Fraud Bulletin rated the Vatican as a top cutout country along with such offshore banking sanctuaries as Nauru, Macao, and Mauritius. A cutout was a nation in which banking secrecy made it all but impossible to trace laundered funds back to their source. The IOR, concluded the report, was the primary conduit for $55 billion annually just in illegal Italian money. And for the third time in a year, the Vatican Bank had the dubious distinction of getting tagged as a top offshore shelter, the eighth most popular bank for money launderers and the fourth-best cutout. The IOR beat out Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and the Bahamas.12
Despite its high rankings on those unsavory lists, the announcements garnered little more than shrugs from the media, long accustomed to assuming the worst about the Vatican Bank. If the reports concerned Caloia and his associates running the bank, they did not do anything to address the structural shortcomings that allowed the IOR to flourish as a popular destination for illegal cash. (John Walker, the chief investigator on the Melbourne and U.N. reports, told the author in 2014 that the Vatican “remains up there with the best places to launder money.”)13,I
What did attract press attention, though, were new developments in old scandals. In the United States, insurance commissioners in five states used racketeering statutes (RICO) to file civil lawsuits totaling $600 million, naming the IOR and the Pope as two of the defendants, to recover money in the 1999 fraud of financier Marty Frankel.15 Each state claimed the Vatican Bank knew and failed to stop Frankel from swindling investors by using Catholic charities as fronts.16 The church managed to ultimately get the litigation dismissed, arguing that the Vatican was exempt from the proceedings since Frankel’s foundation “did not have Vatican juridical character” and had “always acted outside of any Vatican context.”17 But to Rome’s consternation, the cases drew a lot of attention while they were pending. (Frankel, and the two priests who helped him, Fathers Colagiovanni and Jacobs, pled guilty to counts of racketeering, conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering. Because of their advanced age, the clerics each got probation; Frankel is still serving a seventeen-year prison sentence.)
Beyond Frankel, the Ambrosiano and the never-ending investigation into Roberto Calvi’s death returned to the headlines. A film about the case premiered in Italy in 2002, but an Italian judge ordered it removed from theaters after Flavio Carboni, the Sardinian property developer and Calvi associate, filed a defamation suit.18 That year new forensic tests suggested that Calvi had been murdered. By 2003, the headlines asking “Who Killed God’s Banker?” were replaced by new ones announcing that Italian prosecutors were investigating four mobsters as murder suspects.19 The formal declaration that foul play was involved came almost twenty-one years to the day after Calvi’s body had been found swinging from Blackfriars Bridge. It kicked off stories speculating about who might be behind the murder: the Mafia, Masons, or even the Vatican.20 Starting in 2000, more than half of all English language news stories about the Vatican Bank in a five-year period were about Calvi’s murder and included a reprise of at least some aspect of the Ambrosiano scandal.21
As far as John Paul was concerned, he was likely pleased that the bank was not involved in any new imbroglios. Caloia’s deliberate low profile seemed the perfect antidote to the otherwise salacious Italian tabloid press. In 2005, Caloia was up for yet another five-year term. Most Vaticanologists expected the Pontiff to rubber-stamp the extension. But before John Paul extended his IOR director’s tenure, the eighty-four-year-old Pontiff died on April 2, 2005. Although he had soldiered through years of chronic illnesses, his passing still surprised most Catholics.22 His Papacy had lasted twenty-seven years. A young generation of the faithful had known no other leader.
I. In 2005, a Mexican bishop said that donating money to the church “purified” it. Some Vaticanologists thought that was a not subtle pitch to get narco-traffickers to be more generous with their religious contributions. A Mexican monsignor addressed the matter more directly: “It is immaterial where the donations from drug trafficking originate and it’s not up to us to investigate the source of the money.” Such donations are called narco limosnas (narco-alms) in Mexico. No money laundering laws are violated so long as the Mexican clerics do not kick some of the cash back to the traffickers. But the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration believes the Mexican church’s willingness not to ask questions about large cash gifts is a significant reason why the Catholic church’s wealth there has multiplied in recent years.14