THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND THE CRISIS OF CHRISTIANITY

An Eastern View of a Western Crisis

N. S. Rajaram

MINERVA PRESS LONDON MONTREUX LOS ANGELES SYDNEY

To Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup From whom I learned how to study religions and ideologies

Download this book about the Dead Sea Scrolls as a PDF file.
The Dead Sea Scrolls & the Crisis of Christianity [1 MB PDF]

 

About the Author

Dr Navaratna S. Rajaram is a mathematician, linguist and historian of science living in Bangalore, India and Oklahoma City, USA. He has written extensively on the science and history of ancient civilizations. His most recent book is Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilisation: A Literary and Scientific Perspective, written jointly with the American Vedic scholar David Frawley (World Heritage Press, Quebec, Canada; Voice of India, New Delhi). His book, Profiles in Deception: Ayodhya and the Dead Sea Scrolls is being published in India. He has held faculty and research positions at several American Universities and high technology companies. He is a contributor to the award-winning International Encyclopaedia of Robotics (John Wiley) and a member of the Board of Editors of INDIA 200] Encyclopaedia (Myer Indmark). In addition to over fifty publications in scientific journals, his articles in the popular press have appeared in several languages in the US, India and Europe.

Contents

Preface: Christianity at the Crossroads

Introduction: History and Faith    
   1. Shattered Foundation     
   2. The Dead Sea Scrolls and their Impact    
   3. Message of the Dead Sea Scrolls     
   4. State of the Church;

I  Crisis Of Christianity    
   1. Vatican Woes: Paganisation of Europe     
   2. 'Secular' Vatican: Mussolini to Mafia     
   3. Puppet-master of P2     
   4. Reformer in the Vatican: Pope John Paul I     
   5. Tragedy in the Vatican;    
   6. End to Reform: Business as Usual     
   7. Empty Walls

II  Faith And Freedom: a Pluralistic Look at Religion    
   1. Christianity Today: Exclusivism in a Pluralistic World     
   2. Sources of Pluralistic Thought: Greece and India    
   3. Scripture and Authority     
   4. Constantine on Freedom of WorshipIII Dead Sea Scrolls

III  Early Christianity    
   1. Holy Land to the First Century of Christianity    
   2. Herod and the Herodians    
   3. Dead Sea Scrolls on Early Christianity     
   4. Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible: Qumranian Heritage    
   5. Qumranians: Essenes or Zealots?   
   6. Jewish Wars and the Birth of Christianity

IV Dead Sea Scrolls II: Pauline Christianity  
   1. Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gospels: History and Propaganda
   2. Evidence of Classical Sources
   3. Josephus on James and Jesus
   4. 'Son Of God' in the Dead Sea Scrolls
   5. Rome, the Home of Forgeries
   6. Church Propaganda Machine
   7. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles
   8. Qumranian Source of the Doctrine of the Faith
   9. Acts and the Gospels
 10. Summary: Wages of Exclusivism

V Chronology and Summary of Events
   1. A Chronological Table for the Rise and Fall of Early Christianity
   2. A Plausible Sequence of Events Leading to the First Jewish War.

VI Action and Reaction: Inquisition Then and Now
   1. Doctrine of the Faith and the Holy Inquisition
   2. The Unknown Christ of Opus Dei
   3. Thought Control: the Holy Inquisition
   4. Devastation of the Americas
   5. From Galileo to the Scrolls Monopoly
   6. Inquisition Today: the Case of Allegro
   7. Summary

VII Search for New Pastures
   1. Qumranian Heritage
   2. The Spirit of Theocracy
   3. Search for a New Bandwagon
   4. The Church and the Bank
   5. Tolerance and Truth

VIII As the Drama Continues
   1. Scrolls' Monopoly: the Collapse and After
   2. Pontifex Maximus
   3. Endgame

 

Selected Bibliography 
   1. Primary Works Cited
   2. Qumran Texts
   3. Main References

 

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Preface - Christianity at the Crossroads

...unless drastic measures are taken at once, the greatest and the most valuable of all Hebrew and Aramaic manuscript discoveries is likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century. Geza Vermes, Biblical scholar

On September 22, 1991, trustees of the Huntington Library in California performed an act of great symbolic significance: on that day they released to the public transcripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls that had remained concealed from public view for nearly four decades. It was an act that signalled the collapse of the Church monopoly over the Scrolls - a monopoly that the well-known Biblical scholar Geza Vermes had termed the 'academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century'. Historian Robert Eisenman, the key figure involved in breaking the Scrolls monopoly had only said that it 'cannot be considered anything but reprehensible.'

This was an event of such momentous significance that future historians may well compare the collapse of the Scrolls monopoly to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The latter was the symbol of the ending of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Age of Reason. So too can one view the collapse of the Scrolls monopoly: it will allow us to learn the truth about the origins of Christianity, in particular, how this obscure sect in the most backward corner of the Roman Empire came to dominate Western Civilisation for the better part of fifteen centuries. In the words of Robert Eisenman, 'The work in this field is now at a beginning.'

Yet the action of the Huntington Library was only symbolic, for Eisenman was himself shortly to release his two-volume facsimile edition of the Scrolls manuscripts rendering their action all but moot. This was the result of a clandestine operation: Eisenman had somehow managed to acquire photographs of all the Scrolls from a secret source in Jerusalem where they had been languishing in the custody of a Vatican-com rolled institution known as the Ecole Biblique. This was soon followed by the publication of The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered by Eisenman and Michael Wise consisting of fifty of the most important texts along with their English translation and commentary. Christianity will never be the same again.

Why are the Dead Sea Scrolls so important? And what made Eisenman (and others) risk their reputations and careers in trying to bring these two thousand year old manuscripts to light? After all, it is not every day that a professor of an obscure and esoteric subject is involved in an advemure worthy of a John Le Carre novel. To answer these questions, it is best to let Eisenman himself speak on their behalf.

So what in effect do we have in these manuscripts? Probably nothing less than a picture from which Christianity sprang in Palestine. But there is more - if we take into consideration the Messianic nature of the texts as we delineate it in this book, and allied concepts such as 'Righteousness,' 'Piety,' 'justification,' 'works,' 'the Poor,' 'Mysteries,' what we have is a picture of what Christianity actually was like in Palestine. The reader, however, probably will not be able to recognize it because it will seem virtually the opposite of the Christianity with which he or she is familiar. (Eisenman and Wise, p. 10; emphasis added.)

[The Dead Sea Scrolls] actually give a picture of the mind set of the people of Palestine at this critical juncture in the formation of what is now called Western Civilisation. (op. cit. p. 181)

Extravagant as it will doubtless seem to some, the author's claim, if anything, is modest; the influence of the movemem pictured in the Scrolls has extended far beyond the history and the civilization of the West. For better or for worse, the whole world, and not just the West remains profoundly affected by this movement called Christianity. No more justification is needed to study the Dead Sea Scrolls, their meaning and their impact.

This book is about the Dead Sea Scrolls and their place in history. Every educated person today, at least in the 'Christian' West, has a vague notion that the Scrolls somehow alter our perceptions of Christianity. But few outside the small circle of Biblical scholars have any idea of how far-reaching the change is. While there is no shortage of books on the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of them have been written by Biblical scholars and not easy for the average reader to follow; they presuppose too much on the part of the reader. The various sectarian and academic battles have tended to confuse the public further. What I have to offer in these pages is a popular account of the subject by examining the Scrolls against the background of both the history and the current state of the Church.[1] The book may therefore be read as a popular history of the Church as modified by the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is a history, however, written from the perspective of an Easterner who views Christianity as embodying an expansionist ideology opposed to pluralism. There is something to be said for such a perspective - a perspective not rooted in the Western Biblical tradition.

It is my belief that the impact of the Scrolls on Christianity cannot properly be understood without some historical background of the Church as a political, economic and social institution. For this reason, I have gone beyond the immediate meaning of the Scrolls and reviewed the history of Christianity - from its birth and its evolution into a world movement to its current state of crisis. Christianity today is in the midst of an existential crisis which the world is largely unaware of, but obvious to an observant student. It is also attested by the Church's own records as the book will show.

Similarly, it is not easy to understand the doctrinal confusion resulting from the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls without some understanding of the exclusivism that underlies Christianity. This is something that most Westerners implicitly assume to be true of all religions - as 'faith' opposed to 'reason'. This sharp divide between reason and faith does not exist in the case of Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism - nor did it exist in the case of religions of ancient Greece. To get across this very important point, I have included a chapter on what I have called 'Faith and Freedom' in which I have contrasted exclusivist and pluralistic traditions.

To highlight some of these problems, I have made an effort to give also a picture of the steps that the Church is now taking, and is likely to take in the near future, faced as it is with imminent collapse in the West. It is a little-known fact that an increasingly desperate Church is trying to establish itself in Asia to compensate for massive losses in the West. Speaking before the Asian Bishop's Conference in Manila, Pope John Paul II recently announced:

"A new harvest of faith will be reaped in this vast and vital continent."

He did not, however, tell his audience that without this 'new harvest' in Asia the Church was all but doomed. This too is clear from Church records. The book therefore is meant also as a warning to those who have now become the latest targets in the Church's struggle for survival. Many countries of Asia are already engaged in a struggle against Islamic Fundamentalism. The last thing they need is another exclusivist ideology bent on expansion descending on them in the name of God.

From the Church's point of view, the revelations of the Scrolls could hardly have come at a worse time. This is best understood when examined against the background of Church history and its record as a colonial power. This is necessary also because the true nature of Christianity - including its present practices - remains largely unknown to the public. What even educated Christians know of the Church and its activities amounts to little more than what they have been fed by its propaganda machine. Even Church historians, educated at prestigious seminaries, know only a sanitized version of its history. One of the first to expose it in modem times was Ignaz von Dollinger, the author of the book Pope and the Council, first published (in German) in 1869; it was promptly placed on the Index of prohibited books. Catholic scholar Peter de Rosa had this to say regarding his experience upon reading Dollinger's classic:

The Pope and the Council contained aspects of papal history completely unknown to me. I had been brought up as a Catholic, had gone through the usual six year seminary course prior to ordination, had graduated from a Catholic university, the Gregorianum in Rome, and had never come across such ideas. This is partly to be explained by the partisan nature of seminary education and the fact that in such establishments history is a Cinderella subject. The misbehavior of Popes is lightly dealt with or even excised ... My ignorance must also be set down to the preference Catholics have for a history of the papacy that can be read with white gloves on. It is not easy to admit that one's leaders were often barbarians... (de Rosa, p. 636)

Having given my reasons for writing the book, I should perhaps place before the readers my own position as regards religious belief. I am a Hindu by birth but do not believe in the existence of any God - for this too is a right granted to me by virtue of the freedom of choice that is part of my pluralistic heritage. I hold God (or gods) to be the creation of man, for which reason I feel there must be as many gods as there are minds to conceive them. As a pluralist, I support the freedom of everyone to believe in as many gods as he or she may wish; I find, however, the idea of an external 'One God' that only a chosen privileged person can know, and whose word we must accept without question, irrational and repugnant. I see such coercive, monotheistic doctrine as nothing more than a tool of theocracy. I find myself in agreement with the Buddha when he said: "Accept nothing on my authority. Think, and be a lamp unto thyself", and with Madhvacharya when he said:

Never accept as authority the words of any human; they are subject to ignorance and deception. No human-authored text can be taken as authoritative by attributing infallibility to a human. One deludes oneself in believing that such a man - infallible and free from deceit - existed and he alone was the author of the text.

Vishnu Tatva Nirnaya 7

As this is a topic that is bound to touch many a raw nerve, I wish to make it clear, that, as I see it, the issue is not one of personal faith in Christianity or any other religion; no one has the right to object to the belief of another as long as that belief remains personal. But this has not been the case with Christianity any more than it has with Islam. Both have assumed for themselves the right to impose their exclusivist view of the world on others, by whatever means they deem appropriate. In the process they have destroyed ancient civilizations and plunged Europe and Asia into the Dark Ages in the name of One God - their God. Ancient Greece disappeared forever, and India is only now recovering from a thousand-year long Dark Age that all but destroyed her existence as a pluralistic civilization; other countries - like Persia and Afghanistan - were not so fortunate. Their claims and their record therefore invite the closest scrutiny. This is all the more necessary now since the Church has cast its eyes on Asia with its teeming millions; its expansion has invariably meant the end of pluralism.

In summary, what I have to present here are the following: first, a brief account of the Church as it really is - stripped of the pious publicity put out by its propaganda machine; second, an account of the origins of Christianity - including its doctrinal foundation - as revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls, and finally, a brief look at the methods and strategies being used by the Church to counter this latest and most serious threat to its existence, with a glimpse of what the future may bring.

Introduction - History and Faith

The origins of some Christian rituals and doctrines can be seen in the documents of an extremist Jewish sect that existed for more than a hundred years before the birth of Christ.

John Allegro on the Dead Sea Scrolls

1. Shattered Foundation

In the year 1555, a Jewish physician living in southern France wrote that the Catholic Church would one day come to grief. By this he did not mean the rise of Protestant Christianity or the Reformation led by Martin Luther and John Calvin - both of which were by then accomplished facts. What he had to say was something far more ominous for the Church: according to his vision of the future, Europeans in large numbers would abandon the Church 'with its shattered foundation' and return to paganism. His exact words were (with my translation):

Temples sacrez prime facon Romaine,

Rejectoront les goffres fondements;

Prenant leurs loix premieres et humaines,

Chassant, non tout des saints les cuhement.

For temples sacred in the pristine Roman fashion,
They'll reject the one with the shattered foundation;
Taking to their laws ancient and human,

Will expel almost all their cults with saints' action.
Century II, quatrain 65.

The Jewish physician in question was one Michele de Nostradame, better known as Nostradamus. He is a much misunderstood man. We may now see him as a mystic and prophet, but in his own day he was renowned as the foremost physician in Europe, good enough to be appointed court physician by Queen Catherine de Medici of France. He was also a first rate astronomer and mathematician who, while still a youth, had studied and accepted the heliocentric model of Copernicus for the solar system. This was more than fifty years before Galileo and the invention of the telescope. For this or some other heretical position, he had been called to appear before the Inquisition by the Church authorities in Toulouse; he saved himself by leaving France and staying out of the country for six years.

As a Jew whose family had been forced to convert to Catholicism, at a time when both the wars of religion and the persecution of Jews were at their height, he detested the Church of his day.[2] And as a man of science who had to flee the country for his progressive beliefs, he hated the Inquisition. (This is enough to make one wonder if he really could read the future all that well - at any rate his own.) Anyway he had this to say about the Inquisition and its judges:

De plus lettres dessus le faits celestes

Seroot par princes ignorance reprouves:

Punit d'Edit, chassez comme scelestes.

Et mis it mort lit au seront trouves.

Among the most learned in the heavenly arts,

Will by princes of ignorance be denounced;
Punished by an Edict and chased out as frauds,
And put to death wherever found.

Century IV, quatrain 18.

Some have read in this the persecution of Galileo some sixty years later, but that can only be a matter of faith in Nostradamus as a prophet. The 'princes ignorance' are the self-styled princes of the Church, notably the Cardinals and the Archbishops who presided over the trials by Inquisition. On the whole this is a pretty accurate description of the state of affairs in his own time when the Inquisition was raging in all its fury. This was not all, for shortly before his own death Nostradamus came out and boldly predicted the fall of the Roman Church.

o vaste Rome, ta ruine s'approache,

Non de tes murs de ton sang et substance:

o great Rome, your ruin draws close,

Not your walls - but your blood and soul;

Century X, quatrain 65.

Nostradamus made a large number of similarly ominous predictions foretelling the downfall of the Church, giving many details. Their validity is more a matter of faith than scientific proof, but the Church apparently took his predictions seriously, for his Centuries ended up on the infamous Papal Index of prohibited works. In much of Rome itself, Church attendance has fallen to less than three per cent which is being seen as a grave crisis. In Europe and many parts of America, Christianity is facing a serious decline. (We shall be taking a closer look at the crisis confronting the Church in the next chapter.) All this has made the Church extremely anxious.

In what is a remarkable coincidence, at this period in its history when Church attendances are at historically low levels, it has also to deal with the storm let loose by the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It feels its existence being threatened from two sides - the doctrinal and the temporal. The Church has reacted in the only manner it knows how - suppression and distortion of evidence.

Suppression of material that may cast doubts on its positions has been a method of long standing with the Church throughout its eventful history. Nonetheless it is a measure its deep insecurity that it should have gone to the extent of banning a work like the Nostradamus Centuries which most readers find incomprehensible. Be that as it may, the Church now has to deal with a far more serious threat to its position than any of the prophecies of Nostradamus - the ominous shadow cast by the Dead Sea Scrolls.[3]

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Qumran region of Palestine is being seen by many - including Church authorities - as the latest and the most serious threat to organized Christianity. In this regard, Nostradamus' prophecy about 'shattered foundation' may be seen to have been fulfilled, for, if anything can strike at the foundations of the Church, it is likely to be the discovery of these ancient manuscripts dating to the turbulent period leading to the Jewish Wars that also saw the birth of Christianity. The Church is unlikely to recover from the blow delivered by the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Recognizing the threat posed by the Scrolls, the Vatican and its related institutions have gone to great lengths to keep suppressed the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls for nearly half a century. But recently, there have been two major developments to make the Church's worst nightmare come true. First, the release of the Scrolls transcripts by the Huntington Library in California. Secondly, the publication of all the facsimiles and translations of some of the most important texts by Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise. In their recently published book - The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered: The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents Withheld for Over 35 Years, Eisenman and Wise observe:[4]

The struggle for access to the materials in Cave 4 [where some of the most important Scrolls fragments were found] was arduous, sometimes even bitter. An International Team of editors had been set up by the Jordanian Government to control the process. The problems with this team are public knowledge. To put them in a nutshell: in the first place, the team was hardly international, secondly it did not work as a team, and thirdly it dragged out the editing process interminably.

These two recent developments - the release of the transcripts, and the publication of the Eisenman-White book - of course means the collapse of the Scrolls monopoly, leading to a scenario worse than any predicted by Nostradamus - at least from the Church's point of view. The floodgates are now open; it is only a matter of time before the real facts about the origins of Christianity are also brought out into the open. When this happens, it will truly leave the foundations of the Church shaken - if not actually shattered. This at least is how it appears to the present author based on a study of the texts belonging to the Dead Sea Scrolls, viewed against the background of the current state of Christianity and its recent history.

My goal in these pages is to give a brief account of the radically changed picture of Christianity and its origins resulting from a restudy of the Biblical literature along with the texts from the Scrolls now available. While it will no doubt be decades before a more complete picture can be presented, I am encouraged in this effort by the appearance of several books on the topic by scholars like Eisenman and Wise, Golb and Vermes. Also to be noted is the book Dead Sea Scrolls Deception by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh who brought to public attention the 'scandal of the scrolls' - as Vermes called it - basing their conclusions mainly on the recent important work of Robert Eisenman. These have been supplemented by my own study of the Bible and other classical sources - notably the great Jewish historian Josephus, as well as Greek and Roman historians of the period of early Christianity.

In broad terms, what I have attempted in the present volume is a picture of the Church in its current state as seen from the perspective of an outsider, one who has no stake in the various partisan positions, at least in a religious sense. I have tried also to anticipate the direction in which the Church appears to be moving faced with the collapse of Christianity in Europe. I see the Church becoming much more of a multinational business enterprise concentrating its activities in the Third World, particularly India with its tradition of tolerance. I see this as a dangerous portent for the pluralistic societies of Asia, for the expansion of Christianity has invariably meant loss of pluralism.

2. The Dead Sea Scrolls and their Impact

The story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 is widely known though its full details are probably lost for ever. It is a complex tale with many actors great and small from several countries, but the following bare facts will serve our purpose. Qumran is an ancient settlement containing a large number of ruins near the north-west coast of the Dead Sea. It lies in what is now the state of Israel, but in 1947, when the first scrolls came to light, it was part of the British mandated territory of Palestine. It was a relatively primitive, undeveloped area at the time, and almost the only people who knew their way about in that desert wilderness were the Bedouin.

According to generally accepted accounts, a Bedouin youth by the name of Muhammad adh-Dhib found the Scrolls secreted in several large jars in some of the caves that are part of the Qumran ruins. The Scrolls are manuscripts of texts in Aramaic and Hebrew written on parchment and papyrus. After that first discovery, many more have been found in the region of Qumran. Some of the most important later discoveries come from the caves of Wadi Murabbat some ten miles to the south of Qumran. These relate to early second century to the period of the Jewish rebellion of AD 132-5 led by Simeon bar Kochba. For this reason, the Scrolls and other finds are often referred to as Qumran texts.

Most of these manuscripts were created during a period from about 150 BC to perhaps AD 70 when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in the First Jewish War. Thus they encompass the period of early Christianity upon which they shed a great deal of light. They show that the authors of the New Testament - of the four Gospels in particular - have borrowed heavily from the Qumran texts. Their borrowings include both the subject matter of the Gospels as well as their language, imagery and style. In fact, many features that we now regard as being unique to the Gospels - like the Davidic Messiah as the Son of God, and the persecution and killing of such a messianic teacher - are found in Qumran documents dating to at least a century before the birth of Christ. A close study of these texts raises basic questions about both the uniqueness and the originality of Christianity.

This seriously undermines the Church's position on its origins, history and message - in fact the whole foundation of Christianity. This has led to turmoil in Biblical circles; it has also resulted in a systematic and persistent effort by the Vatican and its Catholic institutions to suppress the findings of the Scrolls giving rise to what is being called the 'scandal of the Scrolls'. This is of course one of the main stories of the present book.

After many vicissitudes, nearly all the Scrolls ended up in the Dominican supported institution in Jerusalem known as Ecole Biblique et Archaeologique Francaise de Jerusalem (Biblical and Archaeological School of France in Jerusalem). For nearly twenty-five years, from 1947 until his death in 1971, the Ecole Biblique was under the iron grip of its director Father Roland de Vaux - a monk belonging to the Dominican order. All told, for more than forty years, the Ecole Biblique under de Vaux and his successors exercised dictatorial control over access to the Scrolls. They never allowed anyone other than those fully committed to the orthodox Catholic view to see the Scrolls.[5] During this period, almost everything the public and even the scholarly world knew about the Scrolls was what the scholars of the Ecole Biblique - led by Father de Vaux - were prepared to tell them.

Also, as we shall see in a later chapter, he and his institution were (and still are) secretly under the control of the Pontifical Biblical Commission - a Vatican office having final say over all doctrinal matters. As a result, what on the surface appeared to be a scholarly research institution devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, was in reality a Church controlled institution committed to the preservation and propagation of Christian beliefs.

This was seen to be in violation of the terms under which the scholars of the Ecole Biblique - known as the International Team - had been given custody of the Scrolls. They were expected to make available edited copies with translations of all the Scroll materials in their possession. But by adopting various stratagems the International Team led by Father de Vaux and his successors managed to drag its feet for more than forty years. Their behavior was seen as nothing less than scandalous by Biblical scholars the world over. Writing in 1977, Geza Vermes, a leading Biblical scholar from Oxford, summed up their frustration in the following words:[6]

On this thirtieth anniversary of their first coming to light the world is entitled to ask the authorities responsible for the publication of the Qumran scrolls... what they intend to do about this lamentable state of affairs. For unless drastic measures are taken at once, the greatest and the most valuable of all Hebrew and Aramaic manuscript discoveries is likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century .

More recently, Eisenman and Wise had this to say about one of the more important texts that had remained suppressed for more than forty years.

To have a text like this Paen [for King Jonathan, Alexander Jannaeus], introduced by a dedicatory invocation or panegyric to him... is an historical treasure of high magnitude for the study of the Scrolls. ... The fact that it was buried for so long, with the consequence that much of the debate concerning the state of affairs it addresses was misguided and misinformed, cannot be considered anything but reprehensible. (p. 274)

While many excuses continued to be offered for this unforgivable delay, the real reason was that in the Scrolls the members of the International Team had come upon material from the period of early Christianity that struck at the very foundations of Christian doctrine. It was a classic case of conflict between faith and scholarship, and, as official members of the Church whose doctrines they were sworn to uphold, the International Team led by Father de Vaux chose doctrine over scholarship. For what the members of the Team held in their hands was the doctrinal equivalent of dynamite.

Few, including even educated Christians, have any idea of the potentially explosive impact of the Scrolls and their contents on the foundations of Christian belief - especially the position of the Catholic Church. Although a good deal of work still remains to be done before their full implications can be understood, enough is known already in Biblical scholarly circles to say that they pose a threat to the most fundamental premises of the Catholic Church - and even to Christianity itself. And this, as I just noted, was the real reason behind the foot-dragging by the International Team led by Roland de Vaux. Recognizing the revolutionary import of the Scrolls, the Vatican and its related institutions, notably the Ecole Biblique and the Pontifical Biblical Commission, have adopted various subterfuges to prevent scholars from obtaining access to the Scrolls. Father de Vaux and his International Team at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem have served as the front line of defense against the march of scholarship.

Their stranglehold was finally broken in September 1991 when the Huntington Library in California released the full transcripts of the Scrolls of which they possessed a copy. This was soon followed by the publication of the facsimile edition of the Scrolls edited by Eisenman and Robinson; Eisenman, it turned out, had in his possession photocopies of all the unpublished Scrolls manuscripts.[7] (See Chapter 8 for details.) There had been cracks before in the stonewalling position taken by the International Team, but the actions of the Huntington Library and of Eisenman in particular really opened the floodgates. A howl of protest went up from the Catholic scholars of the International Team - there were dark mutterings with hints of law suits - but Biblical scholars and historians the world over rejoiced and applauded the move. The world of Biblical scholarship, not to say of Christianity itself has been changed for ever.

 

3. Message of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Dead Sea Scrolls research is an involved subject, but its central message may be summarized as follows. The contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls challenge the two most fundamenlal beliefs of Christianity: the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, and Christianity as the embodiment of the message of Christ. Both these are put in jeopardy by the Qumran material. First, they show that the message of Jesus did not originate with him, and he was also not unique; he was at most one of several known as 'Teachers of Righteousness' that were part of an ultra-conservative messianic Jewish movement based in Qumran going back at least a hundred years before the birth of Jesus. Many of the practices that we now regard as Christian innovations - like the Lord's Prayer and the Lord's Supper - can be traced to the Qumranians, also going back to a century before the birth of Christ. And secondly, Christianity as we know today is really a creation of St Paul, having little to do with Jesus or his message. In many ways, the two versions - early Christianity of Jerusalem and Pauline Christianity that followed it - stand in opposition to each other.

It is well known and widely recognized that the real founder of Christianity as a world religion was Saul of Tarsus later known as St Paul. It is the position of the Church that Paul took the message of Jesus and carried it far and wide. According to this, Paul was no more than the emissary of Jesus - the only Son of God. The new twist introduced by the Dead Sea Scrolls is that Jesus had little to do with what passes for his teachings. The main conclusion that follows from the Dead Sea Scrolls is: Christianity as we know it today is rooted not in the message of Jesus Christ, but in the expansionist ideology of St Paul who laid the foundations of Christian imperialism while invoking the name of Jesus. Seen in this light, Pauline Christianity was but a theocracy modelled on the Roman Empire; its foundations were laid by Paul, the influential Roman citizen and not Jesus the orthodox Jew.

According to some scholars, even the existence of Jesus, as a historical figure, is brought into question by the Scrolls. John Allegro, who, as a member of the International Team had examined the Scrolls in the original wrote:[8]

My own opinion is that the scrolls prompt us increasingly to seek an eschatological meaning for most of Jesus' reported sayings: more and more become intelligible when viewed in the light of the imminent cataclysms of Qumran expectations, and the inner conflicts in men's hearts as the time grew near.

As far as details in the New Testament record of Jesus' life are concerned, I would suggest that the scrolls give added ground for believing that many incidents are merely projections into Jesus' own history of what was expected of the Messiah.

In other words, the Qumran texts leave ground for believing that Jesus was no more than the personification of the messianic expectations of the era and of the sect in question. This does not necessarily mean that Jesus Christ never existed as a historical person, but only that he came to be given the attributes of the Messiah who was expected to appear. That is to say, Jesus the Messiah was nothing like the Historical Jesus.[9]

This, as one can see, changes the whole complexion of Christianity as commonly seen and understood. In the light of this, the conduct of the scholars of Ecole Biblique like Father de Vaux becomes entirely understandable. The Scrolls deliver a severe blow to their whole position, beginning with the message of Jesus and the actual role played by Paul in early Christianity. They tell us, among other things, that Jesus, if historical, was an ultra-orthodox Jew whose main concern was the preservation of Jewish beliefs and practices then under assault from the liberalizing forces of the largely secular Graeco-Roman world. The 'early Church' was essentially an ultra-conservative Jewish sect ranged against these liberalizing influences. In due course, Paul's heresy grew into the theocratic world empire that we now call Christianity. In their pioneering work Eisenman and Wise put it this way (p. 10):

We cannot really speak of a 'Christianity' per se in Palestine in the first century. The word was only coined [by Paul], as Acts II :26 makes clear, to describe a situation in Antioch in Syria in the fifties of the present era. Later it was used to describe a large portion of the overseas world that became 'Christian', but this Christianity was completely different from the movement we have before us - well not completely.

Both movements used the same vocabulary, the same scriptural passages as proof texts, similar conceptual contexts; but the one can be characterised as the mirror reversal of the other. While the Palestinian one was zealot, nationalistic, engage, xenophobic, and apocalyptic; the overseas one was cosmopolitan, antinomian, pacifistic - in a word 'Paulinized'. Equally, we may refer to the first as Jamesian...

This crucial difference will become increasingly clear in later chapters. Nonetheless it is an interesting insight - that the early history of the Church can be seen as a conflict between the Jamesian orthodoxy and Pauline heterodoxy. Paul engineered a split within the early Church by introducing his own Doctrine of Faith in opposition to the Jewish Law favored by James (known as the 'Lord's brother') and other members of the early Church. No less remarkable is the fact that even this Doctrine of Faith - the crown jewel of Christianity - is a Qumranian inheritance. It is found in a Qumran text known as the 'Habakkuk Commentary' and some others. Paul lifted this message right out of the Habakkuk Commentary during his three year sojourn in Qumran, but did away with the all-important Law of Moses. This was to have momentous consequences for history as we shall see in Chapter 4 where it is discussed in some detail. What all this means is that there may not be much that can be called original in Christianity.

Put another way: Paul took a heretical movement from within the essentially inward looking Judaism of his day, and turned it into an expansionist ideology modeled on Imperial Rome while calling it a religion after the name of Jesus. This is the essence of theocracy: the pursuit of political and economic power in the name of God. And Christianity has undoubtedly been the most successful theocracy in history - even more than Islam.

There is also evidence to show that this hijacking of their movement in the name of Jesus by Paul in pursuit of his own ideology was opposed by members of the early Church - by Jesus' brother, James, in particular. It emerges from the Qumran literature (and other early sources) that James was a much more important figure at the time than what Paul and other leaders of Christianity have been willing to acknowledge. James is mentioned in several early sources as the leader of the early Church of Jerusalem, whereas Jesus is not known in any reliable early record outside the New Testament: the few references that exist can easily be shown to be later forgeries. (See Chapter 4.) The doctrinal struggle in early Christianity was between Paul and James, with James holding out for the conservative Jewish tradition - the tradition to which Jesus himself belonged. This is what Eisenman and White imply in the passage quoted earlier. Recognizing this fact - of the conflict between Jamesian orthodoxy and Pauline heterodoxy - holds the key to understanding the history of Christianity.

It is helpful also to bear in mind the following facts: first, unlike James and some other early figures of Christianity, Paul did not know Jesus personally. Next, Paul was a privileged Roman citizen who enjoyed the friendship and patronage of Roman authorities at the highest levels of the empire. This fact raises some intriguing questions about the role actually played by Paul: it suggests that he was much more of a politician than a religious figure. This too is entirely in keeping with a theocratic movement. A theocracy succeeds not because of its message but due to the political skill of its leaders.

It follows also from the Scrolls that early Christianity, which began as a movement within orthodox Judaism, was more a political power struggle with the ruling authorities than a dispute about the divinity of Christ or his message. The Scrolls (and other early sources) indicate that Jesus Christ was not regarded as divine by his contemporaries - hardly surprising, for the idea of any human as God was abhorrent to the Jews. The idea of Jesus as a divine figure was the brainchild of Paul - to be used as a vehicle in propagating his own expansionist theocratic ideology. It received its final shape at the Council of Nicea in AD 325 where Emperor Constantine put pressure on the assembled bishops to gain firm control over the Christians. (Chapter 8)

Ultimately this power struggle between Paul and James was part of a larger political and religious struggle between Jewish nationalists known as the Zealots, and the High Priest of the Temple and his followers who were Roman puppets. These rivalries erupted in a major uprising in AD 66 that ended only with the defeat of the Jews and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the Jewish War of AD 66-74. What this means is that Christianity was a violent political movement right from the start. In this regard its history was not much different from that of Islam.

In order to understand the rise of Christianity and the implications of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is necessary to have some idea of the political conditions in Palestine at the time when it was a province of the Roman Empire. This, no less than the doctrinal differences between various Jewish sects, or the message of Jesus, was what ultimately determined the course of Christianity.

Upon examining these struggles against the background of prevailing political conditions, it can be said that Paul - an influential Roman citizen - appropriated a Jewish movement and turned it into an expansionist theocracy by 'Romanising' it. It was Paul the Roman and not Paul the Jewish disciple of Jesus who created Christianity as we know it. His expansionist vision was the result of his knowledge of Rome as an imperial entity. Seen in this light, Christianity has been but a theocratic version of the Roman Empire. This also helps explain why the Popes have always acted more like Caesars than religious figures - concerned more about politics and economics than the world of the spirit.

This of course is a view that Church authorities can never afford to concede. John Marco Allegro, one of the few scholars with first hand knowledge of the Scrolls wrote (Harper's Magazine, August 1969):

The scholars [of the International Team] appear to have held back from making discoveries which, there is evidence to believe, may upset a great many Christian theologians and believers. The heart of the matter is, in fact, the source and originality of Christian doctrine. (Emphasis added.)

We shall be meeting Allegro again, for, as a member of the International Team until Father de Vaux booted him out, his research provides a unique perspective on the Scrolls as well as a rare glimpse into the mindset and methods of the International Team. However, his statement gets to the heart of the crisis confronting the Church: the uniqueness and the originality of Christianity, the full implications of which will be examined in Chapters 3 and 4.

Again, to summarize the great theological dilemma faced by the Church following the discovery of the Scrolls: first, Jesus Christ (if historical) was not unique, and secondly, Christianity has little to do with the message of Christ or the sect to which he belonged. For nearly two thousand years, what the Church has propagated as 'history' has been an elaborately constructed mythology intended to support its doctrine and the theocratic empire built upon it. The source for much of this later mythology was the Jewish tradition preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls, going back at least a century before the birth of Christ. It is therefore hardly surprising that Catholic scholars who controlled access to the Scrolls should have done everything possible to suppress their evidence and mislead the public. What the Scrolls have to say truly leaves their institution with shattered foundations. Recognizing the seriousness of the crisis, the Church is looking to Asia to make good its losses in Europe. This now may be seen as its main goal.

4. State of the Church

To get some idea of the high stakes in the drama now being played in Third World countries, we must first get a picture of the current state of the Church - a secular empire that is crumbling in Europe that now sees expansion in Asia, India in particular with its teeming millions, as its main hope for survival. The so-called 'Thailand Report on the Hindus' - or the Report of the Consultation on World Evangelization: Mini-Consultation on Reaching the Hindus - has chapters like 'Biblical Framework for Hindu Evangelization', 'Hindrances to the Evangelization of Hindus', 'Strategic Planning for Evangelization of Hindus' and others in a similar vein that give a clear idea of its scope and intentions. The report goes on to observe: [10]

We rejoice in the fact that the saving Word of God preached faithfully by God's servants has brought about a Christian population of 19 million people in India alone. However we are conscious that God longs for the whole Hindu people to know Jesus Christ and live under his Lordship... (p 5; emphasis added.)

We regret that, after so many years of sincere effort by so many faithful people, the number of Christians in India is still less than 3% of the population. Further, the dispersed Hindus in other parts of the world have been largely neglected by the Christian communities. (ibid.)

No further comment is needed to recognize that the Church is greatly interested in evangelizing the Hindus of India. What is not widely known is that without expansion in countries like India, Christianity may be doomed. This is the concern of Church officials at all levels, including the Pope. Missionaries find India particularly attractive because of the freedom they enjoy in an open society and the Hindus' history of tolerance. This is obviously not an option in Islamic countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, patrolled by 'religious police'. For this reason, religious entrepreneurs, like Pat Robertson, also see countries like India and Sri Lanka as fertile grounds for their activities as we shall have occasion to see in due course.

To grasp the complexities of the drama being played we need to recognize that the crisis confronting the Church today is only partly doctrinal. The real problem facing organized Christianity today is the increasing irrelevance of its message. It helps to bear in mind that for all its religious trappings, the Church has always been a secular institution, more concerned with its economic and political viability than the saving of souls. This has been the case throughout its two thousand year history: all of its so-called 'reforms' have been power shifts brought on by political circumstances. This is how it appears to the present author, who, thanks to the accident of his birth, is in a position to bring a pluralistic, non-Christian perspective to the study of the Church and its present crisis. At the same time, having spent most of his adult life in the 'Christian' West, he has some understanding of Christianity as well.

Seen from the vantage position of one who was born into a non-theocratic Eastern tradition, the Church does not seem much like a religious entity. The 'Christian' West today is in a deep spiritual crisis. But leaders acting in the name of God and Christ - like Pat Robertson, Patrick Buchanan, and even Pope John Paul II - are interested mainly in political and economic expansion. Robertson and Buchanan seek the presidency of the United States in the name of 'Judaeo-Christian values', while the Pope is concerned mainly with expansion in Asia - especially India - to compensate for massive losses in the West. These losses, as we shall see in the next chapter, are much greater than the general public is aware.

Throughout history, whenever confronted with a problem the Church has invariably reacted like a political or a commercial organization rather than a spiritual one. It is no different today. It does not look into the soul for the source of the problem and its solution, but seeks to use its formidable economic and political resources to try and smother it.[11] Money and power - both secular, and both destroyers of the soul - are the prime concern of the Church today as they have been throughout its eventful history. And this - a total lack of spirituality - is what really lies at the heart of the problems facing the Church today as we shall discover in the next chapter.

 

Chapter I - Crisis of Christianity

If Fascism goes under, God's cause goes under with it.

                                     Cardinal Hinsley of Westminster at a sermon in 1935

I have noticed two things that seem to be in very short supply in the Vatican. Honesty and a good cup of coffee.

Pope John Paull in 1978

1. Vatican Woes: Paganisation of Europe

The revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls could hardly have come at a worse time for the Church. At a time when church attendances - especially in Europe - are at historically low levels, the doctrinal foundations of Christianity have also come under a cloud, making things doubly difficult. According to some scholars, even the historicity of Jesus - something that most people including non-believers had accepted as fact - is now in doubt. More fundamentally, some of the highest officials in the Church hierarchy feel that they and their institutions are under siege. This in many ways is a purely secular crisis that bears close examination.

In the previous chapter we saw how the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal a picture of the origins of Christianity[12] that is radically different from the one presented by the Church. The same is true of the Church as an institution: it is nothing like its public image. It is time to take a look at the state of the institutions of the Church as they are today, and see how they may be affected by these revelations. We shall be looking at the impact of the Scrolls on the doctrinal foundations of Christianity in the next few chapters, but to understand the Church's true predicament, we need to review its current condition in some detail. In this chapter, we shall see the Church as it really is by examining its secular affairs. This we shall do, not by exhuming its sins of the past, but by focusing on its recent history, in particular, following the chain of events surrounding the death of Albino Luciani, better known as Pope John Paul I. This will help lay to rest once and for all the pretence that the Church is a religious institution.

While the Scrolls threaten the foundations of Christian belief, it is the state of the great structure that stands over that foundation - the world of churches, parish priests, followers, and above all, its secular operations like political and economic activities that are of more immediate concern to the Pope and his officials today. If the foundation is Faith in Jesus, the superstructure, composed of the day to day activities of the Church - the part with which the flock and the public come in daily contact - is what keeps the Church and its dependants going. And the condition of the Church as seen from within and without is far from healthy. Its officials therefore have every reason to be concerned.

The Church today is plagued by problems that, on the surface at least, are entirely secular in character. (The fact that these problems might not have been so severe as to threaten its very existence, had the Church been a spiritual entity, is a different issue.) Its problems include: falling Church attendances and the rejection of its message by an ever-increasing number of people, especially in the West. What little regard for the Church there still remains in the West is due mainly to the personality of Jesus Christ as understood by the public, and the image of Christianity as a religion of compassion and service embodying his message. As we shall see in later chapters, the Scrolls now shatter this last illusion. The Doctrine of the Faith - the bedrock of Christianity - is shown to be a later fabrication used in building up a theocratic institution that serves itself in the guise of serving Jesus. The exposure of this and other facts can only accelerate the decline, which happens also to be the great fear of the Church.

The cause of this entirely secular decline may be attributed to the fact that through most of its history the Church has been a despotic state deriving its legitimacy from the word of God revealed to Jesus of which the officials of the Church claim to be the sole and undisputed spokesmen and guardians. This is the exclusivist doctrine upon which the Church rests its authority; the Pope and his clergy are the police, the judge and the jury in this Kingdom of Faith. We shall be examining it in more detail in later chapters, but for the present it suffices to know that without this dogma to support it the Church can hardly exist. It is the single prop of authority and legitimacy upon which Christianity rests. The Pope of course claims to be the ultimate servant of Lord Jesus and also the spiritual head.

The reality however is different: the Pope is the successor to the head of the Roman Empire rather than the early Church - more Nero than St Peter. The Scrolls now bring this fact sharply into relief as we shall also see in the next few chapters. But old habits die hard, and the Vatican has continued to act as though Catholics the world over are still its loyal subjects. This has now run its course - at least in the West.

Until 1870, the Roman Church was for all practical purposes a sovereign state of which the Pope was the absolute monarch; even today it has many of the trappings of a state. It is becoming clear that Christianity being a communal religion and not one of self-exploration, cannot exist purely as a religious institution without some form of government support, or, preferably, being in control of the government and the lives of its subjects; loss of this temporal power is what has led to its collapse in Europe. Recognizing this, the Church has always paid more attention to political and economic affairs than to the problems of the spirit. At the same time, being a public relations organization par excellence, the Church has sought to present itself as an institution concerned mainly with saving souls.

Europeans, with their long history of struggles against the Church have seen the Emperor without his clothes. But Asiatics, Indians in particular, have failed to understand this history, and have accepted Church propaganda as truth. It is time that the people of the so-called Third World countries who have now become the target of the Church, following its near total rejection by the West, see the truth and recognize the real face of the Church. In this, India, with its deep philosophical roots, must take the lead. The Church is no more a soul-saving institution than the British East India Company was an organization devoted to the spread of civilization. Indians with their long association with European countries, backed by an unmatched pluralislic civilization of their own, should be in an ideal position to explore and expose the theocratic aims of Christianity. But with rare exceptions this has not happened. It is a source of unending wonder to me that despite the great number of educated Indians who have travelled in the West, how misinformed most Indians are about the state of Christianity in the West, especially in Europe. This was brought home to me in a recent conversation I had with the editor of a well-known weekly magazine in India. We were discussing the threat of Islamic terrorism to world peace, and how concerned Western countries are about the rise of fundamentalism.

"It is only a matter of time," he told me, "before we have another great war. This time, it will be a fight to the finish between Christianity and Islam. Europeans will be forced to defend Christianity against the threat of Islam."

"Christianity is already finished in Europe," I replied. "Europe is no longer Christian, but secular humanistic. Their fear of Islam is not religious, but political and economic. It poses a threat to their peace and prosperity. That is the way the Europeans are looking at it."

The editor, a Hindu, was incredulous. In fact, I don't think he understood me at all.

"But what about the Pope?" he asked. "Will not the Europeans unite and fight to defend the Pope and Rome if threatened by Islamic fundamentalist forces?"

By Rome he really meant the Vatican. Like most Indians, he believed all Romans to be devout Catholics. This is part of the image projected by the Church and its missionaries in India which Indians by and large have swallowed. Most Indians believe that all Europeans look to the Pope as their spiritual leader - laughable though it will seem to Europeans.

"Highly unlikely," I told him. "The people of Europe had to fight for more than a Ihousand years to free themselves from Church tyranny. They are not going to lay down their lives to defend an institution that has been their main oppressor through most of their history. They recognize that Islamic fundamentalism is just another theocracy on the march - not much different from what the Church and the Pope used to be. "

I then quoted for him a popular Italian lament: Italians have long complained how God has cursed their beautiful country with impassable mountains in the north, two volcanoes in the south and a Pope in the middle.

I don't think I got my point across, for, in our next meeting, he repeated his statement. I mention this only to bring out the fact that most Indians have little idea of how irrelevant and unimportant the Church and its message have become to the people of Europe. The only Europeans who look to the Church for liberation are those that have known tyranny worse than Christianity - at least in their recent memory - like Poland under the Communist yoke, and the Balkan countries under Ottoman Turkey. Even this is wearing thin; the 'official' Church candidate Lech Walesa was defeated in the recent presidential election in Poland despite his endorsement by Pope John Paul II. As a result, almost the only Europeans who have any use for the Church today are those whose livelihoods depend upon it. Here is what the Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst has to say about the current state of Christianity in Europe:[13]

Anyone who cares to look, can see that Christianity is in steep decline. This is especially the case in Europe, where church attendance levels in many countries have fallen below 10% or even 5 %...

Even more ominous for the survival of Christianity is the decline in the priestly vocations. Many parishes that used to have two to three parish priests now have none, so that the Sunday Service now has to be conducted by a visiting priest, who has an ever fuller agenda as his colleagues keep dying, retiring or abandoning the priesthood without being replaced...

Outside observers may join the Church leadership in asking why this decline is taking place. As a participant observer of the emptying of the churches in Europe, I will argue that certain circumstances and tactical mistakes may have accelerated the process, but the fundamental reason for the decline is intrinsic to the nature of Christian faith... Any attempt to bridge the gap between modernity and Christian faith has only underlined their incompatibility.

... The notion that there is a single God, Creator of the universe, who is interfering with his Creation by sending messages to privileged spokespersons called prophets, flies in the face of rationality. People will accept that reason isn't everything, but not that your central belief system is so militantly opposed to reason.

(Elst, pp. 1-2)

Church teaching had overruled reason and declared its own dogmas, inspired directly by the Holy Spirit, to be above anything the human mind could think up or envision. ...The idea that humanity's intrinsic imperfection or sinfulness had been remedied by Christ's crucifixion was so absurd... that it could only be upheld as Christianity's basic dogma by declaring reason incompetent. (Elst, p. 3)

The third century Church father, Tertullian, solved the problem, at least for himself, by proclaiming: Credo quia absurdum - I believe because it is absurd. It is this faith - built around a dogma utterly opposed to reason, and one that has been losing its hold over the minds of Westerners - that the Church now is trying desperately to sell in Asia. It is no more than a strategy for survival, for the Church has been forced to recognize that it has no future in Europe. And now, even the rickety foundation of this doctrine of redemption through faith in Jesus has been dealt a severe blow by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So to place the Church's predicament in perspective: not only is the public refusing to buy the sales pitch for the product, even the product is not what it has been advertised to be. And like other businesses whose products no longer have a market in the West, the Church has been forced to seek customers in the Third World.

Elst is far from being the only European to see Christianity virtually on its last legs, at least in Europe. David Yallop has this to say, speaking of Rome, the home of Christianity in most people's minds:[14]

The new Concordat recently signed between the Vatican and the Italian Government makes a fitting epitaph for the current Pope's [John Paul II] reign. Italy, for nearly two thousand years regarded by Catholics as the home of their faith, no longer has Roman Catholicism as 'the religion of the State'. The Church's privileged position in Italy is ending. (p 323)

Rome has a Catholic population of two and a half million [in 1978]. It should have been producing at least seventy new priests per year. When Luciani (John Paul I) became Pope [in 1978] it was producing six. ...Many parts of the city were, in reality, pagan, with Church attendance less than 3 per cent of the population... (p 194; emphasis added.)

Shades of Nostradamus! This is like Saudi Arabia disestablishing Sunni Islam as the state religion, with its people abandoning the mosques. As observed previously, Christianity, like Islam but unlike Hinduism, is a communal religion, not a religion of self-exploration. Loss of participation in communal activities can spell its death. And yet this is precisely what is happening to Christianity in Europe. This bleak picture painted by outside observers like Elst and Yallop is confirmed by official Vatican reports. Peter de Rosa, a former Catholic priest who had access to official Church documents cites a secret Vatican study:

It revealed that from 1963 to 1969 over 8,000 priests had asked to be dispensed from their vows and nearly 3,000 others had left without waiting for permission. The study estimated that over the next five years 20,000 would leave. The estimate proved to be far too conservative.

Matters were worst in countries that pontiffs had relied on for providing missionaries. Holland for example, used to produce over 300 priests a year. Now ordinations are almost as rare as mountains [in Holland]. ... The average age of those who remain is a startlingly high 54. The future, too, looks bleak. Over the last twenty years, the number of Seminarians in the States [America] has fallen from 50,000 to 12,000.[15]

A loss of 76 percent in less than two decades! Even this understates the real loss because seminaries that do remain open have fewer students and teachers than they used to. Many of them have been kept alive only through a massive infusion from Third World countries like India and the Philippines; even the United States Army has been reduced to employing many of these non-Americans as chaplains. And these men and women have been lured less by faith than by the attractions of a more comfortable life in the West.

The situation has grown steadily worse since that time. When Pope John Paul II visited the United States in October 1995, newspapers reported that the number of Seminarians in the country was only 3,500 in 1993! It is probably less than 3,000 today. If present trends continue, it is not easy to see how the Church can survive without a clergy to lead its communal organizations.

What is true of the losses in the priesthood, is true also of its age profile: the numbers understate the real loss. Elst tells us that the average age of Catholic priests in the world is 55, whereas in the Netherlands (i.e. Holland) it is an astonishingly high 64 and still rising. And those that leave the priestly professions are invariably the younger members. All this is silent testimony to the spiritual bankruptcy of the institution. The simple fact is that the Church is imploding. Thus the condition of the Church is of far greater importance to its officials than to its devotees who are deserting it in droves.

This state of affairs no doubt accounts for the siege mentality bordering on paranoia that is displayed by Church authority whenever faced with the threat of a rational alternative to Church dogma. It is this fear that lies at the bottom of the openly expressed hostility to Yoga and Buddhism by the present Pope (John Paul II). The Church is deeply perturbed by the West's discovery of non-dogmatic Eastern spirituality and empirical disciplines like Yoga. These do not ask the faithful to suspend their rational judgement and accept dogma.

Freedom of thought has always been seen as the great enemy of credal religions like Christianity and Islam. That is why they have need for a thought police calling itself the 'clergy', as well as elaborate machineries like the Inquisition and blasphemy laws to suppress all dissent. It is difficult to imagine either Christianity or Islam existing without clergy. In contrast, pluralistic religions like Hinduism and those of ancient Greece have never needed clergy or blasphemy laws. They can resolve disputes through debate. The Upanishads and the Dialogues of Plato are full of them. As that great rationalist Thomas Jefferson once observed: It is error alone that needs the support of the government. Truth can stand by itself.

Elst goes on to contrast this declining state of Christianity in the West with the situation in India, particularly the attitude towards Christianity shown by many Hindus:

When staying in India, I find it sad and sometimes comical to see how these outdated beliefs are being foisted upon backward sections of the Indian population by fanatical missionaries. In their aggressive campaign to sell their product, the missionaries are helped a lot by sentimental expressions of admiration for Christianity on the part of leading Hindus. (Elst, p viii)

This chasm between the real state of Christianity and its image in India must be attributed to the skill of the Catholic propaganda machine which has succeeded in portraying itself as an institution full of vitality and vigour. Hindu gullibility and the subservient mentality of many Indian intellectuals and journalists has also helped.[16] It should be noted that the state of Christianity is far healthier in former European colonies like India and even the Americas than in Europe. (Catholic priests are despised in much of Mexico and Central America, and, horror of horrors, Christianity is being absorbed into pagan cults, but that is a different story.) This being the current state of Christianity, the Vatican can hardly afford another blow like the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. That is a story we shall be looking at later.

In order to understand the Church's predicament, and its near hysterical reaction to the Dead Sea Scrolls, it helps to recognize that what is at stake today for the Church is not so much the loss of spirituality in the world as the loss of the marketplace to itself; if the scene in Europe were to be repeated in the rest of the world, Christianity would be finished. Through much of its history, officials of the Church - the clergy - have functioned mainly as a thought police - an occupation that is no longer open to them. As a result, the Vatican today is not so much a religious organization as a secular business empire, like IBM or General Motors. Its concerns are the same - loss of customers leading to unemployment within its official ranks. The theocratic state has been replaced by the theocratic business enterprise that may fairly be called Vatican Incorporated. The business is troubled, and the Dead Sea Scrolls can only hasten the inevitable.

2. 'Secular' Vatican: Mussolini to Mafia

When we examine all this, it becomes clear that the Vatican today is mainly, if not entirely, a secular organization concerned about its economic and political viability. As Baigent and Leigh observe;

The Church today, after all, is less a religious than a social, cultural, political and economic institution. Its stability and security rest on factors quite remote from the creed, the doctrine and the dogma it promulgates. (p.234)

The doctrine is important only because it is the product sold by the institution which the British writer David Yallop has called Vatican Incorporated. Its 'religion' - under the name of 'Judeo-Christian values' is now little more than a political slogan - just as 'secularism' has become in India and some other former colonies.[17] The Vatican today is essentially a multinational business enterprise, a holding company with investments in many corporations, possibly including those that make firearms and missiles, and, surprise of surprises - birth control pills. But for those employed by Vatican Inc., it is often a very comfortable life indeed. Its one redeeming feature is that it can provide employment to people who might otherwise be unemployable.

As a 'religious' organization the Vatican also enjoys tax and other benefits in countries around the world that bona fide companies do not. And because of the enormous political clout that it commands in several governments, especially in Italy and some Latin American countries, it is also guaranteed a degree of immunity from official and even legal scrutiny which allows its officials to engage in activities and methods for which lesser mortals would be jailed or hanged. Put bluntly, the main concern of the Vatican today is amassing wealth and enhancing its political influence by methods fair or foul.

Most students of history know that Medieval and Renaissance Popes like the notorious Alexander VI were incredibly corrupt. Writing anonymously, the great humanist writer Petrarch (1304-74) described the papal court of Clement VI in the following words:

...the shame of mankind, a sin of vice, a sewer where is gathered all the filth in the world. There the God is held in contempt, money alone is worshipped and the laws of God and men are trampled under foot. Everything there breathes a lie...[18] (de Rosa, p. 117)

In the centuries following, things actually have not changed all that much. It will no doubt come as a surprise to many - especially to people living outside Europe - to learn that most of what Petrarch wrote of the papacy six hundred years ago applies to the Vatican even today. This is especially true of his observation about worship of money and contempt for the law as this chapter will make clear. A brief look at the financial and other operations leading to the death of Pope John Paul I (who occupied the seat for barely a month), helps obtain a picture of the Vatican today as it really is.

It is a tale of Cardinals, Archbishops, nimble-fingered accountants, drug dealers, blackmailers, cold-blooded poisoners and trigger happy contract killers - often working together, and to the same end. The driving forces have been money and power - exactly as they were at the time when Petrarch lived and wrote. And this economic and political position is what the Vatican is trying to protect; everything else is public relations. Ultimately it all comes down to power and money - entirely secular in scope and substance. No one knows exactly how much the Vatican is worth financially.

          One person who came close was Robeno Calvi, a prominent member of the Italian Mafia and banker to the Vatican. He was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano of Milan of which the Vatican was the largest shareholder. He and his bank had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy - thanks to the shady dealings of the Vatican banker Archbishop Marcinkus; the good Archbishop had proven more than a match for the Mafiosi of Milan. The Mafiosi were experts at money laundering, but Archbishop Marcinkus was, as he described himself, 'God's Banker' (and swindler). With both he and his Banco

Ambrosiano reduced to dire financial straits, Calvi, who knew whereof he spoke said:

The Vatican should honour its commitments by selling part of the wealth controlled by the I.O.R. It is an enormous patrimony. I estimate it to be 10 billion dollars. To help the Ambrosiano the I.O.R. could start to sell in chunks of a billion a time. (Yallop, p. 295)

Even this figure given by Calvi in 1982, is in all probability a great underestimate and represented only what he knew at the time. In 1975, a newspaper in Switzerland stated that Swiss banks had put the figure at not less than 50 billion Swiss francs or 15 billion dollars; at today's values that would be worth more than 30 billion dollars exclusive of accumulated interest and other incomes. And this figure does not include its buildings and palaces, priceless paintings and other art treasures. Calvi was speaking strictly of its liquid assets like stocks.

The I.O.R. that Calvi was referring to - Istituto per le Opera di Religione - the Institute for Religious Works is the Vatican Bank which has no function beyond making money. It has served as a religious front for Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano in its drug-related money laundering operations. Shortly after revealing these details about the Vatican, Calvi himself was to lose his life, done to death in London on June 17, 1982 - his death made to look like suicide. His secretary Graziella Corrocher had also been 'suicided' a few hours before. It was obviously the work of professional hit men. His widow Clara Calvi charged: "The Vatican had my husband killed to hide the bankruptcy of the Vatican Bank." (Yallop, p. 306) This is a complex tale that I shall again touch upon a little later.

Calvi had another connection with the Vatican via a sinister organization known as Opus Dei ('Work of God'). It is a secret organization founded in 1928 by the Spanish priest Monsignor Jose Maria Escriva. It seeks to attract the best and the brightest into the fold - from universities, the professional class and especially the media. Dr John Roche of Oxford, a former member of Opus Dei called it 'sinister, secretive and Orwellian'. The organization has as its aim nothing less than the total take-over of the Roman Catholic Church. Three of its members held cabinet positions under the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Jose Mateos, who had to flee Spain to escape prosecution for bank fraud, was a patron of the Opus Dei. Much of its money came from Calvi who funded it through Mateos.[19] (See Yallop, pp. 263 - 4)

The financial affairs of the Church spread like a tangled web that leads from the Vatican to international terrorist organizations to Mussolini and Hitler - a story that I will get to a little later.[20] But the Vatican practice of hiding purely secular activities like political control (a la Opus Dei), banking, stock and currency speculation and even money laundering operations under a religious cover is a constantly occurring theme in all its dealings. As Yallop observes:

Various other Vatican departments with high-sounding names such as The Fabric of St Peter's, The Pontifical Society for St Peter Apostle, the Administration of the Holy See Patrimony, and the Propaganda Fide were revealed as players of the stock market. (p. 103)

It was more than stock market speculation. Their activities included currency speculation, fraud, money laundering and even blackmail. But first, how did the Vatican acquire the financial wherewithal to indulge in these high-flying activities? To understand this, we need to go back to 1929, to the Concordat signed between the Vatican and the Italian dictator Mussolini. Benefits to the Vatican from this treaty were manifold, beginning with a windfall of 750 million lire in cash, and Italian State Bonds worth a billion lire - all told worth at least a billion dollars in today's values.

To manage this enormous influx of capital and its investment, Pope Pius XI created an office called the Special Administration and hired a financial genius named Bernardino Nogara to run it. Nogara was not a priest and he laid down two conditions before accepting the job. The first was that he was to be free from any religious or doctrinal considerations or scruples in his choice of investments; and second, he should be free to invest anywhere in the world. Pope Pius XI agreed to both conditions. Nogara put this freedom to use at every opportunity including his financing of Mussolini's military adventures.

This of course was a highly profitable venture. He had even acquired armament plants for the Vatican anticipating that Europe was heading towards war.

In 1935, when Mussolini needed armaments for the invasion of Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia), the Vatican reaped a huge profit via shipments of arms by a munitions plant that Nogara had acquired for it. (More than fifty years later, during the Falkland Islands war, Argentina acquired the deadly Exocet missiles through the good offices of the Vatican agent Licio Gelli. We shall be meeting Signor Gelli again.)

In the succeeding years, until he died in 1958, Nogara proved himself one of the most successful investors of all time. He had of course the advantage of operating under the cloak of religion and freedom from Italian tax, and sometimes, even criminal laws. Nonetheless, by any standards his was a virtuoso performance. Cardinal Spellman of New York exulted: "Next to Jesus Christ, the greatest thing that has happened to the Catholic Church is Bernardino Nogara. "

When he said this, Spellman probably had in mind what Pope Leo X had said of Jesus more than four hundred years earlier: "It has served us well - this myth of Christ. "

To return to the Vatican's fortunes, in 1933, its Concordat with Fascist Italy was supplemented by another windfall - this time a highly lucrative treaty with Hitler's Germany. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State under Pope Pius XI played a leading role in concluding the treaty with the Nazis. Pacelli was later to attain fame - or notoriety - as Pope Pius XII, who, in the years following the Second World War helped many Nazi criminals escape to South America; these included such luminaries as Klaus Barbie and Martin Bormann. Yallop writes:

Hitler saw many potential benefits in the treaty, not the least that Pacelli [future Pope Pius XII], a man already showing marked pro-Nazi attitudes, might prove an useful ally in the approaching World War. History was to prove that Hitler's assessment was accurate. (p. 98)

And yet the Encyclopaedia Britannica of all things describes Pius XII as a 'deeply spiritual man'! The word 'spiritual' must hold a different meaning for its learned editors. In 1936, Hitler had a long meeting with the Catholic Bishop Berning of Osnabruch. At that meeting, Hitler, a Catholic himself, told the Bishop that he saw no essential difference between the Church and his own Nazism. "I am only doing," the Fuhrer assured the good Bishop, "what the Church has done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively." (de Rosa, pp. 6-7) And he was not far off the mark.

The advantage to the Vatican professing official neutrality in the War was more money in the form of 'Kirchensteuer' - or state tax on the churches in Germany. This is a tax which was (and still is) deducted from the payroll of workers in support of religious institutions - a practice going back to the Middle Ages. The Vatican received a substantial share of this as part of the treaty with Hitler's Reich. In 1943 alone, the Vatican's largesse amounted to more than 100 million dollars (1.3 billion in today's values), and the inflow continued throughout the war.

A striking feature of these negotiations is that all the parties concerned - the Vatican, Hitler and Mussolini - treated it as strictly business and politics. There was no sentimental nonsense about the Church being 'holy' or of 'His Holiness' being anything but a political operative out to cut a deal in return for money, and his Secretary of State a shrewd chiseller. Only in countries like India do soft-headed people, spineless journalists and pompous priests make much of the Pope's holiness. Europeans have seen his holiness without his robe.

So the Catholic Church, which had been continually losing its hold over the flock was granted a lease of life through the generosity of Mussolini and Hitler. One can only speculate as to what the Vatican's position would have been today without this windfall, and without a Nogara to run it. Cardinal Hinsley of Westminster was being no more than truthful when he observed in 1935, "If Fascism goes under, then God's cause goes under with it." But the Church has managed to outlive both Hitler and Mussolini - thanks to its image as a religious institution.

It would be extremely unjust, however, to conclude from this that Cardinal Hensley was in any way party to all this or anti-Semitic; he was neither. Later, to his lasting credil, Cardinal Hinsley was among the first to condemn Nazi atrocities against the Jews. In 1942, he announced on BBC Radio that the Nazis had exterminated 700,000 Jews in Poland and said: "This innocent blood cries out for vengeance." His superior in the Vatican, Pius XII - that 'deeply spiritual' man - on the other hand maintained a stony silence – a silence more terrible than the numerous anti-Semitic decrees of the various Popes that came before him. After the war, Pius and the Vatican helped many high Nazi criminals escape to South America. In his book Death in Rome Robert Katz wrote: "There was one man who could have, should have, and must be held to account for not having acted to at least delay the German slaughter. He is Pope Pius XII."

Among the real victims of the often predatory financial activities of the Vatican have been the people of ltaly and the hapless countries of South and Central America. Various ltalian governments have tried to get the Vatican to pay its share of the taxes, but with little success. The Vatican - not accountable to any electorate - has been absolutely ruthless in dealing with successive ltalian governments; Latin American countries have generally been little more than feudatories of the Vatican. The following episode should help illustrate the methods and the power of the Church.

In December 1962, the cash-strapped ltalian government passed a law levying a 15 percent tax on share dividends; and this rate was soon doubled. The Vatican insisted that as a 'religious' organization, the Holy See should be exempt from all taxes. In particular this meant that its financial institutions - the I.O.R. and the Special Administration - should be free to buy and sell stock in the ltalian stock markets but not be taxed on the profits. Italian governments came and went, and the negotiations between ltaly and the Vatican dragged on. Finally, in 1964, when Aldo Moro was prime minisler, the Vatican used brute force to have its own way. As Yallop tells us:

In 1964, with Aldo Moro yet again in power, the Church of the poor [Vatican] threatened to bring down the entire ltalian economy. During negotiations Vatican officials told the Italian Government that if they did not get their way they would throw on the market every single share held in Italy. They picked their moment well, The ltalian Stock Market was going through a particularly bad period, with shares dropping almost daily. Suddenly to place on the market the enormous share-holdings of the Valican would have destroyed the entire ltalian economy. (pp. 102-3)

This was blackmail pure and simple, and it worked. The government caved in and agreed to give the Vatican special tax benefits even though they were illegal under Italian law. If this was the fate of a fairly rich and powerful European country like Italy, one can readily imagine how vulnerable and weak Latin American countries must be to such tactics. We shall see later that the Vatican has enormous financial and political clout in Latin America where it has financed wars and revolutions to protect and enhance its own interests. (It seems also to be involved in the wars among the various drug cartels - a story that I shall get to later. Aldo Moro himself was to lose his life, killed by terrorists belonging to an organization known as the Red Brigade.)

But the Vatican has not been content to play the stock and currency markets; with the help of unscrupulous and even criminal operators, it has often manipulated whole economies and governments to serve its own needs. This, however, was not without a price. While it may have been successful in blackmailing successive Italian governments, stories of its heavy-handed methods soon made their way into the newspapers. Its tactics no doubt gained it short term financial benefits, but earned long term hostility of the Italian people. The Italian public increasingly saw the Vatican as a predator that was enriching itself at the cost of the poor taxpayer, hard pressed to pay his bills.

More seriously from the Vatican point of view, with the public solidly behind them, successive Italian governments were beginning to show signs of more backbone; it was only a matter of time before the Vatican would be hit with huge tax bills. Faced with this possibility, the Vatican authorities decided that the best course was to get out of the Italian market altogether. But this was to be done as quietly as possible so that the stockholdings could be disposed off without attracting undue notice - no easy task considering its huge holdings. To this end, Pope Paul VI turned to two men - Michele Sindona and Paul Marcinkus, better known as The Shark and The Gorilla.

The Gorilla - or Bishop Paul Marcinkus was an American known for his rough and ready methods. He was made the head of the Vatican Bank. The Shark, Michele Sindona, a personal friend of Pope Paul VI, was a distinguished member of the Sicilian Mafia with underworld connections all over the western hemisphere. An illustrious member of this underworld network was the Gambino family of New York, one of the world's largest heroin traders. As Yallop tells us:

The Gambino family made Sindona an offer he accepted with enthusiasm. They wanted him to manage the family's re-investment of the huge profits just beginning to accrue from the sales of heroin. They needed a laundry man. Sindona, with his proven abilities at moving money in and out of Italy without disturbing the tranquillity of the Government's taxation departments, was an ideal choice. (p. 109)

He was an ideal choice for the Vatican also beset with similar problems. This was the man to whom Pope Paul VI turned to move the Vatican's investments out of Italy. And with the help of his friend Bishop Marcinkus - 'God's Banker' - Sindona was able to use the Vatican Bank as a front in his money laundering operations. His close friendship with Marcinkus, and the Pope himself, allowed him to use the Vatican bank as practically an extension of his Mafia money laundering business. With such influential friends no one was asking any questions until American authorities arrested him in New York after several spectacular bank failures.

Sindona The Shark was once kind enough to enlighten his friends about his philosophy: "My operating philosophy is based on my personality which is unique in the world, on well-told lies and on the efficient weapon of blackmail." (Yallop, p. 129) It was not an idle boast; his blackmail victims included no less a person than Dr Luigi Mennini who was Marcinkus' assistant in the Vatican Bank. I'll get to that story a little later.

The amazing thing is that through its association with men like Sindona and Calvi, the Vatican had become practically an extension of their crime syndicate. The advantage to them was that the Vatican Bank, located in the independent enclave of Vatican City, lay outside the jurisdiction of Italian authorities. Calvi made full use of this immunity. The fact is, by the early 1970s, the Vatican Bank and Calvi's money laundering Banco Ambrosiano of Milan had virtually become one. The nature of this nexus becomes evident when we look at the sale of the Banca Cattolica del Veneto arranged by Calvi - a transaction from which the Vatican reaped a huge profit, thanks to the artificially high values for its shares engineered by Sindona and Calvi. Calvi himself described the sale of Banca Cattolica del Veneto as follows:

Marcinkus, who is a rough type, born in a suburb of Chicago of poor parents, wanted to carry out the operation without even telling the boss. That is the Pope. I had three meetings with Marcinkus regarding Banca Cattolica del Veneto. He wanted to sell it to me. I asked him: 'Are you sure? Is it available to you? Is the boss in agreement with it?' ... Later Marcinkus told me, yes, he had spoken with Paul VI and had his assent. Some time later Marcinkus got me an audience with Paul VI, who thanked me because in the meantime I had sorted out some problems with the Ambrosiano Library. In reality I understood he was thanking me for buying Banca Cauolica del Veneto. (Yallop, p. 142)

Worth noting is Calvi's attitude towards the Pope: not a hint of any reverence for the august figure. He is simply the 'boss' and Paul VI. Through this transaction Calvi had helped the Vatican get rid of a very large Italian investment. In effect, the Vatican traded its immunity in return for money from men like Sindona and Calvi. It was a lucrative arrangement for all concerned. As Yallop observes: "With regard to the Sindona/Calvi/Marcinkus scheme concerning Banca Cattolica del Veneto all the available evidence suggests a criminal conspiracy     involving all three men." (ibid.)

Pope Paul VI too had been party to it even if indirectly.

Sindona was even more audacious. His high-flying operations had led him to buy banks all over Europe as well as in North and South America. Taking advantage of new technologies like EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer), The Shark moved money in and out of his banks at lightning speed, with the result the same capital was often shown as being deposited in several of his banks at the same time. This in turn allowed him to borrow huge sums from these banks - many times more than what was legally permissible. As it happens sometimes with financially successful men, he seems to have developed megalomania, causing him to lose touch with reality. It was not long before banks began collapsing, including the very large Franklin National Bank of Philadelphia; it went under on October 8, 1974 for two billion dollars - the biggest bank crash in American history until that date.

And this was only the beginning. Over the next three months banks were crashing all over Europe - Baokhaus Wolff of Hamburg, Bankhaus Hersatt of Cologne, Amincor of Zurich and Finabank of Geneva being only a few of the more notable victims. Even the Swiss, the most astute bankers in the world, had been taken in by Sindona, apparently impressed by his Vatican connection.

Now several countries had warrants out for Sindona's arrest. It transpired that The Shark, in addition to bank fraud, had issued forged stock certificates for about a billion dollars. Many poor people had lost their life savings - thanks to The Shark and his 'Il Crack Sindona' as the Italians called it. The Vatican expressed itself 'distressed'; in truth it was more than distressed, it had suffered heavy losses. Swiss bank sources estimate Vatican losses at 240 million dollars, or more than half a billion in today's values. Influential men who had been extolling the financial brilliance of Michele Sindona were now claiming that they had never known the man. And one man who had reason to be rather more concerned than anyone else was Bishop Paul Marcinkos - the head of the Vatican Bank.

In 1973, the good Bishop had warmly told American investigators: "Michele and I are very good friends... He is well ahead of his time as far as financial matters are concerned." Less than two years later the same Marcinkus was saying: "The truth is that I don't even know Sindona. How can I have lost money because of him? The Vatican has not lost a cent, the rest is fantasy." (Yallop, p. 136)

The truth of the matter is: God's Banker had a good deal to conceal. To take just one example, in 1973, in the transaction previously described, Sindona had helped Marcinkus sell Banca Cattolica del Veneto - one of the Vatican's Italian holdings - to Roberto Calvi of Banco Ambrosiano for 46.5 million dollars. To facilitate the deal, Sindona had paid Calvi and Marcinkus an illegal kickback of 6.5 million dollars - worth over 15 million in today's values. In addition, Marcinkus sat on the board of several Sindona controlled banks in Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean. Then there was also the problem of Sindona's blackmail of Vatican officials, including Marcinkus' own assistant Mennini.

Dr Luigi MeMini, who was considered a brilliant banker, worked directly under Marcinkus. Sindona's colleague Carlo Bordoni had helped MeMini speculate in currency markets on behalf of the Vatican Bank. And Bordoni, who was in a position to know, called MeMini a 'seasoned gambler' and a 'slave to Sindona's blackmail'. This suggests that MeMini had pocketed some of the profits leaving himself open to blackmail by Sindona and Bordoni. Through the good offices of MeMini, Bordoni the blackmailer's assistant had received a personal letter from Pope Paul VI that included a benediction.

MeMini was arrested by the Italian police following the great bank crash, but Marcinkus managed to evade arrest by staying within the Vatican walls where he still remains. And yet, Bishop Marcinkus was

later elevated to Archbishop by the present Pope (John Paul II). This bears eloquent testimony to the rot within the Church.

Sindona The Shark, serving a sentence in an Italian prison, about to be transported to a New York jail was himself to lose his life in 1986, poisoned by unknown hands. As he choked over a cup of coffee, he screamed bloody murder and pointed an accusing finger at the Vatican. It should be noted that the Church's involvement in drug running and money laundering operations did not cease with the death of Sindona and Calvi. There is now compelling evidence suggesting that the Church is deeply involved in the drug wars among the various cartels in Mexico and other Latin American countries. It is a complex subject shrouded in secrecy, but one recent episode should suffice to give an idea of the Vatican's involvement.

In Mexico and other Latin American countries, the drug cartels practically run parallel governments in which members of the clergy have been implicated at all levels. At least half the law enforcement officials in Mexico are known to be in the pay of drug cartels who are often at war with one another. One of the more illustrious casualties of the drug rivalries was the Mexican Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo who was murdered in May 1993. The official line put out by both the Vatican and the Mexican government was that the cardinal had been caught in the crossfire. The facts of the case, however, do not bear this out. Charles Bowden recently wrote:[21]

On May 24, 1993, in Guadalajara airport, Juan Jesus Cardinal Posadas Ocampo is chauffeured in his fine car to the parking lot in the terminal. He is there to meet the papal nuncio [ambassador]. Some people open his car and put at least a dozen rounds into the cardinal. The details and lies are too many to explicate...

His body was riddled with fourteen bullets fired at point blank range. This was no crossfire - but a planned assassination. It was later claimed that it was a case of mistaken identity. For whom Posadas Ocampo in his priest's habit, cardinal's cap and wearing a large and ostentatious silver cross on his chest could be mistaken was left unexplained. One Ramon Salazar Salazar, a small-time drug dealer from Sonora was accused of the crime. This was patently absurd. It was the work of several professional hit men, not a petty peddler like Salazar. The case was declared 'solved' when Salazar himself was abducted and executed Mafia style by officers belonging to the Mexican Federal Police. He had been unarmed and buying beer at the time. I previously noted that the majority of the Mexican police are in the pay of drug lords.

Though the official cause of the cardinal's death was crossfire, the American magazine Fortune (September 4, 1995) thought otherwise. It reported that at the time of his murder, Cardinal Posadas Ocampo had been on an intelligence-gathering mission. Details of who the Cardinal was working for and what business he had spying on drug lords remain murky. It is interesting though that Mexican authorities allowed the real assassins to escape while declaring the case 'solved' when the petty drug peddler Salazar was killed by the Federal Police. This suggests that Posadas Ocampo was working against the interests of the Mexican government. This was indirectly confirmed by Mexican Church officials.

Recent investigative reports suggest that Posadas Ocampo was heavily involved in the Latin American drug wars. Mexican Church officials point out that Posadas Ocampo was not only prelate of Guadalajara and Tijuana - both major drug trafficking centres - but also Vice President of the Latin American Episcopal Conference based in Bogota, Colombia. Bogota is of course the capital of the drug cartel with its kingpin Pablo Escobar. According to a story in the New Yorker, Posadas Ocampo was acting on behalf of the notorious Pablo Escobar himself, trying to arrange safe asylum for him in Mexico in exchange for undisclosed favours. Escobar was himself later gunned down in a battle with the Colombian armed forces supported by American drug enforcement agents. He had every reason therefore to seek safe haven in Mexico, which is what Posadas Ocampo was trying to arrange for him. This does not either show the cardinal or his institution in particularly good light.[22]

Such activities are not by any means limited to the Catholic Church. Edir Macedo, a religious entrepreneur in the style of Pat Robertson runs an evangelical movement in South America called the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The American weekly Time reported (January 22, 1996) that the Universal Church is under investigation by the Brazilian Federal Police for possible involvement in "currency violations, links with drug traffickers and tax evasion." A video aired on Brazilian television showed Edir Macedo instructing his pastors to solicit donations by "threatening holdouts with damnation" as Time put it.

Even this year (1995-6), missionaries have been caught smuggling arms into India and Sri Lanka in efforts to help local insurgencies. The present Pope therefore is being hypocritical in going around apologizing for the Church's 'sins of the past'; he should do something about its sins of the present.

We may soon be able to learn more about these activities – the Vatican-Mafia connection in particular. In the so-called 'Trial of the Century' of Mafia figures currently in progress in Italy, several important government officials including former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti have been charged with criminal activities. As the case progresses we should be able to learn more about these affairs. Andreotti was and is a strange man, the ultimate amoral politician. Speaking of him, Francesco Cassiga, former president of Italy said: "Andreotti believes in God - the problem is he believes only in God". We shall be meeting Signor Andreotti again.

And yet, Michele Sindona, master criminal though he was, was far from being the most unsavoury character to be associated with the Vatican in recent years. That dubious honour belongs to Licio Gelli, better known to the Italian authorities as 'Il Burallinaio' - the Puppet-master.

3. Puppet-master of P2

Few know or have heard of Licio Gelli, but for nearly three decades following the Second World War, he was one of the most powerful and influential men in the world. At one time he practically owned the Italian government as well as those in several Latin American countries. He was the head of a secret international terrorist organization known as 'Propaganda Due' or in short P2. He could make or break governments in Italy and most South American countries. When General Jose Peron returned to power in Argentina, he publicly expressed his gratitude by kneeling at the feet of Gelli. One of the more unconventional members of P2 was the former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie - the 'butcher of Lyon' - whom Gelli had known through his services as a Nazi agent during the Second World War.

The Puppet-master's strings stretched deep into the Vatican. Several high officials of the Curia including Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot were later revealed as members of the dreaded P2. When Pope John Paul I died suddenly on 28-9 September 1978, Cardinal Villot took immediate steps to destroy a good deal of the evidence surrounding the circumstances of the pontiff's death. Only the night before, the Pope had informed Villot that he was being removed from office along with every other Vatican official who was a member of P2. So, the Vatican Secretary of State, next to the Pope the most powerful man in the Catholic hierarchy, was acting as a member of the terrorist organization P2 under the direction of the former Nazi officer Gelli. Not for nothing was Gelli known as the Puppet-master; he pulled his strings everywhere.

By any reckoning Licio Gelli, the Puppet-master, had a spectacular record. This man - a former Nazi Oberlieutenant, an ex-Fascist who had also spied for the Communists after the War, and had also strong links to the CIA - was a trusted advisor to the Vatican as a financial and political consultant. He more than gave advice; he manipulated stock and currency prices for the Vatican Bank to profit from, and blackmailed Italian officials and politicians to keep the Vatican free of taxes. Senator Fabrizzio Cicchitto stated in 1981: "If you wanted to make it to the top in Italy in the 1970s the best way was Gelli and P2.' (Yallop, p.120) Yallop has this to say about P2 and its grandmaster Gelli:

On March 17th (1981) police raided Gelli's palatial villa in Arezzo... In Gelli's safe they discovered a list of the 962 members of the P2. They also found dossiers and secret government reports.

The list of P2 members was a virtual Who's Who of Italy. The armed forces were heavily represented with over fifty generals and admirals. The Government of the day was also there with two Cabinet Ministers, as were industrialists, journalists,... 36 parliamentarians, pop stars, pundits and police officers. It was a State within a State. Many have said that Gelli was planning to take over Italy. They are wrong. He had taken over Italy. (Yallop, p. 286; original emphasis)

And a few more countries in Latin America in the bargain. One example should suffice to give an idea of how Gelli and the Vatican worked hand in glove. The office of Finance Police has the responsibility for monitoring all financial laws in Italy. Thus, the head of the Finance Police was in a position to cause problems for the Vatican. Ugo Poletti, Cardinal Vicar of Rome, suggested that having one of his own men could result in substantial savings for the Vatican. The Cardinal went on to suggest one General Giudice as the best man for the job from the Vatican point of view. This was arranged through Gelli who was a personal friend of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. (Andreotti again!) And Andreotti was one of the most important Italian politicians after the War, having served several terms as prime minister. (Cardinal Poletti was another Church official that John Paul I had decided to remove from his position before his sudden death.)

Gelli's (and Calvi's) great influence extended far beyond the borders of Italy or even Europe. In 1977, with the connivance of Paul Marcinkus of the Vatican Bank, Calvi had opened a branch of the Banco Ambrosiano in Managua, Nicaragua. Its purpose was to help Marcinkus unload a large quantity of Banco Ambrosiano shares without drawing the attention of the Italian authorities. This was facilitated through Gelli's friendship with the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza who received several million dollars for the favour.

And yet, when Somoza was ousted by the revolutionary Sandanista government, Calvi's bank was left to operate unmolested for several months long after all other banks had been nationalised. This gave Calvi and Gelli enough time to shift their funds out of Nicaragua before the revolutionary government nationalised their now worthless bank. Gelli's far-sighted tactic of cultivating both sides had paid off. The man who had spied both for the Nazis and the Communists had put that experience to good use, and the Vatican had benefited handsomely through his sagacity.

Gelli was not without influence even in the United States. By 1974, his friend Sindona, finding himself in trouble with the Italian authorities had fled to the United States. In January 1975, the prosecutor's office in Milan applied to the US Embassy in Rome for The Shark's extradition. The Americans demanded a new set of extradition papers translated into English. On the face of it, it was an absurd request; the American Justice Department has many officers who know Italian to help in its investigation of the drug Mafia. The Milan prosecutor filed the extradition papers with the Italian Ministry of Justice in Rome with a request to forward an English translation to American authorities. The papers were returned by the Ministry of Justice claiming that they could not manage the translation. The American Embassy in Rome also claimed that it had no knowledge of any extradition request, even though it had earlier demanded the English translation! It was later revealed that some of the highest officials in the Ministry of Justice in Rome were members of Gelli's P2.

In signing an affidavit on behalf of his valued friend Sindona The Shark, Gelli once stated that he had been himself accused of being a 'CIA agent; the chief of the Argentine Death Squad; a representative of the Portuguese secret service; the co-ordinator of the Greek, Chilean and West German secret services; the chief of the international movement of underground Fascism, etc.' Interestingly, as David Yallop observes, his signed affidavit did not deny any of the charges. (pp. 147-8)

Many of the facts about Gelli, especially how the Puppet-master practically owned the Italian government were revealed by the investigative reporter Mino Pecorelli - himself a former member of the P2. But Pecorelli was a peculiar kind of journalist, he could be bought. He wrote for a news agency called L 'Osservatore Politico (OP) which specialised in political scandals. Gelli paid him a bribe, but Pecorelli wanted more money for his silence. Gelli refused. He had other plans for the tiresome journalist. Most unwisely, Pecorelli went on to reveal that Gelli, regarded a pillar of the right wing political and financial establishment, a man who had been invited to the presidential inauguration of Richard Nixon, had once spied for the Communists. It was also revealed that Gelli, while serving as a Gestapo officer in Yugoslavia during the War, had looted the art treasures of that country, the sales of which had provided him with the necessary capital for starting his business empire.

Pecorelli was playing with fire for Gelli was not a man to be trifled with. For the Puppet-master who could finance the Argentine government in the Falkland Islands war, who could arrange the assassinations of investigating magistrates Emilio Alessandrini, Giorgio Ambrosoli, Vittorio Occorsio and others who were becoming a nuisance to him, a man like Pecore iii was little more than a fly waiting to be swatted. And this is exactly what happened. On March 20, 1979, as Mino Pecorelli left his office and stepped into his car, someone fired two shots at point blank range killing him instantly. Recently, there have been some interesting developments in the Pecorelli murder case and its connection with the Mafia. In the so-called Trial of the Century (described earlier), Italian authorities have accused no less a person than the former prime minister and Gelli's protege, Giulio Andreotti, of having ordered the assassination of Pecorelli. The trial should reveal connections between the Mafia, P2 and the Vatican. Shortly before his death, Pecorelli had named Cardinal Jean Villot, the Vatican Secretary of State as a member of the P2.

It was not the only murder in which the ubiquitous Andreotti has been implicated. When the prosecutors indicted Sindona for the assassination of the fearless magistrate Ambrosoli (with the sinister Gelli in the background) they wrote: "Without Andreotti and the protection he gave to Sindona between 1974 and 1979, the Ambrosoli murder would never have taken place.[23]

This brings up another interesting point. It was not just lay crooks and adventurers like Calvi, Gelli and Sindona who were involved in criminal activities on behalf of the Vatican; even members of the Church establishment were involved. As already seen, Archbishop Marcinkus has been up to his neck in corruption and bribery investigations. But probably the greatest public embarrassment to the Vatican was to come from the antics of Cardinal Cody of Chicago - the head of the wealthiest diocese in the world with an annual income in 1978 that exceeded 300 million dollars.

Cardinal John 'Buffalo Bill' Cody is the type of man that only America seems able to produce, just as only Italy could have produced Sindona The Shark and Puppet-master Gelli.[24] Freewheeling and flamboyant, Cody had little respect for ordinary conventions or the law. Sworn to celibacy, he was never seen anywhere without a woman called Helen Wilson, who was married to another man. One of the Cardinal's innovations was to spy on the movements of priests and nuns and compile dossiers on them. He ran the Chicago diocese like a despot, controlling assets that in 1970 were worth more than a billion dollars. Within a decade of his assuming office, more than a third of the priests and nuns under him had left holy orders. There were so many complaints about his bizarre behavior and financial irregularities that Pope Paul VI decided that he had to be replaced. But Paul, a complex man with a tortured soul could never bring himself to act.

Recognizing his problems, in 1976 Cardinal Cody hired a public relations firm - at Church expense - to help spruce up his image for the media. There was also the problem of his 'cousin' Helen Wilson to whom Cody had channelled millions of dollars from the diocese. When questioned, he claimed that her lavish lifestyle was being supported by the money she had received from her late husband. An examination of the records showed however that the man had died virtually penniless leaving less than 150 dollars. Records also showed that Cody had falsified Helen's employment records to pay her a substantial salary and also a lump sum of 90,000 dollars to help her buy a luxurious house in Florida.

When Vatican officials, including Cardinal Baggio met Cody and demanded an explanation, they were treated with contempt. He unceremoniously threw the papal delegation out, telling them that the Vatican had more need of him and his money than he of the Vatican. Still Pope Paul refused to act. He wanted Cody out, but all the Pope was prepared to do was request him to give up his position voluntarily! Paul was out of his element, but he had to act. The' situation in Chicago just could not go on.

Fortunately Pope Paul was spared the anguish of having to make a decision. Within a week of Cardinal Baggio's return from his humiliation at Cody's hands, Paul was dead. And in Albino Luciani, the newly elected Pope John Paul I, Cody found that he would have to deal with a very different man. Unlike the tortured and indecisive Paul, a prisoner of the bureaucrats of the Curia, Luciani was an independent man who thought hard and acted swiftly. And he wanted not only Cody out, but also Marcinkus and Secretary of State Villot. Perhaps more importantly, he wanted to root out all traces of P2 from the Vatican. This was to be the most thorough housecleaning in modern history.

Though not apparent at the time, the election in August of 1978 of Albino Luciani as Pope John Paul I threatened to blow the whole game apart. The new Pope was probably not the flawless saint that David Yallop paints him to be, but he was an upright and determined man who wanted to change both the image and the workings of the Vatican. The threat for the entrenched establishment both inside and outside the Vatican was the exposure of all the skeletons in the Holy Closet and a thorough cleaning of the Augean stables. The Vatican had served as an extremely effective shield for the operations of men like Gelli, Sindona and Calvi, and their associates within the Vatican establishment. The new Pope posed a threat to this cozy relationship. The only way out seemed to be the elimination of the threat.

4. Reformer in the Vatican: Pope John Paul I

Albino Luciani, Cardinal Bishop of Venice was elected to succeed Pope Paul VI on August 26 on the third ballot, or the 'third conclave' as the Curia terms it. In electing him Pope, the cardinals the world over - especially those from Third World countries - had made plain their unhappiness with the way things were being run from the Vatican. It was a vote against the establishment - the Curia. It is also possible that the officials of the Curia, living in their own insular world, had been unaware of the breadth and depth of discontent in the Catholic world. After Luciani's death thirty three days later, the conservatives closed ranks and elected the reactionary Karol Wojtyla - the present Pope. It was back to business as usual.

The person most responsible for the election of Luciani was his friend Cardinal Giovanni Benelli of Florence. Unlike the patrician Popes that preceded him, Luciani was a provincial from the mountainous north; but he was by no means the simple monk he has been made out to be. He was widely read in several languages, widely travelled, and as Popes go, still quite young. No less significantly, he seemed to be in excellent health and good physical condition with reason to look forward to a long reign. The ease with which he was elected, and the speed at which he moved to implement his reforms suggest that he had studied the problems of the Church long and hard with the help of like-minded reformers like Cardinal Benelli and Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider. All this indicates careful planning by the reform wing of the Catholic hierarchy.

In voting for Luciani as the proverbial 'compromise' candidate hoping that he could be made a prisoner of the Vatican bureaucracy, the conservatives had clearly underestimated the man. They elected him in preference to a known liberal firebrand like Lorscheider of Brazil (supported by Luciani himself). Italian chauvinism probably also played a part. Those who had known the mild-mannered Luciani over the years had a very different opinion of him. They knew there was much steel in the man. One of them observed:

His mind was strong, as hard and sharp as diamond. That was where his real power was... He could not be overwhelmed. When everyone was applauding the smiling Pope [Luciani, John Paul II, I was waiting for him... to reveal his claws. He had tremendous power. (Yallop, p. 163)

Luciani had another quality that went unrecognized - detachment. He could draw himself completely away from the surroundings and analyse problems purely as abstractions. One is led to suspect that he may even have been an agnostic. But as so often the case in this age of television and instant analysis, all this was overlooked by pundits and Pope watchers keen on presenting their own preconceived opinions as the result of 'expert analysis'. They also never bothered to check what had made Luciani, while Cardinal of Venice, terminate all banking transactions with Banca Cattolica del Veneto and complain to Marcinkus. He clearly had more than an inkling of the financial problems in which the Vatican Bank was mired. The very fact that he moved so fast and yet unerringly to attack the sources of corruption suggests that he must have had some prior knowledge regarding the financial irregularities.

But reporters with closed minds and an inflated sense of their own worth never bothered to study the man or his record. His folksy manner and simplicity of bearing were taken for ignorance, and his gentleness for weakness. Luciani had never shown much interest in theology, which also contributed to his underestimation by the reactionaries who throng the Curia. To such minds, there exists nothing worth knowing beyond theology.

Upon assuming office as John Paul, the new Pope moved with impressive speed. He concentrated on two major issues: greater flexibility in the Church's position on birth control, and cleaning up the financial mess in the Vatican Bank. He was soon frustrated by the entrenched establishment that seemed to move according to its own agenda. It reacted with horror when it learnt that John Paul looked favorably upon contraception as a method of birth control. As one who had grown up in a large family, and had experienced poverty at first hand, he understood the need for birth control to alleviate poverty, and also the need for the Church to take the lead in the effort. He well understood that most Catholic countries are poor and suffer from overpopulation. He also knew that the Church had acquired a bad image in Latin America through its association with right wing dictators like Duvalier of Haiti, Peron of Argentina, Pinochet of Chile and others of the same brand.

This shift in the Church's position on birth control was to be John Paul's first major policy initiative - and it was a tremendous one. He had granted an audience to a high level United States delegation at which he planned to announce this historic change of stand on birth control. This would ensure world-wide publicity for the event. Jean Villot, the Vatican Secretary of State and a firm opponent of birth control raised objections in a long argument. At the end of a forty-five minute meeting on the subject held on September 19, 1978, John Paul told Villot off, displaying uncharacteristic impatience:

... during the period which we have been talking over one thousand children under the age of five have died of malnutrition. Over the next forty-five minutes while you and I look forward with anticipation to our next meal a further thousand children will have died of malnutrition. By this time tomorrow thirty thousand children who are alive, will be dead - of malnutrition. God does not always provide. (Vallop, p. 170)

The words of an agnostic - "God does not always provide". He then told Villot to confirm the meeting with the US delegation and make arrangements to receive it. The 'steel claw' of John Paul was beginning to show. The new Pope was having increasing difficulty with his Secretary of State. He found that he was often misquoted in the Vatican mouthpiece L 'Osservatore Romano. John Paul saw himself being surrounded by a misinformation campaign, in which his views were being misrepresented and his initiatives sabotaged. In frustration he told a visitor: "There are two things that appear to be in very short supply in the Vatican. Honesty and a good cup of coffee." (Vallop, p. 164)

The new Pope's position on some of the most cherished doctrines of the Church was seen as subversion by conservative officials like Villot. If John Paul were to have his way, it would not be long before the Catholic Church as they knew it would be dismantled. As an outsider in touch with the public, John Paul understood something that men like Villot in their insular world did not - to wit, the Church was in a crisis. But he went much further; John Paul wanted changes not only in some long-held positions on birth control, but he also wanted a complete change in the administration, especially on the financial side. This sent shivers down the spines of men like Marcinkus and his associates Sindona, Gelli and Calvi.

What particularly concerned John Paul was the link between the Vatican Bank and Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano with its unsavory reputation as a money laundering outfit. Marcinkos had bought so heavily into Calvi's bank, that the Vatican practically owned the Ambrosiano. It was deeply disturbing to John Paul to learn that Italian authorities were probing this Vatican-Calvi link. Potential criminals in this investigation were high officials of the Vatican Bank including Marcinkus, Luigi Mennini and Pelligrino De Strobel - all highly visible members of the Vatican establishment.

In the meantime someone sent John Paul a list of 121 names in the Vatican who were members of the illegal P2. The list included the name of Jean Villot, his own Secretary of State. On the list were also the names of Vatican officials like Cardinal Baggio, Bishop Paul Marcinkos and Foreign Minister Monsignor Agostino Casaroli, as well as the Cardinal Bishop of Rome Ugo Poletti. These were criminals according to Italian law but enjoying immunity because of the Vatican's position as a sovereign state. No less disturbing was the fact that two years earlier, Pope Paul VI had been given the same information but had done nothing about it. John Paul had known that there were problems within the Church, but the rot was very much deeper than he could have ever imagined. All these men would have to go.

Through their P2 network, Gelli and Calvi came to learn of John Paul's intentions. By September 1978, Calvi had already stolen four hundred million dollars - almost a billion in today's values - of the depositors' money from the Banco Ambrosiano which was now owned by the Vatican Bank. If John Paul were to remove Marcinkos, the new man would discover Calvi's game and he would end up spending the rest of his life in an Italian prison. But Gelli reassured Calvi that he would take care of the problem.

Another major headache for John Paul was Cardinal Cody of Chicago. In addition to his antics already described, Cody was accused of closing Catholic schools in Chicago, often without even informing the school boards. The fact that most of these schools happened to have a high proportion of black students raised the spectre of racism within the Church. Incredibly, Cody justified the school closings claiming that many of the blacks were not Catholics. He stated that the Church had no obligation to educate Protestant black children. This did little to improve the image of the Catholic Church in Chicago. Priests and nuns were leaving the Church in droves; within a decade of Cody's administration of the Chicago diocese their number had come down by a third.

Cody had always treated the Vatican and its officials with contempt. He knew that Paul VI might complain but would never act. He had been unimpressed by the quiet, softly-spoken John Paul when he came to know him during the papal election. He dismissed him as a nonentity and assumed that it would be business as usual. But he began to panic when he learnt from his Vatican sources that this new Pope acted with firmness once he made a decision. And all signs indicated that Cardinal Cody was on his way out.

The following six men stood to lose everything from the reforms to be put into effect by John Paul I: Marcinkos, Cody, Villot, Gelli, Sindona and Calvi. A bishop, two cardinals, a shadowy ruler of the underworld, a Mafia leader and an unscrupulous banker. A nice balance of three high officials of the Church complemented by three lay crooks of the first water. These strange and sinister men controlled the Holy See and its operations, their positions now put in jeopardy by the election of Albino Luciani as Pope John Paul I.

But these were not exactly ordinary men without influence or resources in the world! With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear now that Albino Luciani, for all his energy and intelligence, had underestimated the power and influence of the men and forces ranged against him. They inhabited and operated in a nether world - like the P2 - that lay beyond Luciani's comprehension. All this power and influence, not to say experience, came in extremely handy for these men - inside and outside the Vatican - allowing them to engage in a large-scale destruction of evidence and records of their misdeeds during the hours and days following the death of Pope John Paul I on September 28-9 1978.

5. Tragedy in the Vatican

Pope John Paul had been in office only about a month and already there was a systematic campaign to undermine his reforms and even his executive decrees. The limit was reached on September 27, 1979. On that day, there appeared in the semi-official Vatican voice L 'Osservatore Romano two major articles stating positions on birth control and artificial insemination that directly opposed the views of John Paul. Since L 'Osservatore is seen by the world as the official organ of the Vatican, the articles were bound to be interpreted by world newspapers and politicians as reflecting the Pope's views. The timing was particularly awkward as he had planned to announce the Church's change of stand on abortion to the US delegation that was to visit him shortly. Someone or a group within the Vatican was deliberately sabotaging John Paul's reforms by putting out an official line totally opposed to his views.

This made the normally composed John Paul furious. He correctly judged that the man behind the misinformation campaign was his own Secretary of State, Cardinal Villot. At a meeting held the evening of the next day he told Villot about his major administrative decisions: he wanted not only Villot out, but also Marcinkus, Mennini and De Strobel of the Vatican Bank. Villot was to be replaced as Secretary of State by Cardinal Bellini - another reformer. The Vatican Bank officials would be removed with immediate effect - the following day - while Villot was to assist Bellini for a few days until he became familiar with his new office.

At 7.30 p.m. when the meeting ended, John Paul handed Villot a sheet of paper listing all the changes. Villot went back to his office and checked the list. Every one of the men removed by John Paul was a member of P2; no one appointed in replacement was a member. John Paul's message was clear: he wanted to break the hold of P2 on the Vatican. He probably did not realize the risk he was incurring in taking on such a formidable adversary.

That night, some time between 9.30 p.m. on September 28 and 5.00 a.m. on September 29, 1978, Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I died under mysterious circumstances.[25]

The bare facts of his death are as follows. His body was discovered at 4.45 a.m. of September 29 by Sister Vincenza. It was his habit to come out at 4.30 a.m. and have coffee left by her for him in the study. It was a routine that Sister Vincenza had not known Luciani to vary even once in the nearly twenty years she had been with him. Concerned about the delay, she first knocked, and then opened the door to find him seated with a frozen grimace on his face. He had been reading, wearing glasses and with some papers in his hands. She felt his pulse and found it had stopped. She immediately informed the Pope's secretary, Father Magee, who called the Secretary of State, Cardinal Villot.

Villot arrived at 5.00 a.m. and confirmed that the Pope was dead. In a supreme irony, the man who was about to be removed from office by Pope John Paul was now practically the acting Pope because of the death; he was one of the major beneficiaries of the tragedy. Villot next took some steps to destroy and conceal evidence that in a normal state ruled by regular laws would be criminal. His main concern over the next few days was to make it appear that John Paul's death had been natural. But he would not allow an autopsy (post mortem examination) that would have established the cause of death.

Villot immediately removed all of the late Pope's paraphernalia - his glasses, slippers, his papers and medicines. He even destroyed John Paul's will that was stored in the safe! The whole room was ransacked the same day. It was as if Albino Luciani had never occupied the papal apartment. But even before arriving at the Pope's apartment, he had phoned the embalmers and sent a car to fetch them. The most logical explanation is that he either somehow knew or suspected the hand of Gelli's P2, which had a great deal to lose from John Paul's reforms, and of which Villot himself was a prominent member.

The normal course after the sudden death of a healthy man is to order an autopsy; Villot, however, went to great lengths to ensure there would be no autopsy. What makes his actions all the more suspicious is that he wanted the embalming to be done without blood being drained, (the normal practice). This makes the embalming process somewhat messy, but Villot's motive is not hard to surmise. A sample from the drained blood could be used to determine if the Pope had been poisoned. The very fact that Villot could think of such a detail at a time like that is compelling evidence that he was involved in the conspiracy of concealment and destruction of evidence following the Pontiffs death.

The official statement was that Albino Luciani had died at 11.00 p.m. of myocardial infarction (heart attack). To determine the cause of death as myocardial infarction, and the time of death as 11.00 p.m. without an autopsy is a medical impossibility.

A few days later Villot claimed that it had been caused by an accidental drug overdose - again a medical impossibility without an autopsy. At least he seemed to have been closer to the truth this time, except that it may not have been accidental. Later, rumours swept through the Vatican claiming that signs of vomiting were to be seen when Luciani's body was discovered. This would explain Villot's rush to remove everything from the room including the Pope's slippers and glasses, and every scrap of paper.

Many also recalled an 'accident' at the Vatican that had killed the Russian Archbishop Nikodim of Leningrad on September 5. He had been granted an audience by Luciano during which he suddenly slumped over a cup of coffee and died. The Russian prelate had been in extremely poor health with a record of several heart attacks. As a result, though it came as a shock, his death was no great surprise. It was now being said that the Archbishop had been killed by a poisoned cup of coffee intended for the Pope.

These rumours could have been laid to rest with an autopsy, but Villot would not permit it. It was claimed that the Pope was too august a person on whom to perform an autopsy, but this too proved false. There had been autopsies on Popes before, the last one being on Pius VIII who had died on November 30, 1830 under suspicious circumstances. The results were not made public though it was widely believed that he had been poisoned.[26]

Throwing more suspicion on the circumstances of John Paul's death was the embalmers' statement: the brothers Ernesto and Renato Signoracci who embalmed the Pope's body denied that the death could have been so early as 11.00 p.m. of the 28th. Rigor mortis had not yet set in, and they told investigator David Yallop that they would place the Pope's death between 4.00 a.m. and 5.00 a.m. of the 29th. This means that the Pope must have been dead less than an hour when Sister Vincenza found him; he may even have been alive but with a pulse too faint to be detected.

A systematic misinformation campaign was immediately set in motion by Villot and the Curia suggesting that John Paul had been in poor health with a weak heart. This is extremely doubtful for the Vatican has not released any records in support of the claim. In all his sixty-five years, Luciani had needed medical attention only three times, none of which had anything to do with his heart. As a northerner from the Italian Alps he had low blood pressure, exactly the kind of man who is not susceptible to heart attacks. Only the year before being elected Pope, Luciani had gone on a mountain climbing expedition during which he had climbed 2,400 metres (8,000 feet) at good speed and with ease. This, in fact, had been an annual practice with him.

The most telling fact of all is that no doctor in Italy was prepared to sign John Paul's death certificate. This can only mean that no doctor was willing to risk legal liability by signing a certificate about the cause of death without an autopsy. To this day, there is no official death certificate for Albino Luciani signed by doctors.

For all the official statements from the Vatican, the real cause of Albino Luciani's death remains a mystery. The strange behavior of Jean Villot and other Vatican officials following the tragedy, however, is a matter of record.

6. End to Reform: Business as Usual

Who could have done it - tampering with evidence on a large scale in the hours and days following the Pope's death? Any number of people, for the Vatican had no security at all worth the name; it was normal practice for the night guards to sleep on duty. The main beneficiaries were Cody, Marcinkus, Villot, Gelli, Sindona and Calvi - and, of course, the P2. We can leave Cody out though David Yallop makes a case that he could have done it through his contacts in the Vatican. But it seems out of character with the bluff Cody. It is also hard to believe that the Secretary of State Villot would have gone to such lengths, destroying evidence to help the American cardinal. There clearly had to be a conspiracy involving several highly placed men.

The concerted campaigns of tampering with the evidence, and misinformation, were obviously the work of professionals with contacts at the highest levels of the Curia and tremendous organizational ability and support within the Vatican. And this points to P2. The best guess is that it was engineered by Gelli and the P2. This also has the merit of dovetailing with the actions of Cardinal Villot, himself a prominent member of P2.

From the point of view of P2 and the conservative wing of the Church hierarchy - practically one and the same - the election of Albino Luciani had been a close call. Had he remained Pope for a few years, the Church would probably have been changed beyond recognition. It is not possible to believe that he could have changed it into a purely spiritual entity, for that is not part of the heritage of the Church; its inflexible dogma makes any reform other than cosmetic impossible. But Luciani would surely have made its operations more transparent. The result in all probability would have meant the exposure of the Church as a purely secular entity. The facade of religion for concealing illegal activities would probably have been dismantled. This was something that an organization like the P2 could never allow. To the men of P2, the death of John Paul was a godsend.

After this brush with disaster, the conservatives closed ranks and elected one of their own - Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Cracow, Poland, who as John Paul II became the first non-Italian Pope in more than four hundred years. The only thing in common between the two John Pauls is the name. With the arch conservative, even reactionary Karol Wojtyla as Pope, every one of the reforms put in place by Albino Luciani was reversed. All transfers and appointments were cancelled. And he appointed the gloomy and reactionary Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the important office of the Secretary of Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and also head of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. This was repudiation of John Paul with a vengeance.

To go with this, Jean Villot was kept on as Secretary of State. Cardinal Cody was allowed to continue with his antics at his diocese in Chicago.[27] Bishop Marcinkus not only remained in charge of the Vatican Bank, but was soon elevated to Archbishop by the new Pope. He continued to have problems with the law, but has remained out of reach of Italian authorities by staying within the confines of the Vatican.

There was also a sinister new development. The new Pope is an open admirer of the right wing organization Opus Dei which has many features in common with the P2. It is a secret society, and secret societies are strictly forbidden according to Vatican laws. But we have already seen that the Vatican and its officials generally act as though laws do not apply to them. Also, as we already saw, Opus Dei has been funded by proven criminals like Roberto Calvi and Jose Mateos with connections to the Mafia and P2.

A curious fact came to light shortly before Calvi's death. He had been successful in persuading Opus Dei to buy the Banco Ambrosiano shares owned by the Vatican. As a result, the Vatican would lose control of Banco Ambrosiano, allowing Calvi to run his business empire free of the suffocating hold of Marcinkus. This money would be laundered by the master launderer Calvi himself. His Banco Ambrosiano - practically owned by the Vatican Bank - was in the hole for 1.3 billion dollars. Had Calvi succeeded in his venture, the hole would have been filled by draining Opus Dei of 1.3 billion dollars.[28] Marcinkus shot down the deal because this way Calvi and his bank would be free of Vatican control. (It would also have crippled Opus Dei of which conservatives like Marcinkus himself were members.)

It turned out that currency speculation and other shady transactions had left the Vatican owing more than a billion dollars to various banks. David Yallop observes:

The evidence now available clearly shows that other illegal and criminal agreements between Marcinkus and Calvi existed. They reach back as far as November 1976. The criminal conspiracy therefore, began during the reign of Pope Paul VI. These facts serve powerfully to underline what would have occurred if Albino Luciani had lived. (Yallop, p. 322)

To an outsider (like the present author), the truly amazing thing in all this is how little if any role was played by any religious considerations. For not only Marcinkus, but Mennini and De Strobel - all criminals - were given sanctuary within the Vatican by the new Pope. "In such a manner does Pope John Paul II preside over his Vatican Bank..." observes David Yallop. (ibid.)

And over the Church empire, with Karol Wojtyla in the Vatican, it is now business as usual. Vatican Inc. goes on its merry way, carrying on its business and politics in the name of religion.

This is the institution, rejected by the West and concerned about its survival, that has now set its eyes on India with her teeming millions, and other countries of the Third World.

7. Empty Walls

To this I may add a personal note. I was in Switzerland and Italy (though not in Rome) at the time of election of Albino Luciani as Pope John Paul in August of 1978. I can still recall the excitement that his election caused all over Italy and even in the Italian speaking parts of Switzerland. At one of the pensiones (guest houses) where I stayed, the hostess greeted me with free glasses of Chianti to celebrate the event. At a sleepy little town called Varese near the Swiss border I was even invited to partake in the evening meal. Italians are, of course, a naturally exuberant and hospitable people, but this went beyond anything I had known before. The excitement was there to be seen. The election of Albino Luciani as John Paul I - 'the smiling Pope' - was popular beyond anyone's imagination.

When I was in Europe again the following summer, by then John Paul had been dead nearly a year, I saw complete apathy even in Rome. The new Pope - John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) - and the Vatican officialdom went through their rituals of course, but no one seemed to care. Romans are notoriously cynical about the Vatican and their Popes for they have seen it all from close quarters. Almost everyone I spoke to seemed to be convinced that John Paul I had been murdered, but was now completely indifferent to the whole affair. As far as they were concerned, the Vatican could well be on a different planet. I didn't even see any anger - just indifference. It left me puzzled.

What I saw then suggests something that I failed to grasp at the time: the Church is an institution in deep trouble, set on an irreversible course. For a brief moment, Albino Luciani as Pope John Paul I had held out a hope that things might after all be different. The problems in the Church are far too deep, and far too advanced for anyone to retrieve its fortunes, but Luciani had shown a willingness to face reality and take firm action. He was prepared to place principle above commercial and political interests - an extreme rarity in the history of the Church. That hope is now gone, at least in Europe. Not many in Europe believe that the Church has any relevance to their future. This was especially noticeable in Rome. Apparently this is nothing new, for it was noted by Machiavelli long ago:

The Italians owe a great debt to the Roman church and its clergy. Through their example, we have lost all true religion and become complete unbelievers. Take it as a rule, the nearer a nation is to the Roman Curia, the less religion it has.

(de Rosa, p. 165)

A remarkably astute observation. The death of John Paul I has extinguished the last vestige of faith in the Church left in Rome. The Church of Rome is now for all practical purposes brain dead. Its remains are being carried by the momentUm of its secular wheels - the public relations and its commercial empire. Recalling the words of Nostradamus:

o vaste Rome, ta ruine s'approache,
Non de tes mur de ton sang et substance;

The walls of the Vatican - de les mur - is all that is left today, while its blood and substance - sang el substance - is long gone. The people of Europe - Romans in particular - have seen this truth. Will the people of the Third World - of Asia in particular - also see this, or will they continue to be dazzled by the empty walls of the Vatican and the guile of its propaganda machine? Do they expect any spiritual guidance from a theocratic bureaucracy that recognizes no laws of man or God, and is now concerned with its own survival above all else? Do they realize that the Church, having been rejected and driven out of Europe, having ruined South and Central America, and large parts of Africa, is now seeking to establish its theocratic empire in Asia? That is one of the questions for our time. If it succeeds, it will mean the end of pluralism in Asia, the home of pluralism.

What I have presented in this chapter is a slice of what the Church is really like - not a thousand years ago, but in our own time. It may be a secular organization, but it also has claims to being the preserver of a holy doctrine revealed to its founder. Having seen the rot within the Church it is time now to take a look at its doctrinal foundation - its revealed truth. Was Nostradamus right again when he said: Rejecteront les goffres fondements - They'll reject the shattered foundation? Is the foundation really shattered?

To get an answer to this question, we need to go back some two thousand years - to the period of the Jewish Wars when the ancient texts that we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls were being deposited in the caves of Qumran in the Holy Land. But to understand what the Scrolls really mean for the Church, and the peculiar fragility of its doctrine, we need to take a look at the foundation of Christian belief. This is what we shall be doing in the next chapter, followed by an examination of the fascinating story of the rise of Christianity as depicted in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is nothing like the history Christians have been told to believe for a hundred generations.