This ritual usually occurred eighteen times a year. Time magazine reported that in 1969, “San Gennaro (St. Januarius) was dropped from the Vatican ’s official church calendar, along with St. Christopher and other saints whose existence was in doubt… Among other things the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples…persuaded the congregation of the cathedral to refrain from roaring approval when the liquid bubbled… An encyclopedia labeled the San Gennaro miracles a ‘residue of paganized Christianity which the church has not managed to remove from Neapolitan usage.’ That was enough to bring the blood of all Naples to a boil. San Gennaro, a newspaper editorial proclaimed, was ‘not just the patron but the godfather of Naples.’…[Neapolitans] have been through it all before. In 1750 one iconoclast sought to discredit the ‘Miracle’ of San Gennaro as a mixture gold-affecting mercury and sulphide of mercury. In 1890 an Italian professor got results from a concoction of chocolate, water, sugar, casein, milk serum and salt. Even the Vatican ’s doubts did not daunt the Neapolitans. After San Gennaro lost his place on the church calendar, a fervent follower scrawled on the saint’s altar in the cathedral, ‘San Gennaro, don’t give a damn.’”
In World War II, as American forces moved from invasion beaches at Salerno toward Naples, “the Vatican, having heard rumors that the retreating Germans…had made plans to melt down the silver of the altar of St. Januarius to pay for their occupation of southern Italy, contacted the Mafia and asked for their cooperation… The Mafia…, also immensely religious, accepted the Vatican ’s proposal with pious alacrity.” Because they had been cooperating with the Germans since the occupation began, they were permitted to transport” food and black-market items from Naples to Rome. “The result was that the silver of the altar was transported in Mafia trucks to the very entrance of the Vatican where it was safely deposited.”
Residing in Naples at this time was American organized crime figure Vito Genovese, who had been deported from the United States in a crackdown on crime that landed Genovese’s boss, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, in prison. When the U.S. Army occupied Naples, it learned that its task would be easier if it had the help of Genovese and the Neapolitan mafiosi. Michele Sindona was among the Italians who also learned that to do business in Naples in 1943, Genovese was the man to see. Michele Sindona, a Sicilian, who was the future associate of Roberto Calvi in the Vatican bank scandal, “studied law and during the war became involved in the lemon business.” According to Luigi DiFonzo’s biography of Sindona, “he needed to purchase a truck to transport lemons. To accomplish this, Michele Sindona needed the protection of the Mafia because it had control of the produce industry and could supply him with the documents he needed to present to the border patrols. Help came from a local bishop…[He] got in touch with Geneovese.” The result was not only a truck, but “forged papers and a safe route to do business.”
Twenty years later, investigations into the Roberto Calvi murder revealed a flow of money from the Sicilian Corleone Mafia family (the real one, not the one in The Godfather) to Sindona and the Vatican bank. In an instance of fiction following life, in The Godfather Part III, Michael Corleone attempted to garner respectability and wealth through legitimate enterprise by seeking to buy the Vatican ’s shares in a global real estate holding company, of which one fourth was controlled by the Vatican. He negotiated a transfer of $600 million to the Vatican Bank with Archbishop Gilday, who had plunged the Holy See into debt through poor management and corruption.
While movie makers have provided entertainment by implicating a cinematic Vatican in conspiracies and historians have delved into Vatican archives in the years before World War II, the Holy See has declined to open them for the remainder of Pope Pius XII’s reign (1932-58). Repeatedly urged by researchers to do so, the Vatican says some are closed for organizational reasons, but that most of the significant documentation regarding Pius XII is already available to scholars.
Pressure to make the files public has come primarily from Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors. “Until the Vatican ’s secret archives are declassified, Pius’s record vis-a-vis Jews will continue to be shrouded and a source of controversy and contention,” said ADL [Anti-Defamation League] director Abraham Foxman. “We strongly urge the Vatican to make full and complete access to the archives of this period its highest priority and call on all interested parties to assist.”
Although the Vatican archives for the World War II period remain secret, other sources have revealed that the Vatican, sometimes in cooperation with the U.S. government, assisted Nazi war criminals to escape. They went from Europe and made their way to countries in South America, especially to Argentina, following a route that became known as the Rat Line.
CHAPTER 10
Spooks and Rats
Six decades after the end of World War II, a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco claimed that “atrocities carried out by the Nazi puppet government of Ante (Anton) Pavelic, head of the ‘ Catholic State of Croatia,’” had been done with the complicity of Vatican officials. “The Pavelic regime was typical of political movements that sprang up throughout Europe and had the support of so-called ‘Clerical Fascism,’-an amalgam of orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, anti-Semitism, and authoritarian politics. These groups enjoyed assistance of both the government in Italy under Mussolini, Nazi Germany’s ‘Ausland’ department, which assisted like-minded movements” beyond Germany, and some Catholic clergy in and out of the Vatican.
“In Croatia, Pavelic’s terrorists received critical funding in 1939 from Mussolini, and with the help of Archbishop A. Stepinac, to establish the Croat Separatist Movement and eventually seize power.” Under Ustashi, [the secret police] a reign of terror fell “upon Jews, Orthodox Serbs who refused to convert to Catholicism, and political dissidents. Pavelic’s government operated death camps, and extorted a fortune in gold and other valuables, much from Jews who were shipped to work in extermination camps in Germany. The Ustashi had the support of the Catholic Church (Archbishop Stepanic was the group’s official “chaplain,” he gave his blessing to the Pavelic regime), and especially the Croatian Franciscans. The San Francisco lawsuit charged that the Catholic order ‘engaged in far ranging crimes including genocide [and] funding the reestablishment of the Croatian Nazi movement in South America in the 1950s.’”
The involvement of Croatian Catholics in creating an escape route for Nazis after the war was documented by American intelligence agents. Their records were preserved in the archives of the postwar Central Intelligence Agency. One of these declassified files was that of a priest, Krunoslav Stjepan Draganovic. It noted that he was born in Brcko, Bosnia. “Ordained a priest, he served in Sarajevo from 1930 to 1932. During this period he came in direct contact with Dr. Ivan Saric, the Catholic Archbishop of Bosnia.” The CIA file noted that the archbishop was “perhaps the most rabid opponent of the Orthodox Serbs and the Yugoslav Royal family, which is of Serbian origin, and a vociferous champion of the Independent State of Greater Croatia (which would include all of Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina).”
“It was under the auspices of Archbishop Saric that he [Draganovic] was sent to Rome in 1932 to attend the Instituto Orientale Ponteficio… He obtained his doctorate in 1935 and returned to Sarajevo, where he acted as secretary to Archbishop Saric from 1935 through 1940. In February 1941 he taught Ecclesiastical History at the University of Zagreb, Croatia.