January 16, 2005
Feature: Stranger than fiction
John Cornwell reports
The Da Vinci Code shocked millions with its claims about the Catholic Church. But the Vatican harbours far more astonishing secrets
At the somnolent heart of Bayswater in London lies a narrow lane over which glowers the gloomy exteriors of three huge terraced mansions known as 4 Orme Court. Within their portals, as any reader of the world's bestseller The Da Vinci Code will tell you, lurk the denizens of the secretive Catholic organisation known as Opus Dei — the Work of God. According to the novel, Silas the psychopathic albino Opus Dei monk hides out here from the French and British police. Silas has a mobile phone, an automatic pistol, and drives a top-of-the-range black Audi. In his cell he whips himself until blood spatters up the wall, while increasing the pressure to the point of agony of the "discipline" spikes strapped around his waist.
In the cold light of day, Jack Valero, PR chief for Opus Dei in Britain, and a "numerary" — that is, a higher-echelon member — gazes lugubriously at me in the lobby of 4 Orme Court. "They come in buses with their copies of The Da Vinci Code," he says. "They look up at the windows, hoping to spot Silas. But there are no albinos here, nor monks. No Holy Grail behind the bookshelves."
Opus Dei, traditionally guarded and still suspect because of its links with the fascist General Franco of Spain (five members of the dictator's cabinet were members of Opus), has been plunged by Dan Brown's novel into the eye of vulgar, mass-market curiosity. "Transparency's the best policy," he says. "I invite them in and tell them we're just a Catholic lay group bringing Christ into our everyday lives and work." But if the success of The Da Vinci Code owes everything to a high-octane mix of fact and fiction about the Catholic Church and its supposed history of conspiracy and secrecy, some facts of life in Opus Dei, albino monks apart, are only slightly less intriguing than Brown's fantasy.
According to Valero, numeraries do whip themselves, but they are not allowed to "draw blood". And they do wear a spiked discipline, "but it is only meant to be uncomfortable rather than actually hurt," he says. "We never wear it in the street." And they do give all their earnings, minus essentials, to the organisation: Murray Hill Place, the new Opus Dei national headquarters and conference centre on Lexington Avenue, New York City, was built at a cost of $47m.
The Da Vinci Code excels, however, at taking bits and pieces of the truth, exaggerating and weaving them into outlandish factions, as the readers are taken on a breathless Blyton-for-adults juggernaut: "Secrets, secrets, secrets... Blah! Blah! Blah!" With lashings of blood, hidden treasure, initiates, adepts, scary professors, codes, sexual rites and oodles of unholy twaddle about Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene, and the Holy Grail being in fact "sang real", namely, blood royal, being their secret holy bloodline... Blah! Blah! Blah! And the Catholic Church wanting to bury all this stuff, which is of course encrypted in the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris. Or is it the church of the Temple in London? Or is it a cave carved out of the living rock under the Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland? And the girl finally kisses her man, a handsome expert on "symbology", destined to be played by Tom Hanks in the planned movie of the book. Blah! Blah! Blah!
The "killer fact" conspiracy of The Da Vinci Code features the Catholic Church attempting to quash through the ages the female nature of God, and a holy ritual involving couples bonking in the inner sanctum. The Knights Templar, according to Brown and a host of historical fantasists, were liquidated by the Inquisition to prevent such "secrets" from coming to light.
But while Brown has exploited a mania for cocktails of religion, conspiracy and mystery, his seductive factions are anaemic compared with the authentic secrets and conspiracies of Holy Mother Church. For such is Catholicism's rich inheritance, it inhabits far more wide-ranging and fascinating dimensions of the mysterious.
Take an alternative blurb: "In the depths of the first world war, Portugal is wracked by a Communist revolution; churches have been burnt, priests and nuns murdered. On May 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary appears to three peasant children in a remote place called Fatima. The size of a doll, and hovering over a bush, she imparts three cosmic secrets. The first predicts the end of the war. The second predicts the coming of another world war if Catholics do not pray to Mary. The third secret is to be entrusted to the Vatican, and revealed on May 13, 1960 by the pope of the day. With trepidation, Pope John XXIII opens the envelope on the appointed date. Stunned by what he reads, he consigns the secret to the deepest, darkest Vatican archive, where it moulders until May 1981. He will not publish it. The rumour spreads that it is the date of the nuclear holocaust. Shortly after the attempt on his life in St Peter's Square, which occurs on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II calls for the long-forgotten secret. He finds that it is a prophecy: that a pope will be the victim of an assassination attempt."
The improbable plot, with its mix of global politics, violence and prophecy, is not pulp fiction, but just one item in Catholicism's huge repertoire of authentic tales of the unexpected. The facts are these: in the autumn of 1980, a Turkish hitman, Ali Agca, arrived in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, having escaped from prison in Istanbul and acquired a Bulgarian passport. He travelled Europe for several weeks, arriving in December 1980 in Rome, where he bided his time. On the afternoon of May 13, 1981, as John Paul was driven through the crowds in St Peter's Square, Agca opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol. One of the bullets tore through the pope's abdomen. Nobody knows for certain who had hired the killer; although it is believed the Soviet Union's president, Leonid Brezhnev, gave the order to the KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who enlisted the Bulgarian Soviets.
Recuperating in hospital, John Paul pondered the fact that the attack occurred on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, the anniversary of the day, at the "very hour" that the Virgin had imparted the third secret to the children. Requesting the text from the archive, John Paul discovered that it was about a pope who would be shot by "atheists". The subject of the prophecy, he was totally convinced, was himself. On May 13 of the following year, 1982, John Paul travelled to the shrine of the Virgin of Fatima to place the bullet in the crown of the Virgin's statue. He told the faithful that one hand guided the gun, but it was another, "a motherly hand, which guided the bullet millimetres away from vital blood vessels", which "halted him at the threshold of death".
John Paul's long-held conviction about the interventionist role of the Virgin Mary in history had thus been continued. He came to believe, moreover, that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was linked to all the other messages the Virgin had imparted to the three Portuguese peasant children. Only in 2000 did he finally sanction the public announcement of the third secret. Senior cardinals of the Catholic Church later gave doctrinal legitimacy to the prophecy, confirming that the faithful should give credence to its mighty significance.
Secrets are invariably about power. The Pope's survival indicates he was saved for nothing less than to bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union. Hence John Paul emerges as the greatest pope in modern history, his papacy, policies and agendas endowed with mystical certitude. The secret defines and encompasses the 20th century, and the huge forces of good and evil beyond the veil of appearances. The cult of the Fatima secret, for members of the faithful, reveals the power of heaven. But many of Catholicism's secrets stem from the church's history of defence against enemies, from raging Roman emperors, like Valerian, to murderous French revolutionaries; from Elizabeth I's priest-hunters to the Soviet commissars. Hence the imperative for discretion and evasion. Some of the church's most malignant adversaries, moreover, emerged from within — not least the constipated, haemorrhoid-tortured Martin Luther, who had been a Catholic Augustinian monk before he publicly burnt the Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law, took a woman into his bed, and sparked the Reformation.
In epochs when Christianity was powerful enough to threaten its opponents, notably Islam, cabals thrived. "Interior" knowledge involved magic spells, potions and astrology culled from the crusading knights' enemies. The church's inquisitors readily ascribed occult practices to Catholicism's perceived enemies; the infamous blood libel against the Jews involved the accusation that Christian children were spirited away to be sacrificed in secret Jewish rituals. Catholicism's most mysterious, treasured object, the shroud of Turin, often believed to be the Holy Grail itself, is a 14th-century fake, according to carbon-dating experts. But worse than that, it required a human model, who was clearly tortured and crucified: almost certainly that model was a Spanish Jew, making the shroud a relic to Jewish rather than Christian suffering.
In time, the church's missionary Jesuits, pitched against Protestants such as Queen Elizabeth, became a byword for espionage as they formed underground networks while keeping Catholicism alive. They were deemed by Protestant priest-hunters to be cruel fanatics. Jesuits were believed to be party to Guy Fawkes's conspiracy to blow up parliament. Under Queen Elizabeth, Catholic "massing priests" were gleefully hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.
But the Catholic Church had already done more than its fair share of man- and woman-hunting under the auspices of the Inquisition. According to one recent academic authority, in the 17th century the Inquisition was responsible for sending some 32,000 victims to the stake for heresy. The trials preceding sentencing were characterised by closely guarded secrecy relating to the witnesses' identities, the charges and the developing case of the prosecution. According to Norman Cohn, the author of Europe's Inner Demons, the inquisitors winkled out the secrets of witchcraft from thousands of women, even girls under the age of 10, sending them to their deaths. According to a leading confessor of alleged witches, Father Frederick von Spee, a Jesuit of Wurzburg, all the women he heard confess before their executions were innocent.
The secrets of the Roman Inquisition, which thrived in Italy mainly in the 16th century, slumber in the bowels of the Vatican. I've seen the wormy vellum files in which they are contained, thousands of them in the basement beneath the office of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now run by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Apart from these, the most intriguing secrets in the Vatican's vast archive relate to burgeoning secular nation states, many of them rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-papal, in the period following the French revolution. The network of bishops, priests, religious orders and nuncios in every country was a rarely exploited source of political intelligence. Serious Vatican espionage was first developed by a few dedicated professionals. The most famous Scarlet Pimpernel of the period was Abbé de Salamon, Pope Pius VI's official spy in Paris. By day, Salamon wandered the streets picking up information in shops and taverns; by night he hid out under a kiosk in the Bois de Boulogne. He employed trusted couriers across Europe to maintain a clandestine channel of communication to Rome, as the official post was under surveillance; and reported on the events of the revolution, especially legal assaults against the church, which culminated in the massacre of hundreds of priests. He was arrested and imprisoned, but managed to talk his way free, to return to his spying for the pope.
Another spy master was Francesco Capaccini, based in Holland and Belgium from 1829, during a period when anti-Catholic subversives were fomenting revolution in the Papal States in the midriff of Italy. Capaccini had agents inside the government and the royal court of the House of Orange. He discovered conspirators in the Papal States spreading revolutionary literature, and persuaded one to become a double agent, thus exposing the others, who were then arrested.
Capaccini had been a cryptographer in the papal secretariat of state. He designed codes for his personal use and persuaded the pope of the day, Leo XII, that polyalphabetic ciphers were the most secure systems. Invented in the 15th century by the polymath Leon Alberti and the cryptographer Matteo Argenti, polyalphabetic systems avoided the fixed substitution of letters of the alphabet with the same cipher symbols throughout a message (for example, A always being Z); instead the system provided for layers of substitutions to confuse the decoder.
Deep in the Vatican archives are records of conspiracies that have become the stuff of legend, many stories remaining unresolved to this day. Some involve the violent deaths of past popes. The first pope to be assassinated was John VIII, poisoned in AD882 by members of his entourage. The potion took so long that his fellow prelates clubbed him to death. Others were hastened into eternity usually from poison in the form of powdered glass deposited in a pope's figs or his lunchtime melon. In the period of the Borgias, mayhem became routine. In 1503, Pope Alexander VI died of poison intended for another. It was thought to be arsenic in his wine. His flesh turned black, froth formed around a hugely distended tongue, gas hissed and exploded from every orifice. His body was so swollen that the undertakers had to jump on his stomach to close the coffin lid.
Suspected assassinations and spectacular assassination attempts have continued into the 20th century. Pius XI, the pope of the 1920s and 30s who had originally espoused fascism but later turned against the Duce, was said to have been murdered with a contaminated injection by Mussolini's daughter's lover, a doctor.
Outlandish conspiracy theories persisted beyond the end of the second world war. One allegation, popular among left-wing radicals in the church, involves the charge that Paul VI, pope from 1963 to 1978, was relieved of his office by three powerful cardinals because he was too much of a socialist. They allege that the pope was replaced by an impostor. Photographs have been published to show that the shape and eyes of the earlier and later Paul VIs, especially the distinctive shape of his ears, indicate two different men. As late as 1983, an editor on the British Catholic paper The Universe, Piers Compton, reported the rumour that the real Pope Paul VI was living in hiding in a suburb of Rome five years after the death of the impostor.
A more recent and unchallenged conspiracy involves the killing of two Swiss guards and a woman in a hail of bullets on the night of May 4, 1998, within the Vatican City. The victims were the commander of the Swiss Guard, Alois Estermann, his wife, and a young lance corporal, Cedric Tornay. It was the most shocking bloodbath to take place within the Vatican in centuries. After just four hours, and without proper forensic investigations, the Vatican announced that Tornay, 23, had shot the couple and then committed suicide in a "fit of madness".
In subsequent months, independent inquiries unravelled the Vatican's account. It appeared that the two men were in a sexual relationship, and that the elder, Col Estermann, was a bullying and proselytising member of Opus Dei who wanted to turn his charges into "soldier monks". In a strange interweaving of gay and straight sexual relationships, complicated by harsh religiose military discipline and the ambitions of Opus Dei within the Vatican, the truth about the killings has been shrouded in secrecy. Cardinal Sodano, the equivalent of prime minister in the Vatican, said at Estermann's funeral: "In times like these, we feel above all the need to be silent." On Sodano's orders, the Swiss guards were sworn to secrecy on the matter. John Follain, the author of the only in-depth investigation of the affair, City of Secrets, has commented: "Even today, the conspiracy of silence and the refusal to admit any responsibility prevails... the Vatican's inquiry remains closed, the files still locked away."
The popes have always had ultimate control over their archives. To this day, no material dated after 1922 and relating to the popes can be scrutinised. The rule has dismayed scholars trying to get at the truth of the conduct of Pius XII during the second world war. He was charged with remaining silent on the Jewish Holocaust despite knowing of the deportations. Paul VI allowed a book of wartime documents to be printed in the 1970s, but a recent body of Jewish and Catholic scholars abandoned a joint study on the question when the Vatican refused to open up the archive originals. Portions of the secret archive have been placed out of bounds for even longer periods, especially the details of what many church historians regard as the most sinister and detestable conspiracy in the history of the Catholic Church: the anti-modernist campaign of the first decade of the 20th century.
The term "modernist" was applied as a term of abuse to priests, bishops and even cardinals suspected of introducing modern critical thinking into church teaching: for example, the notion that the Bible might not be strictly, literally true, but in places metaphorical. The chief anti-modernist spy master was a neurotic prelate, Umberto Benigni, who had the ear of the then pope, Pius X. As a young man, Benigni had run three newspapers and a news service and was skilled in modern communications, which he developed into unprecedented systems of espionage. He persuaded thousands of seminarians, priests, monks, nuns and prelates to spy on each other and report back to his office in Rome. A chance word in a refectory, or being seen with a "suspect" book, might be enough to be "delated", or reported to Benigni's office in Rome. Dismissals were instant, but the charges and "witnesses" were kept a secret. Those who attempted to defend someone who had been delated were usually themselves punished. An English modernist, Father George Tyrrell, was even denied a Christian burial. In the last days of the campaign, Benigni became acutely paranoid and began charging cardinals in the Vatican with modernism. The campaign ended with the death of Pius X in 1914 and the arrival of a new pope, Benedict XV. Benigni ended up spying for the Russians, but the consequences of his plotting were far-reaching, discouraging new scholarship and any debate within the church for decades.
The Vatican, with its long experience in diplomatic secrecy, employed sophisticated methods of espionage during the second world war, when the Vatican City state was threatened on all sides and dependent on Mussolini's Italy, even for electricity and water. Pius XII kept his diplomatic channels open by employing a sophisticated code known as "Green", which has never been divulged. In 1940 he secretly warned the Belgians and Dutch that Hitler was on the verge of invading their countries. That same year, Pius was involved in the most dangerous and feasible plot to bring down Hitler in the entire war. So secretive was he about its details that he did not even confide them to his secretary of state, Cardinal Luigi Maglione. The scheme was for a group of leading German generals and former politicians to depose Hitler in a coup. The pope acted as a go-between with the British government, from whom the conspirators wanted a guarantee not to exact reprisals against a new German government. The British failed to play ball and the plot fizzled. But the historian Harold Deutsch has judged it "among the most astounding events in the history of the papacy".
The lives of many Jews and other displaced persons were saved by Catholic initiatives during the war: convents, monasteries and parts of the Vatican were used as safe houses. But if Pius XII is to take credit for this, he should equally take the blame for them becoming safe houses for Nazi criminals fleeing justice after the war.
The secrets of the Catholic Church are fraught with paradoxes: it has exhibited generosity, fortitude and self-sacrifice alongside greed, malevolence, self-indulgence and sheer folly. Many are the church's saints and martyrs who displayed remarkable self-denials and self-sacrifice. Buried in the religious archives of nuns' and bishops' palaces, however, are tales of religious characters whose psychological dysfunctions make Dan Brown's Silas look sane. Fasting, self-induced vomiting, self-flagellation and outlandish self-denials indicate widespread anorexia and bulimia in convents in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. St Catherine of Siena, records show, attempted to obliterate her "bodily senses" by drinking a cup of pus she had squeezed from the cancerous breast sores of a woman patient. St Margaret Mary Alacoque, who had suffered abuse from a violent mother, would eat quantities of cheese, to which she had an allergy, to make herself sick.
St Mary Magdalene de Pazzi, at the age of 11, would spend nights flagellating herself. Later, in the convent, she would lie naked on a bed of sharp branches and splinters in a woodshed to combat temptations against chastity.
Strange goings-on in convents have been revealed in the 17th-century records of Venice. Following the tightening of rules in convents at the Counter-Reformation, nuns, many of them forced into it by parents who couldn't afford to marry them well, were determined to enjoy a social and sexual life. The Cambridge scholar Mary Laven has revealed in her book Virgins of Venice the secrets of long-hidden cases tried 400 years ago in the Doges' court. They involve nuns hiding men in boxes for the shared sexual delight of the sisterhood, and exchanging cakes and other delicacies for the sexual favours of plumbers and plasterers. Men caught breaking the convent enclosure could be executed or exiled.
Many of the most lurid secrets of the church span an era that runs from the Dark Ages to the recent past. One shocking tradition, still obscured by rival accounts and theories, involves the existence of a woman pope: Pope Joan. The earliest version, dating from the 13th century, claims that in the year 1100 a talented woman, dressed as a man, became a member of the curia, the Vatican bureaucracy, and later a cardinal, and finally pope. After riding out on horseback, she gave birth prematurely to a son. According to the account written by the Dominican chronicler Jean de Mailly, she was bound to the tail of a horse and dragged through Rome before being stoned to death by a mob.
The most compelling of all the mysteries in recent times, and a result of the Vatican mania for secrecy, is the story of Pope John Paul I, who died after just 33 days in office. The so-called smiling pope, who read Readers' Digest and went to bed at 9pm, was, according to David Yallop's book In God's Name, the victim of a murder conspiracy on the part of bishops and cardinals in the Vatican in league with Freemasons. They plotted to murder the pope, Yallop says, as he was about to spill the beans on corruption in the Vatican Bank and allow birth control. Yallop suggested they put poison in his early-morning coffee. The conspiracy theory flourished in the absence of transparency: Vatican officials lied about the circumstances of the death to avoid admitting that a nun took the pope coffee in bed every morning. The truth is, John Paul I died of an untreated embolism.
The Vatican Bank, however, whose euphemistic full title is the Institute for Religious Works, is a highly secretive finance house that has helped the poor and the victims of hunger and disaster since it was founded after the second world war. But in 1982 it was ordered by the Italian government to pay $1/4 billion in compensation for its part in the collapse of the Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano as a result of fraudulent deals done in the mid-1970s. The Vatican had issued "letters of comfort" to creditors, even though the Ambrosiano was in dire trouble. The head of the Vatican Bank at the time, Archbishop Paul Casimir Marcinkus (who, Yallop alleged, was one of the co-conspirators in the death of John Paul I), informed me in an interview in 1987 that he had found the money for the fine by raiding the Vatican's pension fund. The archbishop failed to see that he had done anything wrong.
Marcinkus evaded arrest in Italy by hiding inside the Vatican City for several years in the early 1980s. Magistrates in Milan had issued warrants, hoping to put him on trial for alleged fraud along with the mafia banker Roberto Calvi. In 1982, Calvi was found hanged under London's Blackfriars Bridge. The death was made to look like a Freemasonry execution: his pockets were filled with bricks and he was left suspended, to drown at high tide. Scotland Yard remains baffled as to whether it was suicide or murder.
Marcinkus survived as head of the bank until 1992, working closely with the present pope. John Paul II used his Vatican Bank and secret connections in Poland to give Solidarity, the Polish union, $32m dollars to help in the struggle against the Soviet Union. If Marco Politi and Carl Bernstein, authors of the papal biography His Holiness, are to be believed, John Paul joined in a conspiracy with Ronald Reagan and the CIA to keep track of Soviet troop movements in order to manipulate the peaceful resistance against the regime in the late 1980s.
Enticing to every age in history, although less promising for saleable pulp fiction, Catholicism, like the other great world religions, has at its heart a cluster of authentic spiritual mysteries that owe nothing to codes, conspiracies and dodgy legends. Religion is, among other things, about the secret places of the soul and hiding places of God. For many worshippers the silence and semi-darkness of a church put them in contact with a spiritual presence.
To this day, some of the most impressive places on Earth are the Carthusian monasteries of the Catholic Church, where monks live their lives in silence, solitude and secrecy. Even though vocations to the priesthood are rapidly declining in many countries, monasteries that offer the most rigorous and austere spiritual routines, such as the Carthusian community at Parkminster in West Sussex and the Benedictines of Pluscarden in Scotland, are thriving, filled with novices.
Unlike Brown's Silas, the monks in such places don't wear spikes or flog themselves with whips; nor do they tote automatic pistols, nor make calls on mobiles, nor have access to smart Audis. They lead uncomplicated lives of prayer, fasting and study, coming together in church, where the conspiracies are few and far between, and in the refectory, where the food is simple and the contents of their beakers low-octane.
THE FATIMA SECRETS: HOW THE VIRGIN MARY IMPARTED THREE PROPHECIES TO THREE PEASANT CHILDREN
The predictions
On May 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to three children in the Portuguese village of Fatima. She conveyed three prophecies to them, including the ending of the first world war, and a second world war. The third prophecy was to be entrusted to the Vatican and revealed on May 13, 1960, by the then pope. It was Pope John XXIII who opened the envelope containing the Virgin's predictions but, apparently shocked by its contents, he consigned it to the Vatican archives again. After surviving an attempt on his life on May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II opened the envelope. The third prophecy was that a pope would fall victim to an assassination attempt.
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