Murder in the Vatican ; The CIA & the Bolshevik Pontiff
By Lucien Gregorie
Published by Author
House USA, 2013
ISBN; 978 1 4490
2304 1
This is Gregoire’s
revised and updated edition of an earlier book under the title
‘Murder in the Vatican – Pauper who would be Pope’ originally
published in 2003 and by the time this reviewer got her hands on it
in 2005 was already consigned to the basement stacks at the Auckland
Public Library, victim one surmises of a cleansing exercise perhaps.
Having thought that
I had already read all there was to say on the subject of Pope John
Paul I’s death this title was an eye-opener in that it was written
by a man who was firmly within the orbit of Albino Luciano years
before he became Pope and not only privy to the nature of the man
himself but also witness to a number of clandestine meetings that
took place well out of sight of Rome and the Vatican curia in the
years leading up to Luciano’s elevation into the Holy Office.
These meetings
concerned the very grave situation of not only the corruption within
the Vatican - moral and theological, but pivotally the enormous
scandal of the conduct of the Vatican’s financial branch – the
Institute for Religious Works. Up to his neck in it along with his
cohorts from the Mafia and P2 Freemasonry Lodge, was the powerful
Bishop Marcinkus whose dealings and money-laundering was beyond
oversight or control. Of all the knowledge that Luciano had been
gathering in his rise up the priestly ranks, such as that of
paedophile priests or of mistresses and children, it was the bank’s
activities and his plans to clean house that most imperilled his life
going into his pontificate. What he had perhaps underestimated was
that there was much at stake for too many players to allow Luciano
his day at the bank and that the long & deadly arms of the
criminal fraternity reached all the way into the Vatican.
Here in this book,
Gregoire makes a sound case for not only the assassination of Albino
Luciano – Pope John Paul I, but also of the assassination of
Luciano’s various supporters within the College of Cardinals and
his support staff. That poisoning was at the heart of the roll call
of deaths of people connected intimately to Luciano appears certain,
that the household/administrative staff of John Paul I were hurriedly
reassigned to new positions in places ‘unknown’ gives any
questioning mind cause for pause and consideration.
The spotlight is
also on the man who was subsequently elevated into the Holy Office
after Luciano who did nothing for the plight of the poor but who it
appears stage managed his pontificate as a consummate performer
whilst paedophile priests and power hungry cardinals’ corruption
ran unchecked. The role of the western intelligence services in and
around the political manoeuvrings of JP2’s pontificate as he kissed
tarmac all around the world is also addressed and is very
enlightening indeed.
There has been much
muck thrown at this author, casting aspersions on his information and
sources, however who we have here is an educated man who has had a
successful career as an industrialist and who in his time was head of
a corporation based in South America that had dealings with the very
banks and institutions the Vatican was involved with that evolved
into the Vatican Bank Scandal. He also spent a military career
serving as a Pentagon Officer at the Arctic Circle in ‘connection
with espionage activities up over the top during the Cold War and was
a NATO (CIA) agent operating out of Milan when he first made the
acquaintance of Albino Luciano when he was a little known bishop of a
mountain province in Northern Italy and involved in the Priest-worker
movement’. So one would imagine Lucien Gregoire would know how to
write up the facts correctly leaving aside unfounded or unwarranted
speculation.
That all aside, this
is one of those books that it behoves one to read if you wish to
understand the history of the late 20^th^ century and the
influence this state, the Vatican, has had and still wields on the
international stage and how close we all once were to a very
different political landscape had Albion Luciano lived to fulfil his
vision of the eradication of poverty.
The
lesson still stands; All
power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.