As the supreme authority of the Catholic Church, the Papacy is the oldest institution in the world. It is the only institution that flourished in the Middle Ages, led the Renaissance, thrived in the Counter-Reformation and endured the French Revolution, the Industrial Era, Fascism and Communism. The popes have always known that the place of the Church is at the centre of the action and have been quick to diminish its role when necessary. Napoleon Bonaparte was even convinced that “the papacy is the best office in the world” and Hitler considered the Church “the most dangerous institution in international politics”.
But already many Catholic historians have considered such absolute power in the hands of the Pope to be dangerous and immoral, saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Such power, of course, requires not only a firm faith, but also the necessary information to sustain it. And the Popes had this, because from the 16th century onwards, all the necessary information was brought to them by their intelligence service, called the Holy Alliance (Santa Alleanza).
But without the strong support of the Pope, neither the Holy Alliance, founded in 1566 under the motto “Cum Cruce et Gladio” (With Cross and Sword), nor its special counter-intelligence unit, the “Sodalitium Pianum”, founded many years later, in 1913, would have been able to carry out their work successfully. These two organisations planned and carried out covert operations, political assassinations or “mere” liquidations of second-class participants who got in the way of Church politics.
They have assassinated several kings, poisoned diplomats, turned a blind eye to disasters and holocausts, financed dictators in Latin America, hidden war criminals, laundered mafia money, manipulated financial markets and sold arms, all in the name of God.
The Vatican has never acknowledged the existence of these two intelligence organisations, even though their activities were an open secret. Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, said that the best and most successful intelligence service in the world belongs to the Vatican. The powerful Cardinal Paluzzo Paluzzi, who headed the Holy See in the 17th century, said at the time that ‘if the Pope decides to remove someone for defending the faith, those in charge do so without unnecessary questions. He is the voice of God and we in the Holy Alliance are his right hand.”
There are several stories about who actually founded the Holy Alliance and who was the first to organise the papal spy service. In 1566, the young Miguel Ghislieri was tasked by the then Pope to set up a kind of intelligence service to gather information on anyone who opposed papal decrees or Church dogma. They would, of course, be tried by the Inquisition.
Ghislieri, who first worked in the Como and Bergamo area, was successful and in the first year 1200 people, from peasants to nobles, were brought before the Inquisition, 200 were found guilty and executed. Ghislieri soon organised a spy network in Rome itself, with agents operating virtually everywhere; in public houses, markets and the kitchens of noble families.
The information thus obtained by the spies was communicated to him either in person or in writing via messages called “informi rosso”. These were rolled sheets of parchment, marked with red tape and sealed with the sign of the Inquisition. Anyone who broke this seal was immediately executed. These sheets, which were then deposited in a letterbox at the Inquisition’s headquarters, contained all the accusations against the individuals. The result was an extremely extensive archive on many Romans.
Ghislieri, who has since become a cardinal, has become one of the most powerful men in Rome. He worked by having his agents wait for a suspicious person in a side street, assault him and push him into a closed carriage, which then sped off to the headquarters of the Inquisition.
But the Pope’s death sealed his fate. As soon as word got out that Pope Paul IV was dead, the Romans began to persecute and kill his agents, and he temporarily fled the city with eight carriages full of secret archives. In 1559, Pius IV became Pope and immediately sent Ghislieri into exile and dismantled his spy network. So Ghislieri returned to his diocese and planned his return.
The papacy of Pius IV. It was short-lived, however, as he said goodbye in 1565, and so, with the help of the King of Spain, the new Pope was none other than Manuel Ghislieri, who took the name Pius V.
The new Pope is no more pained by what is happening in England. If he wanted to hold on to the last partial island of Catholic enclave in Protestant England, he had to support Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, against the Protestant Queen Elizabeth of England. And so it was that a young man from Piedmont, David Rizzio, one of the most successful agents the Holy Alliance had at the time, found himself at the court of Mary Stuart.
He quickly established himself at the Scottish court, and the Queen of Scots found in him all that her husband Henry Darnley did not. He was young, handsome, educated, played the lute and wrote love songs. Darnley quickly realised that all this was very dangerous for him and, despite being a Catholic, he became involved with Sir Francis Walsingham, the head of Elizabeth’s Protestant spy service in London. Soon, a conspiracy was hatched.
One evening, while Rizzio was in the Queen’s private chambers, conspirators burst in, shouting that Rizzio was a spy for the Pope and deserved to die. Mary Stuart tried to defend her lover, but they pushed her away and dragged Rizzio, who was desperately clinging to her clothes, up the staircase and began stabbing him with swords and knives. When the Queen regained consciousness, it was all over. She wondered what to do with her husband Darnley, the organiser of the conspiracy. She could not execute him, after all he was her husband, but she could move him to house arrest, to a smaller residence a little further away.
It is not clear who in Rome suggested that the death of Agent Rizzio should be avenged, but the consequence of this action hastened the fall of Mary Stuart. Pope Pius V summoned to his side the young Lambert Macchi of the Jesuit order founded by Ignatius of Loyola. He explained to him that the Jesuits, who had the task of representing the Pope’s army, were being publicly hanged in London squares and had their intestines pulled out of their stomachs in Ethiopia, were being eaten alive by the Iroquois Indians, beheaded in Japan, flogged to death in the Holy Land, crucified in Siam and drowned in water in Madagascar.
The young Macchi was so fascinated by all this that he entered the Jesuit order and travelled to Scotland to discover and punish Rizzi’s murderers. When he arrived there with three colleagues, he quickly realised that if he wanted to punish Rizzio’s murderers, he must first eliminate the Queen’s husband Darnley, the mastermind of the conspiracy.
In February 1567, Mary Stuart gave a grand ball at her court, to which her forgotten husband Darnley was invited. He left his residence, leaving the house empty. Still weak from syphilis, he returned home shortly after midnight. Around 2am, the ground shook with a powerful explosion, and the windows and doors of the residence were blown wide open as the house where Darnley was staying was blown apart by the powerful explosion. Where the residence once stood was now just a large crater, and Darnley’s remains were found in a nearby ditch.
Lamberto Macchi and his colleagues were already on the run. He was carrying a message “informi rosso”, which identified as culprits four other people who had taken part in the removal of Rizzi. The orders contained in this document had to be obeyed. These people also had to die. And they did die.
A month later, Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth of England in his papal bull “Regnans in Excelsis”. The papal bull was a martyrdom for English Catholics, who were now caught between loyalty to their Queen and loyalty to the Pope, who was their religious leader. The Pope knew that, despite his failed attempt to make England Catholic, he had a powerful weapon in the Holy Alliance with which to move his pieces around the chessboard.
Murder of a King
Alessandro de Medici was a scion of a side branch of a famous Florentine family, and became one of the best spies the Vatican has ever had. As such, he made history, but as Pope he was insignificant. In 1596, Pope Clement VIII sent him to France to reorganise the Catholic Church there. Within two years he had spread his intelligence network throughout the country, and on his return to Rome, after the death of Clement VIII, he was elected the new Pope, Leo XI. Just seventeen days after his election, he died of a severe cold.
His successor on the throne of St Peter in 1605 was Cardinal Camillo Borghese, who took the name Paul V. He was Pope in difficult times. Catholics in England had to swear allegiance to the King of England, the Thirty Years’ Religious War was raging in Germany, and France and Spain were at constant loggerheads with each other.
At the time, Denis Lebey de Barilly, President of the Metz Court, wrote a 64-page treatise entitled On the origins of former knife murderers. Despite his poor knowledge, he gave a fairly credible account of a pre-Islamic sect operating in the area between Damascus and Aleppo, led by Prince Sinan, known in history as the “Old Man of the Mountain”. The members of this sect, known as ‘Assassins’, were totally loyal to him and carried out assassinations of his opponents without any objection, even though they knew that they would die for it.
Paul V was given this writing, read it and believed that he was the modern Prince Sinan and that the Holy Alliance should be turned into a unit to assassinate the Church’s enemies in the name of the faith. His first victim was King Henry IV of France, who decided to interfere in the inter-Germanic disputes and therefore spoke out against the Catholic Habsburg monarchy. Henry IV feared assassination and avoided public appearances, but he could not avoid his fate.
On 4 May 1609, while walking through the castle gardens, he confessed to the Duc de Guise that he was about to die, as the stars had foretold him. When he returned to the palace, he found a letter on his desk, unsigned, which read: “Sir, under no circumstances go anywhere this afternoon.”
He disobeyed the advice and left the palace, refusing to be escorted by his guards. In the carriage with him rode a few other high-ranking courtiers, but only a few men-at-arms accompanied her on foot. Suddenly the King wanted to see the nearby cemetery, and the coachman turned into a side road. No one noticed that the carriage was being followed by a stranger on horseback with a sword.
On the narrow road between the village houses, there was a traffic jam. A carriage wheel got stuck in the rut and the villagers gathered around to greet the King. The group of men-at-arms was not with the King at the time, as they had taken a shortcut and intended to join the King only at the cemetery. Then a stranger approached the carriage with a sword and stabbed the King in the chest. The first wound was only superficial, but the assassin struck again, severing the King’s aorta. The assassin did not flee, but stood by the carriage.
The King was brought to the palace, but the doctors could not help him. The murderer was arrested and searched, and a piece of parchment was found with the words Jesus on each page and the phrase Be prepared for the pain of torture in God’s name.
He was identified as Jean-François Ravaillac and sentenced to death. Even under torture, he refused to say who sent him to kill the King. It was only years later that it was discovered that Ravaillac was a member of a Catholic mystical group called Octogonus, unconditionally subject to the Pope, and its members were trained in the military.
The Vatican’s hand was present at the French court after this, as the Queen Dowager chose as her new advisor the Florentine adventurer Concino Concini, who, although not a member of the Holy Alliance, was the Pope’s most trusted spy at the French court. Concini managed to secure incredible influence over him, since all the important matters decided by the new King Louis XII passed through his hands first. His wife, Leonora Galigai, also had a great influence, as the companion of Queen Marie de’ Medici, she represented the link between the Queen and the Pope’s Holy Alliance.
But in 1617, Concini’s star began to set. The King realised that the Florentine had become too strong. “He cannot be deposed, he must be killed”, he resolved. One day in April, Concini went to the Louvre on foot and on the way was stabbed by three strangers. His wife, Leonora Galigai, was arrested the same day and accused of witchcraft. She was found guilty and the next day, members of the Royal Guard beheaded her and her body was burned at the stake.
In February 1775, Cardinal Braschi was elected Pope Pius VI. His papacy began at a time of the emergence of the Enlightenment, a profound crisis of Catholicism and the French Revolution. The second part of his long papacy was the most difficult. It was then that the Parisians feared their own victory; the convocation of a national assembly to adopt a constitution against the will of King Louis XVI. When the revolutionary Camille Desmoulins jumped on the table of the royal palace and shouted “Citizens! To arms!”, nobody had any arms.
But there was enough of it in the Bastille, symbol of royal power and violence. The Governor of the Bastille, de Launey, ordered the firing on the townspeople, but in the end the fortress had to surrender and a cook cut off de Launey’s head with a butcher’s knife and impaled it on a stake. The same fate awaited the other officers.
At the beginning of the French Revolution, Pius VI maintained strict neutrality, despite the contrary wishes of Cardinal Carpara, head of the Holy Alliance, whose agents soon noticed the anti-clerical mood in France. But in March 1791, Pope Pius VI, in his letter “Quod aliquantum”, repealed all the new laws passed by the French National Assembly concerning religion.
The event that later caused Louis XVI to lose his head was actually instigated by agents of the Holy Alliance, who warned the King that the National Assembly was about to adopt reforms, one of which was that priests could no longer swear obedience to the Pope. In that case, therefore, the King could simply exercise his right of veto over these laws, which was also guaranteed by the Constitution.
Then came the unfortunate advice of the Pope’s agents to the King to flee Paris with his family. He failed, and on 21 January 1793 he ascended the guillotine to the podium. He took off his hat, his hair was cut by the executioner’s assistants and his hands were tied behind his back. He cried out, “French, I am innocent!” Then they pushed him under the guillotine and lowered the blade. Queen Marie Antoinette suffered a similar fate in September of the same year.
The Pope’s diplomats and politicians, together with the nuncio, retreated to the safety of Italy, and were replaced by Holy Alliance spies. The most astute of them was Abbé Salamon, who became the Pope’s eyes and ears during the Great Terror. From his small house, he sent constant reports to the Pope of all the measures the new authorities were taking to reduce the influence of the clergy.
The Corsican and the Vatican
The French Revolution was, of course, a thorn in the side of Pope Pius VI, who in his speeches and letters referred to the Revolution and its leaders as emissaries of Satan himself. Relations between the Vatican and France became extremely strained when agents of the Holy Alliance killed Napoleon’s General Duphot, who was accompanying the French ambassador to the Holy See, Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, to Rome.
In December 1797, a crowd gathered in front of the French embassy to demand the declaration of the Italian Republic. A scuffle broke out, General Duphot intervened, and in the crowd someone stabbed him with a knife. When the situation had calmed down, a piece of parchment was found next to Duphot’s corpse, on one side of which was written the name of Jesus and on the other the phrase: “Prepare yourself for the pain of martyrdom in the name of God”. Next to it was drawn the symbol of the Octogonus organisation. As a result, Napoleon’s troops in Italy occupied Rome, and the octogenarian Pope was taken to the French city of Valence, where he died ill. His body was sealed in a lead coffin and returned to Rome.
After Napoleon had successfully dealt with the Revolution and seized all power, he realised that he had to somehow normalise relations with the Vatican and nip in the bud the intelligence services of Austria, Britain and the Holy Alliance. The man who seemed to him to be the right man for the job was Joseph Fouché. From then on, Fouché was the main enemy of the Holy Alliance.
The first conspiracy he discovered was that of Louis Henri de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien. Some of the conspirators were shown to be in close contact with Cardinal Capraro, the head of the Pope’s spy service. The conspirators intended to remove Napoleon and return the Bourbons to the throne of France, but they were quickly captured, imprisoned and strangled in their cells, and the Bourbons were tried and shot.
Relations between Paris and Rome were again strained in 1806, when Napoleon ordered Pope Pius VII to expel from Rome all citizens of countries hostile to France. The Pope refused, and French troops reoccupied Rome, knocked on the door of the papal palace and took the Pope to Savona. Pius VII still had time to threaten excommunication against anyone who used force against the Holy See and its representatives.
But Napoleon also wanted to get his hands on the archives of the Holy Alliance to see what else it was up to. But they were carefully stowed away in 36 closed carriages, on their way to a secret place outside Rome.
Vatican agents tried to rescue the Pope, but were too late, arriving at his residence six hours after the French had already taken him elsewhere. Joseph Fouché had learned of their intent and took the Pope to Fontainebleau. Here Napoleon and Pius VII met several times and discussed not only political but also personal matters. In the end, Napoleon’s plan did not work out and he found himself exiled first on Elba and then on St Helena, where he died.
It should be noted that Pope Pius VII. Pope VII did not resent Napoleon’s behaviour. After Napoleon’s exile, he ordered the head of the Holy Alliance, Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca, to take proper care of his immediate family. The dictator’s mother, Letizia, lived in Rome in a villa under papal protection until her death in 1836, and Napoleon’s brothers Lucien and Louis Bonaparte were also under papal protection.
Popes never usually reign for long, and so in 1823 a new Pope had to be chosen. Cardinal Annibale della Genga was not one of the favourites, and when he was chosen to succeed Peter, he said in surprise: “You have chosen a corpse.” He had been constantly ill for the last three years. But as Pope Leo XII, he immediately confirmed Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacco as head of his intelligence service.
In the post-Napoleonic period, the Holy Alliance had new enemies; members of secret societies such as the Carbonari. In fact, nobody thought of the Carbonari as real bandits. They were just one of many secret groups, such as the protectores, the independienti, the calderari, the peregrines, the mafia, the Society of 13 and the disciples of Jesus.
But the Carbonari, who emerged in the Kingdom of Naples, were in favour of a constitutional monarchy or republic and strongly opposed absolutism. Although Leo XII wanted to make some sort of truce with them and even sent an envoy to them, Bartolomeo Pacca decided to use force and tricked the two leaders of the Carbonari into arresting them, who were then condemned and beheaded. The secret and cruel war with the Carbonari continued until the Pope’s death in 1829.
His successor, Pius VIII – whose papacy lasted only 10 months – left the leadership of the Holy Alliance to Cardinal Pacce, who became the most powerful man in the Vatican. During this short period, Pacce’s agents uncovered a conspiracy by a group of individuals, with ample funds and even a printing press, whose aim was to subvert the Papal State. At the time, this involved several areas under the direct authority of the Vatican, stretching from Rome northwards and along the Adriatic coast as far as the territory of Veneto.
This group was also associated with the Carbonari. At least 15 people were arrested and five were sentenced to death. Although many admitted that the Holy Alliance agents were almost always successful and that the Papal State was the best informed of all as to what was going on, some in the Vatican were convinced that espionage, especially against other countries, was not something that the clergy should be involved in. Quite a few papal nuncios have publicly grumbled about the practice.
The Papal States are no more
In November 1829, Pius VII died and was succeeded by Gregory XVI, at a time of revolutionary change. Everywhere in the Papal States, the desire to unite Italy was boiling over, and revolts were growing louder and louder, but the Papal army could not silence them. The Pope had to call in the Austrian troops to help, only to have them bloodily quelled.
But Pope Gregory XVI has now had to agree to a series of necessary reforms to calm the revolutionary fervour. He was helped by conservative European countries, who also did not want revolutionaries to take over the Papal States and carry the flame of revolution elsewhere in Europe. Bartolomeo Pacca had to resign.
Gregory XVI will go down in history as the Pope who signed 110 death warrants, suppressed freedom of speech and writing, and banned Jews from holding religious services outside ghettos. In doing so, he took the first step towards the complete collapse of the Papal State. He died of cancer at the end of 1846. In fact, he was lucky, because even more turbulent times were ahead, in which the ideas that Marx and Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Bismarck had about the future were already appearing in Europe.
Pope Pius IX was one of the longest-serving popes, and his papacy was marked by conflict and revolution. He had to leave Rome and take refuge from the revolution in the port of Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples. He was only able to return to Rome in 1850.
But the Papal States were already being torn apart by Garibaldi and King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont. One of the first agents of the Holy Alliance to understand the tectonic shifts taking place was the Papal Nuncio in Munich. He became an excellent source of information, sending it from Vienna to Rome.
But his first success was in Munich. He was informed by Austrian espionage that a revolutionary group linked to Garibaldi was preparing to liquidate three Holy Alliance agents. All its agents in Italy were immediately informed and told to be on their guard. Despite this warning, in January 1854, the revolutionaries Rambelli, Marloni and Mancini entered the tavern and opened fire on a trio of Holy Alliance agents who were holding a meeting there. The one who did not die immediately was stabbed to death, and the assassins disappeared into the narrow streets of the city.
De Luca did not stand still in Vienna. He used bribes and intimidation to obtain information about the former areas of the Papal States annexed by the Piedmontese sovereign Emmanuel II.
In March 1861, Victor Emmanuel II proclaimed himself King of Italy, promising the Pope concessions, both financial and spiritual, if he recognised his authority. The papal state collapsed. With the collapse of the former Papal State, the Holy Alliance also lost all contact with its agents in European countries. It was able to discover coded messages sent by Piedmont’s representatives in Rome to its Foreign Minister, but it was no longer able to decipher them.
In July 1870, Victor Emmanuel II declared that now was the time to take Rome and the Piedmontese army entered the city. Victor Emmanuel II settled on the Quirinal Hill, the traditional seat of the Popes. “We are in Rome and here we will stay”, he proudly declared.
In 1877, Pius IX was 86 years old and had been Pope for 31 years. He noticed that his health was failing and that he was going to die. But he had the satisfaction of knowing that his eternal opponent, King Emmanuel II of Italy, had died four months before him.
The Conclave of 1878 was the first conclave after the Papal States lost their territories. Pope Leo XIII’s papacy was marked by years of instability and uncertainty. No one wanted to take the helm of the spy service, and many of its operatives across Europe were left without clear instructions on who and what to report to. Quarrels between the Pope and the King of Italy were the order of the day.
One such incident occurred in July 1881, when the Vatican wanted to transfer the remains of Pope Pius IX to the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura. Two days before, Vatican informers, infiltrated by various revolutionary groups, had learned that these groups were planning to attack the procession carrying the remains of Pius IX and throw his body into the Tiber. They informed the Pope’s Swiss Guard and the new Italian police.
When the funeral procession turned into a side street, they attacked it with stones and tried to take the body. The Italian police turned away as if it was none of their business and refused to intervene, so the Swiss Guards protected the body with their bodies.
These attacks angered Leo XIII so much that he proposed to the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph that the Vatican move its headquarters to Austrian territory. But Franz Joseph refused to hear of this, as it would have severely damaged his relations with the new Italian state.
In June 1903, Leo XIII contracted pneumonia and it became clear that his days were numbered. A month later, Cardinal Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, known as Pius X, became the new Pope. The new Pope merely continued the policy of his predecessor, who had strongly condemned all modernist ideas, and appointed the Spanish Cardinal de Valo, a firm supporter of the German and Austrian monarchies, as his Secretary of State.
The head of the remnants of the papal spy service was Umberto Benigni, an insignificant priest and journalist who had come to Rome to seek happiness and make money. But his importance went far beyond his obscure career beginnings. In 1909, he conceived a spy network aimed at identifying all those in the Vatican itself and its institutions who espoused modern ideas. His agents began to spy on priests in the universities, the media and the political institutions of France, Britain, Germany and Italy.
Soon, around 300 names were on the list of suspects. So Secretary of State de Val authorised Benigni to set up a special spy service, to operate only within the Vatican and in Church organisations. This organisation was called the “Sodalitium Pianum”, and within the Vatican walls it was briefly called the S.P. Spying abroad was still the responsibility of the Holy Alliance.
Two spy organisations within the Vatican meant duplication of tasks, which led to competition between them as both networks competed for the same information.
In reality, the S.P. had no official name and no headquarters or offices. Its creation was not even reported in the “Anuario Pontificio”, a publication which regularly published the Vatican’s organisational plan. Its activities were paid for from a hidden fund. It used the same technology as the spy services of other countries, and rarely exchanged information with the Italian security services. Its classic repertoire included classical espionage, interception of mail and telegrams, and surveillance of persons.
Her first task was to collect arguments that could be used to oppose modernist ideas and thus prevent any public discussion of reforms in the Church. She was then to set up a network of spies to detect modernists and liberals and thwart their plans.
Benigni recognised the power of the press and was convinced that it could be used successfully, so he founded the Corrispondenza Romana, which was full of attacks on modernism and liberal politics. This sparked a wave of indignation, especially in France, but also in Italy. Pope Pius X had to officially deny that this newspaper was the Vatican’s newsletter, even though the Vatican treasury contributed money for its publication.
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World War
The S.P. archives were soon full of information on reformist priests, liberal teachers, suspicious intellectuals and journalists, as well as cardinals, bishops, rectors of Catholic universities and others. The Roman Curia soon began to refer to the S.P. as the Holy Terror.
Benigni has become one of the most powerful people in the Vatican. He sent weekly reports of his discoveries to the Pope. But he was slipping slowly into ruin. In fact, it was rumoured in the corridors of the Vatican that he had fallen out of favour because he had been caught passing on some of the Pope’s documents to a representative of the Russian Tsar. But it is more likely that the cardinals in the Vatican were fed up with his intrigues.
Nevertheless, he still tried to manage his network of informants and maintain contact with the Pope’s entourage from his small apartment. But paranoia was catching up with him and he saw hidden enemies everywhere. In the first months of 1914, he was still handling some minor matters in the Vatican, but when Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa became the new Pope, he had to say goodbye for good.
He left behind a spy service in disarray, but even the Holy Alliance’s espionage operations were irrelevant or almost non-existent. Benigni’s vision of an effective papal intelligence service collapsed like a house of cards. But World War I breathed new life into the work of the Holy Alliance.
Gavrilo Princip was a product of the period when Europe was swept by the wave of anarcho-syndicalism. Long before the outbreak of the war, Pius X also feared assassination, because the Holy Alliance had reported to him that a war would soon begin that would shake humanity. “The Pope approves of Austria’s harsh attitude towards Serbia. He does not think highly of the armies of France and Russia in a probable war with Germany. Secretary of State del Val says that if Austria does not attack Serbia now, it never will,” reported a foreign diplomat from Rome after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife.
In August 1914, Pius X was already feeling unwell and breathed his last on 20 August, almost two months after the assassination in Sarajevo. Although hostilities had already begun in Europe, a conclave gathered and chose Cardinal Chiesa as Pope under the name Benedict XV.
While reports of casualties on the battlefields were already coming in from all the nuncios in Rome, Benedict XV was taking the first steps to break with the past. He immediately dismissed the Secretary of State, del Valo, and formally stripped Benigni of all his powers.
Austria-Hungary and Germany had their best diplomats in the Vatican at the start of World War I, and the Holy Alliance’s spies reported to the Pope that the Italian government was negotiating with Germany and Austria-Hungary on a price for which it was prepared to remain neutral. This price was the “terre iredente” of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the province of Trentino-Alto Adige, where there was also an Italian population.
The spies informed the Pope that the Italian government was simultaneously talking to its allies, England and France. Benedict XI ordered the Holy Alliance and his diplomacy to try by all means to prevent Italy from entering the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Pope doubted Italy’s ability to survive the turmoil of war, both politically and economically. But he also knew that a large part of the Vatican Curia was on the side of Germany and that even the agents of the Holy Alliance could no longer be fully trusted.
But Britain and France offered Italy much more – part of Slovenia, Istria, part of Dalmatia and some Adriatic islands – if it entered the war on their side. So Italy declared war on Austria in May 1915. In vain were the efforts of Austria and Germany to influence Italian policy through the Vatican, in vain the cooperation of the Holy Alliance with their intelligence services, and in vain the large sums of money that poured from Germany through secret channels into the empty Vatican coffers.
In 1917, both belligerents realised that only negotiations could end the senseless slaughter on the European battlefields. From this realisation onwards, the main role of the intelligence services, both of the Holy Alliance and the Sodalitium Pianum, was to act as mediators in these talks.
In the last years of World War I, the main targets of Italian intelligence were the Vatican and Austria. One of Italy’s best agents at the Holy See was Count Carlo Monti, a classmate of the Pope. Holy Alliance agents regularly sent him confidential information from the Pope, which was then passed into the hands of Italian intelligence.
The main group of these informants in the Holy See was known as the Vaticanetto, and consisted of senior members of the Curia who were opposed to Benedict XV, who had removed them from his presence because of their extremely conservative views. Led by the well-known Cardinal del Val, they sought to humiliate the Pope and his policies, and to pass on intelligence and intelligence operations to foreign intelligence services. All this information was gathered and sent to certain persons through the territory of Switzerland, which Italian intelligence was convinced had become the centre of activity of the Holy Alliance and the Sodalitium Pianum.
But the Pope was still well informed about all the attempts to end the senseless war. He himself had something to contribute and sent Eugenio Pacelli to Munich as Papal Nuncio. This was a major change in the recent history of the Vatican, except that nobody realised it at the time.
Pacelli had all the outward signs of a pious religious; he was thin, with sparse hair and an eagle nose, and was well versed in Vatican politics and its relations with other countries. He had the task of persuading the German Emperor to accept the Vatican’s mediating role in the peace talks.
The Vatican was in a hurry, as agents of the Holy Alliance were reporting that America might also enter the war, which would make the situation of the Central Powers, especially Germany and Austria-Hungary, much worse. A truce or peace would therefore have to be achieved before America entered the war.
However, neither the Vatican nor its intelligence services were aware of the London Agreement, under which the Entente powers, including Italy, excluded the Vatican from the peace consultations. Thus, the First World War ended in November 1918 without the help of Vatican diplomats.
Pope Benedict XV and Eugenio Pacelli were deeply disappointed. However, one event strongly marked Pacelli’s attitude towards the race question and the war. After the war, the Vatican, using information from its intelligence services in America and England, launched a powerful campaign accusing France of raping white girls in the Rhineland by its African soldiers. Pacelli also pressed Paris on the issue, but the Pope’s advisers suggested that he should not ask for any explanations from Paris.
The three African soldiers were accused of raping and murdering Nina Holbech, but the case never went to court and they were found bound and strangled a few months later. The two officers who watched the rape were also found hanged. No one ever found out who did it. Twenty-five years later, however, Eugenio Pacelli, when he was already Pope Pius XII, asked the Allies, who were preparing to invade Rome in 1944, not to have any black soldiers in those troops.
Two years before the Rhineland event, on 23 March 1919, Benito Mussolini met 118 followers in Milan and founded the “Fasci di combattimento”. His programme demanded the expropriation of all religious institutions and the end of the law passed by the Italian Parliament in 1871, which, despite the loss of the Papal States, still guaranteed the Vatican sovereignty in ecclesiastical matters.
The Holy Alliance immediately informed Benedict XV of this event. What the Pope did not know was that the very Mussolini who wanted to expropriate him would sign the Lateran Pact ten years later, which in fact created a small Vatican state.
Early in January 1922, the Pope caught a severe cold, pneumonia and died. The conclave lasted only four days and white smoke announced that the new Pope was Cardinal Achille Ratti, who took the name Pius XI. The new Pope immediately told the cardinals that he wanted to achieve lasting peace and ensure coexistence with the Italian state. He expressed this wish at a time when dictators were everywhere, but who had no desire for lasting peace.
Church underground
World War I had not yet ended when Pope Pius XI and the Holy Alliance gained a new enemy with the Russian Revolution; the atheist communist regime in Russia, which banned church schools, persecuted priests of all faiths, closed churches and turned them into warehouses.
The Church suffered its final blow in 1919, when it was banned from teaching the Catholic faith to children, even in the home. Communication between the Vatican and Moscow was cut off. Yet the Pope wanted to at least try to defend Catholicism in the Soviet Union.
In April 1926, a scantily clad figure emerged from a Moscow hotel and made its way through a circuitous route to the Church of St Louis of France, the only Catholic church still in operation in Moscow. She entered the dark church, where three people were waiting for her. In a whisper, the newcomer introduced himself as Michel d’Herbigny, a Catholic archbishop sent by Pope Pius XI on a secret mission to the cesspit of atheism to set up a Catholic administration to replace the imprisoned priests and bishops.
But d’Herbigny was not only a bishop, he was also an agent of the Holy Alliance, who had been tasked by the Pope to set up a special section to prepare priests to exercise the priestly vocation in secret in the Soviet Union. One of those present in the church was Eugene Neveu, whom d’Herbigny was to ordain as the first illegal Catholic bishop in that country.
The whole ceremony was over in five minutes. D’Herbigny read the consecration document to Neveu in Latin and put the episcopal ring on his hand. The new Bishop said that he already had two priests waiting to be consecrated. Then they parted.
Secret missions were nothing new for the Holy Alliance, but this one was something special. To be a Catholic priest in the Soviet Union was to risk, at best, ending up in a labour camp or prison, or being shot as a counter-revolutionary.
But when d’Herbigny returned to his hotel, he was told to report to the Moscow police. It was then that he first began to realise that there was a traitor in their ranks. Unbeknown to him, the OGPU secret political police agents were following his every move.
He went to the police to get his visa extended, as he was planning to visit Ukraine. But three days later, the police came to his hotel, returned his passport and told him he was an undesirable person. He was escorted to the train station, from where he was taken by train to Berlin.
The new Catholic Bishop Neveu waited for him in vain in the church. Only a man in a working suit came to him and gave him a package containing clothes and money. “This is sent to you by the Holy Alliance. May God protect you in your work.”
Neveu knew he was now alone. Without too much speed, the Soviet authorities gradually began to break up the small Catholic community of remaining priests. As a rule, they ended up in labour camps or sentenced to long prison terms. Most often, they were stopped in the street by members of the secret police and pushed into a black car with tinted windows, after which all trace of them disappeared. By 1936, the number of Catholic priests in the Soviet Union had fallen to fifty, to ten the following year, and by 1938 only two remained at large.
The Nazis’ rise to power greatly shuffled the spy networks of many countries. Hitler, like any dictator – and Mussolini too – wanted religious recognition for his regime, because it would increase his prestige abroad. Thus, as early as 1933, the German Vice-Chancellor von Papen met with Pacelli, who was becoming more and more respected in the Vatican. Together, they set out the main points on which the famous Concordat between Berlin and the Vatican, concluded in July 1933, was based.
Pacelli was the Papal Nuncio to Germany at the time, and had an almost completely free hand. Meanwhile, Holy Alliance spies from Germany began sending messages of persecution, racial intolerance, sterilisation and the killing of the mentally ill and physically handicapped. Pius XI reacted strongly with the encyclical “Mit brennender Sorge”, condemning Nazism and its leaders.
The encyclical was secretly printed and read in some German Catholic churches. Hitler reacted immediately. Around a thousand Catholics, journalists, priests, seminarians and leaders of Catholic youth organisations were arrested. Around three hundred were sent to concentration camps.
I am not up to my role
However, Pius XI’s health began to deteriorate, so that on Christmas Day 1938, he could barely read the message on the radio. On 10 February 1939, his life ended peacefully and a new Pope had to be chosen. Each of the superpowers had its own candidate, Hitler’s was of course Eugenio Pacelli, because he was a well-known Germanophile. He had been Papal Nuncio to Germany for 12 years and spoke excellent German.
The Germans figured that three million deutschmarks in gold would be enough to bribe some candidates to vote for Pacelli. A special train with three million gold marks left Germany for Rome. Agents of the Holy Alliance found out about it. The conclave was already in session and on 2 March 1939, after the third vote, Pacelli became the new Pope. He took the name Pius XII.
It was the shortest conclave in 300 years, and the train with the millions of gold had not even arrived in Rome yet. Pacelli thus became Pope without German gold. The German SD security service immediately demanded that the train, which had stopped near Venice, be returned to Germany, but neither the train nor the gold came from anywhere. The Italian police soon found the body of the German spy in charge of the transaction hanging from the roof of a pavilion in the park of the Eternal City. The gold had disappeared.
There were several versions of what happened, but the most persistent one was that the gold was seized by agents of the Sodalitium Pianum. The Italian police suggested that the gold was then melted down in the furnaces of the Venetian smelters, thus obliterating the mark of the German National Bank from the gold ingots, and then the gold bars were smuggled to Switzerland, where they disappeared in one of the bank vaults. What really happened to this gold is still a mystery today.
The papacy of Pius XII during the Second World War still evokes mixed feelings. Many of his gestures were incomprehensible, he is accused of not saying what he should have said during the war and of just shaking his head helplessly at the atrocities he learned of. Only the Vatican archives, which are now being opened, will perhaps be able to tell us what he did and did not do during this time.
He finished inconspicuously, but quickly. In October 1958, as he was about to bless the faithful, his hand faltered. The 82-year-old Pope was completely exhausted and on 9 October 1958, the death knell rang. In his will, he wrote: “Have mercy on me, Lord. In times of responsibility, I have made mistakes and abandoned duties which have led me to realise that I am unfit and unworthy of my role.”
Maybe Pius XII was even right. He lived and worked in an age that demanded a different way of doing things. But he would not have been at all suited to the age that was coming, the age of the new Pope John XIII, who was more interested in preparing for the revolutionary Second Vatican Council, where Pius XII, with his conservative views, no longer belonged. The Holy Alliance was also very little active in the following years. It was waiting for its time to come again. It was not wrong.
Although the Holy Alliance today cannot compare with the CIA, the Russian FSB and the Israeli Mossad in terms of the use of technology and the resources expended, it would be a great mistake to underestimate its capabilities. Near the Piazza della Minerva in Rome, there is a palace that appears to be just one of many ancient palaces in Rome. But it is the seat of the Pontificia Accademia Ecclesiastica, or rather the Vatican Diplomatic Academy. Here, a flower of Catholic priests is being trained, sent here by dioceses from all over the world to become the Vatican’s elite diplomats – the Apostolic Nuncios.
Most Catholics do not realise that today it is the nuncios who organise the gathering of intelligence from all over the world. In 2008, the Vatican also became a member of Interpol, giving itself access to a huge database. So there is more than enough work for a real Vatican diplomat.
