Today’s Financial Times has a piece announcing the trial of 4 men for the murder of a senior Vatican banker, who had threatened to blow the whistle on corruption linked to the Catholic Church with details he said were enough to provoke ‘the third world war’.
This announcement comes more than twenty years after the murder happened – on the exact day that the first election of a new Pope commences.
The Shady Deals of God’s Banker
Over twenty years ago, after being arrested on corruption charges involving dissapearance of $1 billion, on a trail that lead to the Vatican, and possible funding of right wing governments in South America, Roberto Calvi was found hanging under a bridge in London. His death was deemed to be suicide but was later deemed to be murder.
Against the backdrop of the Vatican banking scandal, Pope John Paul II was appointed as the first non Italian Pope in over four hundred years. This unusual appointment was possibly to sidestep political wrangling and disagreement amongst factions in the church over things such as corruption.
Now, I am not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories (since because people like to believe mysteries, there will always be a large population of false mysteries and conspiracy theories) but this one stands out for two reasons:
1. there is plenty of evidence.
2. there is plenty of precedent for this kind of corruption in Italy.
3. the evidence comes from reputable sources.
4. the level of ‘coincidence’ in some of the events surrounding the mystery is very high.
So it seems very odd that the announcement that 4 people will stand trial for Calvi’s murder is made on the exact day that the election of a new Pope begins after more than 8,000 days.
If there were a faction in the Catholic Church, involved in corruption that Calvi had threatened to expose, then perhaps the announcement of this trial is a warning to that group not to try and engineer the election of their man to be the Pope.