The Vatican Gives Haven to a Fugitive

ROME — Next October, Pope John Paul II will open another Synod of Bishops, a kind of debating society that meets in the Vatican every three years where the voices of bishops from all over the world are heard and where resolutions are passed that are intended to illuminate the Pope on what the outside world is thinking. As always, the Vatican has chosen the agenda. This year it will be about the role of the laity--the ordinary Roman Catholics--in the affairs of the church.

Ideally, this could be the occasion for “let’s hear it from the people out there.” However, for the first time, the Pope has thus far refused to allow the foreign bishops to make public their country’s working papers prepared for the synod.

One issue that an informed and devout laity might raise is the one of the Vatican bank, for whose president, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, a 65-year-old native of Cicero, Ill., an arrest warrant was issued five months ago.

The Institute for Religious Works, commonly called the Vatican bank, was set up in 1942. It was intended as a place where Catholic religious orders could deposit their funds. Marcinkus took charge of the bank in 1971, after long tenure with the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.

The Vatican bank has grown under Marcinkus, and is now internationally famous, although mostly for the wrong reason. Last year, after a patch of trouble, it was able to give the Pope, as its annual donation, nearly $5 million.

Marcinkus’ current and long-enduring problem is that in his pursuit of profit, he has chosen some odd partners. One early consultant was Michele Sindona, the swindler convicted both in New York and in Milan of fraudulent banking practices. When Sindona’s bubble burst in 1974, Marcinkus took up with Roberto Calvi, president of Milan’s Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank, which also became Europe’s largest bank failure in 1982. As luck would have it, both men are dead. Calvi, who allegedly spent his last hours trying to reach Marcinkus by telephone, was found hanging beneath a bridge in London under mysterious, contradictory circumstances. Last year, while in an Italian prison, Sindona’s morning coffee was spiked with cyanide.

The Milan prosecutor who has been charged with investigating the Ambrosiano’s collapse has accumulated hundreds of documents, some of them from, or relating to, Marcinkus or his bank. He also would like to interrogate the archbishop, but routine attempts have been stopped at Vatican City’s seven-feet-thick brick wall. In February an arrest warrant was issued as a last resort. It was not served because, probably forewarned, Marcinkus had moved from his Rome residence to an apartment within the Vatican, a 108-acre enclave set in the middle of Rome as an independent, sovereign state. Its existence, as such, is a legacy from the late Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini.

The Vatican convoked a “tribunal” of trustee Italian lawyers to judge the arrest warrant attempt and they found that the 1919 treaty, establishing Vatican City, forbids all “interference” by Italy in its “central administration.” That surely meant that the Pope did not want the Italian dictator telling him whom to make bishop of what, and other clearly ecclesiastical matters. Anyhow, the Vatican bank had not yet been born.

The Milan investigators checking Marcinkus’ links with the Ambrosiano bank have now played their last card. They asked, and Vatican lawyers asked, that the Italian Supreme Court rule on the validity of the arrest warrant. The court was told that the Vatican bank was “an indispensable partner” in Calvi’s illegal transfers of his bank’s funds amounting to $1.3 billion, used for years in the world’s biggest shell game, shuttled between Calvi’s phony shelters abroad. Marcinkus and two lay assistants were “accessories to the secret disbursal, the dissipation, and the eventual destruction of the Banco Ambrosiano,” the court was told.

On Friday the Supreme Court declared the archbishop’s arrest warrant invalid. The court’s ruling could mean that Marcinkus will be tried in absentia.

There really are two simple questions to be asked. Why should Marcinkus, who was a board member of Calvi’s Bahama bubble bank (to cite but one clear-cut example of their partnership), not be interrogated in an extremely important inquiry? The second question is does the Vatican, or the Holy See, or the Pope, really need a bank of its very own? The Vatican could do its banking anywhere, including in Italy. Banking secrecy is as closely guarded here as in Switzerland, or was. The recent exception gives a magistrate the right to investigate certain monetary movements in Italian banks if there are good reasons to suspect they are being steered by the Mafia.

Traditionally, the Vatican prefers ignoring unpleasant questions, but in this case its response has been made known. Marcinkus is innocent, but if misdeeds were committed by the bank they took place within the Vatican and thus outside Italian legal jurisdiction.

Yet when Ali Agca, a Turk, shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, both the target and the would-be killer were well within Vatican territory. The Vatican was happy to have him arrested, tried and sentenced in Italy, and under Italian law, and his life sentence will be at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. The Vatican becomes another country only when it chooses to be.

Also, its argument goes, to allow the archbishop to be quizzed (the arrest warrant was a formality used for “missing” witnesses) would set a bad precedent, as if offering refuge to the archbishop were not in itself somewhat unseemly.

And what interpretation was the laity expected to make when, about four years ago, the Vatican made a “voluntary donation,” with no admission of any fault, of $240 million to the 119 banks around the world that had lost money in the Calvi caper? What about the small Ambrosiano shareholder, and what about those who had their savings there?

There is a human, one might even say blood, factor at play in this affair. Paul Casimir Marcinkus’ parents came from Lithuania. That makes him the Polish Pope’s fellow-Slav. That probably explains why American dollars for Poland’s Solidarity Movement were channeled through the Vatican bank. Pope John Paul’s only direct comment on the subject, to reporters aboard his airplane in April, was that “the Holy See has taken the Marcinkus case to its heart. We’re not convinced that a person should be attacked in such an exclusive and brutal way.” To the Pope, Marcinkus seems to be another victim of Calvi’s manipulation.