Historical Roots of the St. Gallen Mafia

Editor’s note: in this ongoing series, Synod Watch, we will analyze the machinations of the “mafia” in the Vatican – past, present and future.

Anyone who wants to understand what is behind the “Synod on Synodality” opened on October 10 by Pope Francis cannot do without the recently published book The St. Gallen Mafia (TAN, 2021) by Julia Meloni, which traces its historical and ideological premises.

Reading this book is as exciting as reading a novel, but everything in it is documented with a rigorous historical method. This aspect deserves to be underlined at a time when certain conspiracy theories are exposed in a superficial and sometimes fanciful way. To make up for a lack of evidence, theories such as these use a narrative technique, which appeals to the emotions more than to reason, and enwraps those who, with an act of faith, have already decided to believe the improbable. Julia Meloni instead tells the story of a real conspiracy, of which she accurately exposes the end goal, the means, the places, and the protagonists. It is the story of the “St. Gallen Mafia,” to use the term coined by one of its main exponents, Cardinal Godfried Daneels (Karim Schelkens and Jürgen Mettepenningen, Gottfried Danneels, Editions Polis, Anvers 2015).

St. Gallen is a Swiss city, where in 1996 Bishop Ivo Fürer — who until the year prior was the secretary general of the Conference of European Bishops — was bishop. In agreement with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini (1927-2012), Archbishop of Milan (pictured above left), Bishop Fürer decided to invite a group of prelates to establish an agenda for the Church of the future. The group met for ten years, between 1996 and 2006. The key personalities, in addition to Cardinal Martini, were Walter Kasper, Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, and Karl Lehmann (1936-2018), Bishop of Mainz, both of whom were destined to receive the red hat as cardinals. Subsequently, two other future cardinals were co-opted: Godfried Danneels (1933-2019), archbishop of Malines-Brussels and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor (1932-2017) archbishop of Westminster (pictured above right). They were joined in 2003 by the Cardinal of the Roman Curia Achille Silvestrini (1923-2019), thanks to whom the St. Gallen group became a powerful lobby, capable of determining the election of a Pontiff. A few days after the funeral of John Paul II, at the invitation of Silvestrini, the “St. Gallen Mafia” met at Villa Nazareth, in Rome, to agree on a plan of action in view of the next conclave. In a photograph that appeared in The Tablet of July 23, 2005, next to Cardinal Silvestrini, one sees Cardinals Martini, Danneels, Kasper, Murphy-O’Connor, Lehmann, all “key members and alumni of the St. Gallen mafia,” as Julia Meloni writes (p. 5).

The initial plan was to elect Cardinal Martini to the papal throne, but starting in 1996, the year of the creation of the group, the Archbishop of Milan began to feel the first symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. In 2002 the cardinal made the news public, passing the baton to Cardinal Silvestrini, who from January 2003 was directing the maneuvers for the next conclave. Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor was in turn linked with Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, and presented him to the group as a possible anti-Ratzinger candidate. Bergoglio received the consent of the “mafia”, but it was Cardinal Martini himself who had the greatest doubts about his candidacy, in light of the information he received about the Argentine bishop from within the Society of Jesus. It was perhaps with relief that, when in the conclave of 2005 Bergoglio’s defeat seemed certain, Cardinal Martini announced to Cardinal Ratzinger that he would make his votes available to him. The St. Gallen group held a final meeting in 2006, but Martini and Silvestrini continued to exert a strong influence on the new pontificate. In 2012, Cardinal Kasper spoke of a “southerly wind” blowing through the Church, and on March 17, 2013, a few days after his election, Pope Francis unsurprisingly cited Kasper as one of his favorite authors, assigning him the task of opening the extraordinary Consistory on the Family in February 2014.

Pope Francis, however, has disappointed progressives no less than he has irritated conservatives, and his pontificate has seen, after eight years, an inexorable decline. However, if the main exponents of the St. Gallen Mafia are dead, its modernist spirit hovers over the synodal process, while new maneuvers are underway for the next conclave. Julia Meloni’s book, which reconstructs the history of this “Mafia,” helps us understand the dark dynamics that agitate the Church today. I can add a few elements, drawing on my own memories.

In the fall of 1980, I received a visit from a priest of the Roman Curia, Msgr. Mario Marini (1936-2009), not yet fifty years old, intelligent and full of verve. The priest had been a collaborator of Cardinal Giovanni Benelli (1921-1982) and was concerned about the conquest of key positions in the Vatican by those who had been Benelli’s enemies and who were thriving in the shadow of Cardinal Agostino Casaroli (1914-1998), John Paul II’s Secretary of State.

Between 1980 and 1981 I had numerous meetings with Msgr. Marini, in which he explained to me in great detail the existence of what he called a “Mafia” that surrounded John Paul II, elected in 1978 to the papal throne. This Mafia had its “gray eminence” in Msgr. Achille Silvestrini, shadow and alter ego of Cardinal Casaroli, who had succeeded him in 1973 as Secretary of the Council for Public Affairs of the Church: the same Silvestrini that Julia Meloni presents to us as the “mastermind” of the Mafia of St. Gallen.

Silvestrini was an intelligent but intriguing man who had represented the Holy See in the conferences of Helsinki (1975), Belgrade (1977-78) and Madrid (1980), though he never had the diplomatic experience of a nunciature. Like many post-conciliar prelates, he was above all a politician who liked to shed his curial robes for confidential meetings outside the apartments he occupied in the Vatican. The vaticanistas appreciated his willingness to pass on confidential information, even if his information, equally distributed to the right and left, cunningly mixed lies and truth. In international politics he was aligned with the positions of Monsignor Luigi Bettazzi, Bishop of Ivrea, in favor of the policy of unilateral disarmament; in domestic politics he supported the line of the Christian Democrats who were more “open” towards the Italian Communist Party. He cultivated in particular relations with Giulio Andreotti and was head of the delegation of the Holy See that in 1985 would ratify the disastrous New Concordat with the Italian State. Through Msgr. Francesco Brugnaro, current archbishop emeritus of Camerino, Silvestrini was in close contact with Carlo Maria Martini, archbishop of Milan, but not yet a cardinal, whose future destiny he sniffed out. All this was twenty-five years before the “St. Gallen Mafia.”

I agreed with the priest to bring to light this information, which was also transmitted to John Paul II, through Dr. Wanda Poltawska, who was also aware of many things through her friendship with Cardinal Edouard Gagnon (1918-2007), a friend of the Msgr. Some of these revelations were published by the magazine Impact Suisse, by Si Si No No and by the Courrier de Rome. Forty years have passed since then and I am pleased to remember the figure of Msgr. Mario Marini, a priest who has always served the Church with apostolic zeal, and who was among the first to denounce the existence of a “Mafia” within it. I was inspired by the beautiful book by Julia Meloni. But what did Msgr. Marini say then? This will be the subject of another article.

Editor’s note: other critical information from Msgr. Marini is related through his friend Fr. Charles Murr, in his text The Godmother.

From the article:

Casaroli’s case and relationship with Silvestrini are curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agostino_Casaroli

Agostino Casaroli (24 November 1914 – 9 June 1998) was an Italian Catholic priest and diplomat for the Holy See, who became Cardinal Secretary of State. He was the most important figure behind the Vatican’s efforts to deal with the persecution of the Church in the nations of the Soviet bloc after the Second Vatican Council. . .

Relations with Communism

Casaroli’s signing of treaties with Hungary in 1964 and Yugoslavia in 1966 was the first time the Holy See had opened itself in this way to Communist regimes, which had killed a great many Catholics since coming to power. Although his 2000 memoirs revealed a man hostile to Communism, his remarkable diplomatic skill made this hostility appear non-existent.

According to John O. Koehler, the KGB and its “brother organs” in Eastern Europe were well aware of Cardinal Casaroli’s real opinions and influence. Therefore, his personal office was one of the primary espionage targets inside the Vatican.

The KGB was assisted in this by the Cardinal’s own nephew, Marco Torreta, and Torreta’s Czechoslovakian wife Irene Trollerova. According to Italian intelligence officials, Torreta had been a KGB informant since 1950.

According to Koehler:

Irene returned from Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s, with a ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary, about 10 inches high, a beautiful work of renowned Czech ceramic art. The couple presented the statue to Cardinal Casaroli, who accepted gratefully. What a betrayal by his own nephew! Inside the revered religious icon was a “bug”, a tiny but powerful transmitter, which was monitored from outside the building by the couple’s handlers from the Soviet Embassy in Rome. The statue had been placed in an armoire in the dining room close to Cardinal Casaroli’s office. Another eavesdropping device inside a rectangular piece of wood was hidden in the same armoire. Both were not discovered til 1990 during a massive probe initiated by Magistrate Rosario Priore in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. The bugs had been transmitting until that time.”[2]

Teilhard de Chardin

On 10 June 1981, on the 100th anniversary of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s birth, L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, published a letter by Casaroli that praised the “astonishing resonance of his research, as well as the brilliance of his personality and richness of his thinking.” Casaroli wrote that Teilhard had anticipated John Paul II’s call to “be not afraid”, embracing “culture, civilization and progress”.[3] The letter was antedated 12 May 1981, the day prior to the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, but was published during his convalescence. On 20 July 1981, a communiqué of the Press Office of the Holy See stated that the letter did not change the position of the warning issued by the Holy Office on 30 June 1962, which pointed out that Chardin’s work contained ambiguities and grave doctrinal errors.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Silvestrini

He began studying at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in 1952 and joined the Vatican diplomatic service, section of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, Secretariat of State, in 1953. He was chargé d’affaires in the Holy See’s diplomatic offices in Vietnam, China, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. In 1955, he worked in the section of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, directed by Domenico Tardini.[1]

He served as personal secretary to cardinals Domenico Tardini and Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, as well as in the Council for the Public Affairs of the Church from 1969 to 1979, where he was in charge of the section for international organisations, peace, disarmament, and human rights. He traveled to Moscow with Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, secretary of the council, to deliver the instrument of adhesion of the Holy See to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1971.[1]

He headed the Holy See’s delegation to the United Nations conference on the peaceful use of nuclear energy in Geneva in 1971 and to the conference on compliance with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in the same city in 1975. He was appointed undersecretary of the Council for the Public Affairs of Church on 28 July 1973.[1]

Bishop and diplomat
Silvestrini was appointed Secretary for Relations with States of the Secretariat of State on 4 May 1979 and assigned the titular see of Novaliciana with the title of archbishop.[1] On 27 May 1979, he was consecrated a bishop by Pope John Paul II.[2]

He worked for the next five years on the revision of the Lateran Treaty on its fiftieth anniversary, and signed a revised treaty that reflected the rapid secularisation of Italy since the 1960s.[1]

He was involved in a number of other concordats between the Vatican and other countries, most notably in the Falklands War of the early 1980s and the war in Nicaragua.[1]. .

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.