Eric Frattini - The Entity: Five Centuries of Secret Vatican Espionage

INTRODUCTION

T he papacy, the supreme authority at the head of the Catholic Church, is the oldest established institution in the world. It was the only institution to flourish during the Middle Ages, a leading actor in the Renaissance, and a protagonist in the battles of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the French Revolution, the industrial era, and the rise and fall of communism. For centuries, making full use of their famous infallibility, popes brought their centralized power to bear on the social outcomes of unfolding historical events. The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his study of the history of Protestantism, asserted that the popes knew how to place the Church in the center of events, just as they knew how to mitigate its role. He stressed the pontiffs ability to co-opt new social movements that kept arising over the course of centuries, or to adapt the Church to them.

The emperor Napoleon Bonaparte regarded the papacy as one of the best jobs in the world. Adolf Hitler called it one of the most dangerous and most delicate in international politics. Napoleon likened the power of a single pope to that of an army of 200,000 men. Really, throughout history, the papacy has always displayed two faces: that of the worldwide leadership of the Catholic Church and that of one of the planets best political organizations. While the popes were blessing their faithful on the one hand, on the other, they were receiving foreign ambassadors and heads of states and dispatching legates and nuncios on special missions.

This power has led many to see the popes more as the priests of princes than as the vicars of Christ. From the eighth century on, the supreme pontiffs sought primacy and universal jurisdiction for their pronouncements until in 1931, with the creation of Vatican Radio, they gained uninterrupted contact with the world, which made this desire a reality. During the Reformation, Martin Luther attacked the papacy as an unnecessary human evil. The Catholic historian Lord Acton criticized the papacys excessive centralization and, after a trip to Rome, declared that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The history of the Holy Alliance (in 1930 renamed The Entity), the Vaticans spy service, cannot be told without telling the history of the popes, nor can the history of the popes be told without telling the history of the Catholic Church. It is clear that without Catholicism there would be no pope, and, as Paul VI wrote in his encyclical Ecclesiam suam , Take away the sovereign Pontiff and the Catholic Church would no longer be catholic. Without the actual power that the popes have possessed, neither the Holy Alliance nor the counterespionage unit Sodalitium Pianum would exist. Both have formed part of the machinery that they have also helped to create: the Holy Alliance since its foundation in 1566 by order of Pope Pius V, and the