‘God’s banker’ Marcinkus confesses … but it’s all an act
Posted Monday, January 29, 2007
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 By Chuck Goudie
Daily Herald Editorial Columnist
Posted Monday, January 15, 2007

 
“I’ve served three popes and done what I was told. I blessed myself with one hand and counted their money with the other. They wanted to arrest me. They couldn’t ’cause I had Vatican diplomatic immunity … but they fought that every day. I outlasted ’em.”

Those words will be spoken this coming weekend by Paul Marcinkus, which may seem odd because the notorious Catholic archbishop from Cicero has been dead for nearly a year.

They won’t be spoken from the grave, rather by an actor in a one-man stage drama entitled “Marcinkus.”

Marcinkus was infamous for a few untidy things that occurred during his decades at the Vatican and especially while he was president of the Vatican bank from 1971 to 1989.

There were widely published allegations that he poisoned Pope John Paul I in 1978 just 33 days after the pope’s election; investigations of missing church money and arms smuggling; charges that he was connected to the Chicago Mob and the Sicilian Mafia and that the Vatican trafficked in radioactive material, stolen Nazi gold and counterfeit currency.

Many of the people closest to Marcinkus ended up dead, including a banking partner found dangling from a London bridge, literally at the end of his rope. Another financier friend died in prison after drinking poisoned coffee.

There was the warrant issued by Italian prosecutors in the 1980s to arrest Marcinkus that he avoided by invoking Vatican City sovereign immunity with Pope John Paul II’s backing. After all, Marcinkus was considered the second-most powerful man in the Catholic Church.

Frustrated by the standoff, Italian authorities eventually gave up and Marcinkus returned to the United States. He lived out his days in Sun City, Ariz., playing golf and tennis.

He died having said almost nothing publicly about the allegations. Years ago, a British reporter asked him whether he poisoned Pope John Paul I.

“A lot of times I’ve said I’d like to strangle a guy,” Marcinkus was quoted as saying. “But that’s when you’ve lost patience with him or something like that, a figure of speech.

“I’ve been accused of murdering a pope,” he said, calling the claim “completely unfounded.”

That’s about all he ever said.

But now, in “Marcinkus: A One Man Show,” he comes to life to “confess” things that he never publicly explained while walking God’s great earth.

“You tell me what a priest like me is gonna do with all this money I supposedly stole? I should be jet skiing in the Bahamas right about now instead of getting up at 6 in the morning to say Mass to 5 people,” the Marcinkus script says. “But it’s how I stole all this money that you’ll want to hear about … yes?”

“What we do is take the money in the (Vatican) bank … and invest it. But sometimes we make mistakes. … Seems like everybody that comes walking through the door wearing a nice suit has got Mafia ties if you dig deep enough. And I can’t ask for a dossier on everyone that comes into my office. In Italy? Are you kidding?

“So we get into business with this bank from Milan. This guy has a great reputation in the banking community. For years you had to show a baptismal certificate to even open an account there … so you know you’re dealing with the faithful.

“And then this guy gets thrown in jail and I start screaming ‘What the hell is going on here?’ And they say to me ‘Don’t worry. If you don’t get caught, that just means you’re not worth anything.’

“Finally the bubble burst … everybody follows the paper trail and sees the Vatican Bank name all over the place … and later they find him hanging underneath a bridge in London with his pockets stuffed with bricks. And then some paid off coroner says… ‘Well, it looks like a suicide.’ A suicide?! It was like gas on the flames.

“Now I become ‘the mob priest’ … laundering mob money … I’m the face of all this now … lining my own pockets of course. And the Italians all figure that now is the perfect time to get rid of me … And then Luciani becomes Pope … and of course I had to kill him because he was gonna do me in. He was gonna take away my jet skis.”

“How could I not want to write about this guy?” said Pennsylvania playwright Tom Flannery when he began researching Marcinkus — whom he described as “a guy who reached a fork in the road and somehow managed to split himself in two and follow both paths.”

Unfortunately for now, if you want to see the one-man play, you’ll have to get to the Old Brick Theatre in Scranton, Pa. That’s where it opens this weekend. But Flannery told me he would love to see it play in Cicero or Chicago and thinks there would be an audience for it.

“Nobody could get this guy (Marcinkus) to say anything,” Flannery told me. “So all we’re really left with is the evil our imaginations could conjure up. And based on what the guy was accused of, that’s enough for about 50 plays.”

I certainly tried to get Marcinkus to talk over the years, but whenever I sent him a letter out in Arizona, something very mysterious would happen.

My phone would ring. The caller ID would show Marcinkus’ private unlisted number in Arizona, a number he must not have realized I knew.

An elderly sounding man with a gravely voice would tell me that “Archbishop Marcinkus doesn’t care to comment. He has nothing to say. He just wants to live in peace and quiet.”

I always figured the caller was Marcinkus himself, just toying with me.

Just like a voice from the dead.