Book 3: The Vatican Moscow Washington Alliance (1982)
Three Powers, One Twilight World
Published in 1982, this is Manhattan’s most geopolitically sophisticated work. It argues that the three most powerful political entities of the Cold War era — the Vatican, the Soviet Union, and the United States — were operating, despite their public enmity, in a covert relationship of mutual accommodation that served each party’s institutional interests. The book’s subtitle is: Startling Revelations of Dangerous New Partnerships.
Manhattan’s preface sets the stage:
The Vatican’s Strategic Use of Both Superpowers
Manhattan’s core argument is that the Vatican’s apparent implacable opposition to Communism was not purely ideological. It was strategic. Rome feared Communism primarily because Communist governments expelled Catholic clergy, nationalised Catholic schools and hospitals, and destroyed the Church’s social and political influence in the countries that fell under Soviet domination. The Vatican’s anti-Communism was therefore as much a defence of institutional power as a defence of Christian civilisation.
But simultaneously, Manhattan documents, the Vatican maintained back-channel diplomatic contact with Moscow throughout the Cold War. Under Pope John XXIII — whose Ostpolitik opened Vatican dialogue with Soviet-bloc governments — Rome traded public denunciation of Communism for Soviet tolerance of the Church’s residual presence in Eastern Europe. Manhattan’s analysis of this double game:
John Paul II and the Polish Strategy
On the election of John Paul II in 1978 — the first Polish Pope and the first non-Italian Pope in four hundred and fifty years — Manhattan is particularly incisive. He argues that the election was itself the product of a strategic calculation by the Vatican and its American allies, designed to use a Polish Pope as a destabilising instrument against Soviet control of Eastern Europe. The CIA and the Vatican, he contends, worked in parallel — not always in formal coordination but with convergent strategic objectives — to support the Solidarity movement in Poland and to erode Soviet power in historically Catholic nations. He writes:
The Mysterious Deaths of the Popes
Chapter 3 addresses one of the most disturbing episodes in recent Vatican history: the death of Pope John Paul I after only thirty-three days in office in September 1978. Manhattan’s chapter, titled “Mysterious Death of Two Popes,” presents evidence suggesting that John Paul I — who had announced intentions to investigate the Vatican Bank, reverse the Vatican’s position on contraception, and re-examine the careers of certain Vatican officials — did not die of natural causes. The Vatican refused an autopsy. The body was embalmed within hours, destroying any post-mortem evidence. Several senior Vatican officials who had been scheduled to be removed by John Paul I were subsequently confirmed in their positions by John Paul II. Manhattan was writing this two years before David Yallop’s bestselling investigation In God’s Name reached the same conclusions from independent sources.
Publisher’s Note
The publisher’s note in this volume contains a remarkable statement about Manhattan’s credibility and the confirmation his work received from an unexpected source:
Book 4: Vietnam: Why Did We Go? (1984)
The Question and the Answer
This is Manhattan’s most detailed work and the one with the most specific, documented, and verifiable claims. It traces the Vietnam War — in which 58,220 Americans died, more than 300,000 were wounded, and the United States spent over $168 billion — to its origins not in Cold War geopolitics but in a deliberate campaign by the Vatican, in alliance with the American Catholic lobby and the CIA, to create a Catholic political state in Buddhist Southeast Asia.
The book opens:
The Fatima Conditioning: Chapters 3–5
Manhattan opens the book with what he calls the “Fatimaization of the West” — the use by Pope Pius XII of the Fatima apparition cult as a political instrument to mobilise Catholic populations for military action against Soviet Russia. He documents how Pius XII claimed to have personally witnessed the sun zig-zagging in the sky — a supposed miracle authenticated by the Vatican’s own newspaper, the Osservatore Romano — and deployed this claim as a religious incitement to war. Cardinal Spellman of New York, meanwhile, was publicly calling for a “preventive atomic war” against the Soviet Union.
The intended atomic crusade against Russia did not materialise. But the emotional and ideological conditioning it created among American Catholics — the sense that they were soldiers of Christ engaged in a religious war against godless Communism — was channelled directly into the Vietnam conflict.
The Selection of Diem: Chapter 7
The central figure of the book is Ngo Dinh Diem — the Catholic mandarin whom Manhattan identifies as the “foster-child of the Washington-Vatican sponsorship of South Vietnam.” Diem was identified by Cardinal Spellman, John Foster Dulles, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and a young Senator John F. Kennedy as the man to lead South Vietnam. He had spent two years in Maryknoll seminaries in New Jersey and Belgium, was personally admired by Spellman, and had a messianic certainty about his own destiny. Manhattan traces his selection, elevation to the premiership of South Vietnam in 1955, and subsequent installation as President through a fraudulent election to the joint efforts of the CIA, the Vatican’s diplomatic network, and the American Catholic lobby.
“The Virgin Mary Has Gone South”: Chapter 8
Chapter 8, titled “Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary Go South,” documents one of the most extraordinary operations of the Cold War: the mass displacement of Catholic populations from North to South Vietnam in 1954–55, orchestrated through a joint CIA-Vatican propaganda campaign in which Catholic priests in the communist North acted as agents spreading a single message among their congregations:
The propaganda was remarkably effective. Between 600,000 and 800,000 Catholics fled from North to South Vietnam, aided by the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet in what was publicly presented as a spontaneous refugee crisis. Manhattan documents that it was orchestrated: the US government provided $40 million to resettle the Northern Catholics in the South, where they would form the base of Diem’s political support. He calls it “the greatest phony refugee campaign promoted by the CIA and the Vatican.”
Catholic Totalitarianism in South Vietnam: Chapters 10–11
Having installed Diem, the Vatican-CIA-American Catholic lobby combination then funded, equipped, and politically protected a regime that systematically persecuted the Buddhist majority — which constituted approximately 80 per cent of South Vietnam’s population. Manhattan documents:
Government positions were distributed exclusively to Catholics or to those who converted. A rapid programme of “Catholicization” offered material incentives for converting: promotions, land grants, and protection from harassment. Catholic militias were trained at Michigan University. Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu controlled a secret police that arrested, tortured, and executed Buddhist monks, nuns, and laypeople. Manhattan quotes Diem’s own justification, grounded explicitly in papal social teaching:
Diem issued executive orders providing for concentration camps for “individuals considered dangerous.” American advisors in South Vietnam filed gloomy reports about the regime’s religious persecution — reports that were systematically suppressed in Washington by the influence of the Catholic lobby. Manhattan estimates 80,000 Buddhists were executed and 24,000 wounded under the Diem regime before his assassination in November 1963. In June 1963, the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burned himself alive in a Saigon street in front of international press cameras — an act of protest that shocked the world and triggered the eventual American-sanctioned coup against Diem.
Cardinal Spellman’s War
Manhattan traces the American Catholic establishment’s investment in the Vietnam War through its most prominent figure: Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, whom he calls the “Military Vicar” of the American armed forces and the most powerful Catholic political figure in American history. Spellman flew to Vietnam in 1966 to bless American troops, calling the war “a war for civilisation” and describing the American soldiers as “soldiers of Christ.” He called opponents of the war “traitors, cowards, and weaker citizens.”
Manhattan’s conclusion is devastatingly simple: the United States paid with more than 58,000 lives and $168 billion for a war that was designed, promoted, and sustained by the Vatican as a campaign to create a Catholic state in Asia. The American taxpayer, through AID programmes, CIA black budgets, and military appropriations, financed every stage of it — from the resettlement of Northern Catholics to the training of Catholic militias to the military defence of a regime that was torturing the majority population of its own country.
Book 5: The Vatican’s Holocaust (1986)
The Subject
This is Manhattan’s most harrowing work. It documents the systematic campaign of forced conversion and mass murder carried out by the Ustasha regime of the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945 — a campaign in which Roman Catholic clergy, from Franciscan friars to diocesan priests to archbishops, participated as active and documented agents. The book is described by reviewers as “replete with photographic evidence” — photographs of killings, of clergy in Ustasha uniform, and of the concentration camps.
The Independent State of Croatia
When Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Axis powers created a puppet state in Croatia under Ante Pavelić and his Ustasha movement. The Ustasha were a Croatian fascist organisation that had been in exile in Italy under Mussolini’s protection since the 1930s. Pavelić was received in a private Vatican audience by Pope Pius XII within weeks of taking power. The state he created had a programme: all Serb Orthodox inhabitants of Croatian territory — numbering approximately two million — must convert to Roman Catholicism, leave, or die.
Manhattan’s chapter structure tells the story in its own terms: Birth of a Monster: The Independent Catholic State of Croatia. Christ and the Ustashi March Together. Catholic Friars, Priests, Executioners, Bishops and Murderers. The True Inspirer, Promoter and Executor of the Religious Campaign.
Named Clergy, Named Crimes
What distinguishes Manhattan’s account is his systematic documentation of named Catholic clergy personally involved in killings. He is not describing institutional complicity or silence. He is describing personal participation:
Father Dr. Branimir Zupanic ordered the killing of more than 400 people in a single village. Father Srecko Peric, of the Gorica Monastery near Livno in Herzegovina, addressed his congregation:
This sermon preceded a massacre in which over 5,600 Orthodox Serbs in the district of Livno alone were killed on August 10, 1941. Father Filipovic — whom Manhattan calls “a Franciscan monster” — commanded the Jasenovac concentration camp, the largest of the Croatian killing sites. Jasenovac was not a German camp. It was a Croatian Catholic camp, run by Franciscan monks and Ustasha officers, at which an estimated 700,000 to 750,000 Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Roma were murdered between 1941 and 1945.
Manhattan summarises the conversion campaign:
The Archbishop and the War Criminal
Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, Head of the Croatian Catholic Hierarchy, welcomed Ante Pavelić at the opening of the Ustasha government in Zagreb on February 23, 1942. A photograph of this welcome appears in the book. Manhattan quotes Stepinac’s own pastoral letter of 1941, in which he told his clergy:
The Vatican Coverup and the Ratlines
After the war, the Vatican used its network of Roman monasteries and convents as escape routes for Ustasha war criminals fleeing Yugoslav and Allied justice — what historians call the ratlines. Pavelić himself was sheltered in Rome for years before escaping to Argentina with a Vatican travel document. Manhattan devotes chapters 14–15 to documenting this coverup, including the CIA’s cooperation with Vatican institutions in securing the escape of anti-Communist war criminals who were regarded as useful assets for Cold War operations.
Pope Pius XII intervened personally to prevent the execution of Stepinac after the Yugoslav government convicted him of war crimes — an intervention that the Communist government accepted in exchange for diplomatic normalisation with the Holy See. Stepinac served five years of house arrest rather than execution. In 1998, Pope John Paul II beatified him — placing him on the path to sainthood — in a ceremony in Croatia attended by 400,000 people, provoking a formal protest from the Serbian Orthodox Church and the government of Yugoslavia.
Historical Confirmation
The Holocaust Museum in Washington acknowledges Jasenovac and the Croatian genocide. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has listed it among the major Holocaust sites. Professor Edmond Paris’s Genocide in Satellite Croatia independently documented many of the same atrocities from different primary sources. Historian Vladimir Dedijer’s The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican corroborated Manhattan’s account from eyewitness testimony and postwar trial records. The figure of 700,000–750,000 killed at Jasenovac is cited by multiple independent historical works. Manhattan was not alone, and he was not fabricating.
The Man, the Books, and the Scripture
Avro Manhattan was not writing theology. He was a secular historian writing political history. But his documentation, taken as a whole, constitutes a remarkable secular confirmation of what the Scripture’s own prophetic books have always declared about the Roman system.
Revelation 17 describes a woman “drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus” (v.6), who rules over kings (v.18), who is adorned in purple and scarlet and decked with gold (v.4), who sits on seven mountains (v.9), and who is called “the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth” (v.5). Revelation 18 describes her commercial empire: the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies (v.3). Any reader who opens Manhattan’s five books and then opens the seventeenth and eighteenth chapters of Revelation will recognise immediately what he is looking at.
The books of Avro Manhattan are available through the Internet Archive and various online libraries. Vietnam: Why Did We Go? is freely available as a PDF. The Vatican in World Politics had 57 editions and was translated into most major languages. None of them are comfortable reading. But then, the truth about the most powerful institution on earth has never been comfortable — which is precisely why Manhattan’s books appeared on the Vatican’s own Index of Forbidden Books, and why, according to those closest to him, it may have cost him his life.