A Man the Vatican Tried to Silence

Avro Manhattan (April 6, 1914 – November 27, 1990) was one of the most consequential and most suppressed historians of the twentieth century. Born in Milan as Teofilo Lucifero Gardini, of American and Swiss-Dutch parentage, he was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and the London School of Economics. During the Second World War he was jailed in Italy for refusing to serve in Mussolini’s fascist army. Later in the war he operated a clandestine radio station called Radio Freedom, broadcasting to nations occupied by the Axis powers. His friends included H.G. Wells, Pablo Picasso, George Bernard Shaw, and Marie Stopes.

Manhattan authored more than twenty books on the Vatican’s role in world politics, genocide, finance, and geopolitical strategy. His works appeared on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books — the most explicit official acknowledgment Rome could offer that he was hitting close to the truth. According to his publishers at Chick Publications, his life was more than once in jeopardy. A brother in Christ in communication with Manhattan’s widow believed his death was brought about through poison. His major books ran through dozens of editions and were translated into Chinese, Russian, Korean, and most other major world languages.

Manhattan was not, by his own account, a Bible-believing Christian. He was a secular intellectual and historian. But what he documented — from primary sources, diplomatic records, congressional archives, war crimes trial transcripts, and eyewitness accounts — confirms with extraordinary precision what the Scripture has always said about the Roman system and what the Protestant and Baptist tradition has always proclaimed. The Apostle John described her; Manhattan documented her. What follows is a book-by-book account of his five most important works.

Book 1: The Vatican in World Politics (1949)

The Vatican in World Politics
1949 — 57 Editions · Pioneer Press, London • Book-of-the-Month twice • Translated into most major world languages

The Foreword States the Thesis

The Vatican in World Politics is Manhattan’s first and most widely read work. Its foreword, written by Guy Emery Shipler, states the book’s thesis in terms that every subsequent decade has only confirmed:

“The importance of this book cannot be exaggerated. Properly understood, it offers both a clue and a key to the painfully confused political situation that shrouds the world. No political event or circumstance can be evaluated without the knowledge of the Vatican’s part in it. And no significant world political situation exists in which the Vatican does not play an important explicit or implicit part… This book is valuable also in that it brings to light historical facts hitherto kept secret, many of them published here for the first time.” — Guy Emery Shipler, Foreword, The Vatican in World Politics (1949)

Manhattan’s Own Preface

Manhattan’s preface to the American edition is direct. He identifies three goals that Vatican strategy, in his analysis, was actively pursuing in 1949:

“These goals are: 1. The annihilation of Communism and of Soviet Russia. 2. The spiritual conquest of the U.S.A. 3. The ultimate Catholicization of the world. Do these goals seem fantastic? Unfortunately they are neither speculation nor wild and idle dreams. They are as indisputable and as inextricably a part of contemporary history as the rise of Hitler, the defeat of Japan, the splitting of the atom, the existence of Communism. Indeed the inescapable alternative by which mankind today is confronted is not whether this will be the American or the Russian Century, but whether this might not after all become the Catholic Century.” — Avro Manhattan, Preface, The Vatican in World Politics (1949)

He then states the argument that runs through all his subsequent work:

“The American citizen, perturbed by the past, bewildered by the present and made increasingly anxious about the future, would do well to ponder the exertions of the Vatican in contemporary American and world politics. His destiny as well as the destiny of the United States, and indeed of mankind, has been and will continue to be profoundly affected by the activities of an institution which, although a church, is nonetheless as mighty a political power as the mightiest nation on the planet.” — Avro Manhattan, Preface, The Vatican in World Politics (1949)

The Structure and Scope

The book surveys the Vatican’s political activities across twenty chapters covering every major European nation and the United States. It documents: the Vatican as a sovereign state with a global diplomatic corps; its programme of what Manhattan calls “spiritual totalitarianism” through which it commands the political obedience of Catholic populations worldwide; its role in bringing both Mussolini and Hitler to power through concordats and diplomatic recognition; its ambiguous conduct during the Second World War under Pius XII; and its post-war strategy of deploying Catholic political parties across Western Europe as a bulwark against Communism.

On the Vatican’s political machinery Manhattan is precise. The Pope commands not only the spiritual loyalty of his bishops and priests but, through Catholic Action organisations and political parties, the voting behaviour and political obedience of hundreds of millions of laypeople in every democracy on earth. The Vatican does not operate through armies. It operates through influence, the confessional, Catholic schools, and the hierarchy of a global organisation embedded in the domestic politics of every sovereign nation.

Mussolini, Hitler, and the Concordats

Manhattan’s documentation of the Vatican’s role in the rise of European fascism is the most controversial and most thoroughly sourced section of the book. The 1929 Lateran Treaty — by which Mussolini recognised the Vatican as a sovereign state and the Vatican recognised the Fascist regime — gave Fascism the religious legitimacy it required to consolidate power over a deeply Catholic Italian population. The 1933 Reich Concordat, negotiated by the future Pius XII (then Cardinal Pacelli as Vatican Secretary of State) gave Hitler international legitimacy at the critical early moment when German Catholic political opposition, had Rome withheld its blessing, might still have succeeded in stopping him.

Manhattan opens Chapter 10 on Germany and the Vatican with a summary that he then documents in detail: Catholicism helped condition the German population to accept authoritarian rule; Catholic newspapers supported the Nazi regime once the Concordat was signed; and the Vatican’s diplomatic recognition of Hitler’s government fatally undermined the Centre Party — the Catholic political party that had been Germany’s most effective parliamentary opposition to the Nazis — which dissolved itself within weeks of the Concordat’s signing.

Manhattan also documents the Vatican’s conduct during the war itself under Pius XII — a pope who maintained diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany, who did not publicly condemn the Holocaust, and who facilitated the escape of numerous Nazi war criminals through Vatican-run ratlines after the war. The book was published before the full extent of the Pius XII-Holocaust connection became part of mainstream historical debate, making Manhattan’s early documentation all the more significant.

The Conclusion

Manhattan concludes that the failure of historians, journalists, and democratic citizens to scrutinise the Vatican’s political role leaves the most powerful institution on the planet systematically unexamined. The book was on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books from the time of its publication. That is the measure of how seriously Rome took its arguments.

Book 2: The Dollar and the Vatican (1956)

The Dollar and the Vatican
1956 — Third Edition 1957 · Pioneer Press, London

The Argument

Published in London in 1956, this book addressed a subject that had been almost entirely absent from mainstream historical scholarship: the Vatican’s enormous, largely invisible, and entirely untaxed financial empire and its deployment as an instrument of political power. Manhattan was among the very first writers in the English-speaking world to attempt a systematic account of Vatican wealth.

The Vatican, Manhattan argues, is the wealthiest institution in the history of the world. Over two thousand years it has accumulated land, gold, stocks, and financial instruments on a scale that no government or corporation has approached, all of it held tax-free in every nation in which the Church operates. At the time of writing — the mid-1950s — the Vatican held significant real estate across every continent, equity positions in major international corporations through its investment arm (what would later become publicly known as the Institute for Religious Works, or Vatican Bank), and a diplomatic network that gave it privileged access to the financial secrets of every major government on earth.

The American Connection

Manhattan traces with particular care the connection between Vatican finances and American political influence. By the 1950s the American Catholic community was the wealthiest Catholic population in the world. The revenues generated by American dioceses — through collections, bequests, school fees, and hospital income — flowed up through the diocesan hierarchy to Rome on a scale that dwarfed the contributions of any other national church.

Those revenues were then deployed by Rome to fund the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and West Germany, which dominated post-war European politics; to sustain the Vatican’s global network of schools and hospitals, all of which served as instruments of political influence under the cover of charitable activity; and to maintain the diplomatic infrastructure through which Rome shaped the foreign policy of Catholic-majority nations from Latin America to the Philippines.

More provocatively, Manhattan traces Vatican financial relationships with American banking and corporate interests that raised serious questions about conflict of interest — questions that the subsequent P2 masonic lodge scandal of the 1980s, in which the Vatican Bank’s deep involvement in the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano became a matter of public record, would vindicate with devastating force. Manhattan was writing about these relationships a quarter-century before they became headline news.

Confirmation in Later Events

The Vatican Bank (Instituto per le Opere di Religione) was at the centre of one of the largest financial scandals in history when, in 1982, Banco Ambrosiano collapsed with debts of $3.5 billion, and the Vatican Bank was identified as a major shareholder and co-conspirator in the fraud. Roberto Calvi, known as “God’s Banker,” was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London in what was ruled a murder. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank, was wanted for questioning by Italian magistrates but sheltered within the Vatican’s sovereign immunity. Manhattan had described the structural conditions that made this scandal possible — untaxed, unaudited, diplomatically protected financial operations embedded in global capitalism — twenty-six years before the scandal broke.