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As the leaders of the Catholic Church go into conclave to elect the next Pope, the Vatican’s secret service faces far higher hurdles than those portrayed in the recent Hollywood Conclave blockbuster, and many of their modern manifestations can be traced back to the reign of Pope John Paul II, the charismatic Polish Pontiff, who ruled the Papal roost from October 1978 to April 2005.

Although Pope John Paul’s reign was notable for many things, chief of them was its Ostpolitik, its suppression of liberation theology in Latin America and its rampant child sexual abuse. When the Vatican’s secret service directs the cardinals how to vote in their conclave, those three issues, which we will now peruse, should be paramount.

Although the Vatican has had a secret service since the time of King Henry VIII’s Anglican heresies, that secret service really had to step up its game during the reign of Pope John Paul II when, to cite the ex Polish Jesuit, diplomat and secret service double (or treble?) agent, Tomas Turowski, “there were more spies in the Vatican than in James Bond films”.

When the Polish Pontiff returned to his homeland to say Mass on 2 July 1979, it was obvious that the writing was on the wall not only for the Polish Peoples Republic but for all of East and Central Europe’s buffer states as well. And, though the Polish Pope John Paul can take much of the credit for that change, it is one he must share with the British and American secret services, with whom he was in active cahoots, as well as with the Vatican’s own secret service who, incredible though it seems, had been parachuting commando-type priests into Poland for years before his historical return.

NATO’s primary role had been the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and, because Poland and its Catholic faith had always been a major chess piece in achieving that objective, let’s just say that the Holy Spirit was not the only force guiding the Cardinals in their choice of Pontiff. The CIA and MI6, neither of which should be let anywhere near the Vatican, also lent a hand. Although POTUS Reagan and John Paul were on the same “Warsaw Pact delenda est” page, special credit must go to CIA Director William Casey and Monsignor Luigi Poggi, aka the ‘Pope’s Spy’, for the pivotal role they played in all this.

Fast forwarding to the recent passing of Pope Francis, we see Olga Lyubimova, representing the Russian authorities, dressed appropriately and following due decorum, as she pays her respects and Presidents Trump and Zelensky, both ill-attired and both ignoring that decorum when they had a public mafia style sit down in the Vatican to discuss their ongoing war against Ukraine’s Orthodox Christians. Although their little tête-à-tête could be criticised on several grounds, the fact that it took place within the Vatican makes the Vatican complicit to their war plans. And that is not a good look either for the Vatican or for the wider Catholic Church.

Although I touched on all these topics in May 2023 when I wrote about how Zelensky had shredded Vatican protocol, just as he did by being allowed to sit in the front row at Pope Francis’ funeral, the fact is that the Vatican is much too close for its own good to the West’s secret service agencies. When Jesus said that you cannot serve two masters, no doubt He had nefarious imperialist enforcers like the CIA and MI6, as well as knuckle draggers like Zelensky’s Nazis, in mind.

The claims of Eric Frattini, author of The Entity, a pot boiler about the Vatican’s secret service, that “Napoleon likened the power of a single Pope to that of an army of 200,000 men”, sounds impressive when we consider that Wellington said that Napoleon’s presence on the battlefield “was worth forty thousand men”. However, that was just Napoleon sounding off and the Pope’s 200,000 men would not be a match for 40,000 men under Napoleon or any modern leader and that is the crux of the Vatican’s modern problems.

Although the Catholic Church claims 1.4 billion members, just under one million of them are in holy orders and it is from that smaller number that the Pope must get his command, control and coordination officers to oversee not only diplomatic protocol but to put its finances and its attitude to children on an even keel. Although the Vatican’s museums and art galleries both pay their way, other white elephants, such as Vatican Radio, cost the Vatican a fortune it does not have and, although God might provide, Trump’s vulture funds would prefer to pocket the Vatican’s priceless assets, just like Napoleon did before them.

To counter these threats, the Vatican’s secret service (the Entity) and its counter intelligence unit (Sodalitium Pianum) need to divorce the Church from the West’s secret service outfits, and take the matter of its own governance both to money and to children in hand.

Why, for example, does Vatican Radio broadcast in Azeri and how, given that over 97% of Azeris are Muslims, do those broadcasts give value for money? Just which particular prelate is empire building on white elephants like that? And how many other talented paedophiles, besides Theodore McCarrick and Marcial Maciel, were able to wield immense influence in the Vatican because of their fundraising abilities? What CIA strings were their largesse gift wrapped in?

Although Stephen Karganovic’s recent article makes a lot of worthy points, the top brass of the Church would listen to if they were not the narcissistic gerontocrats that they are, the core issue facing them is as fundamental as the pun Jesus built His Church on. An enduring church must be built on a solid rock, not on mercurial quicksand that changes from Pontiff to Pontiff, depending on how the baser interests of MI6 or the CIA change.

Although the always-excellent Hélène de Lauzan gives a good account of the various factions currently vying for the Vatican’s top spot, the real danger is that the new pope will not only inherit an empire in decay but he will hasten that decay, a state of affairs that will not be remedied by simply electing an African or Latin American (oh sorry, we already got one of those) Pope for a bit of empty DEI window dressing. And it certainly won’t be remedied by following the DEI example of Hollywood’s Conclave and electing a transexual Pope.

At day’s end, it does not matter who gets to fill the shoes of the fisherman. What is important is for the Church to relearn its core mission of serving God, not Mammon, the CIA or MI6 and try adhering to it in practice not only in the killing fields of Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine and the Congo but much closer to the eternal city of Rome and the hopefully more transient ones of Washington and London as well. Heavy lies the crown.