Damian Thompson has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Since it became independent in 1929, Vatican City has been the world’s smallest state. Every evening the gates close, leaving behind only 500 permanent residents. I once spent a week behind the walls as a guest in the Santa Marta hostel where the Pope lives; at night the deserted courtyards are thrillingly spooky.
But it’s during the day that they echo with the footsteps of secret agents. The Vatican has been teeming with spies since popes started living on this 100-acre plot of land west of the Tiber when they returned from Avignon in 1377. In the 20th century it entered a new era of espionage when the papacy was targeted by Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the United States.
By definition, secret agents are supposed to be difficult to identify. It’s doubly hard in the case of the Vatican spies who are the subject of the French historian Yvonnick Denoël’s book because so many of them have been priests. Those employed by the Church range from taciturn creatures of the Curia – George Smileys in clerical collars – to heroic clergy who take insane risks behind the lines in order to help persecuted Catholics.
I say ‘those employed by the Church’ because, since the 1930s, when Denoël begins his narrative, a scandalous number of priests have infiltrated the Vatican as agents of foreign powers. Some did so because they were being blackmailed; some were bribed. Others, especially during the Cold War, were sincere Marxists who received the sacrament of Holy Orders on the instructions of their communist bosses.
The Polish secret service almost certainly managed to sneak a mole into the Vatican during the Second Vatican Council.
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