Power, secrecy feed conspiracy theories in Vatican City

National Catholic Reporter, July 31, 1998 by John L. Jr. Allen

Writers sniff trails leading to deaths, money scandals, descendants of Jesus

Within hours after the Swiss Guards murders in the Vatican on May 4, the whispering began about what had really happened. Did the tragedy spring from a lovers' triangle gone sour? Perhaps Opus Dei was involved -- it was reported in the Italian press that two of the three dead were members, a claim Opus Dei denied. Some even suggested that one or more of the victims were East German spies.

Whatever the truth -- and it may well have happened just as the Vatican said it did, in a "fit of madness" -- the skepticism surrounding that explanation illustrates one of the few iron laws of human behavior: Secrecy breeds speculation. The more hush-hush an institution is, the more people will smell something to hide and try to ferret it out. When ferreting fails, they'll turn to guesswork, and thus are conspiracy theories born.

Curiosity, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Unless the Holy See is more forthcoming, some intrepid journalist will soon publish The Swiss Guards Cover-Up, and people will snatch up copies like powerball tickets.

The Vatican has been down this road before. In that light, this is probably an opportune moment to look back at the greatest Vatican-related conspiracy theories of all time -- the pick, as it were, of the cabalistic litter. But even these "Top 7" represent merely a small sampling of the literally thousands of alleged schemes, plots and scandals that have bubbled up in the Eternal City over the past 2,000 years. They range from total fiction (as far as we know), to matters of historical record, and traipsing through them can be alternately hilarious and horrifying.

Taken together, this litany of real and imagined duplicity illustrates the astonishing readiness of people to believe the Vatican capable of just about anything -- and the Vatican's equally astounding capacity, all too often, to merit that cynicism.

No. 7: Jesus and family

This one goes all the way back to the beginning, to the events at the heart of Christianity: Jesus' death on the cross and his resurrection three days later. According first to Hugh Schonfield in his 1967 book, The Passover Plot, and expanded later into a near-cosmic conspiracy stretching over two millennia by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Dell, 1982), those events are indeed mysteries, but of the Sherlock Holmes rather than the supernatural sort.

Schonfield conjectured that Jesus faked his death on the cross. In one version of the argument, the wine mixed with a drug offered to Jesus just before the crucifixion (Mt 27:34) was actually a soporific intended to help him simulate death. His followers revived Jesus three days later, and voila: the Resurrection. Great theater, Schonfield said, but hardly a time-to-change-religions sort of miracle.

How is this plot Vatican-related? Enter Messrs. Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, who more or less go along with Schonfield, though their central claim is even more startling: Whether or not Jesus expired on the cross, he had at least one assignation with Mary Magdalene, giving her a child and Jesus an heir. After lying low for a while, the "Jesus family" legged it to the Provencal region of France, where they founded the Merovingian dynasty of French warrior-kings, rumored to have gnarly mystical powers.

Following one of history's great betrayals in the eighth century, When the pope recognized the Carolingian dynasty and dumped the Merovingians, Jesus' descendants variously founded or co-opted a number of secret organizations, most notably the Knights Templars, and the Priory of Sion, all to a single end: to protect the royal bloodline of Jesus himself. The authors even tracked down someone they claimed to be Jesus' current living relative, a mousy-looking Frenchman named Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, who was mum on whether he's getting ready to take over the world.

Thus the Baigent group's great "revelation": The Holy Grail of medieval legend is actually a coded reference to the Holy Blood of Jesus' descendants, which knights and other assorted good guys swore to protect and defend. In their sequel, The Messianic Legacy, Baigent and gang actually sound like campaign managers for Plantard, arguing that a "theocratic United States of Europe" under Jesus' descendant could be a really good thing.

Natch, the pope is the great villain of this story. Ask yourself: Who stands to lose the most if it turns out Jesus' great-great-great-great grandson is running around today? The Holy Father, of course, since his claim to be head of the church would pale in comparison to a blood connection to the Big Guy. So over the years, various pontiffs have tried in nefarious ways to extinguish the memory of Jesus' bloodline, but (obviously) with little success -- Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln's books staking this very claim sold millions of copies in the 1980s.

Of course, all of this is all wild speculation (as far as we know). But Holy Blood, Holy Grail does make gripping reading -- along the way the authors manage to work in the Visigoths, the Cathar heresy, the conquest of the Holy Land, Renaissance artwork and, inevitably, the Nazis, who supposedly went tearing around Europe looking for the Grail. And if in a few years you see Pierre Plantard's smiling face on the new Eurodollar, remember, you heard it here first.