2013 was such a whirlwind time in the church that some of the subplots that emerged in that period have been forgotten.
The most intriguing of which were the accusations of spying on the Vatican on behalf of Barack Obama’s United States, with cooperation from Angela Merkel’s Germany.
The National Security Agency (NSA) were alleged to have spied on the Vatican, with the German Foreign Security Agency (BND) also having been accused of the same.
In 2013, Italian magazine Panorama made headlines around the world when it claimed that Obama’s NSA had been monitoring phone calls in Italy. As many as 46 million phone calls had been monitored between December 2012 and January 2013, with some of them taking place inside the Vatican.
According the Panorama, the calls were grouped together in the following categories ‘leadership intentions, threats to the financial system, foreign policy objectives and human rights’. Panorama also claimed that the residences where Cardinals lived prior to the conclave were likely monitored. They also speculated that the monitoring took place up as far as the conclave which occurred in March 2013.
Although some claimed at the time that the conclave itself could have been bugged, Catholic Culture recalls a story where it was virtually impossible to find a phone after Francis’s election to inform Benedict XVI, because of the strict rules on carrying phones inside the Vatican.
During the Wikileaks scandals, it emerged that Obama/Clinton staff had sent emails that expressed a desire to subvert and damage the Catholic Church. They had written of the need to subvert the church in order to stop its members from being a political impediment to success, one wrote: ‘Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic -- many converts. ... It's an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy’.
In another one, Sandy Newman of Voice for Progress openly suggested destabilising the church for their benefit as they did to the Arab world, ‘‘This whole controversy with the bishops opposing contraceptive coverage, even though 98 percent of Catholic women, and their conjugal partners, have used contraception, has me thinking. ... There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a Middle Ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church.
"Is contraceptive coverage an issue around which that could happen?"
The Catholic Spring was a play on words of the Arab Spring, where US Intelligence agencies tried to subvert leaderships in those countries in order to expand their sphere of influence.
John Podesta then admitted that he had, ‘created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up’.
Despite Globalist extremist Angela Merkel claiming that ‘friends don’t spy on one another’ in relation to revelations that the NSA had monitored her calls, it was revealed in Spiegel two years later that her BND had kept tabs on countries like Poland, organisations such as Oxfam and even the Vatican’s German Embassy.
What does this tell us?
It reminds Catholics not to take everything at face value, just because the pope smiles and greets people does not mean that he is good friends with them. Just because he meets with people, likewise. There is much that takes place that we will never be aware of, even less so since the treatment given to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange deterred future whistleblowers.
This is something to bear in mind in light of the USA’s behaviour in the Vatican this week, which has been designed to insult and mock Catholics.
