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Laghi was also papal envoy to Washington after Ronald Reagan became president. He acted as the pope’s discreet troubleshooter, based upon his service in Argentina, Nicaragua, and Palestine. In Washington, Laghi’s work was easier because he had the collaboration of ardent right-wing Catholics who were in strategic and sensitive positions within the Reagan administration. For example, CIA Director William Casey was a member of the elite and highly secret Knights of Malta, which pledges allegiance to the pope. Before Reagan nominated him to the CIA post, Casey was part of a small group that chose key Reagan officials, including cabinet heads, according to Penny Lernoux in her book, The People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism. Others in the group included two Knights who were influential right-wing Catholics: James L. Buckley, brother of William Buckley, and Frank Shakespeare, chair of the Heritage Foundation.
Among the key Reagan administration players who met with Laghi were such right-wing Catholics as Casey and his chosen associates: Senior Foreign Policy and National Security Adviser Richard Allen; National Security Advisor William Clark; Secretary of State Alexander Haig; General Vernon Walters; and U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See William Wilson. In Anna Maria Askari’s book, The Vatican and the Reagan Administration, there is reference to taped interviews with Ambassador Wilson in which he points to Salvador, Asia, all the “trouble spots” in the world and says the Pope has a hand in all of them. Where does Wilson detect differences between the Pope and the United States? “No conflict at all;’ says Wilson. Any misunderstandings? “None at all. We talk a lot to them. They listen very carefully.”
Pio Laghi, one of the Roman Catholic Church’s most prominent cardinals, has been accused by a leading human rights group in Argentina of complicity in the torture, murder, and kidnapping of thousands of suspected political dissidents.
The following are among the Vatican-inspired changes in U.S. foreign policy largely unknown to the American public:
The CIA, having many Catholics in key positions, established a working relationship with the Vatican after World War II and cooperated with the Curia (Vatican bureaucrats) in helping Nazi criminals find refuge, usually in Latin America.
The CIA supplied the Curia with background data on “diplomats accredited to the Vatican;’ according to Penny Lernoux in The People of God.
The CIA, in response to Vatican political strategy, “pumped $65 million into Italian centrist and right-wing movements between 1946 and 1972, according to hearings by the House of Representatives,” Lernoux also wrote.”Meanwhile, Catholic Action’s papal troops prepared for battle with U.S. jeeps, guns, and other supplies.”
The Catholic bishops, led by Archbishop Joseph Bernadin, pressured then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in August 1976 to put a Roman Catholic in the cabinet post supervising the Agency of International Development (MD). In 1979, President Carter appointed Joseph Califano, a Roman Catholic, who ended the thirteen-year tenure of Dr. R.T. Ravenholt as director of the State Department’s global population program.
In 1980, Senator Frank Church, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, stating, “Catholics . . . are requesting that any aid program that we may embark upon in any foreign land include information and services which relate to and support natural family planning methods.”
On January 10, 1984, the Reagan administration established full diplomatic relations with the Vatican, ending more than a century of U.S. opposition to such relations. Although challenged by a wide spectrum of interests, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
During the U.S.-financed “contra” war, MD assisted the Archdiocesan Commission for Social Promotion (COPROS) and the diocese in Nicaragua in their opposition to the Sandinistas.
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