Catholic Conspiracies

Mark Honeychurch - 28 April 2025

Committee member Hamish Dickson posted the above image to our committee chat the other day, along with the question:

“A friend lent me this. Anyone know anything about this conspiracy?”

It just so happens that I am aware of this book, as I read it about 25 years ago while travelling in Asia. I’m not sure how things are these days, but back in the day when backpacking, second hand book stores were a godsend - there can be a lot of down time when travelling on the cheap, and reading really helped to fill the time. I’ve picked up and read some really horrific books in my travels, including Scientology’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and a book about how supersonic air travel was going to pollute air and shatter everyone’s windows.

Anyway, I think I picked up a copy of this book in Laos or maybe Cambodia, and read it with maybe a little more credulousness than I should have done - this was back before I’d committed myself to the skeptic lifestyle, so I wasn’t quite so attuned to eyeing things with suspicion.

Thinking back to the book now, and skimming through a copy I downloaded, it’s obvious that David Yallop is a great storyteller - weaving half-truths into a coherent storyline that people will like because it accuses the Catholic Church of a lot of things that it has actually done wrong - money laundering, tax evasion, cozying up to the Nazi Party, and so on. But when it comes to the main thesis of the book, that cardinals who were members of an illegal political group called P2 conspired to murder Pope John Paul I to cover up their crimes, the evidence is lacking. Thankfully a follow-up book, titled A Thief in the Night, was written by Cambridge University academic and writer John Cornwell. Wikipedia says about the book:

In his book A Thief in the Night, British historian and journalist John Cornwell examines and challenges Yallop’s points of suspicion. Yallop’s murder theory requires that the pope’s body be found at 4:30 or 4:45 a.m., one hour earlier than official reports estimated. He bases this, inter alia, on an early story by Vatican Radio and the Italian news service ANSA that garbled the time and misrepresented the layout of the papal apartments. Yallop says he had testimony from Sister Vincenza Taffarel (the nun who found the pope’s body) to this effect but refused to show Cornwell his transcripts.

It’s not often that I would choose to quote the Catholic Church uncritically, but I think the Vatican probably put it best when they said of Yallop’s book:

“Taking fantastic speculation to new levels of absurdity”

Conversely, Eugene Kennedy from the New York Times said of Cornwell’s rebuttal that it:

“helps to purge the air of paranoia and of conspiracy theories, showing how the truth, carefully excavated by an able journalist in a refreshing volume, does make us free.”

Having taken this walk down memory lane, I wondered how else the Catholic Church has been unfairly maligned over the years. I wasn’t overly surprised to learn that there are quite a few Catholic conspiracy theories out there. Here are just a few of the weirder ones:

False Popes

Apparently since 1958 all the heads of the Catholic Church are illegitimate - False Popes. At the papal conclave after the death of Pope Pius XII, in late 1958, rumour has it that the conservative cardinal Giuseppe Siri had been voted to be the next Pope, but that political shenanigans denied him his rightful place on the throne. Instead of Siri, cardinal Angelo Roncalli was given the job, and named himself John XXIII.

The same thing happened a second time, in 1963, on the event of John XXIII’s death. Again, the conclave supposedly voted for Siri, but the machinations of the more progressive cardinals instead handed the mitre to Giovanni Battista Montini - Paul VI. After this cardinal Siri was passed over for the role not once, but twice, in 1978 - losing to Popes John Paul I and II.

Somewhere in this conspiracy theory, cardinal Siri is supposed to have been banished to a remote monastery and forced into a vow of silence, but looking at his Wikipedia page I’m having trouble figuring out when this was supposed to happen - it looks like he was active with the church leadership until his retirement in 1987.

Jesuits Sank the Titanic

The Jesuits (officially called the Society of Jesus) are a group within the Catholic church that formed in 1540. Apparently a shadowy group of Jesuits were trying to create the Federal Reserve bank in the US, as part of their plan to start a war that would make them more money. However they were being hampered by some powerful businessmen - specifically John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim and Isidor Straus.

To eliminate their problem the Jesuits had the Titanic built, and then convinced the three businessmen to all sail on its maiden voyage. During that voyage, the ship’s captain, supposedly a Jesuit himself, was ordered by his “master” to pilot the ship at full speed through an ice field at night.

I’ve managed to confirm that those three named businessmen all died on the Titanic, and that the Titanic was moving at nearly its maximum speed when it struck the iceberg, but beyond that I don’t feel the need to spend much time even entertaining the idea that this bad movie plot of an idea is real. A quick Google search suggests that the Jesuits didn’t build the Titanic, Captain Smith wasn’t a Jesuit, and none of the three named businessmen were involved in opposing the formation of the Federal Reserve - in fact, I found a (paywalled) article from the New York Times in 1911 suggesting that Isidor Straus was in favour of its creation.

To me this whole thing sounds like a pretty far-fetched way to get rid of three supposed opponents, but apparently some people see this entire convoluted, failure-prone endeavour as something not only plausible but convincing. I guess hatred really can make you blind.

The Chronovisor

This theory postulates that the Vatican has its hands on a machine that can play back video, without sound, from any location on earth at any point in history - the Chronovisor. A claim was made in the 1960s by Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti that he used a Chronovisor to watch both the Crucifixion of Jesus and the Last Supper in glorious technicolor - he even produced an image of Jesus as proof. However, as far as I can tell, it wasn’t long until someone showed that the image was just a mirrored copy of a postcard from a nearby town.

The Vatican has the World’s Largest Collection of Pornography

Most Vatican conspiracies centred around suppression of information revolve around the Vatican Secret Archive. It probably doesn’t help that the collection used to be known as the “Vatican Secret Archive”. The word “secret” was supposed to denote that the archive is a private archive owned directly by the Pope (with ownership handed down from Pope to Pope) rather than being the Catholic Church’s property - but it’s understandable that this archaic use of the word secret would cause confusion. Thank goodness they’ve now renamed it to the Vatican Apostolic Archive.

There are abundant conspiracy theories that this “secret” repository contains all sorts of wondrous artifacts, including the tip of the spear that supposedly pierced Jesus’ side (called the Spear of Destiny), evidence that Jesus never existed, the Third Secret of Fatima (this one seems to be a little dated, as the Third Secret was published back in 2000) and even evidence of alien visitation.

However, the World’s largest collection of porn is supposed to reside elsewhere within the Catholic church, in one of the extensive book collections in the Vatican Library. From what I can tell, this rumour was started in a book titled “An Unhurried View of Erotica”, from back in 1958, which says:

“The whereabouts of the world’s remaining great collections of erotica, though unknown to the public at large, is of course no great secret to bibliographers and librarians.

The world’s foremost collection reposes in the Library of the Vatican, in Rome. It includes 25,000 volumes and some 100,000 prints, collected over the centuries from all parts of the world as specimen outcroppings of the creative urge that are to be shunned by good Catholics.”

According to Snopes back in 1999, Father Leonard Boyle (who was head librarian until he retired in 1998) spoke about trying to find this hidden collection:

“When I first came here, I asked an inhabitant who had been around the Vatican longer than anybody else about whether this famous pornography actually existed. He said there was no such thing, and I certainly haven’t come across it. But it makes a nice story.”

I can’t find much in the way of trustworthy sources when it comes to this theory, but there were at least a couple of articles that seemed to take a decently skeptical view of it:

The Catholic Church created COVID

“Watch the Water”, a 2022 documentary by crank Stew Peters, features the ramblings of a chiropractor and acupuncturist, Bryan Ardis. The assertions put forward in the video by Peters and Ardis claim that the COVID symptoms were being caused by a synthesised snake venom which had been spread globally in the water supply.

Who would do something like this? The Catholic Church, of course! I haven’t had time to watch the video, but according to this article Ardis said:

“The Latin definition historically for virus - originally and historically, virus meant, and means, venom. So I started to wonder, well, what about the name ‘corona’? Does it have a Latin definition or a definition at all? So I actually looked up what’s the definition, and on Dictionary.com it brings up 13 definitions: Corona, religiously, ecclesiastically, means gold ribbon at the base of a miter.

So, this actually could read ‘The Pope’s Venom Pandemic. In Latin terms, corona means crown. Visually, we see kings represented with a crown symbol. So put that together for me: king cobra venom. It actually could read, ‘King Cobra Venom Pandemic.’

I actually believe this is more of a religious war on the entire world. If I was going to do something incredibly evil, how ironic would it be that the Catholic Church, or whoever, would use the one symbol of an animal that represents evil in all religion? … You take that snake or that serpent, and you figure out how to isolate genes from that serpent and get those genes of that serpent to insert itself into your God-given created DNA. I think this was the plan all along; to get the serpent’s, the Evil One’s, DNA into your God-created DNA. And they figured out how to do this with this mRNA technology. They’re using mRNA, which is mRNA extracted from I believe the king cobra venom, and I think they want to get to that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.”