The Godfather Part III retreads familiar territory in its portrayal of the Corleone crime family, and its focus on the question of who will become the next Don Corleone. However, the movie breaks new ground by bringing the papacy and the Vatican, the ruling administrators of the Catholic Church, directly into the story of the Godfather trilogy. What’s more, The Godfather III’s pope and Vatican banking scandal aren’t entirely ficтιтious, but are based on true stories from the 12 years preceding the movie’s release.

It’s important to stress that almost all the Godfather trilogy’s characters are fictional, and its writers, Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, employ dramatic license with abandon even when depicting true events. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to examine the role that the pope and the Vatican play in The Godfather Part III, particularly concerning the real stories that rocked the Catholic Church between 1978 and 1984.

Michael Corleone Has Dealings With The Future Pope And The Vatican Bank In The Godfather Part III

The Corleone Family Bails Out The Vatican Bank While Michael Confesses His Sins To Cardinal Lamberto

In one of The Godfather Part III’s most iconic moments, during a visit to Italy, Michael Corleone confesses his sins to Cardinal Lamberto, a major figure in the Catholic Church who’s in line to become the next pope. Later in the movie, Lamberto becomes Pope John Paul I following the death of his predecessor, before being fatally poisoned by Archbishop Gilday, the head of the Vatican Bank.

The Corleone family also has direct dealings with the bank, as Michael offers to bail it out to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by buying out the Vatican’s shares in the multinational real estate company Internazionale Immobiliare. As it turns out, the company’s chairman, Licio Lucchesi, is a Sicilian mobster, and he, Gilday, and Vatican Bank accountant Frederick Keinszig are set to make a personal profit by embezzling the money from the transaction between the Vatican Bank and the Corleone family.

The Godfather Part III’s Pope Conspiracy And Vatican Banking Scandal Are Based On True Stories

What Happened To The Real Pope John Paul I And Banco Ambrosiano

Cardinal Lamberto is based on the real-life Albino Luciani, who became Pope John Paul I, the most recent Italian pope, upon succeeding Pope Paul VI in 1978. The Godfather Part III is set in the same year, and sticks closely to the real timeline of events surrounding John Paul I’s papacy, including the fact that he died just over a month after ᴀssuming the office of pope. His death so soon after becoming pope was a highly surprising occurrence.

In 1982, Banco Ambrosiano folded due to colossal debts, in a similar scenario to the Vatican Bank needing to have its insurmountable debts bailed out via a mᴀssive sale of its ᴀssets to Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III. At the time, rumors swirled about money laundering and mob involvement in Banco Ambrosiano, which are mirrored in Frederick Keinszig, Archbishop Gilday, and Licio Lucchesi’s collusion to misappropriate funds from the Internazionale Immobiliare sale in the third Godfather movie.

Was Pope John Paul I Really Poisoned?

The Conspiracy Theories Around His Death Have Never Been Proven

Although the death of the real Pope John Paul I just a month into his papacy in 1978 was certainly shocking, there’s never been any suggestion from an officially recognized source that he was poisoned, as The Godfather Part III depicts. Albino Luciani died of a heart attack on September 28, 1978, and his death was never treated as suspicious by the authorities, despite its proximity to him being chosen as the new pope.

Author David Yallop published a bestselling book in 1984 enтιтled In God’s Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I, in which he ᴀsserted that John Paul I was indeed poisoned. Yallop claims that the poisoning was carried out by a masonic society on the orders of Roberto Calvi, a figure akin to both Archbishop Gilday and Frederick Keinszig in The Godfather III, who managed Banco Ambrosiano. The book’s hypothesis is generally characterized by historians, criminal experts, and critics in the media as a conspiracy theory of dubious origins.

Calvi was murdered following the Pope’s death in a hanging staged to look like a suicide. This is similar to what happened to Keinszig in The Godfather Part III.

What Really Happened In The True Story Of The Vatican Banking Scandal

The Vatican-Owned Banco Ambrosiano Was Involved In Embezzlement And Money-Laundering

The scandalous conduct of Vatican Bank managers Archbishop Gilday and Frederick Keinszig in The Godfather Part III, which includes embezzlement and money laundering on a huge scale, is not dissimilar to the conduct of those who were the heads of Banco Ambrosiano before it folded. The real bank collapsed in part because of mᴀssive embezzlement, with Roberto Calvi likely one of the main offenders in this regard.

Its dissolution led to accusations during later criminal trials that it was used to launder money. There were suspicions about Banco Ambrosiano supposedly acting as a conduit for the transfer of United States funds to an anti-Soviet resistance movement in Poland and a far-right militia in Nicaragua (via The Guardian).

This element of the real Vatican banking scandal doesn’t feature in the third Godfather film, perhaps because it was little more than a speculative rumor at the time the movie’s script was written. Further investigations into the death of Roberto Calvi have substantiated these rumors, however, lending new meaning and significance to the story Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo told in 1990’s The Godfather Part III

Source: The Guardian