Julia Meloni’s book The St Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group within the Church, is one of the most important books published this year about the crumbling Catholic Church. I mean the visible Catholic Church.
It is a painstakingly researched book, loaded with references, that lays bare the manoeuvring, manipulation, and agitating of a small group of prelates on the Catholic far left to place Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio on the seat of Peter. Ms Meloni, in this article on her publisher’s website (TAN), provides some background to the writing of the book.
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Exposing the St. Gallen Mafia: Exclusive Interview with the Author
Julia Meloni, 12 November 2021, TAN
In discussing my new book, The St. Gallen Mafia, certain questions frequently come up. Here are some of them.
What made you want to write this book?
I still remember the moment when I first became captivated with the St. Gallen mafia, the secret group of high-ranking churchmen who used to meet at or near St. Gallen, Switzerland to plot their opposition to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. It was winter, it was night, and I was reading Henry Sire’s The Dictator Pope. When the first chapter turned to the mafia’s leader, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, I was arrested. I temporarily put down the book, downloaded Martini’s Night Conversations, and read late into the night.
When I finished, I knew I had wandered into a detective story.
A detective story?
Yes. At the center stood Martini—the man hailed as the next pope by the media in the 1990s. It is said that the mafia at this time wanted Martini as pope, too—but then Martini got sick with Parkinson’s. So Martini’s dream mutated in order to survive. No longer the “next pope,” Martini began in Night Conversations to call himself the “ante-pope,” the mysterious forerunner to some future pope.