A Reply to Pope Leo

By: Edwin Black

Editor’s note—this article is based on a video at The Edwin Black Show, which includes visual documentation of all facts. The video can be seen here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIfP5p4lBYk

During the final ceremony of the most recent March of the Living at Auschwitz, I was quite moved when Israel Defense Forces Chief Cantor LTC Shai Abramson sang the song of the fighting partisans who waged war from the forests, and he sang it in Yiddish — just like my father and mother sang it when they were partisans fighting in the Polish woods [ed. note: see all the MotL recordings]. My parents told me that every day, they prayed to God to deliver them just one more day. As the cantor’s voice pierced the air, I also recalled the brave men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, praying to the heavens as they did. The speakers on stage reminded us as well that every day the brave men and women of the IDF also pray to God as they fight to preserve life and the nation.

We are reminded of the Talmudic injunctions for self-defense and warfare to save lives. It is the principle of self-defense, and the mandate to preserve life, the principle of Pikuach Nefesh, which overrules all other religious tenets in Judaism — Save Life.

And then my mind went to Pope Leo XIV, who on Palm Sunday declared that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

Pope Leo says this about men who stormed Normandy, about every Jew in the IDF, and about my parents who fought as partisans. At the same time, he condemned President Trump’s war to save humanity from nuclear conflagration by religious fanatics in Iran. Pope Leo, who are you to tell us whose prayers God hears?

I know the world sees you as a great Holy Man. But I see you as just another product of the Catholic Church in Chicago, one of the most criminal and corrupt organizations in American history. I’m from Chicago myself. So, you, Pope Leo, know what I know about Chicago.

I spent some of my early professional years investigating the Catholic Church in Chicago, as did a cadre of Catholic reformers and Catholic journalists. Fact: The Catholic Church in Chicago completely partnered with the corrupt Democratic political machine and the Chicago Mob’s worst gangsters to make millions of dollars and accrue power. Let’s go back a few decades.

The Chicago Archdiocese was led by Cardinal John P. Cody. He lived in a mansion and had a mistress — effectively a wife — Helen Dolan Wilson, who he showered with a missing million dollars of church money that funded a Boca Raton vacation home and many other benefits. The Chicago Sun-Times was among the leaders in exposing this. A federal grand jury was close to indicting Cardinal Cody for embezzlement when he died in April 1982.

The Chicago Archdiocese was also loaded with child predator priests. Scores of priests assaulted young boys and girls, and when these priests were exposed, the archdiocese transferred them to out-of-the-way parishes, such as in Arizona, where they often remained in teaching, counseling, and coaching roles — and could and did repeat offend. Around Thanksgiving of 2025, the Chicago archdiocese was hit with the so-called “Predator Pipeline” lawsuit, accusing the Church of reassigning pervert priests, enabling them to re-offend against new child victims. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said, “This wasn’t just a series of bad decisions — it was a system … For decades, the Archdiocese relied on secrecy and reassignment … putting children in harm’s way.”

The Church was partners with the Daley political machine, participating in their power and control schemes. Somehow, everywhere there was a Chicago public school, a few hundred feet away, there was a church parish property, generally a stately rector’s home. In 2021, the archdiocese listed $1 billion in cash and assets, including millions in banks. Yet the Church served so many impoverished communities, especially on Chicago’s South Side.

But since the days of Al Capone, the Catholic Church has partnered with the mob. America’s most famous gangster was regularly given communion at a South Side church, St. Columbanus, now known as St. Moses the Black, located on 71st Street near the highway — and there were lots of mob church weddings in and around Chicago.

Capone was so comfortable operating in the church, he ordered two murders on the church steps of Chicago’s biggest cathedral, Holy Name. Capone’s favorite assassin, Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, shot Dion O’Banion and later Hymie Weiss. The bullet holes are still visible on at the cathedral entrance.

A stronghold of the Chicago mob was the suburb of Cicero. One of the local enforcers was a big guy who later became known as “The Gorilla.” The Gorilla was Paul Marcinkus. Eventually, Marcinkus became an archbishop — and the bodyguard for Pope Paul VI. Despite zero experience in banking, Pope Paul appointed Marcinkus secretary and then chairman of the Vatican Bank. The Vatican Bank was a mob front. In the 1970s, for example, it held the funds of Michele Sindona, who was heavily involved in money laundering heroin profits from both the Italian and American mobs. When Sindona’s personal investment portfolio collapsed, the Vatican Bank reportedly lost some $80 million.

The Vatican Bank set up Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed after discovering $1.3 billion missing. In 1973, the heads of the organized crime and racketeering section of the US Department of Justice, William Aronwald and Bill Lynch, questioned Marcinkus in his Vatican office. Topic: his alleged delivery of $14.5 million in counterfeit bonds to the Vatican years earlier. Italian grand juries wanted to indict Marcinkus, but he was shielded by Vatican immunity. Eventually, Marcinkus was given a remote church post in Sun City, Arizona, where he died, leaving a half-million dollar home and estate. His partner in crime, Robert Calvi, general manager of Banco Ambrosiana, was not so lucky.

He lost the mob’s money, and in 1982 the mob rubbed him out. The day after he was fired, Calvi’s body was found hanging from scaffolding beneath a bridge in London. He had five bricks in his pockets. Calvi’s secretary, Teresa Corrocher, jumped — or was pushed — to her death out of a five-story window. Chief suspect in these deaths was fascist gangster Licio Gelli, who ran the secretive Italian Blackfriars terror society known as Propaganda 2 (P2). Gelli lost a lot of money when Banco Ambrosiana collapsed. He was arrested and escaped more than once and ultimately died peaceably in his home in Italy. At all times, the Chicago mob had a direct link to Pope Paul through their Cicero gangland stooge, Marcinkus the Gorilla.

Also remember that when Hitler came to power Pope Pius XI wasted no time, and on July 20, 1933, sealed a concordat with the Hitler regime to stay quiet during all Nazi activity. Article 16 binds all Catholic bishops to swear allegiance to the German Reich before assuming their Church offices — and to not interfere with Reich policies. That’s why the Church said nothing when the camps were set up, when the Nuremberg Laws were decreed, when Kristallnacht burned through the synagogues of Germany, and even during war itself, which killed millions.

This Reichskonkordat has never been annulled. It’s still in force. And let’s remember that Hitler would have never gotten his early powers, beginning with the so-called “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich” — the Enabling Law — and his cabinet’s ability to enact laws without parliament or the president — without the Zentrum Party — Catholic Center Party — giving its 11.2 percent of votes to elevate Hitler to dictator. The party was led by Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, who reported directly to the Vatican.

The Church was comfortable with fascists. In 1929, the Church had cut a similar deal with Benito Mussolini, who had preceded the Führer, and enjoyed a substantial working relationship with Generalissimo Franco in fascist Spain.

History also recalls that the Catholic Church was part and parcel of the most sadistic killing regime in the Holocaust, in Croatia, where it joined with the Ustaše, which heinously murdered tens of thousands of innocent Jews and Serb Orthodox. The Ustaše collected baskets of eyeballs and other body parts for souvenirs. The unspeakable atrocities committed by the Ustaše are too bloodcurdling to detail here. But it operated a concentration camp called Jasenovac, which was a magnitude more hellish than Auschwitz.

It is thought that 80,000 Jews, Serbs, and others were murdered by the Ustaše in rituals too ghastly to describe. Franciscan monks carried out mass executions in three villages near Banja Luka, where about 2,000 Serbs were slaughtered using gruesome physical methods. The Jasenovac camp, by the way, was overseen by Franciscan monk Miroslav Filipović, who personally and brutally oversaw the murder of some 30,000 individuals, often by horrid methods — and about 100 by his own hand. He wore his priestly garments while murdering. In 1946, Filipović was tried for war crimes and hanged. Although Filipović had been suspended and then expelled from his order, he nonetheless wore his Franciscan habit at the gallows.

A Truth Commission after the war concluded that some hundreds of Catholic priests and monks were involved in the genocide. During this entire genocide, Pope Pius XII granted provisional recognition to the Ustaše and monitored its every activity via church contacts. Chief Ustaše Ante Pavelić mainly worked through Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, appointed by the Church as its main contact. After the War, chief Ustaše Pavelić was given shelter in the Vatican and protected at various papal residences. He was smuggled into Italy and then out to Argentina via the extensive Church ratline network, which relocated Nazi war criminals to other countries where they could hide.

In 2018, the Ustaše monsters were honored in a special Catholic mass in Zagreb and another in Bleiberg. The World Jewish Congress wrote to Rome and the Church and begged them to cancel it. Their pleas were ignored.

I didn’t have time to get to the Inquisition.

So, I offer this advice from a fellow Chicagoan, Pope Leo. You might think twice about declaring on behalf of God that my father’s prayers and the prayers of the IDF won’t be heard. Perhaps you should look closer to home.

Edwin Black is the NYT bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust and recipient of numerous awards including the Moral Courage Award from San Diego State University and the Moral Compass Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Naples Holocaust Museum. This article is based on a video at The Edwin Black Show, which includes visual documentation of all facts. The video can be seen here.