How Trump took on
the mob in Venezuela

Every Sunday morning, three bells ring-out from a German church on Via Sicilia in Rome. Ambassadors to the Vatican are used to polite conversations about marble and mosaics, but in a uniquely sophisticated statement of diplomatic defiance, the tone of the bells is identical to Wittenberg Castle, a blackened Schloss an hour by train from Berlin, where more than five hundred years ago, the first Protestant, Martin Luther, nailed to the door his 95 complaints against Catholicism.

Bureaucrats in the Vatican are famously slow-moving when it comes to reform but “gladly accept” invitations to informal parties held by the German ambassador, Bruno Kahl, who previously led the B.N.D. in Berlin, the world’s largest intelligence building, surrounded by dystopian steel palm trees. Private gatherings at his Rome address are “of great important to the embassy’s work” and the Vatican is an “important partner” for Germany on peacekeeping efforts, Kahl says, suggesting the Church can tread carefully in other areas, such as business or trade.

But the history of the saints, said Benito Mussolini, is the history of insane people. With tired eyes and an impatient smile, Cardinal Mimmo Battaglia is a preta di strada, or a priest of the streets in Naples, running rehab clinics for men and women addicted to narcotics, basing his life on one line of the gospel: “Take heart, stand up, He is calling.” Growing-up in Calabria in the 1960s on the southern tip of Italy, poverty was widespread and criminals were easily recognised by their elegant suits and courteous smiles, though faith can also be hidden, lived in church more than our daily lives.

Clasping his spectacles and nodding quizzically, Leopoldo Girelli is given even tougher assignments, serving as the Church’s ambassador to Israel and East Timor. He was the first Vatican official allowed into Vietnam since the Fall of Saigon 50 years ago and is now Archbishop of Capri, a rocky, sun-soaked island with hotels and swimming pools overlooking the sky-blue waters of the Mediterranean, surrounded by sheer cliffs and glistening cruise liners, churning their way into the Bay of Naples.

With billions of dollars of drugs funnelled into shipping lanes each year, Cardinal Pietro Parolin is the world expert on the Italian mafia, as ambassador to Caracas for four years, then Segretario di Stato della Santa Sede, second only to the Pope in Rome, running sprawling offices overlooking a prison-like courtyard in Vatican City and well over a hundred embassies around the world, his once-boyish smile now almost hidden by an all-knowing frown. “Faith is a gift,” he tells Vatican News, “and no one can measure another person’s faith, and perhaps not even their own.”

After months of U.S. air strikes on Venezuelan cargo ships cruising through the Caribbean, on Christmas Eve, Parolin summoned the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, proposing a flight out of Venezuela for the president, Nicolás Maduro. From Panama to Zimbabwe, well-placed priests often negotiate exile deals for embattled dictators: we are all on a journey to overcome the shadows of our heart, mercy will be shown to the merciful and a peaceful transition protects the poorest from upheaval. “Man is split within himself,” wrote Paul VI (1897 to 1978), who saw peace as a constant process, more personal and deep-seated than any proclamation, turning life into a “dramatic struggle” between good and evil. But the American ambassador refused: after months of manoeuvring on the ground, President Donald Trump had no plans to back-out of “Operation Absolute Resolve.”

At 2am on Saturday 3rd January, explosions tore through docks, warehouses and aircraft hangars in Venezuela, the U.S. Air Force using new sonic weapons that “nobody else knows about”, Trump boasted. Even before sunrise, President Maduro, a bodyguard and union official who wound-up in the palace, signing-off papers with the speed of a seismograph, was flown to the D.E.A. office in New York, responsible for drug busts. In his Nike tracksuit, even the leader of a country with thirty million people and trillions of dollars of oil reserves looked more like a street dealer than those at the top of the trade, known to the Church since their school days. “Crede in Dio?” journalists sometimes ask Italy’s wealthiest industrialists. “Io sì… Yes, I do.”