Paul Marcinkus: As a rising talent within the Catholic Church, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus was once tipped as a future cardinal, but his links to two international banking scandals with Mafia imputations and the violent deaths of two participants banished that notion. With his death, at the age of 84, his exact role in the affairs may never be known.
Despite world headlines that followed him for years, Marcinkus spent his last days peacefully, playing golf at an Arizona retirement home. He never spoke about the Vatican's tumultuous period after the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano in 1982 or of his indictment as an "accessory to fraudulent bankruptcy".
Nor would he discuss his associations with shadowy men in Italian finance, including Michele Sindona, a convicted swindler who died in a Milan prison in 1986 after drinking coffee poisoned with cyanide.
Officially, from 1971 to 1989, Marcinkus headed the quaintly named Institute for Religious Works, in reality the Vatican's bank, which managed the Holy See's financial investments and oversees funds entrusted to it by religious orders and individuals. At the time of the scandal, the institute owned about 1.5 per cent of Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private investment house with close ties to the Holy See. Its chairman, Roberto Calvi, was friendly with Marcinkus, whose financial position put him near the top of Rome's elite.
The Vatican share of the stricken bank did not seem large, but it somehow lost more than $1.3 billion. The missing money had been loaned to 10 offshore companies controlled by the Vatican's bank and Marcinkus. The church later paid about $250 million to creditors as "goodwill", declined to concede wrongdoing but admitted "recognition of moral involvement".
Calvi was convicted of financial misdoings, disappeared during his appeal and, in June 1982, was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London.
After reports about his alleged Mafia connections, what had at first been thought to be suicide became a murder investigation; last October five people went on trial in Rome on charges connected with his death.
During the Banco Ambrosiano inquiry, Marcinkus remained largely hidden in the Vatican, declining to answer questions about the church's role in the creation of the bogus companies. Later, letters were found that apparently showed he had guaranteed protection to the creditors' investments. His only public comment came at his retirement: "The Italians should have looked into their own banking system. It's very easy to blame someone else. I've never done anything wrong."
Authors of books about the scandal have suggested that Marcinkus should have been convicted on serious charges but his diplomatic immunity safeguarded him. After leaving the bank in 1989, he stayed on in Rome as governor of Vatican City for a year.
Meanwhile, the church authorities turned over the bank's management to a board of lay financial experts.
Marcinkus was born in Chicago, the youngest of five children of poor Lithuanian immigrants. He did well at school and graduated from the University of St Mary of the Lake Seminary in Illinois and was ordained in 1947.
He started as an assistant pastor at a Chicago parish, then moved to the Vatican secretariat and, in 1955, to its diplomatic corps. He was stationed in Canada and then Bolivia, where he acquired a good knowledge of Spanish.
Later he took a doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, befriended the man who, in 1963, became Pope Paul VI and occasionally acted as his interpreter.
Marcinkus was ordained a bishop in 1969, and became Pope Paul's bodyguard; at 6ft 4in and a husky rugby player, he was nicknamed "the gorilla".
The following year he thwarted a knife attack on the pope in Manila, then rose to become the papal banker, saying in one of his well-publicised one-liners, "You can't run a church on Hail Marys."
It might be thought odd that a man who knew nothing about banking should have been put in charge of so much money, but the pope trusted him.
Even after his involvement in the Sindona scandal, and Pope Paul's death in 1978, Marcinkus was reappointed head banker by Pope John Paul II, who made him an archbishop in 1981.
The mid-1970s scandal involved the Sicilian financier Sindona, who had advised the Holy See and Marcinkus on its investments and assets. His empire crashed in 1974 and the Vatican reportedly lost tens of millions of dollars.
Sindona was eventually jailed for life for arranging the assassination in 1979 of the lawyer who had liquidated his failed bank. He swallowed the fatal cup of coffee four days after being sentenced. Marcinkus himself was indicted in 1982, but a year after Sindona's death, he and two executives of the Vatican bank were legally freed from the scandal. An Italian court ruled that, as Vatican employees, they were immune from prosecution.
Archbishop Paul Casimir Marcinkus: January 15th, 1922; died February 20th, 2006.