While the Epstein files have turned out to contain many genuinely shocking revelations about this man’s malign influence on public life, for a long time the belief that this would turn out to be the case was firmly in the category of conspiracism. It fed off the same anxieties, fears, and prejudices as, for example, Pizzagate and QAnon. Where Peter Is has not gone in for conspiracies, even when doing so would seem flattering to “our side,” whatever that is. (Case in point: “I’m hearing huge and big there,” from this Umberto Eco parody by Gareth Thomas Weaver that we ran almost five years ago, is something I say all the time. Even some of my non-Catholic friends have picked it up.) Unfortunately for just about everyone, with Epstein the conspiracy theories are turning out to have more than a grain of truth. The man had an almost unbelievably extensive address book, and countless people who should have known better than to associate with him or allow him into their circles evidently did not.
Some of the more recent releases from the files (“E-drops?”) have implicated Steve Bannon and other figures associated with the intrigues against the late, great Pope Francis. In November 2016, a man whose sender name is Alain Forget emailed Epstein the text of a 2014 speech that Bannon delivered in Rome for the Dignitatis Humanae Institute. At the time of the speech, the institute was still under the patronage of Cardinal Raymond Burke. In February 2018, if not earlier, Epstein and Bannon began a correspondence about bankrolling a “Populist/Nationalist first, Conservative Christians (catholic/eva=gelical) next” (sic) political coalition that would, among other things, offer some protection against the impacts of the Time’s Up movement (Hollywood’s counterpart to the #MeToo movement). By June 2019 Bannon and Epstein were interested in adapting the muckraking book In the Closet of the Vatican into a movie, which they thought would weaken Pope Francis. According to CNN, this proved to be a bridge too far for the book’s author, Frédéric Martel, and even for Cardinal Burke, who bluntly told Bannon that “I am not at all of the mind that the book should be made into a film” and cut, or at least reduced, ties with him shortly after.
Such is, currently, what is known about this.
For those of us who have given years of our lives to our loyalty to Pope Francis and his legacy, it would be tempting to draw some very vindicating and consoling conclusions from all this. We could be forgiven for concluding that the opposition to Pope Francis from within the Church was entirely astroturfed by a clique of wealthy sex criminals who did not like that someone powerful was holding other powerful people to some form of moral account. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case, at least not based on what has been made public by the Epstein files so far. Epstein does not appear to have taken any particular interest in Vatican affairs until 2018 and 2019, by which time the hard-right opposition to Francis was already well-established. It’s possible that he dumped some money into the cause, but if so, it’s not clear how much it could have helped, since he was dead within two months of the most damning emails to and from Bannon. Indeed, his attempted involvement might have inadvertently strengthened Pope Francis’s position by driving a wedge between Burke, who had limits of some kind, and Bannon, who did not. (I do hope Burke has genuine standards that this idea transgressed, but whether he does or not, he certainly has compelling personal reasons to dislike In the Closet of the Vatican, a book that ridicules him at length.)
What I think we can conclude from this, however, is that at least some of the opposition to Francis, his teachings, and his legacy, was and is driven by just about the least noble motivations imaginable. Additionally, the documents suggest that powerful men of influence viewed our faith communities as being open to manipulation for their own personal and political gain. Even among the genuinely devout, there is a history of manipulative dishonesty about one’s motives for taking fringe positions; for example, with the influential Traditionalist Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, concerns about liturgy and piety and vocations serve in part as a smokescreen for good old-fashioned Jew-hatred. Yet what we learn here about newer forms of intra-Catholic dissent “from the right” is even worse, since it is not even being advanced by pious people. We are seeing concerns about nationhood, sovereignty, or cultural identity serve in part as a smokescreen for the desire of the rich and powerful to rape and traffic without consequences. (I put “from the right” in scare quotes because of the peripheral involvement in the Epstein-Bannon communications of a left-wing notable who nevertheless seems to have had quite a bit of fire in the belly for the pro-sex-pest cause, Noam Chomsky.) I think it’s important to avoid going in a conspiracist direction with our conclusions in large part because the conclusions that we can fairly draw are already so damning. No need to artificially weaken one’s own case. It should also be noted that, since Epstein and many of his associates were Jewish, going fully down the conspiracist rabbit hole about him might lead us to very antisemitic places very quickly; the temptation to do so should be resisted for that reason as well.
It is also possible, however, that more will come out that will substantiate the stranger-than-fiction narrative of Epstein as the Forrest Gump of twenty-first-century evil. We have already found out that he was heavily involved in the late-2000s financial crisis, which previously seemed to have very little to do with him. Maybe we are in fact through the looking glass and living in a world in which there is a Lynchian “one who’s doing it,” a world of Dan Brown’s dreams and Umberto Eco’s nightmares. The possibility is disconcertingly grounded and sane-seeming to speculate about now. We should take any further evidence to this effect as it comes.
Image: Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein. From Alamy.
Nathan Turowsky—a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution—works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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