VATICAN CITY -- American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, central figure in a Vatican Bank scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in the early 1980s, has resigned from Vatican service after 40 years, the Vatican announced Tuesday.
The brief Vatican announcement said Pope John Paul II had accepted the resignation of Marcinkus as head of the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State, the job he has held since he was replaced as president of the Vatican bank in June, 1989.
Apparently reflecting the pope's reluctance to see Marcinkus go, the announcement said Marcinkus presented his resignation 'insistently' and would remain a 'consultant' of the same Pontifical Commission.
Marcinkus, 68, said he planned to return to the United States to work as a simple parish priest in his native Chicago archdiocese.
'I am very grateful to the Holy Father for having granted my request to retire from Vatican service and return to the United States,' he said.
The towering son of Lithuanian parents, born in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, Ill. on Jan. 15, 1922, Marcinkus had served in various Vatican posts for 40 years. He was president of the Vatican bank -- formally known as the Institute for Religious Works (IOR) -- from 1971 until June 1989, when the Vatican appointed a five-man Supervising Council to head the bank.
The scandal linked with his name erupted in 1982 when the Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank, collapsed with debts of $1.287 billion.
Italian investigators accused Marcinkus of being partly responsible for the crash because of his close banking ties with Ambrosiano President Roberto Calvi. Calvi fled to London, where he was found hanging by the neck under a Thames river bridge in September 1982.
A coroner's court first ruled Calvi's death was suicide, but after a second hearing it returned an open verdict, leaving open the possibility that Calvi was murdered.
Milan magistrates issued arrest warrants against Marcinkus and two other Vatican bank directors, charging them with 'complicity in fradulent bankruptcy.' But the Vatican refused to hand them over and later Italy's top appeals court and its Constitutional Court ruled that Italian legal authorities had no jurisdiction over the sovereign Vatican City State.
The pope showed his confidence in Marcinkus, who formerly acted as a bodyguard on papal trips, by maintaining him as bank president until the bank was reformed in 1989.
The Vatican always denied any wrongdoing in connection with the Banco Ambrosiano collapse. But in 1984 it paid $240.9 million to Ambrosiano creditors as a 'goodwill gesture.'
In a magazine interview at the time, Marcinkus said he told Vatican officials: 'You are crazy. If we are not guilty we should not pay.'
'I have nothing to be ashamed of in what I have done,' Marcinkus told the magazine. 'I could be ashamed of one thing, and that is to have perhaps had too much faith in Roberto Calvi. But that was not difficult because Calvi had an excellent reputation in the banking community.'
