Vatican conspiracy theories Vatican conspiracy theories Vatican conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories that concern the Pope and/or the Roman Catholic Church. A majority of the theories allege that the Church and its representatives are secretly controlling secular society with a Satanic agenda for global domination. Pope John Paul I died in September 1978, only a month after his election to the papacy. The timing of his death and the Vatican's alleged difficulties with ceremonial and legal death procedures have fostered several conspiracy theories. British author David Yallop wrote extensively about unsolved crimes and conspiracy theories, and in his 1984 book "In God's Name"
History of the papacy Pope Pius IX into the Tiber river on July 13, 1881. The pope even considered moving the papacy to Trieste or Salzburg, two cities under Austrian control, an idea which the Austrian monarch Franz Josef I gently rejected. His encyclicals changed Church positions on relations with temporal authorities, and, in the 1891 encyclical "Rerum novarum" addressed for the first time social inequality and social justice issues with Papal authority. He was greatly influenced by Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, a German bishop who openly propagated siding with the suffering working classes Since Leo XIII, Papal teachings expand on the right and