April 19, 2026

Saints and the Secret Island of Satanists. Epstein's Files Point to Close Ties with the Catholic Church and a Special Interest in Russia

On January 30, the US Department of Justice released a significant volume of materials from the case of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, including over 3 million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images. Since then, the establishment has been trembling weekly, with new details and names emerging daily. In April, independent UN experts again called for all individuals implicated in the dossier to be held accountable, emphasizing that the published data indicates the continuation of systemic violence by "patriarchal power systems." "Novaya Gazeta Europe" examined which religious figures are mentioned in Epstein's dossier and whether there is anything about Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church. And they found something. Jeffrey Epstein. Photo: U.S. Department of Justice. "The Most Secret" Bank - in the Vatican. "The most significant change in the Vatican may not be the sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, but the change in leadership at the Institute for the Works of Religion, the Vatican Bank," Jeffrey Epstein wrote on February 21, 2013, seven days before the sensational abdication of the pontiff, in a letter to Larry Summers – his confidant and business partner, former Treasury Secretary in Bill Clinton's cabinet. Today, Summers is part of the "Group of Thirty" – a rather influential association of top bankers and economists, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Earlier this year, the letter was published by the US Department of Justice as part of the "Epstein Library," consisting of approximately 3 million files. The "patron," already convicted and having served time for sexual abuse, draws the attention of his important partner to the uniqueness of the Vatican as a financial jurisdiction, opaque to international regulatory bodies and allowing "elite clients to avoid any scrutiny of their transactions." Epstein links Benedict XVI's resignation to a decision made by the College of Cardinals in late 2012 to appoint Ettore Gotti Tedeschi's successor, Ettore von Freiberg, as the new director of the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) – replacing Gotti Tedeschi, who was arrested in Italy. The secret correspondence between Tedeschi and Benedict XVI at that time fell into the hands of the Rome prosecutor. Later, under Pope Francis, who managed to close thousands of suspicious accounts of non-Vatican citizens at the IOR, Tedeschi was released but soon supported a campaign against Francis. Forbes recognized the Vatican Bank as "the world's most secret," and Tedeschi presented himself as a victim of some international influential lobby interested in the opacity of the IOR. Rumor has it that the Vatican Bank also holds some assets affiliated with Patriarch Kirill (Gundyaev), who has been under sanctions from several Western countries since 2022. It cannot be said that the purpose of Epstein's message to Summers is fully clear. It can be assumed that the partners were developing some schemes related to specific methods of money laundering through the IOR. Specific Common Interest. If Epstein's attitude towards Benedict XVI's resignation is impossible to understand from the correspondence, then he clearly sympathized with the idea of retiring "too left-wing" Pope Francis after his predecessor. It is not for nothing that Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Steve Bannon called on Epstein himself in June 2019 to "overthrow Francis." Bannon has a reputation as one of the ideologists of the ultra-right wing of MAGA, embodied by the website Breitbart and the "Movement" center he created, which consolidates far-right parties in Europe. According to Bannon, Francis is on par with the Clintons and the EU, supporting "globalist elites," and therefore should not occupy the papal throne. CNN journalists discovered jokingly ominous promises in Epstein's records to invite the Pope for "a massage" and to "organize a trip to the Middle East." But on July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested in the US on suspicion of organizing child trafficking for sexual exploitation, and a month later died in his prison cell. Thus, from the perspective of devout Catholics, God himself prevented him from carrying out his plan: Pope Francis outlived the scoundrel by almost six years. Jeffrey Epstein was not new to Vatican politics: his partner Richard Kahn reports in a letter to the financier-pedophile's financial consultant that his boss once lived in the Vatican with Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła, reign 1978–2005). One document from the published Epstein files indicates that the hacker who worked for him apparently had a Holy See passport – an extremely rare document issued only to a narrow circle of Vatican employees and diplomats. Despite the fact that John Paul II has been beatified by the Holy See and is revered in the Catholic Church as blessed, discussions among Catholics, including in his native Poland, about his responsibility for covering up cases of pedophilia among Catholic clergy have not subsided. Pedophilia is the main nerve connecting Epstein's case with the reputational crisis of modern Catholicism. John Paul II is accused of concealing cases of pedophilia among priests in the Archdiocese of Krakow, which he headed from 1964 to 1978. Later, in 1983, already as Pope, John Paul II amended the Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church, transferring the investigation of such cases from the dioceses to the Holy See and obliging victims to participate in church trials. According to several analysts, this complicated the procedure for considering accusations. Pope Benedict XVI addresses the faithful in St. Peter's Square, Vatican, September 6, 2006. Photo: Giuseppe Giglia / EPA. The first pedophilia scandal of the 21st century related to the Catholic Church erupted in the USA, where in 2004 an investigation was published, identifying the names of 10,667 children who were sexually abused by 4,392 priests (for comparison, about 35,000 Catholic priests serve in the US). But the real scale of the phenomenon is demonstrated by the report of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (CIASE), published on October 5, 2021. In France alone, the commission identified about 216,000 children who were sexually abused by clergy over the past 70 years. The report also noted that church leadership generally tried not to investigate such complaints; only in recent years has the Holy See recognized the seriousness and scale of the problem. Some dioceses (especially in the USA) have begun to pay compensation to victims of clerical pedophilia. The "Epstein Files" contain several mentions of the "patron's" financial involvement, convicted for corrupting minors, in Catholic Church youth projects. In particular, he generously financed children's Catholic camps in the U.S. Virgin Islands, making targeted donations to a special charitable foundation. " After Epstein had already been convicted in Florida, the Catholic foundation expressed its warm gratitude to him, calling the criminal a "patron of science and education." According to the indictment compiled by the FBI in 2007, from 1999 to 2005, Epstein paid for the services of at least 40 underage girls for giving him "massages" nude at the financier's Florida mansion. Often, such massages were accompanied by sexual acts, and one of the episodes was considered by the investigation as rape. Under US law, Epstein faced a life sentence, but he signed a mysterious deal with the prosecutor, receiving only 13 months of restricted freedom, which he served in comfortable conditions. The federal prosecutor of the Southern District of New York, with whom the deal was signed, was Alex Acosta at the time. As soon as Trump first became president, in early 2017, he appointed Acosta as Secretary of Labor, which, according to CNBC journalists, was a form of reward for "correctly" resolving the Epstein issue. Far more extensive charges, related to mysterious orgies on Epstein's private island Little St. James (U.S. Virgin Islands), where billionaires and politicians, including the brother of Britain's King Charles III, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, gathered, were planned to be brought after the financier's arrest in 2019. But the case was dropped after Epstein's mysterious death in his prison cell a month after his arrest. In 2023, Jeffrey Epstein's brother Mark wrote to the FBI that the suspect was murdered with the sanction of Donald Trump because he intended to publicize the names of his accomplices, including the current US president. Epstein's pedophilic crimes were never fully investigated; only one of Epstein's accomplices, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted in 2021 for complicity (human trafficking and pandering). The connection between Epstein's criminal group and U.S. charitable Catholic organizations that cared for minors requires thorough investigation. For now, it is known that the charitable organization "Caritas" and various Catholic dioceses received millions of dollars in funding for the organization of transfer of unaccompanied migrant children to private guardians and shelters. According to the government website USASpending.gov, Catholic structures received up to $449 million over several years for work with homeless children in the US, with the Archdiocese of Miami, in whose territory Epstein committed his crimes, being one of the top recipients of funding. The sheer number of homeless migrant children is staggering: from 2021-24 alone, about half a million minors without parental accompaniment crossed the border with Mexico, and a significant portion of them subsequently went missing. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, only about 90,000 such children were found by government agencies. In November 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives held joint hearings of the Subcommittees on National Security and Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability, where data was discussed indicating that cross-border child trafficking is entirely criminal. Border patrol officers and experts spoke at the hearings, providing examples of child migrant trafficking and illegal organ harvesting. Outright "Satanism" The Orthodox Church is mentioned several dozen times in the "Epstein Files" - usually in media publications that ended up in the dossier and in classified CIA bulletins that the financier illegally obtained. It is known that in the late 1990s, Epstein began visiting Russia quite often, but his interest was apparently not in holy sites, but in modeling agencies that selected beautiful girls, and business structures involved in international money laundering schemes. The "Dossier" Center published a discreet request that Epstein made in 2015 to his Russian acquaintance, a graduate of the FSB Academy and chairman of the board of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Sergey Belyakov, who readily provided Epstein with a dossier on a girl who tried to blackmail the financier. In return letters, Epstein shared with Belyakov his belief in Russia's "great mission" and understood the "new prospects" opened by Russia's annexation of Crimea. Incidentally, Belyakov later became an advisor to the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Kirill Dmitriev – the current chief Kremlin negotiator with the Trump administration. These contacts gave rise to a conspiracy theory that Epstein was an agent of the Russian special services, and his island was their "honey trap." The documents published by the US Department of Justice include a letter from Jennifer Freeman, an attorney at Marsh Law Firm, written in October 2019, after Epstein's death. Freeman represented the interests of victims of sexual violence and pedophilia who had suffered from the financier and his accomplices. The document mentions that one of the victims suffered abuse from an Orthodox priest, whose name is censored. A small building on Little St. James Island. Photo: U.S. Department of Justice. The Epstein Cult. On Epstein's private island, there was a mysterious cult object - a kind of chapel with a golden dome and golden gargoyle statues on the roof (the dome was later dismantled, and the statues were destroyed by a hurricane). The object is faced with alternating white and blue tiles, which involuntarily evokes associations with ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian temples. It is known that Epstein was interested in religious relics that could be used for occult rituals - for example, he kept fragments of the kiswah (the covering of the Kaaba - the main shrine of Muslims in Mecca) and a stone from the inner wall of the Kaaba. Epstein, who had Jewish Brooklyn roots, was not religious in the classical sense of the word. Russian propaganda - both church and state - is doing its best to interpret his beliefs as "satanism," which was declared an "extremist organization" by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in July last year. Epstein's longtime companion, Belarusian Karina Shulyak, to whom he bequeathed over $100 million, allegedly posted information on social network X about human sacrifices, implying that Trump should be held responsible for them. The post was soon deleted. Even before the decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, the World Russian People's Council - a church-public body headed by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church and uniting leading public figures in Russia - resolved that the West had "fallen into Satanism," and Russia was fulfilling a divine "mission of the holder, protecting the world" from this very West. In this context, almost all Russian analysis concerning Epstein boils down to identifying signs of Satanism. "Komsomolskaya Pravda" drew attention to Epstein's interest in the works of Marina Abramović - a Serbian artist (incidentally, the niece of Patriarch Barnabas!), living in the Netherlands. The publication shows a photo of Abramović with banker Jacob Rothschild against the backdrop of Thomas Lawrence's (1769–1830) painting "Satan Calling His Legions." Within this conspiracy theory, Stanley Kubrick's last film "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999), which depicts a ritualistic satanic orgy in New York, is seen as a hint at the "secret springs of world politics and capital." Attention is drawn to the fact that Kubrick died unexpectedly a few days after completing the film's editing. A hint of Epstein's island is also seen in the series "Westworld" (2016-22), which takes place in a closed amusement park where the rich and powerful indulge in debauchery. The official position of the Russian Orthodox Church was presented shortly after the publication of the "Epstein Files" by the chairman of the patriarchal commission for family issues, priest Feodor Lukyanov. According to him, very influential people in the West patronize child trafficking, so the Russian state must protect future generations - "primarily in the information space." The website "Pravoslavie.Ru," close to Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), published a whole "theological analysis" of the "Epstein Files," carried out by priest Tarasiy Borozents, a cleric of the Khanty-Mansiysk Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church who fled from Ukraine to the Russian Federation. He insists that everything that happened on Epstein's island was a "ritual of initiation into the caste of the chosen," "binding the elite with common anti-values, common complicity in "pure" evil." Strangely enough, Tarasiy draws a parallel between the island and an Orthodox monastery: but "if a monastery is a place for mortifying passions and spiritual upbringing through obedience and prayer, then Epstein's island is a place for cultivating the darkest passions and killing the spirit." The official Russian position was formulated by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: "The fact that this is pure Satanism, probably, does not need to be explained to a normal person." In essence, the head of Russian diplomacy supported the myth of a "secret world government of Satanists," which until recently was the lot of the most radically marginal groups, even by Russian standards. Lavrov called it a "deep alliance that controls the entire West and tries to control the entire world." It seems that the "Epstein Files" risk repeating the fate of WikiLeaks: illusions that a new gigantic array of "secret documents" will explain the mysteries of world politics and business are quickly replaced by disappointment and the recognition that this is "just the tip of the iceberg." Clearly, the mass of documents related to the activities of the mysterious American "fixer-mediator" deserves careful study. But it is also obvious that this study will not bring humanity answers to the main questions about the meaning of the processes taking place in the world. Sometimes, and increasingly often, reminiscent of the Apocalypse.