Constantinopel Patriarch Athenagoras (+1972) who encountered Paul VI in June 1964, was a Freemason.

The Freemason Bertrand Heyraud writes this in the article, “A Different Look at Spirituality” recently published in the official journal of the Grande Loge Nationale Française (Les cahiers Villard de Honnecourt).

According to Heyraud, Athenagoras was enrolled in the 33rd degree of the Ancient Scottish and Accepted Masonic rite, just as his predecessor, Meletios Metaxakis (+1935), had been.

Heyraud claims that at the headquarters of the Grand Lodge of Greece Meletios’ and Athenagoras’ are hanging side by side on the wall.

Rothschild loans to the Holy See refers to a series of major financial loans arranged between the Rothschild family and the Holy See of the Catholic Church. The first loan which occurred in 1832 took place in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars during the Pontificate of Pope Gregory XVI (involving James Mayer de Rothschild and Carl Mayer von Rothschild). This loan agreed on was for a sum of £400,000 (equivalent to £36.5 million in 2018). A second loan occurred during the Pontificate of Pope Pius IX ("Pio Nono") in the early 1850s with the same members of the Rothschild family after the collapse of Giuseppe Mazzini's short-lived revolutionary Roman Republic and the restoration of the Papal States.