Mario Puzo is best known for The Godfather – one of those rare instances where the movies are almost as sublime as the book – but it’s not the only book he wrote on the Mafia. There is The Sicilian, which is part of The Godfather universe and even has a cameo by Micheal Corleone, and is about the real-life bandit Salvatore Giuliano. There’s The Last Don. But perhaps, the true sequel to The Godfather – not those money-grabbing attempts – is The Family, which was published two years after his death and covers the high intrigues and conspiracies in the Vatican.
The Vatican and the Holy Pontifex might be in the news for their tete-a-tetes with Donald Trump, but the Vatican has always been an institution that – while claiming spiritual authority – spent much of its history negotiating, exercising, and wielding political power, to the sense that pre–World War II, the group controlling the Catholic Church decided the moral vocabulary of Western civilisation.
