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‘We want to save Western civilisation’
How a Catholic convert from Leicester and Trump’s controversial former strategist Steve Bannon plan to shake up the Church. By Nicholas Farrell
Steve Bannon may have been fired by the White House as President Trump’s chief strategist and forced to step down from the inflammatory website Breitbart News, but that just means this highly controversial firebrand of the alt-right has crossed the Atlantic to focus on his next projects: stoking up European populism, going after Pope Francis and, intriguingly, opening a new ‘academy’ in Italy, which he calls ‘a gladiator school for culture warriors’. One moment he’s at the Oxford Union defending his former boss in the White House; the next, in Brussels, busying himself at the HQ of his political organisation, The Movement; then in the mountains above Rome, planning his academy (with a 43-year-old man from Leicester).
When I finally catch up with Bannon, it’s clear that he has lost none of his urge to disrupt. On Europe: ‘Generations of kids have been deliberately robbed of their own national histories and identities,’ he tells me via email. Europe needs to find ‘the will to survive as a civilisation and to nurture the fighting spirit it takes for victory’. As for the Pope, Bannon insists Francis is ‘siding with the globalist elites against the citizens of the nations of the world’. And he can’t help but chip in on Theresa May’s EU withdrawal deal about to face Parliament: ‘The May [deal] is not what the citizens of the UK voted for when they demanded their sovereignty back.’
But back to the ‘gladiator school’ and Benjamin Harnwell, the Englishman Bannon plans to run it with. The academy’s proposed headquarters is the Charterhouse of Trisulti, a former monastery 70 miles east of Rome, high in the Apennine Mountains. Until a few months ago, it was the home of Cistercian monks. Now, after eight centuries, the brothers are gone and the Charterhouse has a new master. Harnwell is no monk but he is a zealous convert to the Catholic faith who, with Bannon, is attempting to usher in a new era not just for Trisulti but for Europe and the entire Catholic Church, if they are to be believed.
Harnwell, in cardigan and panama hat, may seem an unlikely figure to shake the foundations of the Vatican, but, in Bannon’s estimation, he is ‘the smartest guy in Rome’. And as the founder of something called the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (DHI), Harnwell has another powerful ally in Trump-supporting, ultra-traditionalist Cardinal
Raymond Burke – Pope Francis’s most outspoken critic inside the Vatican (Burke is president of the DHI’S advisory board). Another patron listed by the DHI is Field Marshal Lord Guthrie, the former head of the armed forces who fell off his horse at this year’s Trooping the Colour.
Harnwell picks me up in a rattling Fiat Punto at a station 30 miles away and, announcing that he has only just got his licence and wants ‘to test things to the limit’, he drives along the mountain roads to the monastery at speeds that could win the Almighty a few more converts. Harnwell says his aim is nothing less than to ‘save Western civilisation’, and the Charterhouse is certainly the right backdrop for such an ambition. Founded in 1204 by Pope Innocent III, who used it as his summer residence, it is a vast baroque citadel mainly built in the 17th century, set amid densely wooded mountains. Its famous pharmacy is well preserved but much of the Charterhouse has seen better days, and the only people now shuffling around its hundreds of empty rooms are the elderly former prior Don Ignazio, a cook and Harnwell.
As we proceed through an impressive cloister, he chatters excitedly about the classrooms, where hundreds of young men and women will be taught the fiery precepts and sticky hashtags that he considers to be ‘the cultural weapons’ necessary to restore the Judaeo-christian roots of Europe to the heart of the political and social agenda. By now we are sitting in a cold and clammy room and it is clear his zeal will need to extend to finding a local builder with the appetite for a big project. Nonetheless, to be the first non-monk in charge of this place in all its 800 years is quite a coup for the son of a fireman from the Midlands, who only converted to Catholicism in 2004.
Four years later, while working for Tory MEP Nirj Deva in Brussels, Harnwell founded the DHI (its office moved to Rome in 2010). Its lofty mission, according to its website, is ‘Defending the Judaeo-christian Foundations of Western Civilisation through the recognition that Man is made in the Image and Likeness of God’. In person, Harnwell defines the role of the institute more punchily: ‘To protect Christian politicians in the public square from being no-platformed and sacked for their Christian views.’ The DHI also cites a few issues that concern it particularly: abortion, assisted suicide and taxation (or ‘the increasingly collectivist and confiscation a list approach taken by Western governments towards property rights and the private wealth of individuals’).
None of which would necessarily elevate Harnwell and the DHI from the ultra-conservative fringes of Catholicism, were it not for Bannon’s association. The two met in 2014 when, at two hours’ notice, Harnwell was able to secure a meeting with Cardinal Burke. ‘Steve was impressed,’ Harnwell recalls. ‘When he first came to Rome in those days, no one was particularly interested in him. Now when he comes they’re all queuing to meet him.’ At the time, Bannon was executive chairman of Breitbart News, which was nicknamed ‘the CNN of the Tea Party’, and which he called ‘virulently anti-establishment’. Why, then, was this rabble-rouser organising meetings with cardinals at the Vatican? All became clear, to Harnwell at least, during a speech Bannon gave via Skype at a conference organised by the DHI at the Vatican in 2014. In it, Bannon proposed that capitalism had been debased – treating people not as human beings but as commodities – by jettisoning Judaeo-christian values that compelled it to benefit the majority, and that secularism was to blame. Worse, not only were there enemies within Western society, there were, Bannon went on, barbarians at the gates. Bannon bemoaned the absence of a ‘church militant’, claiming that: ‘We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism… [the West] is at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict [that will] completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the past 2,000, 2,500 years… [unless] we fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity.’
While it was subsequently criticised after his rise to prominence, Bannon’s Vatican speech went largely unnoticed by the media at the time. Harnwell, though, was inspired by the words of the man he defines as ‘a phenomenal genius’. He set about securing the Charterhouse of Trisulti, envisaging it as the spiritual home of Bannon’s international populism, and eventually securing a 19-year lease from the Italian government. Bannon, meanwhile, was able to turn some of his inflammatory views into US government policy
‘It will be a cross between a Roman gladiator school and a medieval university campus’
with Donald Trump’s election. He is widely credited with persuading Trump to enact a so-called Muslim ban in January 2017, preventing people from a number of majority-muslim countries, plus North Korea and Venezuela, from entering the US. (As recently as two weeks ago, during an address to the Oxford Union, Bannon defended the policy as ‘humanitarian. It has made our citizens safer,’ he said.)
Harnwell, predictably, stands four-square behind Bannon. ‘It wasn’t a ban on Muslims anyway, but a ban on people from certain countries. Trump said he’d bring it in during his election campaign and that’s what people voted for,’ says Harnwell. He and Bannon regard Pope Francis in general as merely ‘disappointing’ – as he puts it – but his open-arms attitude to mass illegal immigration from Mexico and across the Mediterranean makes them see red. Bannon has accused the Catholic Church of being ‘one of the worst instigators’ of open-borders migrant policies because, he says, it needs ‘illegal aliens to fill the churches’. In June, he claimed on ABC News that Pope Francis ‘more than anybody has driven the migrant crisis in Europe’.
This year, Bannon has travelled to Europe often, especially Italy, which he describes as the ‘centre of the political universe right now’. Its new government is a coalition of two populist parties: the ‘alt-left’ anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the radical-right Lega.
The political arm of Bannon’s populist mission in Europe is The Movement, a Brussels-based task force he co-founded, which aims to coordinate populist parties campaigning ahead of the elections for the European Parliament next May, offering expertise in polling, data analytics, messaging and get-out-the-vote efforts. (It remains to be seen whether The Movement will be able to circumvent strict regulations regarding foreign sources of funding in many of its target countries. Legislation in the Netherlands and Italy, however, is said to be more favourable to its ambitions.)
When I last met Bannon in Rome just after the formation of Italy’s new populist government in June, he told me: ‘We’re going to have to take over the Catholic Church.’ It wasn’t obvious if he was joking. What did Bannon mean, I ask Harnwell. It’s at this point that Harnwell confirms the apocalyptic vision of society that he and Bannon share.
‘I’ll tell you what Steve meant by that and he’s absolutely right,’ he says. ‘If we’re going to save Western civilisation, the Catholic Church needs to be part of that equation and on the right side of the equals sign. That’s one of the reasons Steve is so fired up about bringing the Catholic Church back on track.’
Surely, stopping the illegal immigration of poverty-stricken people over the Mexican border and across the Mediterranean is not terribly Christian, is it? ‘The issue is not should we be welcoming or not. The issue is who is going to pay? That’s what concerns people. Here in Italy the economic situation is catastrophic. Young Italians are going to Germany to get jobs.’
If they believe the Church is so off-course, is the aim of Bannon and the DHI to unseat Pope Francis? ‘Not at all,’ says Harnwell. ‘What we want is the Pope to come on our side.’ On the same subject, Bannon emails me later: ‘The Catholic Church is historically a pillar of Western civilisation. We’re not trying to destroy the Pope, but call him back to his responsibilities to speak for the little guy rather than acting as spokesman for the globalist elites. Memo to the Pope: if you want to cultivate a media image of working man’s champion, great; but you then have to stand up for the little guy and not with the rich and powerful who drive the UN and the EU in favour of their own internationalist agendas. [Pope Francis’s] attempts to demonise the populist movement in Europe and the US are beneath contempt. All the while the Church implodes from a sexual-predator scandal that [Pope Francis] refuses to address in any meaningful way.’
(It will not go unnoticed that Bannon is not exactly a textbook example of devout Catholicism. At 65, he has three daughters and has been married three times – one annulment, two divorces. To Harnwell’s knowledge, does he believe in God? ‘Absolutely,’ says Harnwell. ‘He talks all the time about his Catholic base and how important it is to him and to his identity.’)
What of the plans for the ‘gladiator school’, the cultural arm of Bannon’s mission in which he plans to weaponise the people of Europe against the ‘elites’? The room that Harnwell receives me in is unlikely to inspire anyone to arms: it’s damp and sparsely furnished. The DHI is paying annual rent of €100,000, but the government will waive that if the Institute stumps up the estimated €1.9 million renovation bill. The identities of the project’s backers remain a mystery, though rumoured to be among them is Princess Gloria of Thurn and Taxis, the former punk princess who became a devout Catholic activist and philanthropist after a visit to Lourdes. Harnwell will only say that they are ‘private individuals mainly in the UK and the States’. Catholics? ‘We have some Jews.’
Harnwell hopes that the first two-week course for a maximum of 300 students will begin in June next year. Four lecturers, who have yet to be named, will teach philosophy, history, theology and economics. Bannon, who visited Trisulti for the first time in June, will also give a series of lectures. It may be early days, but for Bannon, it seems, it has been a long time coming. ‘The academy’s aim is to train a new generation of… modern-day gladiators, who are formed with the intellectual training and the conceptual tools to defend the Judaeo-christian West against its existential enemies,’ he writes to me. ‘Over the last 10 years, I have been working towards a global strategy and [Trisulti] will play a major part in that strategy.’
What will the Charterhouse be like in 15 years’ time? ‘It will be a cross between a Roman gladiator school and a medieval university campus,’ says
Harnwell. How like a gladiator school? ‘The point is that Steve has referred to himself and his movement as street fighters. These are people getting out there starting websites, collecting signatures, knocking on doors. So we’re going to send them back to their communities conceptually armed with the weapons to fight for Christian values.’
Whether the DHI’S inaugural class of culture warriors will actually be lapping up Bannon’s words of wisdom come next summer remains to be seen. He will presumably be busy rousing the populist masses against ‘the elites’ for the elections in May across Europe. Meanwhile, there is some local consternation that an interloper like Harnwell is now in charge of the monastery.
In the kitchen, Harnwell, the prior and I gather for a frugal supper – spaghetti with slithery little black mushrooms called chiodi (nails) gathered in the woods by the cook. Harnwell mentions that he is planning to buy a gun, in case of burglars. Don Ignazio, who has otherwise remained silent, looks up from his plate and pronounces solemnly: ‘He who shoots another, shoots himself.’ Perhaps these are words that Harnwell might reflect on more broadly as he prepares to ‘save’ the Pope, the Catholic Church and Western civilisation.
‘We’re not trying to destroy the Pope, but call him back to speak for the little guy’