Render Unto Rome (12 page)

“A myth is a faith, a passion,” Mussolini declared. “Our myth is the greatness of our nation.”
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In 1922, with a ragtag army of 30,000 Fascisti, Mussolini marched into Rome, a power strut that Italy’s generals could have halted well before its arrival in symbolic triumph, but in a country so politically fragmented, Mussolini’s militant charisma straddled many lines. Substantially poorer than France and Britain, Italy faced severe unrest: 400,000 engineering workers occupied factories in September 1920.
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The society hungered for order, a center, stability to feed prosperity. “Violence is a brutal necessity to which we have been driven,” Mussolini told parliamentarians in 1922. “We are prepared to disarm if you, too, are prepared to disarm.”
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As snakes peel their skin, Mussolini the arriviste prime minister shed his raw anticlericalism. He awarded stipends for parish priests; he advocated restoring religious education in public schools and a crucifix in every class. Mussolini had his three out-of-wedlock children baptized; he married their mother. Where Liberal Italy held to a negotiating posture no prewar pontiff would embrace, the Fascist strongman saw a Catholic-majority country and decided to convert it to his agenda. In the mating ritual of demagogue and pontiff, Mussolini met secretly with Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the secretary of state, in 1923, and sent a message: if His Holiness broke with the Catholic Party, Il Duce would seed government funds in the faltering Banco di Roma, where Vatican investments teetered. Pius XI ordered Father Sturzo to quit the PPI. Sturzo withdrew from politics; later on he moved to America.

When the Fascists murdered the leader of the Reformist Socialist Party, the PPI withdrew from the parliament in protest, throwing Mussolini’s government into a crisis. Just when a movement was gelling around the Catholic Party for an alliance against Fascism, Pius XI denounced any collaboration between Catholics and the left. The pope equated Lenin’s persecutions in Russia with even a democratic form of Socialism in Italy. Despite Catholic parties in Italy and Germany pushing for alliances with the moderate left against the Fascist right, Pius wanted the church as the absolute center of Catholic lives. Politics, coalitions, closing ranks to thwart political gangsters, all eluded the pope’s purview. Imagine Mussolini’s delight:
the pope was hammering his Catholic enemies
. Pius saw Fascism as corrupt, but considered it the lesser of two evils whose leader signaled a receptivity to
restoring the church’s high role in society. Aloof from ground-level politics, Pius failed to see the value of pluralism over a unilateral dealing with Il Duce for Catholic interests. When Sturzo’s party collapsed, Catholic trade unions and peasant groups became more vulnerable. Seventy-four small banks with Catholic clientele folded. The killings continued.

After installing Fascist officers at Banco di Roma, Mussolini shored up its holdings, which helped stabilize Vatican finances. He gained support on Wall Street and with the Hoover administration for a break on Italy’s war debt. The State Department took an “at least he’s our bastard” approach to Mussolini, prizing rough unity over the Fascist homicides. King George V gave Mussolini a medal in Rome. Such cynicism on human rights would plague Anglo-American foreign policy for generations. Deported by Mussolini, George Seldes published
Sawdust Caesar
, a prophetic 1935 biography of Il Duce.

In pushing for church unity, Pius XI showed a comfort with power. Exasperated by retrograde French monarchists in a group called Action Française, Pius XI excommunicated the leader (an anti-Semite at that) and his followers. He summoned the superior of the French seminary in Rome and told him to fire the rector, an AF sympathizer. “Yes, Holy Father,” answered the old priest. “I’ll see what I can do.” Grabbing his beard, the pope snarled, “I said,
‘Fire him!’
”
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For a pope with such a volatile streak, the reliance on American finances must have been humbling. In 1928 Cardinal Mundelein arranged a $300,000 loan from the Chicago archdiocese for the Holy See. In Rome, a young Boston monsignor, Francis Spellman, had a minor post (overseeing playgrounds built by the Knights of Columbus) that positioned him to befriend wealthy Americans who spent winters in the Eternal City. Spellman facilitated financial gifts to Vatican officials on up to the pope. “Holy Father asked me for three autos,” Spellman wrote in his diary on February 8, 1929.
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But the days of papal begging for limousines were about to end.

Cardinal Gasparri met with Mussolini at his residences over several years, negotiating in fits and starts. On February 11, 1929, Gasparri, as papal surrogate, signed the Lateran Pacts with Prime Minister Mussolini in a brief ceremony. Vatican City became a sovereign, neutral state with ownership of fourteen churches and properties in Rome. Catholicism became Italy’s official religion. The Holy See would control the appointment
of bishops. In compensation for parts of Rome and the Papal States, Italy paid the equivalent of $92 million. The Vatican agreed to reinvest about 60 percent of it into government bonds.

“Italy has been given back to God and God to Italy,” the Vatican paper
L’Osservatore Romano
exulted. Pius was pleased that Mussolini was overpowering Communism in Italy. But the Lateran treaty was Faustian at both ends. Mussolini tightened his grip on Italy, gaining respect on the world stage, while bankrolling his adversary, whose office magnified in global public opinion. Mussolini won a huge boost in Catholic popularity, particularly where he most needed it, in northern Italy. Pius gushed that Mussolini was “a man sent by providence.”
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As if heeding the whispers of Pio Nono’s ghost, he signed the death warrant of the PPI, but as time passed he watched in horror as Fascism forged its creed. “Like the Christian ideal, the Fascist ideal is one in a state of perpetual becoming,” a party secretary declared.
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An ex-Fascist likened the radiant banners, mass marches, and solemn torch-lit rites to “a religion, a divinity all its own: the State, with its own Supreme worship … to which everything should be sacrificed.” In 1931 Mussolini pulled Boy Scouts from parishes into Fascist groups, saying, “Youth shall be ours.” Pius used an encyclical to condemn Fascism as “Pagan worship of the State.”
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He was absolutely correct but by then in a quagmire of his own making.

Gasparri retired in 1930. In the next few years Pius, through his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, oversaw concordats with European countries to secure papal authority in naming bishops, state support for clergy salaries, and autonomy for Catholic Action. Pius XI saw this movement of laypeople guided by bishops and clergy as a crusade waged by a Christian army against immorality in popular culture. “One of its tasks,” Peter Godman writes of Catholic Action, “was to regain the allegiance and sympathies of the working classes alienated by Communism.”
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But in promoting an ethos of social cohesion through the church, Pius XI turned his back on party politics at a time when pluralism was the last hedge against the boot heel. When Cardinal Pacelli, a skilled diplomat and future pope, signed the 1933 concordat with Germany, the centrist Catholic Party there was in eclipse. As Pacelli ruefully joked to a British envoy, the Nazis “would probably not violate all of the articles of this Concordat at the same time.”
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After its long estrangement from Liberal Italy, the Vatican became a financial partner of Fascist Italy. Pius launched a major construction project
to remediate decades of deferred maintenance and expansion of the Vatican infrastructure, work that pumped Rome’s sagging economy. His pivotal move was the hiring of Bernardino Nogara to manage the many millions. Papa Ratti, as Italians called Pius, was from Milan, the industrial and fashion center. The Milanese looked down on Romans as lazy, unproductive bureaucrats—
“Roma ladrona,”
Rome the big thief. For financial advice Pius turned to a small group of Milanese, including his brother, a count, who became a key figure in the Vatican’s civil administration. Among the Milanese, Nogara came with a good pedigree. An engineer who had managed mining operations in Britain and Bulgaria before the war, he had gone on to Istanbul as a vice president of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, and later worked on the Economic Council of the 1919 Versailles Treaty conference. A specialist in international currency, Nogara was a devout Catholic who kept a copy of
The Divine Comedy
at his bedside. He was on good terms with the Ratti family, and among his own siblings, two brothers were seminary rectors, a sister was the mother superior at a convent, and another brother supervised the Vatican Museums. When Pius XI asked the fifty-nine-year-old Nogara to run the newly established Special Administration, managing the Lateran windfall of $92 million of which $39.7 million went to the Vatican (the other $52.4 million went into government bonds at 5 percent), Nogara reportedly insisted that his investment not be constrained by religious or doctrinal issues, and that he be free to invest Vatican funds anywhere in the world he so chose. Pius said yes.
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Nogara guided investments in stocks, bonds, currency exchanges, and gold, amassing profits for the Holy See’s muscular new wealth as the global financial crisis squeezed Italy. Mussolini created an Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) which issued bonds (backed by banks and insurance and mortgage companies) through which the state gained control of key industries. Nogara became an IRI adviser and made Vatican investments in the safest bonds.

“Whenever I read the words:
The sacrifice of our Father Abraham
, I cannot help but be deeply moved,” Pius XI exclaimed tearfully to a group of visiting Belgians on September 6, 1938. “Mark well, we call Abraham our Patriarch, our ancestor. Anti-Semitism is irreconcilable with this lofty thought, the noble reality which this prayer expresses … But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are all Semites.” Father
Sturzo, the exiled leader of the banned PPI, made sure the pope’s words got published in a Belgian newspaper.
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Pius XI’s change of heart did not ignite a collective mind shift. The Vatican did not report his words. Inside the Curia Fascist sympathizers worked alongside priests of a broader worldview. Anti-Semitism was a curse of the clerical culture that surfaced in Catholic journals in America and Europe, including
Commonweal
and
America
, in the 1930s.
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Many bishops who backed the New Deal kept silent on Mussolini and the slurs on Jews by the popular “radio priest” from Detroit, Charles Coughlin, until his career ended.

As Mussolini closed ranks with Hitler, Nogara shifted the investments into U.S. manufacturing, bonds, and, in a $7.6 million transfer of Vatican gold out of London, the Federal Reserve.
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Italy joined Germany’s march to war. Pius XI scorned “barbaric Hitlerism” and “the myth of race and blood.” When he passed away in 1939, Mussolini said, “At last, that stubborn old man is dead.”
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As the war ended in 1945, anti-Fascist partisans captured Mussolini and his mistress, executed them, and hung their corpses upside down in Milan.

Cardinal Pacelli became Pius XII. The son of a Vatican lawyer and financial adviser to Pio Nono and Leo XIII, Eugenio Pacelli had a lifelong friendship with one of Rome’s distinguished Jewish physicians in whose home he had shared Sabbath dinner as a youth. In 1916, as a young monsignor, he drafted a statement for Benedict XV in support of Poland’s Jews.
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As the beleaguered pontiff in World War II, Pius XII ordered priests, nuns, and nuncios (like Angelo Roncalli in Istanbul, the future John XXIII) to help Jews avoid Nazi deportations to death camps. His refusal to publicly denounce Hitler and the Nazis was “a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism,” charged John Cornwell in the provocatively titled
Hitler’s Pope.
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Later, in a paperback edition, Cornwell retracted some of his criticism; however, the book spotlighted deep divisions among historians and Jewish leaders over historic anti-Semitism in the Vatican and larger European church, and whether the Holocaust could have been halted. The ongoing debate has such severe implications for Catholic-Jewish relations that Pius’s candidacy for sainthood seems stalled.
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Yet he was praised by Albert Einstein in 1940 as a defender of Jews and by Golda Meir, then Israel’s foreign minister, at the time of his
death. In the thirteen years after the war, Pius stood on the global stage as a symbol of peace. Regardless of how the debate transpires over Pius XII’s wartime reticence about Hitler and the Nazis, the two world wars turned the papal agenda toward the cause of peace, and under John Paul II the sanctity of human rights. That evolution hit a turning point in 1965, when Paul VI, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, raised his arms and cried: “No more war! War never again.”
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How far the papacy had come since Pio Nono’s complaint to a British envoy that he could not execute a single rebel in the Papal States.

In the century of that transition, the Vatican financial system shifted from a religious monarchy, scrambling to recover from the loss of Rome and the Papal States’ fiefdom, to the emergent economy of the Holy See, which relied on Peter’s Pence to accrue dividends by investing in the city of Rome through the decades in which the pope was a putative Vatican prisoner. Who is to say whether Italians or any other believers in the pews of American churches would object to the use of those funds had they known? None of them wanted a pope in rags. Thanks to Mussolini’s payout, Bernardino Nogara forged a hybrid form of religious capitalism by investing in Roman infrastructure, gold, and foreign markets. In 1942, Pius XII established the Vatican Bank.