Render Unto Rome (8 page)

THE WORLD OF PIO NONO

In 1849, when Catholic Church membership in America stood at 5 percent of its size today, the bishops collected just under $26,000 to help a financially crippled pope. The international funding drive revived a tradition called Peter’s Pence. French Catholics led the benefactors until the late nineteenth century, giving way to the American church. But the 1849 American gift to Pius IX was substantial for the time. American Catholic support for Peter’s Pence—particularly from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston—rose with the tides of Irish, Italian, and other European immigrants settling in the cities. In the 1870s, with his papacy afloat on these donations, Pius IX railed against the unified Kingdom of Italy, demanding the return of a massive farming territory to the pope as an absolute monarch. As wrangling over the Papal States dragged on, Peter’s Pence fed Vatican investments in Rome’s booming real estate market.
¹²

When the dispute over the lost territories was finally resolved to the Vatican’s benefit, on the eve of the Great Depression, the Catholic Church in America stood as the Holy Father’s chief benefactor. U.S. bishops raised money with the power of politicians, sending streams of support to the Holy Father.

The financial links that spanned the Atlantic were strained even before the global credit crisis erupted in 2008. At the onset of Benedict XVI’s papacy in 2005, American dioceses were reeling from financial losses in the sex abuse cases. Bishops who faced mass lawsuits had resorted to bankruptcy filings in Portland, Spokane, San Diego, Tucson, and Davenport, Iowa (and
later Wilmington, Delaware, and Milwaukee); they looked for no Vatican bailout. The money ran
to Rome
, always had. Still, Roman Curia officials monitored the bankruptcies and litigation losses. Under a 2002 agreement with the Vatican, a bishop seeking to liquidate assets over a value threshold of $5 million (or $10.3 million, depending on the size of his diocese) needed approval from the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome.
¹³

Habits of the heart can defy easy explanation. Behind the financial ties lay a strange romance between New World faithful and the Old World’s last sovereign monarchy, robed in messy Italian politics. But when the Vatican needed money, Catholic America delivered. The Vatican’s financial dependency stood apart from the lawsuits and government probes over the last decade, in America and Ireland, that disgorged shocking church files on predatory priests. As the outlines surfaced of the church’s greatest crisis since the Reformation, Pope John Paul II stood passive, other than to occasionally apologize or scold the media. In 2002, when clergy child-sex cases provoked an international scandal, John Paul, ailing with Parkinson’s disease, blamed therapists for misleading bishops; Vatican cardinals blasted the media and lawyers. To concede failure by the pope was unspeakable, if not unthinkable.

The idea of an inerrant pope has a stormy history enmeshed with the development of church funding. In seventy years, the Vatican went from being a charity case to a Depression-era financial power, providing loans to Fascist Italy. As this strange odyssey unfolded, the image of the pope as a religious monarch with landed wealth changed into that of a preacher for global peace.

The seminal figure in our account is Pope Pius IX, “Pio Nono” as Italians called him,
nono
meaning “ninth.” Pio Nono reacted to the loss of the Papal States by republican forces by demanding the return of the ancient agricultural territories as a right of monarchical absolutism. Pio Nono was the first celebrity pope, his persona garnering affection from Catholics in many countries. Like most celebrities he was in part a creation of publicity; his genial personality had a strange side that sometimes ran dark. Still, bishops and cardinals who traveled to Rome, bearing financial gifts, gained prestige for themselves back home.

Born on May 13, 1792, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was the youngest of nine children. His father was a count in Senigallia on the Adriatic. Priests from aristocratic families had favored status in the Italian
hierarchy; cardinals and archbishops were political figures in governing Rome and the historic Italian midlands known as the Papal States, where the church
was
the state. Two of Mastai-Ferretti’s uncles were bishops; one served at St. Peter’s Basilica. In adolescence Giovanni had seizures attributed to epilepsy. Whatever the neurology, his pleasant personality was subject to angry flares and a weird sense of humor. Family connections helped. A modest student in seminary, he was a priest at twenty-four and papal diplomat in four short years. In 1823 he was posted to Chile for two years. Back in Rome, he oversaw a hospice. In 1827, his thirty-fifth year, Mastai-Ferretti became archbishop of Spoleto in the Papal States, and in 1840, a cardinal.
¹⁴

Reputedly tireless, pastoral, and known for good humor, Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti at age fifty-four was elected pope in the conclave of 1846, a compromise choice who impressed his cardinal peers with a balance of humility and gregariousness. Pope Pius IX entered his reign as a populist. Given to taking spontaneous walks through Rome, installing streetlights, offering an amnesty to rebels in the Papal States, releasing Jews from the onerous requirement of attending weekly sermons by priests, he set up a commission to study the condition of Jewish ghettos.
¹⁵
Pio Nono also held a rocklike belief in his worldly kingdom. He was eight in 1799 when Napoleon’s troops invaded Rome and captured Pope Pius VI, who died a prisoner in France. By Pio Nono’s time Italy had reverted to its status before the Napoleonic conquest: a patchwork of kingdoms and autonomous states, not a nation with a settled identity.

The French Revolution of 1789 had decapitated one king, but royalty still ruled many parts of Europe in the middle nineteenth century. Monarchs viewed the pope as the preeminent spiritual leader and a fellow sovereign. The papacy had a court with cardinals, bishops, and other officials in the retinue of papal advisers, girded by wealthy aristocrats, the “black Romans” who had financial interests in the city governed by the pope. The Papal Court relied on income from the Papal States, a fiefdom dating to the eighth century that stretched from Rome up the middle of the peninsula in a sinuous northwestern curl. Clerical overseers often shared power with local gentry. Seasonal day laborers worked many of the lands; a sharecropping belt ran from the edge of Tuscany down into Umbria.
¹⁶
Estates near Bologna, in the north, threw off profits from silk and tobacco; farther south, in the area around Rome, half of the population lived at
the edge of destitution. Hierarchs censored the press and hired thugs to intimidate rebellious workers in quelling unrest.
¹⁷
Charles Dickens, on an 1844 trip to Rome, took chilly note of the “broken temples; broken tombs. A desert of decay, somber and desolate beyond all expression.”
¹⁸

To the south, Naples was ruled by a corrupt Bourbon king backed by a ruthless army. After an 1851 trip the British politician William Gladstone called the Naples monarchy “the negation of God erected into a system of government.” Gladstone’s comments had an impact on public opinion. The
New York Daily Times
denounced the king of Naples as “murder enthroned and crowned, the incarnated evil … the foulest and fiercest misrule that ever trampled a nation to dust.”
¹⁹
America had trading ties with the Papal States, but only a vice-consul in Rome in 1847. Congress balked at formal ties with a religious state.
²⁰

In the north, Piedmont was ruled by Victor Emmanuel II, a soldier-king of reformist bent who was edging into an alliance with the prime minister of Sardinia, Count Camillo Cavour. The political architect for a united Italy, Cavour was pushing for a national currency. But integrating the monetary systems turned on geopolitical unity. In Sicily the charismatic warrior Giuseppe Garibaldi was leading forces to fight for Il Risorgimento, the unification of Italy. With troops at opposite ends of the peninsula pushing inward, the Papal States, an antique of sagging feudalism, kept losing money.

In 1832 the Rothschild bank of Paris had extended a loan to keep the papacy afloat. “Prohibited by law from owning land and kept out of the trades controlled by the guilds, the Jews found in finance and money-lending the only economic path to prosperity open to them,” writes historian David I. Kertzer.
²¹
The Rothschilds wanted Jews freed from ghettos. In Pio Nono, they sized up a reformer they hoped would ease the harsh treatment of Jews.

The Venetian Republic had confined Jews to a ghetto in 1517. In 1555 Paul IV ordered Jewish segregation in cities he ruled. “For an extreme ascetic like him,” explains historian James Carroll, “there was only one thing to do, which was to impose order in every way he could … 
Oppose
Protestants outside the Church,
im
pose discipline within the Church. But especially,
convert the Jews.
”
²²

In 1848 Pio Nono agreed to a Papal States constitution with an elected chamber. But when Austrian forces headed south to seize a swath of the Italian peninsula, the pope, hoping to avoid war with a Catholic country,
admonished people to be loyal to their princes. Garibaldi and others assembled an army to fight for a unified Italy. The economy heaved; the pope’s prime minister was stabbed to death. As Garibaldi’s troops captured Rome, the pope escaped in disguise as an ordinary priest, by carriage, to Gaeta, a fortress near Naples.

Pio Nono’s hostility to Risorgimento was a huge roadblock to an Italian resolution. The peninsula was riven by dialects and area conflicts such that a national identity like France’s was a distant goal. Regional leaders wanted to unite behind the pope as a spiritual sovereign, with governing power in a prime minister and a parliament. Demanding that Rome be
his
to govern, Pio Nono slammed negotiations shut. In July 1849, after France took Rome, the pope cast lines anew to the Rothschild bank. In Paris, the emperor Louis-Napoléon lobbied a loan in his behalf. But James Rothschild “raised the matter of the plight of the Jews in the Papal States, and demanded that before any loan was made, the Pope agree to free the Jews from the ghetto,” writes David Kertzer.

The Pope sent James a written assurance through his nuncio in Paris. He had the best intentions with respect to the Jews in the Papal States, he said, and he intimated that he would soon issue an edict abolishing the ghetto. But, he added, it would be unseemly—and indeed unthinkable—to directly link the making of a loan to such an edict.
²³

In January 1850 Rothschild approved a loan of 50 million francs. On April 12, Pio Nono returned to beaten-down Rome, reclaiming the city of his rule. But to his lender, he yielded no policy shift in return. In fact, he swung to the right, reverting to harsh controls on the Jewish ghettos as before.
²⁴

Just as he was anchoring himself on the wrong side of Italian history, Pio Nono emerged as a figure of sympathy
outside
Italy. Stirred by the spectacle of an exiled pope, Catholic patricians in Paris revived a medieval tradition, Peter’s Pence (historically, a tax of one penny per household in England for the occupant of St. Peter’s throne),
²⁵
to directly assist the beleaguered Pio Nono. U.S. dioceses raised $25,978.24 in 1849 “for the relief of His Holiness.”
²⁶
The New York archdiocese contributed $6,200 and Philadelphia $2,800. The Catholic population (about 1.4 million) offered
prayers for the pope whose tribulations made them feel closer to him. In helping him, they helped church and faith.
²⁷

For secretary of state, Pio Nono chose a shrewd young deacon from a well-connected family in Naples. Giacomo Antonelli was not a priest, yet Pius so valued his skills that he made him a cardinal, stirring jealousy among other ecclesial princes. Tall, lean, and “demonically astute,” in the scalding words of one chronicler, Antonelli toiled in the shadows of Pio Nono’s carousel personality. The cardinal had a brother in banking who provided commercial contacts beyond Italy. Guiding papal finances amid a sea change in European politics, Antonelli restructured the Holy See’s debt, put the court and the Curia in separate budgets, and imposed tighter accounting procedures on the Papal States.
²⁸
He installed his brother as head of the Pontifical Bank. “A greedy man,” huffed one historian in describing Antonelli.
²⁹
Another sibling gained the monopoly on Roman grain imports. “The Antonelli brothers fixed the price of corn, so that they and their middlemen amassed large fortunes … [in] one of the last cases of grand Papal nepotism,” Anthony Rhodes writes. Pio Nono called Antonelli “my Barabbas.”
³⁰

In 1857 Antonelli used Peter’s Pence as collateral in negotiating a new loan with Rothschild. Nevertheless, Pius refused to order the return of a six-year-old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, who had been taken from his parents by police in Bologna after a servant claimed that she secretly baptized the boy when he was one and severely ill. Placed in the House of Catechumens (those studying for the faith), the boy visited Pio Nono. The pope took the child “into public audiences, playing hide and seek with him under his cloak.”
³¹

Outrage swelled in the international press; Pius browbeat Jewish leaders of Rome in an audience when they pleaded with him to return the boy to his family. “By the grace of God I have seen my duty, and I would rather cut off all my fingers than shrink from it,” declared the pope. The boy entered a seminary. As a priest Mortara had fleeting family memories. He met his relatives as an adult and never truly reconciled with his family. (He died in 1940 in a Belgian monastery at age eighty-eight.) Revulsion rose in many countries for the pope’s treatment of the Mortaras. “Even his critics, exasperated by his stubbornness and unimpressed by his modest intellect, admitted that it was impossible to dislike him,” notes papal historian Eamon Duffy. “He was genial, unpretentious, wreathed in clouds
of snuff.” Years later, when his enemy Count Cavour died, the pope called him “truly Italian. God will assuredly pardon him, as we pardon him.”
³²