The Vatican was defended now by Zuavi Pontifici—Papal light infantry—several thousand young, unmarried Catholic volunteers from more than two dozen countries. Few thought the ragtag force could withstand a sustained assault. The Italian king sent an emissary who offered to spare the church a humiliating military defeat by pretending the nationalist army took control of Rome under the guise of protecting the Pontiff. The nationalists even offered to recognize Papal sovereignty, the right of the Vatican to have ambassadors, and to pay some money to offset the income the church had lost from the Papal States. Pius would hear none of it. Instead, he let loose with a vicious verbal assault. The King’s envoy was so shaken that in his rush to get away from Pius he almost walked out a third-story window instead of a door.98
Rebuffed by the Pope, Italian troops massed outside Rome. Pius could not be dissuaded of his delusion that no Italian army would dare attack Rome—a sacred city—so long as he was there.99 When nationalist troops breached the city’s outer perimeter, the Pope urged his garrison to resist the “vipers.”100 Rome fell in a day. The Pope ordered the white flag raised over St. Peter’s at 9:00 a.m. on September 20. For the first time in a millennium, the church had no sovereign seat of power. Its sixteen thousand square miles of feudal empire had been reduced to a tiny parcel of land.
To soften the blow, the new republic offered the Pope the Leonine City, a large Roman district around which the ninth-century Pope Leo IV commissioned the Leonine Wall. But Pius worried that if he agreed to anything it would imply he endorsed the legitimacy of Italy’s rule over his former kingdom.
Some cardinals and the Father Superior of the Jesuits advised that he flee and establish a Papacy in exile. Antonelli advised against abandoning Rome.101 Pius needed little persuasion. He quickly refused. His exile in Gaeta had been too unsettling. He felt too old at seventy-eight to leave Italy. And he had a different plan. Although Italian officials assured him he was free to come and go as he wanted, Pius declared himself the “prisoner of the Vatican”—a victim Pope—and remained shuttered inside St. Peter’s.102 He excommunicated those who had played key roles in the conquest of Rome. And when the new government wanted to move into the Quirinale—built in the sixteenth century as a Papal summer palace—Pius petulantly refused to hand over the keys.103
Pius and his advisors had every reason to resort to high theatrics: Italy’s unification was disastrous for the church. And to their great frustration, there was little they could do about it. As Antonelli feared, the seizure was more than just a blow to the Vatican’s prestige. The Papal States had included the Vatican’s wealthiest regions and almost all its population.104 Antonelli knew the loss meant the church was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, some 20 million lire in debt.105 The situation would have been worse had Antonelli not secretly met with an Italian aristocrat, Baron Alberto Blanc, and through his efforts got Italy to return 5 million lire belonging to the Holy See, all in bank accounts seized by the secular government.106
Pius seemed oblivious to the bad news.VI He wanted money for a new militia of mercenaries to counter the nonexistent threat that Italian armies might appropriate the Vatican itself.108 He also thought it important to preserve the spectacle of the sumptuous Papal monarchy. Pius refused to dismiss any workers. And he insisted on paying salaries and pensions for officials who had been fired by the new Italian government, as well as for those who resigned out of loyalty to the Vatican. In less than a year, 15 percent of the church’s budget went to salaries of ex-employees of the Papal States.109
Antonelli knew it would take too long to raise money with another debt issue. After much debate, Pius and his advisors settled on an unexpected solution: to rekindle Peter’s Pence. It was a fundraising practice that had been popular a thousand years earlier with the Saxons in England (before Henry VIII had banned it). “Obolo di San Pietro” in Italian, “offerings from the faithful,” Peter’s Pence consisted not only of donations, but also of fees paid by loyal Catholics for services such as weddings, funerals, and confirmations.110 Special taxes levied during the Crusades were tallied as part of Peter’s Pence.111
In better times, the Vatican set aside money raised from Peter’s Pence only for extraordinary costs.112 Now it was needed to pay day-to-day operating expenses. Catholic journals, local churches, and even Catholic politicians throughout Europe, South America, and the United States pleaded to bail out the Pope. Not only did Pius need money to survive, the pitch went, but the church also required a professional army to protect what little it had left. Cash poured in. Austrian Archduke Maximilian and most of the French aristocracy gave generously. The poor and uneducated were induced to donate by tales that Italian inquisitors had chained the Pope to a prison wall. One fraud even sold samples of “Holy straw” from the nonexistent cell’s floor.113 Catholics in different countries competed with one another to see who could raise the most.114
The revival of Peter’s Pence was the first time ordinary Catholics felt as though they individually could help the “imprisoned” Pope. Pius adopted the unfamiliar mantle as a popular fundraiser. He acknowledged the most generous donations. The advent of photography allowed key contributors to receive signed pictures. And he doled out framed letters, personal benedictions, Papal titles of nobility, and knighthoods. The Italian ambassador to the United States noted, “Because they have no aristocracy, the Americans are particularly susceptible to this form of flattery.”115 Philadelphia’s Protestant Mellon family gave a large enough contribution to earn a Papal Marquis. Still, Antonelli knew it was not wise to fund the church on the hope that the faithful would steadily send in a lot of money. For the first three years of the reinstituted Peter’s Pence, the annual receipts covered on average just four months of the church’s annual deficit.116 Another of Antonelli’s ideas was to have European bishops appeal to Catholic worshippers for separate contributions—dubbed loan subscriptions—to pay down the Vatican’s outstanding debt. The bishop of Autun assured his congregants “The Pope is a good risk.”117
In Rome, Catholic financiers pitched more money-raising proposals to the Pope. Pius rejected one for a worldwide lottery to supplement Peter’s Pence. He judged it a volatile mixture of capitalism and gambling.118 And he also said no to the idea of capitalizing the remaining Papal properties throughout Europe so they could be leveraged to produce more revenue. Pius thought that violated Catholic doctrine forbidding business speculation.
Some of the Vatican resistance to capitalism was a leftover of Middle Age ideologies, a belief that the church alone was empowered by God to fight Mammon, a satanic deity of greed. And some doctrine, such as its ban on usury—earning interest on money loaned or invested—was based on a literal biblical interpretation.119,VII
Pius was especially distrustful of capitalism since he thought secular activists used it as a wedge to separate the church from its integrated role with the state. In some countries, the “capitalist bourgeoisie,” as the Vatican dubbed it, had even confiscated church land for public use.121 When leading Catholic banker André Langrand-Dumonceau went bankrupt in 1870 under the weight of too much debt, it further confirmed to the Pope that free market concepts were dangerous.122 Also behind the resistance to change was the church’s traditional view that capitalism was mostly the province of Jews. La Civiltà Cattolica regularly denounced the financial business as the evil dominion of Jews. Typical was this: “It [international Jewry] is the giant octopus that with its oversized tentacles envelops everything. It has its stomachs in the banks . . . and its suction cups everywhere. . . . It represents the kingdom of capital . . . the aristocracy of gold. . . . It reigns unopposed.”123
Running parallel with the ingrained anti-Semitism was a vituperative anti-Protestantism. Protestants did not promote capitalist principles, but certain Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines were receptive to the activities that collectively emerged as capitalism. Protestants embraced private ownership of property and the right to earn profits, and allowed borrowing and lending money as well
as earning interest on it. German sociologist Max Weber contended that the surge of capitalism in northern Europe was a direct result of the tenets of Protestant Christianity. He tracked how the growth of Calvinism and Methodism ran parallel to the rise of capitalism in those countries.124 Protestants encouraged workers to find well-paying jobs and contended that employers should endeavor to provide decent working conditions.125 They invested in ventures for profit and then used those earnings for more investments.126 Catholic theology, in contrast, downplayed the rights of individuals, contending instead that workers should consider that one benefit of low paying work was that it contributed to the common good of fellow worshippers and the church. Vatican traditionalists condemned the capitalism that took hold in Protestant countries.127
But capitalism was only a financial philosophy. The more fundamental struggle among many nineteenth-century church philosophers was whether the Vatican should even be part of the modern world. The internal debate was fierce and long. Pius led the traditionalist camp. But in 1871, a new temporal crisis overshadowed that divisive argument. In May, under pressure from Italy’s enormous Catholic population, a divided parliament passed the Law of Papal Guarantees.128 It recognized the Pope as a “sovereign Pontiff,” granting him the same privileges as an Italian King; extended special territorial status to the Vatican and the Papal summer villa; and issued Vatican envoys immunities and honors. The law also exempted all church property from taxation and set aside an annual subsidy of 3,225,000 lire to help offset the income lost from the Papal States.129
The Pope detested the law, telling aides that it was a shameless effort to leave him a denuded figurehead with only a “royal palace.”130 It was not a treaty between equal partners, he contended, but a unilateral act that any future parliament could undo. Pius issued a hastily drafted encyclical repudiating the law and reiterating his demand that Italy instead restore the Papal States to the Vatican’s control.131 He warned the faithful that “wickedness” was afoot and that the guarantees were “unholy” and the government leaders who offered it were “stigmatized [by] their absurdity, cunning and mockery.”132 The Pope excommunicated more Italian officials he labeled as antichurch and even refused the annual subsidy—money the church needed desperately and for which Antonelli lobbied hard.133
Italy pressured the church. It seized dozens of monasteries and nunneries and converted them to government offices. In 1874, Italy banned mandatory religious classes in schools. It eliminated the exemption for the clergy serving in the military as well as abolishing the religious oath in courtrooms. And much to the Vatican’s fury, the state recognized civil marriages, an institution over which all Popes had insisted the Catholic Church alone had authority.134 Every time Pius lashed out with more invectives—he denigrated government ministers as everything from “monsters of hell” to “satellites of Satan in human flesh”—the state pushed back with more restrictive legislation. In 1876, parliament came short by only a few votes from passing a statute of Clerical Abuses that would have banned all political statements from the pulpit as well as abolishing the inviolable secrecy of the confessional.
Still, Pius refused to recognize the Italian state. Nor would the Pope allow Catholics to vote in national elections. Without a Catholic counterweight at the polls, the most anticlerical politicians were elected.
By the time the eighty-five-year-old Pius died in 1878, after a record thirty-two-year reign, devout Catholics revered him as an uncompromising Pope. And most of Italy’s leaders reviled him. Even his funeral was not free of drama. Hundreds of thousands turned out for his memorial procession. Army troops had to forcibly stop some in the crowd from snatching the coffin and tossing it into the Tiber River.135
Spies had penetrated the Vatican and reported back that some hard-line prelates were talking about boycotting “occupied Rome” for the Conclave of Cardinals to elect the new Pope. If they convened in another country, officials fretted it could lead to the first non-Italian Pope, someone who might be more aggressive than even Pius in challenging Italy’s sovereign claim to the Papal States. Italy sent a message to the senior cardinals: the government guaranteed not to meddle in the conclave, but if the cardinals held it elsewhere, they could never again gather in Rome. The clerics decided to stay in the Eternal City.136
* * *
I. Historians credit Johann Tetzel, a popular sixteenth-century Dominican priest and dispenser of indulgences, with the first advertising jingle: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs.”11
II. The Holy See’s official directory lists thirty-nine antipopes and 265 Popes. Other sources list as many as forty-seven antipopes. An accurate count is difficult because standards for electing Popes changed frequently for more than a thousand years. Some Pontiffs were later classified as dissidents. The antipopes peaked during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, with two or more antipopes sometimes claiming the Papacy.15
III. The Vatican issued the equivalent of bonds that paid between 5 and 8 percent interest. The Rothschilds bought the commercial paper from the church at a 75 percent discount. What they paid the Vatican constituted the loan. The Rothschilds then resold the paper as bonds to the public, with their profit being the difference between what they paid the church and the final sales price. The interest to the buyer was in the form of a discount from the full face value. That arrangement allowed the Vatican to maintain the farce that it followed scripture and did not earn or pay interest on its investments.56
IV. Antonelli was one of the last deacons to become a cardinal. Benedict XV, in 1917, ruled that only ordained priests could be cardinals. Many clerics never fully trusted Antonelli since he was not a priest, and many believed he was secretly a Freemason.64
V. In 1864, as the pressure on Rome increased, Pius defended the seizure of another Jewish boy. This time it was nine-year-old Giuseppe Coen, who lived in Rome’s ghetto. The church claimed the boy wanted to become a Catholic and had voluntarily sought out a priest. The public outcry was again fierce. European Catholics led by the French beseeched Pius to release Coen. He again ignored them.87
VI. Corrado Pallenberg, in a 1971 book, Vatican Finances, reported that Pius quipped, “Sarò forse infallibile, ma sono certamente fallito (I may be infallible, but I am certainly bankrupt).” There is no citation, however, and the author cannot find it in any previous history.107
VII. The ban on earning interest was not relaxed until the mid-1800s and not lifted entirely until the middle of World War I. As late as 1903, when Pius X became Pope, the anticapitalist theme continued in Sacrorum Antistitum (The Oath Against Modernism). That decree required all priests to swear an oath denouncing “Americanism,” something Pius considered an insidious slide toward modernism.120
3
Enter the Black Nobles
Pius’s replacement, Perugia’s Cardinal Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, took the name Leo XIII. The sixty-eight-year-old Leo had none of Pius’s irascible and often volatile charisma. Even his longtime advisors considered him utterly uninspiring. Some insiders speculated that Leo prevailed on the conclave’s third ballot because he was the antithesis of his hot-tempered predecessor. Others thought he was a stopgap choice since he was reportedly in poor health and unlikely to be Pope long. Leo himself averred when elected that he was too old and feeble to handle the pressures of the Papacy.1
His reputation as a cardinal was a moderately conservative traditionalist. Leo had been born into an upper-middle-class family with some claim to nobility. He gave conflicting signals early on about whether he shared Pius’s taste for grandiose pomp. On the one hand, he was the first Pope to deem the traditional Papal apartment, adjacent to the throne room, too grand. He slept instead in a cavernous but spartan ground-floor room.2 But he also insisted that all visitors, including secular officials, kneel throughout any audience. Even top clerics were forbidden from sitting when addressing him.3
Leo was not long Pope before he learned that Pius had bequeathed to the Vatican about 3
0 million lire (the Popes from wealthy families often left the church their personal fortunes).4 It consisted of some gold, bank deposits, and unfortunately many uncollectible IOUs. As a result, Pius’s bequest did not make a dent in the church’s ravaged finances: Leo had inherited a 45 million lire deficit. Although Peter’s Pence had paid many operating expenses for a decade, nothing had been done to trim costs or reduce the staggering debt.5 And even more startling was that the mess seemed the fault of the unassailable late Secretary of State and chief of the Treasury, Giacomo Antonelli.6 He had passed away two years before Pius. It was only now that Leo learned of the grim consequences of the unfettered autonomy Cardinal Antonelli had wielded. Antonelli had accumulated great personal wealth while the Vatican’s assets plunged. He had ennobled his middle-class family. His four brothers had been made Papal Counts. One, Luigi, was the administrator of the Pontifical Railroads. Gregorio attended to church affairs outside the Vatican. And his eldest brother, Filippo, made a sizable fortune after he was nominated as a governor of the reorganized state-owned Banca Romana, the capital’s first savings bank.7 Antonelli had directed many of the sixty families of the Black Nobles—aristocratic Catholics who stayed loyal to the Pope when Italian troops seized Rome in 1870—to his brother’s bank.8 With Antonelli dead, Italian aristocrats and businessmen disclosed that he had rebuffed their pleas to invest Peter’s Pence in conservative ventures.9 Instead, he had deployed a network of Papal nuncios to sell precious collectibles donated by the faithful and smuggled the money out of Italy.10 His final will left the bulk of his estate—623,341 gold francs—to his brothers and nephews. Some gems were bequeathed to the Vatican museum, and as for the Pope, Antonelli left him only his own desk crucifix.11 The coup de grâce came when a young countess, Loreta Lambertini, stepped forward and claimed she was the cardinal’s illegitimate daughter and was entitled to a share of the property, palaces, and gold he had amassed.12
God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Page 4