God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

by Gerald Posner

  By 1950, Spada was emblematic of the tangled relationship between the Vatican and Italy’s private sector. He was a chairman or director of more than thirty companies, including insurance giants Generali and RAS (the Vatican had reinvested in both), Banco di Roma, Mediobanca, Finelettrica, Italmobiliare, Finmeccanica, and Italcementi.30 “The Italian stock market is controlled by about 20 financial companies of such interwoven ownership that their directors answer mainly to themselves,” noted Time in a story about Italy’s incestuous finances.31,I

  The guessing game at the Vatican was which of the men who had worked for Nogara would succeed him. Before the war, there had been widespread speculation that the House of Morgan’s Giovanni Fummi would be his replacement. The patrician Fummi had represented Volpi, the Vatican, and most of Italy’s aristocrats. But Nogara had lived long enough that Fummi, only a year younger, was now himself too old.

  Laying the groundwork for his eventual successor, starting in the early 1950s, Nogara formed a trust of Catholic financial advisors. The new consultants were informally dubbed uomini di fiducia, men of confidence.33 Popes had long used Black Nobles to assist them in business. Bernardino had for decades relied on his own close circle of confidants, men like Fummi and Volpi, trusted advisors and sometimes partners. Nogara envisioned that the men of confidence would meld the best traits from the Black Nobles and his own clique of advisors. He decreed they should be top bankers or financiers, selected for their loyalty and ability. And he thought it important that they did not work for the church, hoping their independence might free them of the stifling Curia bureaucracy and crippling power wars. Nogara’s first selections were two of Pius’s nephews, Giulio and Marcantonio Pacelli.34

  Despite his advanced age and a promise to curtail his workload, Nogara was still a director or managing director at a dozen of Italy’s largest companies.35 And when challenged inside the Curia by another power broker, he demonstrated he was adept at protecting his turf. In 1953, he clashed with Monsignor Giovanni Montini.36 The two had tangled since the war. Montini had lobbied Pius to get the Vatican Bank—the only accessible source of foreign currency—to aid his huge refugee efforts.37 Bernardino did not like the IOR playing a passive role in programs over which it did not have full control. Now, decades later, what had been a simmering enmity broke into the open. Montini complained to colleagues that it was an error to allow a layman—even such a talented one—to gain so much power. And he asked why Nogara did not just concentrate on the IOR and his Special Administration instead of meddling elsewhere in the Curia. The monsignor also charged that the rising stature of Pius’s nephews, under Nogara’s sponsorship, smacked of nepotism.38

  Nogara, and others—chiefly Sister Pascalina—who were not fans of Montini, made their rebuttal directly to Pius.39 In a 1953 consistory, the Pope appointed twenty-one new cardinals.40 Montini was on everyone’s shortlist. But Pius stunned Vaticanologists by not giving Montini a red hat.41 And the following year, the Pope settled the increasing backbiting between Montini and Nogara by elevating Montini as an archbishop and dispatching him to run Milan. Since Milan was the largest archdiocese in Italy, a cardinal was traditionally in charge.42 The slight was clear. The seventy-eight-year-old Pope had ensured that Montini would not be his successor.43

  In 1954, the same year Montini was sent to Milan, Nogara selected Henri de Maillardoz as the IOR’s Delegato.44 It was the position that only Nogara had held since the bank’s 1942 inception. Maillardoz, who had in his private career overseen Credit Suisse’s industrial portfolio, felt at home in his new role. Bernardino remained at the Vatican during the transition. It took two years, until 1956, before Nogara felt his hand-selected team was ready to move forward. He retired at the age of eighty-six, but reminded his colleagues that he lived in a nearby Vatican-owned home and would be pleased to consult.45

  During his twenty-seven-year tenure Nogara had revolutionized the world of Vatican finances. With the full backing of two Popes, he had successively defeated the entrenched Curia traditionalists and transformed the church from a primitive financial institution into a savvy international holding company with its own central bank. By the time of his departure, the intense arguments about whether the Bible prevented the church from playing any role in financial speculation seemed archaic. Nogara’s Special Administration was as capitalist as any Wall Street investment bank. In the eleven years since the end of World War II, his postwar concentration in Italian industry had proven an inspired investment. SNIA Viscosa was now Italy’s largest and most profitable textile company. SGI had become an international conglomerate with gigantic construction projects on five continents, and had taken ownership interests in dozens of related companies. Montecatini had tripled in size and expanded into electric power and pharmaceuticals. Italgas had gone from a small regional utility to the country’s largest natural gas provider.46

  Nogara had also tended to his two sons, Paolo and Giovanni. Paolo was the chairman of two Vatican-owned companies, the Montefluoro mining firm, and later Ceramica Pozzi, a ceramics firm.47 Giovanni ran an IOR-controlled metals firm, Pertusola, and was a director of the Tarvisio travel conglomerate.48 Like his father, Giovanni was an engineer and also served as the director general of the mining company, Predil, in which the IOR had also invested.49

  The eighty-year-old Pius was himself frail by the time of Nogara’s departure. Pius had never seemed robust so it was sometimes difficult to be certain whether the Pontiff was as sick as he appeared. A bad gastrointestinal infection—“constant vomiting and nausea,” recalled Sister Pascalina—over the Christmas holidays in 1954 had taken its toll.50 Now Vaticanologists debated the state of his health. Ricardo Galeazzi-Lisi, an eye specialist, had been Pius’s chief physician since 1939. He was the doctor Pius trusted to examine the “bones of St. Peter” in 1942. Aside from Pascalina, many insiders were wary of Galeazzi-Lisi and his self-made tonics and herbal remedies.51 His botched treatment of Pius’s gum problems with chromic acid—used in tanning hides—led to esophageal complications that now plagued the Pope with chronic hiccups.52,II And it was Galeazzi-Lisi, and Pascalina, who had vouched for Paul Niehans, a Swiss physician who administered “living cell therapy,” injections that consisted of chopped fetuses from freshly slaughtered ewes. Many in the Vatican did not like that Niehans was an ordained Protestant minister, and traditionalists objected to his use of animal fetuses for his injectable tonic. But Pius liked him and dismissed accounts that some Niehans patients had suffered seizures after the injections. Pius even appointed him to the prestigious Pontifical Academy of Sciences.54 During one particularly bad bout of sickness, Pius asked Niehans: “Tell me the truth, do you seriously believe that I shall recover completely and be able to fulfill my duties fully? If not, I shall not hesitate to resign.” Niehans assured Pius he would get better.55 It was not until 1955, after Pius almost died from an infection, that two Italian doctors gathered enough evidence challenging Niehans’s claims and safety record to convince Pius to bar him from further visiting the Vatican.56 But as his health worsened, Pius changed his mind, and by 1958 Niehans had returned to the Pope’s private chambers.57

  Pius now said he “was ready to go to heaven.”58 Italian newspapers added to the sense that something was amiss when they reported about Pius’s self-described hallucinations. In one he saw a Fatima-like replica of the sun spinning in the sky, and in another Jesus appeared in his bedroom to assure him that his reign was not yet over.59 The declaration to have seen the Son of God was the first by a Pope in a thousand years.60 Some skeptics thought by claiming divine visions, Pius was campaigning for his posthumous ascent to sainthood. Others thought it was further evidence that illness and age had taken their toll.

  The laymen who had inherited the IOR and Special Administration steered clear of any backroom chatter about the Pope. They knew that whatever the state of Pius’s health, given his advanced age it was only a matter of time until there was a new Pope. Since most of them had never worked under any other Pontiff,
that prospect alone created considerable angst.61

  Despite all the grim speculation about Pius’s health, many insiders were still surprised and saddened when they learned that the Pope had suffered a massive stroke on October 6, 1958. His shortcomings and peculiarities aside, he had led the church through difficult times. During his nineteen-year reign, he had promoted the Papacy as a position of unrivaled central power, a divine monarch who was a throwback to the boldest Popes from earlier generations. Three days after his stroke, the Pontiff died of what the Vatican called a “circulatory phenomenon.”62

  The conclave that began gathering was different from the one that had elected Pius in 1939. Pacelli had then been the odds-on favorite. The vote that made him Pope was the fastest in three hundred years. There was no frontrunner now. And much to the consternation of the Vatican, the press for the first time speculated about the conclave as if it were a secular political campaign. Even Spellman was mentioned as a leading candidate. He had no chance. He had far too many enemies in the Curia, who coined Spellmanism to refer to a condition in which someone had too large an ego and too obvious an ambition.63

  Once the conclave began, the eighty cardinals—twenty-nine of whom were Italian—split into ideological camps. Pius’s successors were the conservatives, strong anticommunists and authoritarians who believed in an all-powerful Papacy. They coalesced around Genoa’s Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, the prelate whose archdiocese was where the Croatian priest Draganović had run one of his ratlines. The progressives wanted to reduce the church’s partisan Cold War role and were amenable to some modernist reforms. They were split among several candidates, with Bologna’s Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro having the seeming momentum.64

  The divisions among the cardinals became evident to the crowds packing St. Peter’s Square. Over three days, black smoke—indicating no Pope had been selected—poured ten times from the smokestack erected over their meeting hall. White smoke followed on the eleventh ballot. The divided conclave’s compromise? Venetian Patriarch Angelo Roncalli, one month shy of his seventy-seventh birthday.65 No one over seventy had been selected Pope in more than two hundred years.66 They had coalesced around him as a short-term caretaker.

  The congenial, pudgy Roncalli was the physical antithesis to his reserved and isolated predecessor. Although Roncalli had been on no one’s shortlist, he believed he was a serious contender. When his election was announced inside the conclave, he pulled from the pocket of his vestment a long acceptance speech he had written in Latin.67 As for his Papal name, he surprised his colleagues by announcing without any hesitation it would be John, a name all Popes had avoided since the last John had been a divisive antipope in 1410 (Roncalli was fond of it because it was the name of the parish church in which he was baptized).68

  In the first twenty-four hours of his Papacy Roncalli demonstrated that he did not intend to be a caretaker only. At the end of the conclave he had placed the red hat on Monsignor Alberto di Jorio, the chief prelate responsible for the IOR. Di Jorio had been the conclave’s secretary, and by elevating him to cardinal, Roncalli reinstated the practice that two Popes had abandoned. And no sooner had he donned his Papal vestments than he announced that Monsignor Domenico Tardini would be his Secretary of State, filling a position left open by Pius for fourteen years.69

  Roncalli was the third of thirteen children—the eldest son—from a poor sharecropper family in the northern Italian village of Sotto Il Monte. His parents enrolled him in a local seminary when he was only eleven. A priest added some prestige to a family. It also meant one fewer mouth to feed. At nineteen, he won a scholarship to study at Rome’s Accademia dei Nobili, a seminary that was a recruiting ground for the Curia. The Bishop of Bergamo picked him to be his personal secretary, a ten-year period that was broken when Roncalli was drafted as a chaplain into the Italian army during World War I. By 1925, Pius XI appointed him an archbishop and he got the first of his assignments, to Turkey, as a Nuncio. Greece and France followed.III

  When it came to World War II and the question of the Holocaust, he was different from his predecessor. Roncalli had so often urged Secretary of State Maglione to convince the Pope to speak out about the Nazi atrocities that Maglione complained to his colleagues in Rome about Roncalli’s persistence.71 In 1944, Franz von Papen, the German ambassador to Turkey, approached Roncalli, who was then the Nuncio in Istanbul. Papen said that if the Pope condemned Hitler, a group of German patriots would negotiate a truce with the Allies. When the Nuncio sent Papen’s offer to the Vatican, Pius and Maglione dismissed it, believing that Roncalli was unsophisticated and easily duped by the Germans, who might be setting a trap for the Pope.72

  The moment of truth came in late spring of 1944. Roncalli was the first ranking church official to receive a copy of the Auschwitz Protocols, the bone-chilling May report of two Slovak Jews who had escaped the death camp. That document left little doubt the Nazis were preparing their largest death camp to receive Hungary’s Jews.73 He sent it by diplomatic pouch to the Vatican. When Ira Hirschmann, the War Refugee Board’s representative, approached Roncalli that summer, the Nazis had started the massive Hungarian deportations. He asked Hirschmann whether the Hungarian Jews might be willing to be baptized, “only to save their lives . . . not really to convert, you understand.”74 Hirschmann said yes. Two weeks later Roncalli confirmed that he had sent “thousands of baptismal certificates” to the Papal Nuncio in Budapest. That simple act saved more Jews over a couple of months than all of Pius’s dithering during six years of war.

  When Pius XII finally made him a cardinal in 1953, most had thought his red hat was an award for longevity and loyalty, not because his career was distinguished. As opposed to Montini or Siri, Roncalli had no powerful Curial backers nor had he formed any alliances that promoted his candidacy. No one thought of him as predestined for the Papacy.75 What did stand out throughout his earlier service was that he had earned a reputation as being likable. Wherever he served, the jocund, grandfatherly Roncalli was popular with ordinary Catholics.76 Although no one then realized the significance of it, he was assuming the Papacy during the early days of television. Roncalli would be the first Pope seen by tens of millions of the faithful through their TV sets. It was an ideal medium for his personality.

  • • •

  Although Roncalli had mustered the necessary votes to become Pope, some questioned his ability to lead the church. Sister Pascalina groused he was not worthy of succeeding Pius. The new Pope responded the day after his election by barring Pascalina from entering her apartment, which adjoined his quarters. She was told to leave the Vatican. Before she departed, a longtime Curial foe, Cardinal Tisserant, confronted her and demanded to know why she had burned three overstuffed hampers filled with documents belonging to Pius XII. “The Holy Father ordered everything to be burned and it has been.”77 Some of the papers had been drafts of speeches he had written over his two decades as Pope. She did not know, however, all the contents and she did not think it her place to look inside.

  Tisserant was furious. “Do you realize that you have burned a great treasure?”

  “We know that better than anyone, but it was an order of the Holy Father’s, who was sacrosanct to us throughout his life and is no less so after his death.”78

  No one besides Tisserant seemed too concerned that Pascalina had destroyed thousands of pages of Pius’s personal papers. Everyone was instead focused on Roncalli. “He’s no Pope,” the outspoken Spellman told some colleagues upon returning to New York. “He should be selling bananas.”79 Spellman failed to see in Roncalli the talent necessary to be a great sovereign. The New York cardinal and other traditionalists believed ordinary Catholics wanted a royal Papacy. Pius’s reign marked the zenith of that monarchal power. Roncalli would strip away much of the imperial Papacy, ending everything from the five-hour-long coronation to the requirement that lay Catholics kneel in his presence or that his staff remain mostly silent when around him.80 Those who liked the new simplicity referred to the dramati
c change in styles as “de-Stalinization in the Vatican.”81 But a Black Noble reflected the view of those who thought the reforms denigrated the office: “It looks as if this Pope is trying to introduce into the church some of that democracy which has been such a disaster everywhere else.”82

  Genoa’s Cardinal Siri—the leading traditionalist candidate at the conclave—shared Spellman’s concern that the congenial Roncalli did not have their passion as a Cold Warrior. The CIA had the same worries, concluding that Pope John was “politically naive and unduly influenced by the handful of ‘liberal’ clerics with whom he is in close contact.”83 The new Pope believed that the church should stay out of secular politics.84 It was a sea change from Pius XII, who had played the tipping role in the 1948 national elections, allowing Catholic Action to mobilize votes, even personally attending to on-the-ground details such as busloads of nuns making their way on election day from convents to polling stations. John XXIII instead pulled the church back from its full partnership with the Christian Democrats. The new Pontiff did not see communism as a mortal threat. Spellman and Siri fretted that a passive role by the church created an opportunity for the Italian left to gain power.85

  But before there was any chance to test John XXIII’s credentials as a Cold Warrior, on November 15, only eleven days after his coronation, the eighty-eight-year-old Bernardino Nogara died of an apparent heart attack.86 The news of his passing was mostly lost in the wake of the election of a new Pope, and rated only a few lines in a handful of newspapers.87 Nogara’s death was a watershed moment, however, for Maillardoz, Spada, and Mennini, who now ran the church’s finances according to the template he had created.88 They were apprehensive about Roncalli’s election. Speculation was rampant about whether Roncalli would bring in his own loyalists for key positions (it did not help that when asked how many people worked in the Curia, the new Pope said, “About half”).89