by Jason Berry
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, impose 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
In 1860 Cavour’s coalition of Piedmont-Sardinia was allied with the nationalist Garibaldi’s southern forces as the Risorgimento captured two-thirds of the Papal States. Garibaldi, who had once worked as a candle maker on Staten Island, became a hero in America. “The new birth of Italy is already the grandest event of the modern period,” asserted the Dante scholar Charles Eliot Norton. “The claim for Peter’s Pence may well remind us of the Crusades,” the New York Times drily opined. “But today when the Holy City is attacked, it is by Catholics—Catholics from the South and from the North.”33
Pio Nono shifted from benevolent despot to reactionary monarch. He struck back (without identifying Cavour, Garibaldi, or republicans)34 in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, an edict that cracked the whip against the emergence of European democracy. Garry Wills calls the Syllabus “grand in its crazy way” for its declaration that the pope should never have to “reconcile himself, or agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”35
Antonelli, however, had a new marketing asset: the papal image. The distribution of pictures and small cards bearing Pio Nono’s face, combined with newspaper coverage, made him “a popular icon better known than that of any pope in history.”36 As bishops in Europe and America rallied to the cause, Peter’s Pence averaged 8 million lire yearly from 1859 to 1870.37 Although initially conceived to provide military defense for the pope, the money was his to use as he wished.
Despite Pius’s intransigence on freeing Jews, Rothschild took a long view. His bank also lent to the royal house of Piedmont. For a French bank to have an embattled pope among its clients did not hurt, even if his betrayal did. With two-thirds of the Papal States controlled by Italian forces, Pio Nono stood helpless at the birth of the Kingdom of Italy. Thus, in 1861 he excommunicated its king, Victor Emmanuel II. Pio Nono rebuffed overtures by the new leaders for the Law of Guarantees, which pledged 3.5 million lire a year to papal coffers and defense of the Vatican. Count Cavour, the leader pushing for a rapprochement, called for “a free church in a free state.” Antonelli the shrewd bargainer might have cut a better deal had he only had papal support. But Pio Nono believed in his kingship. He refused to concede his lost control of the territories.38
Money for daily operations, notably the salaries of Vatican lay workers, was a pressing need. The Holy See turned to French bishops, seeking subscription loans to be raised by the laity, a scheme quickly quashed for the conflict posed to Peter’s Pence. Catholic financiers suggested a worldwide papal lottery; the Vatican said no. In this quagmire Antonelli gave the order for a massive minting of silver coins “with less than the prescribed amount of necessary metal.”39 French and Swiss banks rejected the quick-fix cheap coins. Money spread, inflation rose: the papacy by 1870 had a public debt of 20 million lire.
Amid the tribulations, Pio Nono kept his odd sense of humor. “How is it,” the pope asked a British envoy in early 1866, “that the British can hang two thousand Negroes to put down an uprising in Jamaica, and receive only universal praise for it, while I cannot hang a single man in the Papal States without provoking worldwide condemnation?” At his own question he burst out laughing, repeating it, shaking a lone finger.40 The envoy wondered if the pope was sane. In 1871 the pope ordered Italians not to vote in parliamentary elections, a decree that magnified his detachment from politics and undercut Vatican influence on party development as democratic changes swept through Europe.
French troops supplied the garrison that defended the pope. In 1869 Pio Nono summoned all of his bishops to a Vatican Council. He wanted their support for infallibility—that the pope could not err on a pronouncement of dogma, and could issue articles of faith entirely on his own, without the collegial advisory of cardinals and bishops. American bishops were not thrilled. Many of them were establishing dioceses in areas where raw sentiments flared against “popery”—the king of a religion who would menace America’s democracy. “In my humble opinion,” the bishop of Rochester, New York, writing from Rome, confided to a friend, “and almost every American Bishop whose opinion I have heard agrees with me, [infallibility] will be a great calamity for the Church.” The bishop of Pittsburgh was more stark: “It will kill us.”41
A mist of irony suffused the Vatican Council. Pius, the antirepublican, wanted the bishops to vote, as if in a parliament, for investing his office with a superhuman power. When an Italian cardinal spoke in opposition, Pio Nono bristled at his “error.” Then he declared: “I, I am the tradition!”42
Such hubris may have sparked a revolt on a preliminary vote on the wording of the papal text, in which the first ballot had 88 votes against Pius, 62 for, and about 85 bishops absent—on account of their leaving Rome. The French troops packed up, heading out for war with Prussia. The Vatican was unprotected. Fifty-seven bishops opposed to infallibility left before voting. A lopsided number of bishops Pio Nono had appointed in Italy and Spain rallied to his position; he won, 533–2.43 But the margin could not offset the misgivings of those who had left. “There was something hollow about this victory, which prevented even the hardliners from showing ebullience,” writes Wills.44
Antonelli the money manager warned the pope that infallibility would alienate many people. “I have the Blessed Virgin on my side,” rejoined Pio Nono.45 Indeed, the infallibility doctrine applied retroactively to the pope’s 1854 declaration of Mary’s birth without original sin (the Immaculate Conception). Otherwise, none of his pronouncements after the Vatican Council carried the stamp
of infallibility. (To date, its only other invocation was in 1950 when Pius XII announced that Mary ascended bodily into heaven.) Such decrees of a spiritual realm stood apart from an emerging age of science. As the geography controlled by the Supreme Pontiff shrank to the size of a small town, the idea of papal perfection enlarged his power, suggesting a reach no president, prime minister, or dictator could rival.
As the papacy’s financial struggle deepened, Pio Nono quipped, “I may be infallible, but I am certainly bankrupt.”46 Infallibility, however, produced an ironic silver lining. As a popular misconception arose that the pope could never make a mistake, the papacy became a symbol of pure truth. Funds poured in from Catholics in Europe and the Americas, registering support for the pope.
The Vatican Council ended. Liberal Italy swallowed Rome and the remaining Papal States. Shorn of the ancient lands, a king without an army, Pio Nono crossed the Tiber into tiny Vatican City—the 108 acres encompassing St. Peter’s Basilica, the Apostolic Palace, gardens, and historic buildings—a self-proclaimed “Prisoner of the Vatican,” vowing bitterly not to reenter Rome proper until Italy returned the land. This was Pio Nono’s full-throated sympathetic coda to the dying age of European monarchy.
“The Achilles’ heel of the Roman theory of infallibility is in the last resort lack of faith,” the eminent theologian Hans Küng would write many years later in assessing Vatican I, as the council is called. “True, God acts on the Church through the Holy Spirit … But the human beings who constitute the Church can err, miscalculate and blunder, mishear, misunderstand and go astray.”47