by Jason Berry
Pio Nono, the blundering geopolitician, had won election as the infallible dogmatist. Priests in Ireland and Germany handed out palm cards of His Holiness in a dungeon on a straw bed, a prisoner of evil Italians.48 Popular myth produced its opposite: a stunning 1.7 million lire for Peter’s Pence yielded at an 1874 Catholic congress in Venice.49 Incensed by Pio Nono’s hostility, the Kingdom of Italy’s parliament debated legislation to outlaw Peter’s Pence; it failed to pass. Meanwhile, the idea of a spiritually perfect pope, standing on the rock of dogma in a fast-changing world, transformed the papal image from landed sovereign to sainted royalty at poverty’s edge. The pope became a magnet for donations amid the spread of urban capitalism, despite a counterwind of dissent by theologians and intellectuals against infallibility to this day.
From his elegant bunker with the garden paths and great Vatican buildings, Pio Nono carved out a global map, creating more than two hundred new dioceses and appointing bishops to run them, a religious expansion in contrast to his tiny kingdom. He named more saints than all popes in the previous 150 years combined, a breathtaking pace unmatched until the twenty-seven-year pontificate of John Paul II. When a Jesuit adviser suggested a truce with Italy over reparations for the Papal States, Pio Nono sacked him, declaring, “In Rome, the Head of the Church must be either ruler or prisoner.”50
The Cambridge historian John F. Pollard calculates that in the seven years following the 1870 fall of Rome, the Vatican saved 4.3 million lire annually from Peter’s Pence income. Antonelli’s investment strategy ignored Italy, still a semifeudal agrarian economy, for more industrialized countries. The nuncios, or papal ambassadors, played a pivotal role. Writes Pollard:
Much of the Vatican’s money was deposited in foreign banks, especially Rothschilds in Paris, the Société Générale in Brussels and the Bank of England; little or no money was sent to the United States at this juncture, though there is evidence that Antonelli did contemplate depositing money there. Antonelli used the papal nuncios as the agents of his financial operations abroad, especially in the matter of seeking attractive bank accounts and stocks and bonds, rather than company shares. Two Roman financial middlemen … performed various necessary operations, smuggling in Peter’s Pence when the Italian governmental authorities showed hostility, exchanging currencies, cashing stocks and bonds which formed part of Peter’s Pence, and selling precious objects donated by the pious faithful.51
Pio Nono refused to negotiate reparations, stubbornly demanding the return of Rome and the ancient plantation belt, unfazed about the bleak peonage on which the lost kingdom had rested. Antonelli streamlined papal finances, steering investments into credit and commerce. Blind to the chance for a diplomatic rapprochement, Pio Nono rebuffed the king’s family in their request that he preside at Victor Emmanuel’s funeral in 1878. Two hundred thousand people thronged the streets for the procession as he was laid to rest in Rome’s Pantheon—another chance to make peace squandered. Splits were surfacing in America, too. When Pittsburgh’s bishop denied Italians a Mass for the king, they met in a Presbyterian church. In Chicago, four thousand Italians held a memorial parade with two hundred decorated carriages and a dozen marching bands, as the governor of Illinois and the mayor watched from a reviewing stand.52
What a paradox: Italian Americans in a parade of eulogy for the king of their unified homeland, many if not most of whom would attend Mass and say prayers for the pope, Pio Nono, a recalcitrant monarchist. Such people giving shape to U.S. cities wanted the social guarantees of a liberal democracy and the spiritual certitude of their faith. The loyal folk in the pews lived beyond the contradictions of a Vatican that was hostile to republican birth pangs in Italy. New World laity waited for the Old World hierarchy to find a faith in pluralism, even as they sent Peter’s Pence donations over to Rome.
A few months after the king’s death, Pio Nono died on February 7, 1878, at age eighty-six. Anticlerical protesters engulfed the funeral procession; a riot erupted at a bridge on the Tiber, and radicals almost dumped the pope’s coffin into the river. Litigation over Pio Nono’s personal estate by several family members ran nearly a decade in the Italian courts. Cardinals finally settled the claims.53
Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci, who was elected in the conclave after Pio Nono’s death, showed greater intellect and vision. Taking the name Leo XIII, he served for twenty-five years, sequestered in the Vatican. A voracious reader who pored through newspapers and novels, Leo had “superb eyes, brilliant like black diamonds,” the novelist Émile Zola noted after a visit. Striving to bring the world and papacy into some accord, he sent nuncios to various countries and a small delegation to Washington.54 Yet he also defended the Christian Social Party in Austria, whose leader pushed an anti-Semitic agenda that some of the Austrian bishops opposed.55 A paradox deepened, as the United States recognized Liberal Italy as a nation, while priests, nuns, and editors of diocesan newspapers protested the Holy Father’s isolation. Leo XIII cast lines to Germany and France to regain Rome and the lost lands. But by the lights of modern Europe, Italy belonged to Italy. As waves of Italians settled in America, Leo refused to negotiate the Law of Guarantees. Italian authorities put away funds in anticipation of an agreement.
In 1891 Leo XIII released Rerum Novarum, one of the papacy’s most influential encyclicals. The pope aligned Catholic social teaching with workers’ rights during an era of burgeoning trade unions. Leo’s emphasis on the sanctity of private property put the church squarely against Marxism, signaling support for Italy’s Catholic-owned banks and credit associations. In America, Rerum Novarum positioned many priests and even bishops behind organized labor.
Leo XIII held none of his predecessor’s detachment about money, nor the assumption that God—or Antonelli, who had predeceased Pio Nono—would provide. Leo kept an iron trunk under his bed filled with gold, jewels, and cash. He chose Monsignor Enrico Folchi as commissario for finances. “Leo’s repeated interference in the choice of investments, and particularly in the matter of making loans, including giving one to his nephew, Count Pecci,” writes John Pollard, made Folchi’s work less easy.56 Pio Nono’s cult of personality had dissolved with his death. To build his own persona, Leo XIII summoned several religious jubilees for which tens of thousands of people flocked to the Eternal City. Monsignor Folchi helped empty the white velvet bags filled with money given by pilgrims at the papal audiences, banked the cash, exchanged the foreign notes, and obeyed Leo on how much to spend for the Court, Curia, and Vatican offices.
In the 1880s Folchi positioned the Vatican as a major stockholder in Banco di Roma which invested heavily in real estate. Elegant buildings in the Prati neighborhood, a ten-minute walk from St. Peter’s, were built as government offices and residences for bureaucrats or politicians. As real estate boomed, Folchi sank Peter’s Pence funds into Società Generale Immobiliare, a contractor that became Rome’s major builder. With the pope still a symbolic prisoner, the Vatican invested in the utility company of its jailer-city. In 1885 Banco di Roma bought controlling interest in Rome’s bus and streetcar service. Infallibility had its profit margin.
THE BUILDING BISHOPS
Washed in rivers of giving from distant dioceses, the Vatican had beauty when Boston seminarian William O’Connell studied in the 1880s at Pontifical North American College, the seminary Pio Nono founded. “Seminarians,” writes James O’Toole in Militant and Triumphant, a biography of O’Connell, gained
an abiding sense of what was called Romanità—“Roman-ness”—an intuitive belief that only from the pope and his expanding administrative apparatus could the definitive expression of Catholicism proceed. A few Roman alumni would adopt broader views once they returned home, but the majority tended to a more conservative, centralized outlook. “The Roman mind is the Church’s mind and the mind of Christ,” William O’Connell wrote later, having himself fully absorbed this attitude.57
Born in 1859, the second of six children of Irish-born parents, Will grew up in Lowell. His father toiled
in the textile mills. Irish children typically married late, with other Irish, creating strong neighborhood bonds.58 Will’s four brothers went to work with their hands; the altar boy went to Boston College, earned academic medals, and spoke at graduation. With his archbishop’s support, Will O’Connell sailed to Rome for seminary and found his stride at the North American College. As a priest he became its rector.
In 1901 O’Connell was consecrated a bishop in Rome and sent to Portland, Maine, in 1903 at age forty-four to assume his rank. In that small diocese—57 churches laced through forest land, 100 priests for 97,000 Catholics in a state of 700,000 people—he declared at his installation, “As I am American in patriotism, so am I, and shall ever be, Roman in faith and love of the church.”59 Dutiful and slightly stern, Bishop O’Connell visited churches and monitored the priests and parishes; if any finances seemed amiss he pressed his clergy for clarification. Obsessed about avoiding debt, he was determined to be a reliable contributor to the annual Peter’s Pence, as the world’s far-flung bishops registered their fealty to the Holy Father. Maine’s small diocese averaged $3,000 annually for Peter’s Pence in his five years there. In 1906 O’Connell went to Boston as coadjutor bishop, meaning that he would serve the ailing archbishop as Rome’s designated successor.
With 850,000 Catholics, Boston was a huge career move for O’Connell. Back in Maine, however, the new bishop had an audit done and found a glaring deficit. Money was missing, a good deal of it. Outraged, Bishop Louis Walsh wrote to Archbishop O’Connell seeking restitution. In a terse reply, O’Connell admitted nothing, but sent a check for $25,576.09 to repair the hole. Walsh quietly balanced his books. If the Greek philosopher Heraclitus was correct in arguing that character is fate, what of O’Connell? “He formed the habit of failing to distinguish between himself as an individual and his role as trustee for the larger, ongoing organization that existed apart from him,” writes O’Toole. In that sense of l’église, c’est moi, O’Connell followed in Pio Nono’s footsteps. “The underside of his clear and aggressive public persona was a readiness to act like a law unto himself.”60 In 1911 he was made a cardinal.
Cardinal O’Connell was a commanding figure in the line of early prelates, mostly Irish American bishops who molded the Catholic Church into a potent institution between the Civil War and the baby boom of the 1950s. These were “the building bishops”: John Hughes, Patrick Hayes, and Francis Spellman in New York; Dennis Dougherty in Philadelphia; John Ireland in St. Paul; James McIntyre (a former stockbroker) and Timothy Manning in Los Angeles; Patrick Feehan and George Mundelein in Chicago; Richard Cushing, who succeeded O’Connell in Boston. The list goes on. The bishops who spanned that era built an infrastructure of parishes and schools. Orphanages and hospitals were largely developed by orders of nuns, who also staffed the parish schools; the male religious orders, notably Jesuits, Dominicans, Salesians, Holy Cross fathers, and Christian Brothers, established high schools and colleges. But it was the bishops’ financial and real estate decisions that boosted church wealth, funding ministries and schools, creating an infrastructure that shaped an American Catholic identity. Archbishop Feehan in Chicago built a record 140 parishes in his twenty-two years that culminated in 1902.61
At five foot eight and a rotund 250 pounds, O’Connell plunged into Boston life with a Romanità splendor of the church resurgent. He mingled with Brahmin civic leaders, politicians, visiting dignitaries, and presidents. He gave his views on certain laws, opposing both Prohibition and child labor laws (which he saw as undermining the authority of the family). An adroit fund-raiser, he harnessed the generosity of an Irish society ascending toward middle class. O’Connell traveled the city in a limousine, often with his adored poodles. He built the twenty-five-room Renaissance palazzo for his residence in Brighton. As Boston’s first cardinal he filled the role of Prince of the Church to the approval of people who had real memory of hard poverty. His stature was their stature. He made lengthy European trips in each of the first seven years of his cardinalate, cultivating Vatican ties. The long winter vacations in the Bahamas came later.
Every pastor of the nearly two hundred churches needed his permission to pay any expense exceeding $100, meaning each substantial repair to a rectory or school had to pass muster with him. Pastors delivered their ledgers for annual inspection at the chancery. Wisely, he routed donations from key parishes into facilities or charities in those neighborhoods to show lay people proof of their giving. He bought a Catholic weekly, The Pilot, turning it into an archdiocesan paper that publicized his appearances (an early editor was the future New York cardinal Francis Spellman). To Rome, he sent Peter’s Pence at $20,000 annually in his first decade as prelate.62 As Boston’s first cardinal (and America’s second) O’Connell was a throwback to Antonelli the backroom man, reborn in an America of Ireland rising. The fusion of two roles, financial and religious, fanned hostilities toward popery, but “the building bishops” of O’Connell’s generation withstood nativist bigotry, tapping strength in numbers to create a vast system of social and medical services for the poor long before federal programs like welfare or Medicaid.
O’Connell personified a form of governing that held allegiance to Rome and America in equal measure. Like the other building bishops, he saw himself through a prism of the medieval church—the bishop as benevolent lord, with laypeople as vassals. As Catholics thrived in a pluralist society with a court system, elections, and a free press, O’Connell and the twentieth-century bishops molded a medieval idea of power, an insular worldview remarkable both for its long resilience and for its catalytic role in the recent abuse scandals and financial crisis.
A dress rehearsal began in 1907. The values of an Irish ward heeler melded with Romanità when the cardinal appointed Father James O’Connell, a nephew, as his secretary. In 1912 O’Connell, by then a monsignor, moved up to chancellor, the chief financial officer. He “relished being his uncle’s hatchet man,” writes John Cooney.63 The cardinal’s nephew kept the archdiocesan bank accounts, corresponded with pastors, and oversaw church insurance policies and the archdiocese’s investment portfolio—a lot of power for one young man.
Just when O’Connell fell in love with the wife of a New Jersey doctor is unclear, but on April 8, 1913, she got a quickie divorce in South Dakota and landed in Indiana the next day to marry the monsignor before a justice of the peace. They were both twenty-eight. For seven and a half years, O’Connell “lived a bizarre and schizophrenic existence, switching back and forth between two entirely different lives,” using the surname Roe at home in Manhattan on East Thirty-sixth Street (his mother-in-law lived with them) and shuttling to Boston for his church duties. The couple had no children. They lived well. James O’Toole writes:
In the summer of 1913 they sailed to Europe for a delayed honeymoon, declaring $1,600 worth of purchases after returning … Mr. Roe speculated in real estate, almost certainly with money that Monsignor O’Connell was embezzling from the church. The need to support his life in New York gave him the motive for such a crime just as surely as his access to large sums in Boston gave him the opportunity. Father [John] Mullen later claimed that an unnamed Boston banker estimated the pilfering at three-quarters of a million dollars.64
But it was a second priest, one David Toomey, whose secret life set the wheels of fate in motion. Father Toomey, the Pilot editor, was James O’Connell’s close friend—so close that he visited the O’Connells/Roes on their European honeymoon. Mrs. Roe well knew who her husband was. When David Toomey fell in love and married Florence Fossa, a friend of the Roes’, he bluffed his bride, insisting he was some kind of secret agent in those stretches of work away. Toomey was Cardinal O’Connell’s confessor. He literally absolved the cardinal of his sins. In a scene befitting a comic film, a suspicious Florence trails David to Boston, where she discovers not only that he is a priest but that he is two-timing her with his secretary at The Pilot! Bursting in on them, Florence ignites an ugly row: the cops come; Florence ends up one-on-one with the car
dinal, disgorging the sordid truth about both priests, deriding Monsignor James as “that dirty skunk.” The cardinal calms her, then excuses himself as the church lawyer steps in.
Today we would call Florence’s $7,500 settlement “hush money.”
And Toomey? Down came the sledgehammer of canon law, excommunicating him from priesthood and church. Florence washed her hands of him.65
On James, the avuncular cardinal stood passive as fallout from Toomey’s disaster wafted through the priestly circles. The papal nuncio in Washington, D.C., met with Florence. Rome demanded the chancellor’s ouster. After an amazing seven-year run in his double life, James O’Connell resigned by letter in November 1920 to “secure a respite from the arduous duties.”66 He went down to New York. The O’Connells lived comfortably ever after. Nothing broke in the press; the nephew was never prosecuted for embezzlement. But New England bishops wanted His Eminence out. Why had the cardinal tolerated his nephew’s immoral life? The New England bishops confronted O’Connell in a private meeting; his denial inflamed them.
Bishop Walsh of Maine went to Rome bearing a letter signed by the region’s brother bishops, calling for O’Connell’s ouster. Walsh presented the letter to Pope Benedict XV along with a $17,000 gift from his small diocese. The pope’s gravitas on receiving the news left Walsh encouraged, as he sailed back to America, that Boston’s corrupt cardinal would soon be gone.
Benedict XV had come through the horrors of World War I with a vision of the papacy as a moral force for the cause of peace; this was a dramatic shift from the more insular concerns of past popes. His predecessor, Pius X, was a great reactionary who persecuted forward-looking theologians for the opaque heresy called “Modernism” (a throwback to Pio Nono’s Syllabus of Errors); yet Pius X fostered a mild détente with Italy through continued support via Banco di Roma. He relaxed the Vatican prohibition against Italian Catholics voting in parliamentary elections. Pius X rejuvenated European parish life with Gregorian chant and improvements in liturgical music. The only Italian pope since the early nineteenth century to have grown up a peasant, Pius X was the only pontiff of the last two centuries (as of this writing) to become a saint. He is credited with miraculous healing. He died in 1914, one month into the world war. Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa succeeded him, a Genoese aristocrat who had done diplomatic service in Spain. Della Chiesa took the name Benedict XV.