Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  For a pope with such a volatile streak, the reliance on American finances must have been humbling. In 1928 Cardinal Mundelein arranged a $300,000 loan from the Chicago archdiocese for the Holy See. In Rome, a young Boston monsignor, Francis Spellman, had a minor post (overseeing playgrounds built by the Knights of Columbus) that positioned him to befriend wealthy Americans who spent winters in the Eternal City. Spellman facilitated financial gifts to Vatican officials on up to the pope. “Holy Father asked me for three autos,” Spellman wrote in his diary on February 8, 1929.86 But the days of papal begging for limousines were about to end.

  Cardinal Gasparri met with Mussolini at his residences over several years, negotiating in fits and starts. On February 11, 1929, Gasparri, as papal surrogate, signed the Lateran Pacts with Prime Minister Mussolini in a brief ceremony. Vatican City became a sovereign, neutral state with ownership of fourteen churches and properties in Rome. Catholicism became Italy’s official religion. The Holy See would control the appointment of bishops. In compensation for parts of Rome and the Papal States, Italy paid the equivalent of $92 million. The Vatican agreed to reinvest about 60 percent of it into government bonds.

  “Italy has been given back to God and God to Italy,” the Vatican paper L’Osservatore Romano exulted. Pius was pleased that Mussolini was overpowering Communism in Italy. But the Lateran treaty was Faustian at both ends. Mussolini tightened his grip on Italy, gaining respect on the world stage, while bankrolling his adversary, whose office magnified in global public opinion. Mussolini won a huge boost in Catholic popularity, particularly where he most needed it, in northern Italy. Pius gushed that Mussolini was “a man sent by providence.”87 As if heeding the whispers of Pio Nono’s ghost, he signed the death warrant of the PPI, but as time passed he watched in horror as Fascism forged its creed. “Like the Christian ideal, the Fascist ideal is one in a state of perpetual becoming,” a party secretary declared.88 An ex-Fascist likened the radiant banners, mass marches, and solemn torch-lit rites to “a religion, a divinity all its own: the State, with its own Supreme worship … to which everything should be sacrificed.” In 1931 Mussolini pulled Boy Scouts from parishes into Fascist groups, saying, “Youth shall be ours.” Pius used an encyclical to condemn Fascism as “Pagan worship of the State.”89

  He was absolutely correct but by then in a quagmire of his own making.

  Gasparri retired in 1930. In the next few years Pius, through his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, oversaw concordats with European countries to secure papal authority in naming bishops, state support for clergy salaries, and autonomy for Catholic Action. Pius XI saw this movement of laypeople guided by bishops and clergy as a crusade waged by a Christian army against immorality in popular culture. “One of its tasks,” Peter Godman writes of Catholic Action, “was to regain the allegiance and sympathies of the working classes alienated by Communism.”90 But in promoting an ethos of social cohesion through the church, Pius XI turned his back on party politics at a time when pluralism was the last hedge against the boot heel. When Cardinal Pacelli, a skilled diplomat and future pope, signed the 1933 concordat with Germany, the centrist Catholic Party there was in eclipse. As Pacelli ruefully joked to a British envoy, the Nazis “would probably not violate all of the articles of this Concordat at the same time.”91

  After its long estrangement from Liberal Italy, the Vatican became a financial partner of Fascist Italy. Pius launched a major construction project to remediate decades of deferred maintenance and expansion of the Vatican infrastructure, work that pumped Rome’s sagging economy. His pivotal move was the hiring of Bernardino Nogara to manage the many millions. Papa Ratti, as Italians called Pius, was from Milan, the industrial and fashion center. The Milanese looked down on Romans as lazy, unproductive bureaucrats—“Roma ladrona,” Rome the big thief. For financial advice Pius turned to a small group of Milanese, including his brother, a count, who became a key figure in the Vatican’s civil administration. Among the Milanese, Nogara came with a good pedigree. An engineer who had managed mining operations in Britain and Bulgaria before the war, he had gone on to Istanbul as a vice president of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, and later worked on the Economic Council of the 1919 Versailles Treaty conference. A specialist in international currency, Nogara was a devout Catholic who kept a copy of The Divine Comedy at his bedside. He was on good terms with the Ratti family, and among his own siblings, two brothers were seminary rectors, a sister was the mother superior at a convent, and another brother supervised the Vatican Museums. When Pius XI asked the fifty-nine-year-old Nogara to run the newly established Special Administration, managing the Lateran windfall of $92 million of which $39.7 million went to the Vatican (the other $52.4 million went into government bonds at 5 percent), Nogara reportedly insisted that his investment not be constrained by religious or doctrinal issues, and that he be free to invest Vatican funds anywhere in the world he so chose. Pius said yes.92

  Nogara guided investments in stocks, bonds, currency exchanges, and gold, amassing profits for the Holy See’s muscular new wealth as the global financial crisis squeezed Italy. Mussolini created an Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) which issued bonds (backed by banks and insurance and mortgage companies) through which the state gained control of key industries. Nogara became an IRI adviser and made Vatican investments in the safest bonds.

  “Whenever I read the words: The sacrifice of our Father Abraham, I cannot help but be deeply moved,” Pius XI exclaimed tearfully to a group of visiting Belgians on September 6, 1938. “Mark well, we call Abraham our Patriarch, our ancestor. Anti-Semitism is irreconcilable with this lofty thought, the noble reality which this prayer expresses … But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are all Semites.” Father Sturzo, the exiled leader of the banned PPI, made sure the pope’s words got published in a Belgian newspaper.93

  Pius XI’s change of heart did not ignite a collective mind shift. The Vatican did not report his words. Inside the Curia Fascist sympathizers worked alongside priests of a broader worldview. Anti-Semitism was a curse of the clerical culture that surfaced in Catholic journals in America and Europe, including Commonweal and America, in the 1930s.94 Many bishops who backed the New Deal kept silent on Mussolini and the slurs on Jews by the popular “radio priest” from Detroit, Charles Coughlin, until his career ended.

  As Mussolini closed ranks with Hitler, Nogara shifted the investments into U.S. manufacturing, bonds, and, in a $7.6 million transfer of Vatican gold out of London, the Federal Reserve.95 Italy joined Germany’s march to war. Pius XI scorned “barbaric Hitlerism” and “the myth of race and blood.” When he passed away in 1939, Mussolini said, “At last, that stubborn old man is dead.”96 As the war ended in 1945, anti-Fascist partisans captured Mussolini and his mistress, executed them, and hung their corpses upside down in Milan.

  Cardinal Pacelli became Pius XII. The son of a Vatican lawyer and financial adviser to Pio Nono and Leo XIII, Eugenio Pacelli had a lifelong friendship with one of Rome’s distinguished Jewish physicians in whose home he had shared Sabbath dinner as a youth. In 1916, as a young monsignor, he drafted a statement for Benedict XV in support of Poland’s Jews.97 As the beleaguered pontiff in World War II, Pius XII ordered priests, nuns, and nuncios (like Angelo Roncalli in Istanbul, the future John XXIII) to help Jews avoid Nazi deportations to death camps. His refusal to publicly denounce Hitler and the Nazis was “a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism,” charged John Cornwell in the provocatively titled Hitler’s Pope.98 Later, in a paperback edition, Cornwell retracted some of his criticism; however, the book spotlighted deep divisions among historians and Jewish leaders over historic anti-Semitism in the Vatican and larger European church, and whether the Holocaust could have been halted. The ongoing debate has such severe implications for Catholic-Jewish relations that Pius’s candidacy for sainthood seems stalled.99 Yet he was praised by Albert Einstein in 1940 as a defender of Jews and by Golda Meir, then Israel’s fo
reign minister, at the time of his death. In the thirteen years after the war, Pius stood on the global stage as a symbol of peace. Regardless of how the debate transpires over Pius XII’s wartime reticence about Hitler and the Nazis, the two world wars turned the papal agenda toward the cause of peace, and under John Paul II the sanctity of human rights. That evolution hit a turning point in 1965, when Paul VI, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, raised his arms and cried: “No more war! War never again.”100 How far the papacy had come since Pio Nono’s complaint to a British envoy that he could not execute a single rebel in the Papal States.

  In the century of that transition, the Vatican financial system shifted from a religious monarchy, scrambling to recover from the loss of Rome and the Papal States’ fiefdom, to the emergent economy of the Holy See, which relied on Peter’s Pence to accrue dividends by investing in the city of Rome through the decades in which the pope was a putative Vatican prisoner. Who is to say whether Italians or any other believers in the pews of American churches would object to the use of those funds had they known? None of them wanted a pope in rags. Thanks to Mussolini’s payout, Bernardino Nogara forged a hybrid form of religious capitalism by investing in Roman infrastructure, gold, and foreign markets. In 1942, Pius XII established the Vatican Bank.

  CHAPTER 3

  SEEDS OF REVOLT

  Peter Borré was no bleeding heart on the subject of poverty, but he believed in Christian duty. The low-rise projects off Mystic River were the largest concentration of public housing in New England. Borré realized that the pastor of St. Catherine of Siena, Father Bob Bowers, was about more than “reaching out” to the lowliest members of his flock. Bowers’s liturgies featured Spanish songs. Rosie Piper adored Bob Bowers, the pastor with a youthful face and graying hair who welcomed the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans as he preached about dignity. Borré liked Bowers’s energy for the parish, once a lost cause, now a blossoming place.

  The parish named for Saint Catherine of Siena lay at the base of Bunker Hill Street. Midway up Charlestown’s long incline stood St. Mary parish, a Tudor Gothic gem, just past Monument Square and the obelisk that pointed like a needle toward the sky. Several blocks farther up, St. Francis de Sales was the most insular and rock-hard Irish of the three parishes.

  Bowers organized a food pantry for hungry people and English-as-a-second-language classes taught by a volunteer Jewish doctor. Many of the unskilled workers taking ESL had no citizenship papers. He runs a good church, Rosie Piper told herself. She felt her $10 donation on Sunday was helping Bowers steer a parish full of life. Imagining Father Bowers thirty years on, she wrote a $100 check for the spring 2003 collection for the clergy retirement fund.

  Borré assumed that when the deal was struck on the settlements for the 552 clergy abuse victims, grown now and with gladiatorial attorneys, the church coffers would take a hard dent that the new archbishop would repair over time. He thought Bowers a bit of a sentimental liberal, but he liked his work and saw how hard he gave to the parish.

  Warm and outgoing, with an easy wit, Bowers had been inspired by Dorothy Day’s radical witness in the Catholic Worker Movement, where activists lived at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. He liked the liberation theology of Latin America and had been active in a group assisting the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. Bowers drew his values from an ideal of Jesus as a peacemaker, and peace as a living force of hope.

  Born in 1960, Bob Bowers had grown up in Greater Boston, an attorney’s son with three older brothers by whom he now had eight nephews. On graduating from Boston College in 1982 with a B.A. in philosophy, Bowers entered St. John, the archdiocesan seminary in Brighton. As a priest, his assignments had been in comfortable parishes where, with one exception, he had felt welcome. His previous parish had been in Milton, six miles outside of Boston.

  Bowers had gotten his new assignment from Cardinal Law two days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Exhausted from the jammed prayer services in Milton, he entered the chancery in a daze from the endless TV loop of airplanes smashing into skyscrapers, spitting back balls of fire and smoke.

  Law, then sixty-nine, with white hair and a thick girth, rose from his desk with a smile. Too young to call him “Bernie” as certain older clergy did, Bowers issued a deferential “Your Eminence.” Law was a Boston potentate at ease with politicians, bankers, and CEOs. But he had an emotional distance that many priests noticed, a self-centeredness that some speculated came from his background as an only child, seeing himself as the pivot point in most situations. In 1985, when Law was invested as a cardinal, several hundred Bostonians traveled to Rome. At a reception in the North American College courtyard, Law declared, “This is the strongest moment for the church since the Reformation.”1

  Strong is one way to describe Law’s presence at the Congregation for Bishops in Rome: he became the go-to prelate in choosing new men for the U.S. hierarchy. The prefect of Bishops, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, met with Pope John Paul II every Saturday; he saw the pope’s esteem for Law and acted accordingly.2 Law, a maker of bishops, made monthly trips to Rome. In Boston, he made late-night hospital rounds, visiting sick people, taking time to chat with his chaplains. Law was generally benevolent toward his priests, but he had a strain of cold arrogance. At a clergy conference on canon law issues, Law interrupted a lecturer to declare, “Father, while I am in this archdiocese, I am the Law!”3

  Bowers’s previous encounter with Law had been in 1996, when the young priest asked to be reassigned; he shared a rectory with an alcoholic pastor whose rage made daily life toxic. Law sent him to Milton, where he thrived. But the old drunk had gotten under Bowers’s skin. “I want to share with you what it is like,” he had written in a National Catholic Reporter essay:

  Some do not seem to know how to pastor or why. They prefer the title and the image, which is accountable to none. I have known them. I thought we were colleagues. I thought we would collaborate. I thought we would empower. I never thought we were better than anyone else. But I never thought I would be treated as less than others.

  If you are not a priest, if you have never been a priest, you cannot know what I am talking about. I barely know myself. I know I am disappointed. I thought priests followed Jesus and made mistakes. I did not know it was a mistake to think all priests follow Jesus. There are indeed some who follow power. And they are a disappointment.

  Does that sound harsh? I pause in my heart to laugh about it and to cry. Priests who will not share, cannot share love. Pastors and autocrats who know their word is law. Institutions long decayed that shut people out, out of Eucharist, out of authority, out of governance, out of a shared wisdom. They do not listen, except to denial. They don’t have to.

  I wonder if they are afraid or hurt. But I no longer excuse it.

  We are not crying about some “vocation crisis.” We are not whining about the work and the task. We are not complaining about celibacy and sexual identity and the roles men and women play in the church. These things just add to the already burdensome experience of being disappointed. We just want to survive.4

  Cardinal Law wrote Bowers, demanding a letter to explain why he wrote the article. Bowers complied; Law then summoned him. Bowers’s genealogy included three cousins who had been nuns and a pair of granduncles who were priests. He unburdened himself, telling Law how his rectory experiences had fallen gallingly short of his seminary expectations—the drunken priest nearly attacked him in one of his stupors. He spoke about the chasm he felt from certain older clerics who were robed in pomposity. Law listened. When Bowers finished, Law said, “I ordained you once and I’d do it again.” That was it: issue resolved. Law had registered his message: No more troublesome articles, Father.

  Bowers left the chancery on a wave of ambivalence.

  Fluent in Spanish, Law was a strong advocate for dark immigrants who came to Boston. The son of a U.S. Air Force officer, he was born in Mexico and moved often with his parents. Elected
president of his black-majority high school class in the Virgin Islands, Bernie Law went to Harvard, and on graduation entered the seminary. As a young priest in Mississippi during the 1960s, he championed the civil rights struggle and became a monsignor at the Jackson diocese, striding on the good side of history. After working in Washington, D.C., for the bishops’ conference, he became a bishop and spent several years at the head of a small diocese in Missouri. In 1984 Pope John Paul II named him archbishop of Boston, an area of 144 towns and cities, with nearly 2 million Catholics. Law announced that the archdiocese would cover the maternity costs and handle adoption for any unwanted pregnancy. After he became a cardinal in 1985, far fewer people called him Bernie. He liked “Your Eminence.”

  His absolutism on abortion and on gay relationships did not endear Law to liberals. But he forged ties with Jewish leaders in an ecumenical spirit, and was a visible advocate for poor people, regardless of their citizenship. Catholic conservatives bridled when he gave Communion to pro-choice senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. He backed Congressman Joe Kennedy’s annulment request, to remain a Catholic in good standing after his second marriage. Kennedy’s annulment took on a ten-year odyssey through the Vatican courts, before it was stunningly revoked, after a well-documented appeal by his former wife, Sheila Rauch Kennedy. She dissected the process in a 1997 memoir, Shattered Faith. After her position was vindicated, she called the process “very dishonest … The way it is used in American tribunals, it can be anything—a bad hair day, your goldfish died, you weren’t playing with a full deck when you married twenty years ago. And people defending [the marriage], usually women, have been belittled.”5

  In sermons Law tended to elongate his vowels, a high sign of gravitas. Socially, he had silken charm. But the side of Law that had to have things his way showed in 1992, when he lashed out at media coverage of James Porter, a notorious ex-priest whose crimes caught up with him, at great cost to the Fall River diocese, as Porter went to jail. In a rare rupture of self-control, Law declared, “By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.”6 But his private side showed traces of doubt. In 1998 Law agreed to sit for an artist named Channing Thieme who was preparing an exhibition called Boston Faces. Thieme, a non-Catholic, approached him with a natural curiosity; they bantered in the two sessions as he struck a formal pose. When she returned with the finished picture, Law was delighted. What’s the toughest part of your job? she asked.