Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [14]
Postwar Italy was a bleeding chaos of embedded Fascists, the largest Communist Party in Western Europe backed by Soviet Russia, a resurgent mafia in the south, and the Christian Democrats, a party supported by Pope Pius XII. The leader of the Christian Democrats, Alcide De Gasperi, had been an outspoken anti-Fascist before the war; he was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1927 and released to the custody of the previous pope, Pius XI, in 1929. De Gasperi spent the next fifteen years basically living in the Vatican Library. “Catholic, Italian and democratic, in that order” was his motto.7 In 1945, as one of the first postwar prime ministers, he led a church-sponsored party with little organization apart from Catholic Action, a movement that Pius X had launched in 1905 to unite lay activism and the hierarchy’s agenda. The little social cohesion left in postwar Italy lay with the 65,000 parish priests serving 24,000 parishes in 300 dioceses. Another 200,000 religious order priests and nuns staffed schools, hospitals, and charitable organizations.8 As De Gasperi guided the Christian Democrats through three governments in as many years, dozens of parties were vying for power. The Truman administration braced for Italy’s 1948 elections. “The American intervention in Italy was large and well-coordinated, very much the work of an ‘efficient machine,’ ” wrote U.S. intelligence historian Thomas Powers.9 “Cash, lots of it, would be needed to help defeat the communists,” observed journalist Tim Weiner in a history of the CIA10—an estimated $10 million, according to the CIA station chief in Rome. Thus, Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder decided
to tap into the Exchange Stabilization Fund set up in the Depression to shore up the value of the dollar overseas through short-term currency trading, and converted during World War II as a depository for captured Axis loot. The fund held $200 million earmarked for the reconstruction of Europe. It delivered millions into the bank accounts of wealthy American citizens, many of them Italian Americans, who then sent the money to newly formed political fronts created by the CIA. Donors were instructed to place a special code on their income tax forms alongside their “charitable donation.” The millions were delivered to Italian politicians and priests of Catholic Action, a political arm of the Vatican.11
Between the CIA and U.S. relief projects, America poured $350 million into Italy during the twelve months before the April 18, 1948, election. The Vatican Bank, which was founded in 1942 under Pius XII to consolidate the Holy See’s finances during the worst of World War II, became a conduit for funds to the Christian Democrats. Pius “provided 100 million lire [$185,000] from his personal bank,” writes John Cornwell, “a sum of money apparently raised from the sale of U.S. war matériel and earmarked for the Vatican to spend on anti-Communist activities.”12 The 1948 parliamentary elections were the first under Italy’s postwar constitution since the fall of Fascism.
“The fate of Italy depends upon the forthcoming election and the conflict between Communism and Christianity, between slavery and freedom,” declared Cardinal Francis J. Spellman of New York. On Vatican orders, Spellman entreated Italian Americans to write to relatives in the old country. Spellman, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, and the golden boy Frank Sinatra made radio broadcasts for De Gasperi’s party.13 The Vatican pulled out all the stops, “even to the extent of swinging open the doors of convents and marching cloistered nuns off to the polling places to vote for Christian Democrat candidates,” reported journalist Nino Lo Bello.14 The Christian Democrats won by a heavy margin in an election that also secured the party’s narcotic dependency on CIA money. “The CIA’s practice of purchasing elections and politicians with bags of cash was repeated in Italy—and in many other nations—for the