Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [167]
But racial and cultural blending—and geopolitical maneuvering—shaped the great western city from its beginnings. The first official settlement, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles—City of Our Lady of Angels—was founded in 1781 by the Spanish crown to counteract the presumed territorial claims of Russia, which had trading posts and forts down the California coast with names such as Sebastapol. The Spanish governor recruited colonists to a pueblo along the Los Angeles River north of Mission San Gabriel—eleven families, who were headed by two Spaniards, four Indians, two blacks, and three men of mixed race. None of the wives was white; most of the twenty-two children were a mixture of Spanish, Indian, and African blood. In 1821, when Mexico won its independence from Spain, California and much of today’s Southwest fell under Mexico City’s nominal control. After the U.S. defeated Mexico in 1848, America claimed all the land north of the Rio Grande, extending out to the Pacific Ocean.17
Flush with the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills, California became the thirty-first state in the Union, admitted as a nonslave state in 1850. California’s motto was Eureka—“I have found it.” People with gilded dreams came from every corner of America and Europe; after the Civil War, jobs building the railroads drew laborers from Canton Province in China to County Cork in Ireland. A century after the founding of the pueblo at Los Angeles, in the city to the north, San Francisco, some 27 percent of the voting-age populace was Irish-born. Long after the gold fields played out, the ethnic pilgrims kept arriving in Los Angeles. As the population grew, farms became subdivisions. L.A.’s population between 1910 and 1930 grew from 319,000 to 1.24 million, of whom 100,000 were Mexicans who had fled the Revolution of 1910, followed by refugees from the late 1920s Cristero Rebellion.18 Cantwell took in three dozen exiled bishops from Mexico and established fifty Hispanic parishes. The Cristero war so central to Maciel’s identity colored Los Angeles, too. In 1934, writes historian Mike Davis, “Cantwell organized the largest demonstration in Los Angeles history: a giant procession of 40,000 people, many of them Cristero refugees, chanting ‘Viva Cristo Rey’ and marching behind banners that denounced the ‘atheistic regimes in Mexico City and Moscow.’ ”19
In 1947, when Cantwell died, Cardinal Spellman of New York recommended his chancellor, James F. McIntyre, to the Vatican. “Lean and taciturn, with the neat gray hair and rimless glasses of a corporate chieftain, McIntyre was a gifted administrator and rock-hard conservative, who fit perfectly with the Los Angeles Protestant establishment,” writes Charles R. Morris. A brokerage executive before his call to ministry, Archbishop McIntyre faced frenetic postwar growth as white Catholics moved into greater Los Angeles at a rate of one thousand per week. Stopping plans for a new cathedral, McIntyre went on to open more than one hundred new parishes and nearly twice as many schools, a seminary, and half a dozen hospitals. This construction agenda stemmed from adroit decisions in real estate, scouting land before housing subdivisions were built, buying tracts and selling the excess to fund new parishes or schools.20
In a 1954 report to the Holy See, the cardinal explained that his parishes’ indebtedness was $15 million, but only $5.5 million of that was owed to banks. As a corporation sole, the cardinal outlined his strategy for Pius XII:
1. In the name of the parish, the money is borrowed from a local bank, the parish giving a promissory note as security. The Corporation Sole then signs this note as a guarantor. This is the only security the