Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [22]
In March of every year, in fact, the IOR makes entirely available to the pope the difference between its income and expenditures the previous year. This total is kept secret, but it is believed to be close to the Peter’s Pence. At least this was the case in the four years for which figures were leaked [before Italy adopted the euro]. It came to 60.7 billion Italian lire in 1992, 72 billion in 1993, 75 billion in 1994, and 78.3 billion in 1995. During those same years, the Peter’s Pence was just slightly above these amounts.
Given this state of affairs, 2007 should have brought Benedict XVI for his “charity” a sum total of about two hundred million dollars.11
The Vatican budget ran a deficit of about 2.4 million euros in 2007. “Chopped liver, by comparison,” mused Magister.
“For many years the Vatican also subsidized the diocese of Rome,” explains Jesuit Father Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Center and author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church. “Now the diocese’s budget is separate and doing well under Italy’s tax check-off system, which allows every taxpayer to approve a payment to the church,” Reese told me. “Even some Communists mark the box on their tax forms because they trust the church with their money more than they trust the state; so the Italian church has more money to donate to the Vatican. The sex abuse crisis may change that.”
The Vatican Bank is an “off-the-books” asset: no accounting on the Holy See financial statement, nothing on the bank’s profits, losses, or how much it gives the pope. Peter’s Pence, however, powered papal finances before the Vatican Bank ever existed. As this charity evolved, it propped up the Vatican through decades of war and convulsions in Europe. The Vatican financial system is a product of charitable donations harnessed for capitalist investment.
THE WORLD OF PIO NONO
In 1849, when Catholic Church membership in America stood at 5 percent of its size today, the bishops collected just under $26,000 to help a financially crippled pope. The international funding drive revived a tradition called Peter’s Pence. French Catholics led the benefactors until the late nineteenth century, giving way to the American church. But the 1849 American gift to Pius IX was substantial for the time. American Catholic support for Peter’s Pence—particularly from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston—rose with the tides of Irish, Italian, and other European immigrants settling in the cities. In the 1870s, with his papacy afloat on these donations, Pius IX railed against the unified Kingdom of Italy, demanding the return of a massive farming territory to the pope as an absolute monarch. As wrangling over the Papal States dragged on, Peter’s Pence fed Vatican investments in Rome’s booming real estate market.12
When the dispute over the lost territories was finally resolved to the Vatican’s benefit, on the eve of the Great Depression, the Catholic Church in America stood as the Holy Father’s chief benefactor. U.S. bishops raised money with the power of politicians, sending streams of support to the Holy Father.
The financial links that spanned the Atlantic were strained even before the global credit crisis erupted in 2008. At the onset of Benedict XVI’s papacy in 2005, American dioceses were reeling from financial losses in the sex abuse cases. Bishops who faced mass lawsuits had resorted to bankruptcy filings in Portland, Spokane, San Diego, Tucson, and Davenport, Iowa (and later Wilmington, Delaware, and Milwaukee); they looked for no Vatican bailout. The money ran to Rome, always had. Still, Roman Curia officials monitored the bankruptcies and litigation losses. Under a 2002 agreement with the Vatican,