Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [23]
Habits of the heart can defy easy explanation. Behind the financial ties lay a strange romance between New World faithful and the Old World’s last sovereign monarchy, robed in messy Italian politics. But when the Vatican needed money, Catholic America delivered. The Vatican’s financial dependency stood apart from the lawsuits and government probes over the last decade, in America and Ireland, that disgorged shocking church files on predatory priests. As the outlines surfaced of the church’s greatest crisis since the Reformation, Pope John Paul II stood passive, other than to occasionally apologize or scold the media. In 2002, when clergy child-sex cases provoked an international scandal, John Paul, ailing with Parkinson’s disease, blamed therapists for misleading bishops; Vatican cardinals blasted the media and lawyers. To concede failure by the pope was unspeakable, if not unthinkable.
The idea of an inerrant pope has a stormy history enmeshed with the development of church funding. In seventy years, the Vatican went from being a charity case to a Depression-era financial power, providing loans to Fascist Italy. As this strange odyssey unfolded, the image of the pope as a religious monarch with landed wealth changed into that of a preacher for global peace.
The seminal figure in our account is Pope Pius IX, “Pio Nono” as Italians called him, nono meaning “ninth.” Pio Nono reacted to the loss of the Papal States by republican forces by demanding the return of the ancient agricultural territories as a right of monarchical absolutism. Pio Nono was the first celebrity pope, his persona garnering affection from Catholics in many countries. Like most celebrities he was in part a creation of publicity; his genial personality had a strange side that sometimes ran dark. Still, bishops and cardinals who traveled to Rome, bearing financial gifts, gained prestige for themselves back home.
Born on May 13, 1792, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was the youngest of nine children. His father was a count in Senigallia on the Adriatic. Priests from aristocratic families had favored status in the Italian hierarchy; cardinals and archbishops were political figures in governing Rome and the historic Italian midlands known as the Papal States, where the church was the state. Two of Mastai-Ferretti’s uncles were bishops; one served at St. Peter’s Basilica. In adolescence Giovanni had seizures attributed to epilepsy. Whatever the neurology, his pleasant personality was subject to angry flares and a weird sense of humor. Family connections helped. A modest student in seminary, he was a priest at twenty-four and papal diplomat in four short years. In 1823 he was posted to Chile for two years. Back in Rome, he oversaw a hospice. In 1827, his thirty-fifth year, Mastai-Ferretti became archbishop of Spoleto in the Papal States, and in 1840, a cardinal.14
Reputedly tireless, pastoral, and known for good humor, Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti at age fifty-four was elected pope in the conclave of 1846, a compromise choice who impressed his cardinal peers with a balance of humility and gregariousness. Pope Pius IX entered his reign as a populist. Given to taking spontaneous walks through Rome, installing streetlights, offering an amnesty to rebels in the Papal States, releasing Jews from the onerous requirement of attending weekly sermons by priests, he set up a commission to study the condition of Jewish ghettos.15 Pio Nono also held a rocklike belief in his worldly kingdom. He was eight in 1799 when Napoleon’s troops invaded Rome and captured Pope Pius VI, who died a prisoner in France. By Pio Nono’s time Italy had reverted to its status before the Napoleonic conquest: a patchwork of kingdoms and autonomous states, not a nation with a settled identity.
The French Revolution of 1789 had decapitated one king, but royalty still ruled many parts of Europe in the middle