Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [25]
The Pope sent James a written assurance through his nuncio in Paris. He had the best intentions with respect to the Jews in the Papal States, he said, and he intimated that he would soon issue an edict abolishing the ghetto. But, he added, it would be unseemly—and indeed unthinkable—to directly link the making of a loan to such an edict.23
In January 1850 Rothschild approved a loan of 50 million francs. On April 12, Pio Nono returned to beaten-down Rome, reclaiming the city of his rule. But to his lender, he yielded no policy shift in return. In fact, he swung to the right, reverting to harsh controls on the Jewish ghettos as before.24
Just as he was anchoring himself on the wrong side of Italian history, Pio Nono emerged as a figure of sympathy outside Italy. Stirred by the spectacle of an exiled pope, Catholic patricians in Paris revived a medieval tradition, Peter’s Pence (historically, a tax of one penny per household in England for the occupant of St. Peter’s throne),25 to directly assist the beleaguered Pio Nono. U.S. dioceses raised $25,978.24 in 1849 “for the relief of His Holiness.”26 The New York archdiocese contributed $6,200 and Philadelphia $2,800. The Catholic population (about 1.4 million) offered prayers for the pope whose tribulations made them feel closer to him. In helping him, they helped church and faith.27
For secretary of state, Pio Nono chose a shrewd young deacon from a well-connected family in Naples. Giacomo Antonelli was not a priest, yet Pius so valued his skills that he made him a cardinal, stirring jealousy among other ecclesial princes. Tall, lean, and “demonically astute,” in the scalding words of one chronicler, Antonelli toiled in the shadows of Pio Nono’s carousel personality. The cardinal had a brother in banking who provided commercial contacts beyond Italy. Guiding papal finances amid a sea change in European politics, Antonelli restructured the Holy See’s debt, put the court and the Curia in separate budgets, and imposed tighter accounting procedures on the Papal States.28 He installed his brother as head of the Pontifical Bank. “A greedy man,” huffed one historian in describing Antonelli.29 Another sibling gained the monopoly on Roman grain imports. “The Antonelli brothers fixed the price of corn, so that they and their middlemen amassed large fortunes … [in] one of the last cases of grand Papal nepotism,” Anthony Rhodes writes. Pio Nono called Antonelli “my Barabbas.”30
In 1857 Antonelli used Peter’s Pence as collateral in negotiating a new loan with Rothschild. Nevertheless, Pius refused to order the return of a six-year-old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, who had been taken from his parents by police in Bologna after a servant claimed that she secretly baptized the boy when he was one and severely ill. Placed in the House of Catechumens (those studying for the faith), the boy visited Pio Nono. The pope took the child “into public audiences, playing hide and seek with him under his cloak.”31
Outrage swelled in the international press; Pius browbeat Jewish leaders of Rome in an audience when they pleaded with him to return the boy to his family. “By the grace of God I have seen my duty, and I would rather cut off all my fingers than shrink from it,” declared the pope. The boy entered a seminary. As a priest Mortara had fleeting family memories. He met his relatives as an adult and never truly reconciled with his family. (He died in 1940 in a Belgian monastery at age eighty-eight.) Revulsion rose in many countries for the pope’s treatment of the Mortaras. “Even his critics, exasperated by his stubbornness and unimpressed by his modest intellect, admitted that it was impossible to dislike him,” notes papal historian