Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [26]
In 1860 Cavour’s coalition of Piedmont-Sardinia was allied with the nationalist Garibaldi’s southern forces as the Risorgimento captured two-thirds of the Papal States. Garibaldi, who had once worked as a candle maker on Staten Island, became a hero in America. “The new birth of Italy is already the grandest event of the modern period,” asserted the Dante scholar Charles Eliot Norton. “The claim for Peter’s Pence may well remind us of the Crusades,” the New York Times drily opined. “But today when the Holy City is attacked, it is by Catholics—Catholics from the South and from the North.”33
Pio Nono shifted from benevolent despot to reactionary monarch. He struck back (without identifying Cavour, Garibaldi, or republicans)34 in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, an edict that cracked the whip against the emergence of European democracy. Garry Wills calls the Syllabus “grand in its crazy way” for its declaration that the pope should never have to “reconcile himself, or agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”35
Antonelli, however, had a new marketing asset: the papal image. The distribution of pictures and small cards bearing Pio Nono’s face, combined with newspaper coverage, made him “a popular icon better known than that of any pope in history.”36 As bishops in Europe and America rallied to the cause, Peter’s Pence averaged 8 million lire yearly from 1859 to 1870.37 Although initially conceived to provide military defense for the pope, the money was his to use as he wished.
Despite Pius’s intransigence on freeing Jews, Rothschild took a long view. His bank also lent to the royal house of Piedmont. For a French bank to have an embattled pope among its clients did not hurt, even if his betrayal did. With two-thirds of the Papal States controlled by Italian forces, Pio Nono stood helpless at the birth of the Kingdom of Italy. Thus, in 1861 he excommunicated its king, Victor Emmanuel II. Pio Nono rebuffed overtures by the new leaders for the Law of Guarantees, which pledged 3.5 million lire a year to papal coffers and defense of the Vatican. Count Cavour, the leader pushing for a rapprochement, called for “a free church in a free state.” Antonelli the shrewd bargainer might have cut a better deal had he only had papal support. But Pio Nono believed in his kingship. He refused to concede his lost control of the territories.38
Money for daily operations, notably the salaries of Vatican lay workers, was a pressing need. The Holy See turned to French bishops, seeking subscription loans to be raised by the laity, a scheme quickly quashed for the conflict posed to Peter’s Pence. Catholic financiers suggested a worldwide papal lottery; the Vatican said no. In this quagmire Antonelli gave the order for a massive minting of silver coins “with less than the prescribed amount of necessary metal.”39 French and Swiss banks rejected the quick-fix cheap coins. Money spread, inflation rose: the papacy by 1870 had a public debt of 20 million lire.
Amid the tribulations, Pio Nono kept his odd sense of humor. “How is it,” the pope asked a British envoy in early 1866, “that the British can hang two thousand Negroes to put down an uprising in Jamaica, and receive only universal praise for it, while I cannot hang a single man in the Papal States without provoking worldwide condemnation?” At his own question he burst out laughing, repeating it, shaking a lone finger.40 The envoy wondered if the pope was sane. In 1871 the pope ordered Italians not to vote in parliamentary elections, a decree that magnified his detachment from politics and undercut Vatican influence on party development as democratic changes swept through Europe.
French troops supplied the garrison that defended the pope. In 1869 Pio Nono summoned all of his bishops to a Vatican Council. He wanted their support for infallibility—that the pope could not err on