Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [27]
A mist of irony suffused the Vatican Council. Pius, the antirepublican, wanted the bishops to vote, as if in a parliament, for investing his office with a superhuman power. When an Italian cardinal spoke in opposition, Pio Nono bristled at his “error.” Then he declared: “I, I am the tradition!”42
Such hubris may have sparked a revolt on a preliminary vote on the wording of the papal text, in which the first ballot had 88 votes against Pius, 62 for, and about 85 bishops absent—on account of their leaving Rome. The French troops packed up, heading out for war with Prussia. The Vatican was unprotected. Fifty-seven bishops opposed to infallibility left before voting. A lopsided number of bishops Pio Nono had appointed in Italy and Spain rallied to his position; he won, 533–2.43 But the margin could not offset the misgivings of those who had left. “There was something hollow about this victory, which prevented even the hardliners from showing ebullience,” writes Wills.44
Antonelli the money manager warned the pope that infallibility would alienate many people. “I have the Blessed Virgin on my side,” rejoined Pio Nono.45 Indeed, the infallibility doctrine applied retroactively to the pope’s 1854 declaration of Mary’s birth without original sin (the Immaculate Conception). Otherwise, none of his pronouncements after the Vatican Council carried the stamp of infallibility. (To date, its only other invocation was in 1950 when Pius XII announced that Mary ascended bodily into heaven.) Such decrees of a spiritual realm stood apart from an emerging age of science. As the geography controlled by the Supreme Pontiff shrank to the size of a small town, the idea of papal perfection enlarged his power, suggesting a reach no president, prime minister, or dictator could rival.
As the papacy’s financial struggle deepened, Pio Nono quipped, “I may be infallible, but I am certainly bankrupt.”46 Infallibility, however, produced an ironic silver lining. As a popular misconception arose that the pope could never make a mistake, the papacy became a symbol of pure truth. Funds poured in from Catholics in Europe and the Americas, registering support for the pope.
The Vatican Council ended. Liberal Italy swallowed Rome and the remaining Papal States. Shorn of the ancient lands, a king without an army, Pio Nono crossed the Tiber into tiny Vatican City—the 108 acres encompassing St. Peter’s Basilica, the Apostolic Palace, gardens, and historic buildings—a self-proclaimed “Prisoner of the Vatican,” vowing bitterly not to reenter Rome proper until Italy returned the land. This was Pio Nono’s full-throated sympathetic coda to the dying age of European monarchy.
“The Achilles’ heel of the Roman theory of infallibility is in the last resort lack of faith,” the eminent theologian Hans Küng would write many years later in assessing Vatican I, as the council is called. “True, God acts on the Church through the Holy Spirit … But the human beings who constitute the Church can err, miscalculate and blunder, mishear, misunderstand and go astray.”47
Pio Nono, the blundering geopolitician, had won election as the infallible dogmatist. Priests in Ireland and Germany handed out palm cards of His Holiness in a dungeon on a straw bed, a prisoner of evil Italians.48 Popular myth produced its opposite: a stunning 1.7 million lire for Peter’s Pence yielded at an 1874 Catholic congress in Venice.49 Incensed by Pio Nono’s hostility, the Kingdom of Italy