Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [28]
From his elegant bunker with the garden paths and great Vatican buildings, Pio Nono carved out a global map, creating more than two hundred new dioceses and appointing bishops to run them, a religious expansion in contrast to his tiny kingdom. He named more saints than all popes in the previous 150 years combined, a breathtaking pace unmatched until the twenty-seven-year pontificate of John Paul II. When a Jesuit adviser suggested a truce with Italy over reparations for the Papal States, Pio Nono sacked him, declaring, “In Rome, the Head of the Church must be either ruler or prisoner.”50
The Cambridge historian John F. Pollard calculates that in the seven years following the 1870 fall of Rome, the Vatican saved 4.3 million lire annually from Peter’s Pence income. Antonelli’s investment strategy ignored Italy, still a semifeudal agrarian economy, for more industrialized countries. The nuncios, or papal ambassadors, played a pivotal role. Writes Pollard:
Much of the Vatican’s money was deposited in foreign banks, especially Rothschilds in Paris, the Société Générale in Brussels and the Bank of England; little or no money was sent to the United States at this juncture, though there is evidence that Antonelli did contemplate depositing money there. Antonelli used the papal nuncios as the agents of his financial operations abroad, especially in the matter of seeking attractive bank accounts and stocks and bonds, rather than company shares. Two Roman financial middlemen … performed various necessary operations, smuggling in Peter’s Pence when the Italian governmental authorities showed hostility, exchanging currencies, cashing stocks and bonds which formed part of Peter’s Pence, and selling precious objects donated by the pious faithful.51
Pio Nono refused to negotiate reparations, stubbornly demanding the return of Rome and the ancient plantation belt, unfazed about the bleak peonage on which the lost kingdom had rested. Antonelli streamlined papal finances, steering investments into credit and commerce. Blind to the chance for a diplomatic rapprochement, Pio Nono rebuffed the king’s family in their request that he preside at Victor Emmanuel’s funeral in 1878. Two hundred thousand people thronged the streets for the procession as he was laid to rest in Rome’s Pantheon—another chance to make peace squandered. Splits were surfacing in America, too. When Pittsburgh’s bishop denied Italians a Mass for the king, they met in a Presbyterian church. In Chicago, four thousand Italians held a memorial parade with two hundred decorated carriages and a dozen marching bands, as the governor of Illinois and the mayor watched from a reviewing stand.52
What a paradox: Italian Americans in a parade of eulogy for the king of their unified homeland, many if not most of whom would attend Mass and say prayers for the pope, Pio Nono, a recalcitrant monarchist. Such people giving shape to U.S. cities wanted the social guarantees of a liberal democracy and the spiritual certitude of their faith. The loyal folk in the pews lived beyond the contradictions of a Vatican that was hostile to republican birth pangs in Italy. New World laity waited for the Old World hierarchy to find a faith in pluralism, even as they sent Peter’s Pence donations over to Rome.
A few months after the king’s death, Pio Nono died on February 7, 1878, at age eighty-six. Anticlerical protesters engulfed the funeral procession; a riot erupted at a bridge on the Tiber, and radicals almost dumped the pope’s coffin into the river. Litigation over Pio Nono’s personal estate by several family members ran nearly a decade in the Italian