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Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci, who was elected in the conclave after Pio Nono’s death, showed greater intellect and vision. Taking the name Leo XIII, he served for twenty-five years, sequestered in the Vatican. A voracious reader who pored through newspapers and novels, Leo had “superb eyes, brilliant like black diamonds,” the novelist Émile Zola noted after a visit. Striving to bring the world and papacy into some accord, he sent nuncios to various countries and a small delegation to Washington.54 Yet he also defended the Christian Social Party in Austria, whose leader pushed an anti-Semitic agenda that some of the Austrian bishops opposed.55 A paradox deepened, as the United States recognized Liberal Italy as a nation, while priests, nuns, and editors of diocesan newspapers protested the Holy Father’s isolation. Leo XIII cast lines to Germany and France to regain Rome and the lost lands. But by the lights of modern Europe, Italy belonged to Italy. As waves of Italians settled in America, Leo refused to negotiate the Law of Guarantees. Italian authorities put away funds in anticipation of an agreement.

In 1891 Leo XIII released Rerum Novarum, one of the papacy’s most influential encyclicals. The pope aligned Catholic social teaching with workers’ rights during an era of burgeoning trade unions. Leo’s emphasis on the sanctity of private property put the church squarely against Marxism, signaling support for Italy’s Catholic-owned banks and credit associations. In America, Rerum Novarum positioned many priests and even bishops behind organized labor.

Leo XIII held none of his predecessor’s detachment about money, nor the assumption that God—or Antonelli, who had predeceased Pio Nono—would provide. Leo kept an iron trunk under his bed filled with gold, jewels, and cash. He chose Monsignor Enrico Folchi as commissario for finances. “Leo’s repeated interference in the choice of investments, and particularly in the matter of making loans, including giving one to his nephew, Count Pecci,” writes John Pollard, made Folchi’s work less easy.56 Pio Nono’s cult of personality had dissolved with his death. To build his own persona, Leo XIII summoned several religious jubilees for which tens of thousands of people flocked to the Eternal City. Monsignor Folchi helped empty the white velvet bags filled with money given by pilgrims at the papal audiences, banked the cash, exchanged the foreign notes, and obeyed Leo on how much to spend for the Court, Curia, and Vatican offices.

In the 1880s Folchi positioned the Vatican as a major stockholder in Banco di Roma which invested heavily in real estate. Elegant buildings in the Prati neighborhood, a ten-minute walk from St. Peter’s, were built as government offices and residences for bureaucrats or politicians. As real estate boomed, Folchi sank Peter’s Pence funds into Società Generale Immobiliare, a contractor that became Rome’s major builder. With the pope still a symbolic prisoner, the Vatican invested in the utility company of its jailer-city. In 1885 Banco di Roma bought controlling interest in Rome’s bus and streetcar service. Infallibility had its profit margin.

THE BUILDING BISHOPS

Washed in rivers of giving from distant dioceses, the Vatican had beauty when Boston seminarian William O’Connell studied in the 1880s at Pontifical North American College, the seminary Pio Nono founded. “Seminarians,” writes James O’Toole in Militant and Triumphant, a biography of O’Connell, gained

an abiding sense of what was called Romanità—“Roman-ness”—an intuitive belief that only from the pope and his expanding administrative apparatus could the definitive expression of Catholicism proceed. A few Roman alumni would adopt broader views once they returned home, but the majority tended to a more conservative, centralized outlook. “The Roman mind is the Church’s mind and the mind of Christ,” William O’Connell wrote later, having himself fully absorbed this attitude.57

Born in 1859, the second of six children of Irish-born parents, Will grew up in Lowell.