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of the Roes’, he bluffed his bride, insisting he was some kind of secret agent in those stretches of work away. Toomey was Cardinal O’Connell’s confessor. He literally absolved the cardinal of his sins. In a scene befitting a comic film, a suspicious Florence trails David to Boston, where she discovers not only that he is a priest but that he is two-timing her with his secretary at The Pilot! Bursting in on them, Florence ignites an ugly row: the cops come; Florence ends up one-on-one with the cardinal, disgorging the sordid truth about both priests, deriding Monsignor James as “that dirty skunk.” The cardinal calms her, then excuses himself as the church lawyer steps in.

Today we would call Florence’s $7,500 settlement “hush money.”

And Toomey? Down came the sledgehammer of canon law, excommunicating him from priesthood and church. Florence washed her hands of him.65

On James, the avuncular cardinal stood passive as fallout from Toomey’s disaster wafted through the priestly circles. The papal nuncio in Washington, D.C., met with Florence. Rome demanded the chancellor’s ouster. After an amazing seven-year run in his double life, James O’Connell resigned by letter in November 1920 to “secure a respite from the arduous duties.”66 He went down to New York. The O’Connells lived comfortably ever after. Nothing broke in the press; the nephew was never prosecuted for embezzlement. But New England bishops wanted His Eminence out. Why had the cardinal tolerated his nephew’s immoral life? The New England bishops confronted O’Connell in a private meeting; his denial inflamed them.

Bishop Walsh of Maine went to Rome bearing a letter signed by the region’s brother bishops, calling for O’Connell’s ouster. Walsh presented the letter to Pope Benedict XV along with a $17,000 gift from his small diocese. The pope’s gravitas on receiving the news left Walsh encouraged, as he sailed back to America, that Boston’s corrupt cardinal would soon be gone.

Benedict XV had come through the horrors of World War I with a vision of the papacy as a moral force for the cause of peace; this was a dramatic shift from the more insular concerns of past popes. His predecessor, Pius X, was a great reactionary who persecuted forward-looking theologians for the opaque heresy called “Modernism” (a throwback to Pio Nono’s Syllabus of Errors); yet Pius X fostered a mild détente with Italy through continued support via Banco di Roma. He relaxed the Vatican prohibition against Italian Catholics voting in parliamentary elections. Pius X rejuvenated European parish life with Gregorian chant and improvements in liturgical music. The only Italian pope since the early nineteenth century to have grown up a peasant, Pius X was the only pontiff of the last two centuries (as of this writing) to become a saint. He is credited with miraculous healing. He died in 1914, one month into the world war. Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa succeeded him, a Genoese aristocrat who had done diplomatic service in Spain. Della Chiesa took the name Benedict XV.

As he called off the Modernist witch hunt, Benedict XV staked out a position of neutrality for the Holy See in calling for an end to a war marked by “hideous butchery.”67 The French, who had twenty-five thousand priests in active service, were hostile to Vatican neutrality; they saw it as favoring the German coalition that was using submarine attacks. In 1916 Benedict denounced the arms trade as “contrary to the law of nations.”68 Trying to bring Austro-Hungarian and German bishops to support a negotiated peace, Benedict saw a sharp drop in Peter’s Pence. Fewer bishops visited Rome; papal audiences shrank in size. Banco di Roma losses were sapping the Holy See’s financial base.

American Catholics sent $300,000 a year to Peter’s Pence during the war, giving Benedict funds for hospitals and relief projects; his gifts were in the $20,000 range. He provided small loans to Italy and authorized two thousand priests to mobilize as medical orderlies. In August 1917 Benedict issued a Peace Note, calling for negotiations to halt the “useless