Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [33]
In Milan, a wounded soldier who had resumed his post as a newspaper editor, one Benito Mussolini, derided “His Holiness Pope Pilate XV.” Mussolini called for a leader with “the delicate touch of an artist and the heavy fist of a warrior … A man who knows the people, loves the people and can direct and bend it—with violence if necessary.”70 Italy’s industrialization mobilized nearly a million workers to manufacture matériel and vehicles. As the German alliance went down, a fleeting sense of triumph swept Italy; the papacy was dependent on American support. For Italy, the costs of maintaining a large navy and army began squeezing the economy.
As nations gathered for the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Benedict was distressed at being denied a place. President Woodrow Wilson adopted several of the pope’s 1917 planks in his Fourteen Points for Peace, and later visited the pope. Versailles instead produced a treaty distorted by fines that drove Germany deeper into poverty, laying punishment over defeat rather than fostering a peaceful rebuilding, as the pope helplessly looked on. In an encyclical, Benedict brooded on the “immense areas utterly desolate, uncultivated and abandoned … innumerable widows and orphans bereft of everything.”71
Italy was reeling from inflation and Mussolini’s Fascists were gaining ground using terrorist tactics against Catholics and leftists when Bishop Walsh of Maine gave Benedict the news of Cardinal O’Connell and his corrupt nephew.
Rarely does the pope remove an ecclesial prince or even a bishop. Temptations of hubris—pride rationalizing a cover-up for “the good of the church”—are enormous. Imagine, too, Benedict’s frustration at handcuffed diplomacy from Pio Nono’s intransigence of a bygone era: he was still a geographic prisoner. In 1920, after 10 million deaths in the Great War, Benedict held a huge ceremony at the Vatican to make Joan of Arc a saint. He hoped it would ease tensions between France’s monarchists and the modern Catholics sympathetic to a “free church in a free state.” Eighty French officials attended the sainthood rites. Against this backdrop, when the Holy Father turned his attention to the matter of Boston’s cardinal, it must have seemed small-scale.
Benedict soon sent word: the U.S. bishops must agree on the cardinal’s guilt before a Vatican intervention. In a war-tested response, the pope was telling the princes and bishops who powered his financial base to decide if they wanted what amounted to a court-martial. Abuses revealed in “the internal forum” were not public. Sins of the nephew had not made the press. To punish Cardinal O’Connell would not mean disclosing the facts; far from it: avoiding scandal to the church was paramount. But some reason must be given. Removing a prince also meant finding him a face-saving job in the Vatican. Here was the papal mind: the rare punishment of a prince must be soft-gloved and as subtle as possible.
By throwing the decision back on the bishops, did Benedict assume they would stall? In the logic of apostolic succession, the bishops considered themselves the descendants of Jesus’s apostles. Who among them compared with Judas? In 1921 O’Connell sent a whopping $60,000 to Peter’s Pence. Time passed. O’Connell stayed in Boston. An affair of state, his funeral in 1944 drew 25,000 mourners who sat in Holy Cross Cathedral, with 10,000 more outside.72
The fears of some bishops that infallibility would wreck the church did not materialize. Antipapal rhetoric ran like brushfire as bishops established