Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [35]
The support ethnic Americans gave to their parishes registered an approval of Romanità, its trappings of royalty and the beauty of liturgical rituals that ran through the year. The church was a spiritual anchor with aesthetic grace to uplift people from the grit and stresses of workaday life. As the generations advanced to the middle class, embezzlement by clerics like the Boston cardinal’s nephew and priests’ sexual transgressions were aberrations quietly covered “for the good of the church.” Philadelphia under Dougherty, Chicago under Mundelein, Boston under O’Connell, and large dioceses in California, the Northeast, and the Midwest signaled Catholic triumphalism.
THE FAUSTIAN PACT WITH FASCISM
Liberal Italy had ended Pio Nono’s suppression of Jews. Under Benedict XV, “the anti-Semitic campaign in the papally-linked press was soon suppressed,” writes David Kertzer.79 As the first pope in a global war, Benedict XV controlled little land; he made quiet moves through intermediaries for a financial resolution with Italy over the lost territory, while Italy blunted his overtures to Britain and France for peace negotiations. After the war, Benedict broadened the church’s global role, sending missionaries to poor countries. In Italy, he saw Socialists and Communists gaining strength, stirring fears of Russian persecution of the church under Lenin’s Communist regime. In Italy, the pope gave covert support to unions and peasant groups that coalesced behind a Catholic political movement. Money, or the lack of it, still hounded the pope. In 1919 he sent an emissary to America seeking a $1 million loan. The bishops were hard-pressed, but the Knights of Columbus provided $250,000 in a lavish ceremony; dressed in knightly regalia, they received Holy Communion from the Supreme Pontiff in the Apostolic Palace.
In 1920, with papal finances still a juggling act, a charismatic priest named Luigi Sturzo, who had won a mayoralty in Sicily, galvanized a national movement, Partito Popolare Italiano, also known as the Catholic Party. In an extraordinary surge, Sturzo’s PPI won 1.1 million votes to capture a fifth of the Chamber of Deputies, becoming Italy’s second-largest party almost overnight. A brilliant organizer, Sturzo pushed land reform and workers’ rights. The Chicago Tribune’s legendary correspondent George Seldes was struck by Sturzo’s pacifism and loyalty to the pope.80 As violence spread against churches and Catholic groups, Benedict wanted Italy to ensure security. The war had boosted his prestige; twenty-seven countries had posted ambassadors to the Holy See.
In 1921, the year Benedict sent 5 million lire for famine relief in Russia, Mussolini and thirty-five Fascists won seats in the chamber. Mussolini (who had called priests “black microbes”) considered the church his chief threat as he used terrorism to cement a political base. “His squadristi descended upon towns and villages, burning, looting, killing,” wrote Seldes. “Catholics as well as Socialists were always the victims.”81 The prime minister, who had secretly facilitated Fascists’ weapons purchases, sent feelers to Benedict, seeking support from Sturzo to form a new government. Averse to taking a direct role in electoral politics, Benedict knew that Fascist attacks on Catholic groups, which had deposits and loans at Banco di Roma and many smaller banks with predominantly Catholic clientele, were killing innocent people as part of a broader assault on the church. The pope steered funds to assist cash-strapped Catholic newspapers. But he held back from endorsing Father Sturzo’s PPI. Many