Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [37]
After installing Fascist officers at Banco di Roma, Mussolini shored up its holdings, which helped stabilize Vatican finances. He gained support on Wall Street and with the Hoover administration for a break on Italy’s war debt. The State Department took an “at least he’s our bastard” approach to Mussolini, prizing rough unity over the Fascist homicides. King George V gave Mussolini a medal in Rome. Such cynicism on human rights would plague Anglo-American foreign policy for generations. Deported by Mussolini, George Seldes published Sawdust Caesar, a prophetic 1935 biography of Il Duce.
In pushing for church unity, Pius XI showed a comfort with power. Exasperated by retrograde French monarchists in a group called Action Française, Pius XI excommunicated the leader (an anti-Semite at that) and his followers. He summoned the superior of the French seminary in Rome and told him to fire the rector, an AF sympathizer. “Yes, Holy Father,” answered the old priest. “I’ll see what I can do.” Grabbing his beard, the pope snarled, “I said, ‘Fire him!’ ”85
For a pope with such a volatile streak, the reliance on American finances must have been humbling. In 1928 Cardinal Mundelein arranged a $300,000 loan from the Chicago archdiocese for the Holy See. In Rome, a young Boston monsignor, Francis Spellman, had a minor post (overseeing playgrounds built by the Knights of Columbus) that positioned him to befriend wealthy Americans who spent winters in the Eternal City. Spellman facilitated financial gifts to Vatican officials on up to the pope. “Holy Father asked me for three autos,” Spellman wrote in his diary on February 8, 1929.86 But the days of papal begging for limousines were about to end.
Cardinal Gasparri met with Mussolini at his residences over several years, negotiating in fits and starts. On February 11, 1929, Gasparri, as papal surrogate, signed the Lateran Pacts with Prime Minister Mussolini in a brief ceremony. Vatican City became a sovereign, neutral state with ownership of fourteen churches and properties in Rome. Catholicism became Italy’s official religion. The Holy See would control the appointment of bishops. In compensation for parts of Rome and the Papal States, Italy paid the equivalent of $92 million. The Vatican agreed to reinvest about 60 percent of it into government bonds.
“Italy has been given back to God and God to Italy,” the Vatican paper L’Osservatore Romano exulted. Pius was pleased that Mussolini was overpowering Communism in Italy. But the Lateran treaty was Faustian at both ends. Mussolini tightened his grip on Italy, gaining respect on the world stage, while bankrolling his adversary, whose office magnified in global public opinion. Mussolini won a huge boost in Catholic popularity, particularly where he most needed it, in northern Italy. Pius gushed that Mussolini was “a man sent by providence.”87 As if heeding the whispers of Pio Nono’s ghost, he signed the death warrant of the PPI, but as time passed he watched in horror as Fascism forged its creed. “Like the Christian ideal, the Fascist ideal is one in a state of perpetual becoming,” a party secretary declared.88 An ex-Fascist likened the radiant banners, mass marches, and solemn torch-lit rites to “a religion, a divinity all its own: the State, with its own Supreme worship … to which everything should be sacrificed.” In 1931 Mussolini pulled Boy Scouts from parishes into Fascist groups, saying, “Youth shall be ours.” Pius used an encyclical to condemn Fascism as “Pagan worship of the State.”89
He was absolutely correct but by then in a quagmire of his own making.
Gasparri retired in 1930. In the next few years Pius, through his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, oversaw concordats with European countries to secure papal authority in naming bishops, state support for clergy salaries, and autonomy for Catholic Action. Pius XI saw this movement of laypeople