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guided by bishops and clergy as a crusade waged by a Christian army against immorality in popular culture. “One of its tasks,” Peter Godman writes of Catholic Action, “was to regain the allegiance and sympathies of the working classes alienated by Communism.”90 But in promoting an ethos of social cohesion through the church, Pius XI turned his back on party politics at a time when pluralism was the last hedge against the boot heel. When Cardinal Pacelli, a skilled diplomat and future pope, signed the 1933 concordat with Germany, the centrist Catholic Party there was in eclipse. As Pacelli ruefully joked to a British envoy, the Nazis “would probably not violate all of the articles of this Concordat at the same time.”91

After its long estrangement from Liberal Italy, the Vatican became a financial partner of Fascist Italy. Pius launched a major construction project to remediate decades of deferred maintenance and expansion of the Vatican infrastructure, work that pumped Rome’s sagging economy. His pivotal move was the hiring of Bernardino Nogara to manage the many millions. Papa Ratti, as Italians called Pius, was from Milan, the industrial and fashion center. The Milanese looked down on Romans as lazy, unproductive bureaucrats—“Roma ladrona,” Rome the big thief. For financial advice Pius turned to a small group of Milanese, including his brother, a count, who became a key figure in the Vatican’s civil administration. Among the Milanese, Nogara came with a good pedigree. An engineer who had managed mining operations in Britain and Bulgaria before the war, he had gone on to Istanbul as a vice president of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, and later worked on the Economic Council of the 1919 Versailles Treaty conference. A specialist in international currency, Nogara was a devout Catholic who kept a copy of The Divine Comedy at his bedside. He was on good terms with the Ratti family, and among his own siblings, two brothers were seminary rectors, a sister was the mother superior at a convent, and another brother supervised the Vatican Museums. When Pius XI asked the fifty-nine-year-old Nogara to run the newly established Special Administration, managing the Lateran windfall of $92 million of which $39.7 million went to the Vatican (the other $52.4 million went into government bonds at 5 percent), Nogara reportedly insisted that his investment not be constrained by religious or doctrinal issues, and that he be free to invest Vatican funds anywhere in the world he so chose. Pius said yes.92

Nogara guided investments in stocks, bonds, currency exchanges, and gold, amassing profits for the Holy See’s muscular new wealth as the global financial crisis squeezed Italy. Mussolini created an Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) which issued bonds (backed by banks and insurance and mortgage companies) through which the state gained control of key industries. Nogara became an IRI adviser and made Vatican investments in the safest bonds.

“Whenever I read the words: The sacrifice of our Father Abraham, I cannot help but be deeply moved,” Pius XI exclaimed tearfully to a group of visiting Belgians on September 6, 1938. “Mark well, we call Abraham our Patriarch, our ancestor. Anti-Semitism is irreconcilable with this lofty thought, the noble reality which this prayer expresses … But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are all Semites.” Father Sturzo, the exiled leader of the banned PPI, made sure the pope’s words got published in a Belgian newspaper.93

Pius XI’s change of heart did not ignite a collective mind shift. The Vatican did not report his words. Inside the Curia Fascist sympathizers worked alongside priests of a broader worldview. Anti-Semitism was a curse of the clerical culture that surfaced in Catholic journals in America and Europe, including Commonweal and America, in the 1930s.94 Many bishops who backed the New Deal kept silent on Mussolini and the slurs on Jews by the popular “radio priest” from Detroit, Charles Coughlin, until his career ended.

As Mussolini closed ranks with Hitler, Nogara shifted the