Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [39]
Cardinal Pacelli became Pius XII. The son of a Vatican lawyer and financial adviser to Pio Nono and Leo XIII, Eugenio Pacelli had a lifelong friendship with one of Rome’s distinguished Jewish physicians in whose home he had shared Sabbath dinner as a youth. In 1916, as a young monsignor, he drafted a statement for Benedict XV in support of Poland’s Jews.97 As the beleaguered pontiff in World War II, Pius XII ordered priests, nuns, and nuncios (like Angelo Roncalli in Istanbul, the future John XXIII) to help Jews avoid Nazi deportations to death camps. His refusal to publicly denounce Hitler and the Nazis was “a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism,” charged John Cornwell in the provocatively titled Hitler’s Pope.98 Later, in a paperback edition, Cornwell retracted some of his criticism; however, the book spotlighted deep divisions among historians and Jewish leaders over historic anti-Semitism in the Vatican and larger European church, and whether the Holocaust could have been halted. The ongoing debate has such severe implications for Catholic-Jewish relations that Pius’s candidacy for sainthood seems stalled.99 Yet he was praised by Albert Einstein in 1940 as a defender of Jews and by Golda Meir, then Israel’s foreign minister, at the time of his death. In the thirteen years after the war, Pius stood on the global stage as a symbol of peace. Regardless of how the debate transpires over Pius XII’s wartime reticence about Hitler and the Nazis, the two world wars turned the papal agenda toward the cause of peace, and under John Paul II the sanctity of human rights. That evolution hit a turning point in 1965, when Paul VI, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, raised his arms and cried: “No more war! War never again.”100 How far the papacy had come since Pio Nono’s complaint to a British envoy that he could not execute a single rebel in the Papal States.
In the century of that transition, the Vatican financial system shifted from a religious monarchy, scrambling to recover from the loss of Rome and the Papal States’ fiefdom, to the emergent economy of the Holy See, which relied on Peter’s Pence to accrue dividends by investing in the city of Rome through the decades in which the pope was a putative Vatican prisoner. Who is to say whether Italians or any other believers in the pews of American churches would object to the use of those funds had they known? None of them wanted a pope in rags. Thanks to Mussolini’s payout, Bernardino Nogara forged a hybrid form of religious capitalism by investing in Roman infrastructure, gold, and foreign markets. In 1942, Pius XII established the Vatican Bank.
CHAPTER 3
SEEDS OF REVOLT
Peter Borré was no bleeding heart on the subject of poverty, but he believed in Christian duty. The low-rise projects off Mystic River were the largest concentration of public housing in New England. Borré realized that the pastor of St. Catherine of Siena, Father Bob Bowers, was about more than “reaching out” to the lowliest members of his flock. Bowers’s liturgies featured Spanish songs. Rosie Piper adored Bob Bowers, the pastor with a youthful face and graying hair who welcomed the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans as he preached about dignity. Borré liked Bowers’s energy for the parish, once a lost cause, now a blossoming place.
The parish named for Saint Catherine of Siena lay at the base of Bunker Hill Street. Midway up Charlestown’s long incline stood St. Mary parish, a Tudor Gothic gem, just past Monument Square and the obelisk that pointed like a needle toward the sky. Several