Said the wicked: Let us therefore lie in wait for the just man, because he tasks us and he is contrary to our doings, and he upbraids us with transgressions of the law, and holds up to us the sins of our way of life. For if he be the true son of God, He will defend him, and will deliver him from the hands of his enemies. Let us test him by outrages and tortures .
—Wisdom 2:12 and 2:18
C ardinal Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci had been one of Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli’s harshest critics, which caused him to stay away from Rome for almost thirty years. But soon after Antonelli’s death, Pope Pius IX summoned him and named him cardinal-chamberlain. The pope wanted Pecci to take charge of Church administration until the election of a new pontiff.
The conclave of 1878 was the first to be held after the 1870 declaration of papal infallibility and the loss of the papal states. It took place during Germany’s emergence as a great European power, displacing France, with Japan abandoning its thousand-year-old traditions to join the modern world, with the United States making giant strides toward becoming the world’s greatest power, and with Europe launching a new wave of colonization in Africa and Asia. 1 Thus the papal regime that would emerge from the College of Cardinals’ deliberations would be the first of the modern world. Though they had lost influence and territory, the cardinals felt free of external pressures for the first time in many centuries.
The conclave that began on the morning of February 18 was also one of the shortest in history. After only three ballots, Cardinal Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci won more than the two-thirds vote needed to be elected as the new pontiff. 2
The early years of his administration as Pope Leo XIII were marked by instability and uncertainty. No one took the helm of the papal espionage service, which left many of its operatives without specific orders to follow and unsure to whom they were supposed to report. In the political sphere, matters were much the same.
The papal diplomatic corps needed to rise from its own ashes. There was continual confrontation between Leo XIII and King Umberto of Savoy, and continual attacks and provocations of the Holy See by the kingdom of Italy. One of the most serious came on July 13, 1881, when the Vatican tried to transfer Pope Pius IX’s remains to the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura.
Two days before, Holy Alliance infiltrators in the revolutionary groups then ranging through the Roman streets had learned that several such groups planned to seize the late supreme pontiff’s remains and throw them into the Tiber. The Swiss Guard went on alert, while the new Roman police were also informed. When the pope’s body and its escorts passed through a narrow street, revolutionary agents attacked with stones and other heavy objects in an attempt to get control of the corpse.
The Italian police accompanying the procession decided to look the other way, while the Swiss Guard took the body into a nearby inn for protection. Hours later, the coffin holding the supreme pontiff’s remains finally reached the crypt of San Lorenzo.
Such attacks on the Holy See convinced Leo XIII to sound out the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph about the possibility of moving Church headquarters to Austrian territory. But Franz Joseph did not want an open breech with the new Italy over something as unimportant as the pope. Austria’s refusal led Leo XIII to the decision to fight for the rights of the Church and the Holy See in Rome. However, another battle loomed, farther away.
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, suspicious of the powerful Catholic centers that had united in the Zentrum party, approved a series of new laws between 1871 and 1878. Their sole object was to harass and persecute the Catholic circles opposed to Bismarck’s policies. 3
Bismarck’s Kulturkampf , or “cultural struggle,” ordered the expulsion of all religious orders from Prussia. It also required all appointments of high Church officials to be approved by the government, closed all the seminaries, and ordered the expulsion of all bishops. Leo XIII suddenly found twelve of the sixteen bishops of Prussia with him in Rome. Continuous protests by Catholic circles that supported Bismarck and the work of the Vatican secretaries of state did the rest. 4
In 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm II decided to dismiss Bismarck, which brought a new golden age to the Zentrum. 5
Leo XIII surrounded himself with efficient leaders of Vatican diplomacy, such as Cardinals Alessandro Franchi, Lorenzo Nina, and Ludovico Jacobini, but none of them felt the need for a spy service like the Holy Alliance to support Vatican policies abroad. Franchi, Nina, and Jacobini all saw the Holy Alliance’s intervention in affairs that could be settled through diplomacy or politics as more of an impediment than a help. Doubtless, they were mistaken. Only the arrival of Cardinal Mariano Rampolla in the secretariat of state after the death of Cardinal Ludovico Jacobini restored some of the splendor of the papal espionage.
One attempt to revive the moribund Vatican secret services came in 1898, the year that war broke out between Spain and the United States. The Holy Alliance had been unable to see the war coming that spring.
Spanish—U.S. relations had been deteriorating because of what was going on in the Caribbean island of Cuba. Spanish repression in Cuba provoked a wave of negative reaction among the U.S. public. In February 1898, two events caused the tense relations to worsen still more. 6
U.S. spies managed to intercept a letter from the Spanish ambassador in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, to a friend of his in Cuba. In the letter he openly criticized the expansionist designs of the United States and made fun of President McKinley. The diplomat had to apologize, but the sensationalist press led by William Randolph Hearst whipped up Americans’ wounded pride. The second incident leading toward tragedy was that involving the battleship Maine. 7
On February 15, while on a visit to the port of Havana, the warship accidentally exploded and sank. Two hundred sixty-six men lost their lives. The U.S. Congress, press, and public opinion accused the Spanish of an act of sabotage. The United States sought a Spanish exit from Cuba more strongly than before.
Pope Leo XIII and his secretary of state, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, still denied the need for an active espionage corps. They preferred diplomacy as a way to avoid wars. The supreme pontiff and Rampolla had successfully mediated a German-Spanish dispute over several Pacific islands, and so they saw the possibility of doing the same with Washington and Madrid in the case of Cuba. 8 However, the Vatican lacked diplomatic relations with the U.S.
The Holy Father ordered his Holy Alliance to contact John Ireland, Archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota. The apostolic delegate was supposed to attempt mediation in Washington, while Ireland was supposed to try to make contact with President McKinley through other channels. But Archbishop Ireland’s experience revealed some of the pitfalls of using local agents. John Ireland was not a Holy Alliance agent who would act disinterestedly in a crisis. Pope Leo XIII and Rampolla would have learned as much if they had only read the Holy Alliance’s report on the controversial archbishop.
The priest was strongly identified with the Republican Party, then in power in Washington. A few years earlier, he had become so closely tied to McKinley’s 1896 election campaign that he embarrassed broad sectors of Catholic opinion in the country. The papal espionage report underlined the fact that Archbishop John Ireland had urged parishioners attending his Masses to vote Republican. 9
For his part, the archbishop now thought that this special commission from the pope would lead him to a cardinal’s purple, and he enlisted the support of important local political figures. He was a nationalist, in favor of political democracy, religious toleration, and economic growth, but he also believed the United States was destined to become the world’s leader, outstripping such traditional powers as Spain and the Vatican.
It is hard to determine John Ireland’s exact connections with the McKinley administration or how his nationalism influenced the reports he sent to the Holy Alliance in Rome, but it is clear that his loyalties were divided between his nationalist passion for the U.S. president and his obedience to the supreme pontiff. The Vatican’s espionage analysts had by now told the pope that, while John Ireland wanted to help him make peace in Cuba, he did not want to make the McKinley administration or the American Protestants feel that an archbishop or a body of Catholic fellow citizens were unpatriotic or pro-Spanish. 10
There is no doubt that Ireland worked to secure peace, just as the pope had requested. But it is equally clear that his method of doing so was to urge the Vatican to pressure Madrid, not McKinley’s administration, to arrange an immediate armistice in Cuba as the first step to resolving the crisis. Holy Alliance agents continued to keep Secretary of State Rampolla informed about John Ireland’s intentions. According to the Vatican secret service, the archbishop wanted to ingratiate himself with both sides and not declare himself in favor of one or the other.
Ireland’s next move was to send a coded message to Rampolla and Pope Leo XIII listing the points he saw as crucial first steps toward peace: a declaration by Madrid of an immediate cease-fire throughout Cuba; Spanish-Cuban negotiations to quickly disarm the insurgents; and acceptance of the U.S. president as arbitrator in the search for a negotiated settlement. Those proposals would give Washington the right to impose a solution on Spain, one that demanded a series of concessions. The Holy Alliance agents in the U.S. capital told Rome, furthermore, that the proposals had been written by the State Department, not by the priest. If they were accepted by the pope or by Madrid, the agents warned, the result would be Spain’s loss of Cuba. 11
The problem was that the Vatican analyzed only the information sent by Ireland and not that from the Holy Alliance agents or the papal delegate in Washington. Rampolla and his secretariat read only the reports coming from the Archbishop of St. Paul. They took seriously Ireland’s claim that President McKinley “desperately wanted to find a peaceful solution to the conflict” and that only Spain’s acceding to his desire could calm the war fever in Congress and public opinion. In fact, the United States wanted to control Cuba—among other reasons, because of its strategic position bordering the Gulf of Mexico—and McKinley was willing either to buy the island or to fight for it. 12
While the Vatican, somewhat misled by Ireland’s report, sought a solution in Madrid, on April 11, 1898, President McKinley asked Congress for special powers to declare war on Spain. 13 That same day, the Congress voted that Cuba was free and independent and if Spain would not renounce sovereignty over the island, the president was authorized to use all means at his disposal to bring it about. On April 21, Madrid and Washington broke off relations. On the 25th, the United States declared war on Spain, the first act of which would be a naval blockade of Cuba. The rest is history.
Next came the defeat and destruction of Spain’s Cuban fleet in Santiago and its Philippine one in Cavite, the surrender of Spanish forces in Oriente, the invasion of Puerto Rico, and the siege of Manila. Seeing the impossibility of confronting the naval power of the U.S., the government of Práxedes Mateo Sagasta began peace negotiations.
As a result of the disinformation operation carried out by Archbishop John Ireland and the way the pope and his secretary of state followed Ireland’s lead in refusing to back Spain in any way, U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt decided to take the first steps to establish diplomatic relations with the Holy See. 14
Archbishop Ireland’s intrigues were revealed by the Holy Alliance agent Monsignor Donato Sbarretti, a papal espionage expert in North American affairs. It took Sbarretti only a few days to see how Ireland had taken advantage of Leo XIII’S confidence to assure himself a brilliant future in Vatican diplomacy. Sbarretti also revealed that John Ireland kept the U.S. secret services informed beforehand as to the content of the messages he was about to send to the supreme pontiff and Cardinal Rampolla.
Monsignor Donato Sbarretti further alerted Rome to the danger facing Catholic religious orders working in the Philippines. He reported that many high U.S. officials responsible for Philippine affairs, especially in the War Department headed by Secretary Elihu Root, were openly prejudiced against those orders and had proposed the radical step of expelling all friars from the archipelago. In a final note, Sbarretti wrote, “I sincerely do not believe that the North Americans have the slightest interest in establishing diplomatic relations with the Holy See as the Archbishop of St. Paul, Monsignor John Ireland, claims.” 15
Mysteriously, the Vatican ignored Sbarretti’s warnings about John Ireland, and Pope Leo XIII ordered the report labeled “top secret.” When on June 1, 1902, William Howard Taft, 16 civil governor of the Philippines, came to Rome at the head of a small delegation on an official visit, he was received at the papal palace with a ceremony of the sort reserved for ambassadors. 17
The Holy Alliance, by order of Rampolla and of Leo XIII himself, did everything in its power to make the press see the Taft delegation’s visit as a clear signal that the U.S. was considering the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Actually, both Rampolla and the supreme pontiff continued to trust Ireland’s partisan analysis, rather than that of Monsignor Donato Sbarretti.
The U.S. reaction was not long in coming. William Howard Taft did not like discovering that papal espionage agents were circulating the rumor that his visit represented a formal diplomatic initiative on President Roosevelt’s part. He stated in response, “We are in Rome only to negotiate the sale of some land.” 18 After several weeks, the negotiations broke down and Washington ordered Taft back to the Philippines.
In early June 1903, while meeting with his secretary of state Rampolla, Pope Leo XIII suffered an inflammation of the lungs. On the 7th, his doctors discovered his lungs were full of fluid. His condition continued to be critical until he died on July 20, surrounded by his most loyal followers. With his papacy ended, too, his policy of restricting the activities of the espionage service. For twenty-two years, the Holy Alliance had been largely inoperative, in spite of the fact that in the last ten years the world had been affected by a series of assassinations that could have touched the pope himself.
The president of the French Republic, Marie-François-Sadi Carnot, was assassinated in 1894. Spanish premier Antonio Cánovas del Castillo suffered the same fate in 1898, as did Austrian emperor Franz Joseph’s wife, Elisabeth Wittelsbach, or Sissi, in 1898, Italy’s King Umberto in 1900, and U.S. president William McKinley in 1901.
On July 31, 1903, the conclave summoned to elect Leo XIII’s successor began its deliberations. The best-positioned candidate was Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, the late pope’s secretary of state, but he was vetoed by Cardinal Jan Puzyna of Cracow in the name of the Austrian emperor. Franz Joseph saw in Cardinal Rampolla an enemy of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria, and Italy) because of his policy of improving relations with France and Russia. On August 4, Cardinal Giuseppe Melchiore Sarto was elected supreme pontiff by fifty of the sixty-two cardinals at the conclave. Sarto chose the name Pius X. In the opening years of the twentieth century, the Holy Alliance would enter one of its most fruitful eras, though not a particularly glorious one.
In this new century, only the Italians had set out to recruit secret agents inside the Vatican. Therefore, when church-state relations became the subject of dispute, many governments had to gather information on papal plans and politics by way of spies.
French-Vatican relations had once again grown tense since the emergence in 1880 of an important anticlerical trend supported by the politicians Jules Ferry and Émile Combes, who were convinced that the pope sought the overthrow of the Third Republic and a return to monarchy. The conflict boiled over with the army’s occupation of convents and monasteries and the expulsion of their occupants. In 1904, Paris and the Vatican formally broke off relations, and France proclaimed a “Law of Separation” between church and state. 19
In the moment of chilliest relations, the French counterespionage services turned to surveillance of the papal nuncio and interception of coded messages between the Vatican and its ambassador. One report decoded by French spies in 1904 spoke of an incident that had occurred on the Avenue Gabriel across from the French president’s residence in the Élysée Palace. The vehicle carrying the nuncio, Monsignor Benedetto Lorenzelli, had collided with a bicyclist without major consequences. Containing only minor news of this sort, the letters were not very significant. Potentially more important from an espionage point of view were telegrams exchanged between the papal secretariat of state and its nuncios. French cryptographers who had succeeded in breaking Spanish, Italian, or Turkish codes were unable, however, to decipher the codes invented by the Holy Alliance cryptographic department. 20
All told, French secret service surveillance of the Vatican was more a question of accident than of efficiently organized operations. In 1913, on the other hand, the Holy Alliance would mount an operation against the French ministry of foreign affairs.
Monsignor Carlo Montagnini, the Vatican’s spy in Paris, knew that French espionage chief Stephen Pichon was decidedly opposed to reestablishing relations with the pope. Therefore he organized an operation to depose Pichon. He ordered the falsification of a supposed message from the Italian ambassador in France to his foreign minister in Rome, which would state that Italian secret services had detected the presence of a certain Cardinal Vannutelli in Paris.
The Holy Alliance’s counterfeit message explained that Vannutelli had come to France to meet with President Raymond Poincaré and his foreign minister Stephen Pichon, which would be the first stage of secret conversations with the Vatican about reestablishing the relations broken off in 1904.
As expected, the Sûreté succeeded in decoding the false telegram. Interior minister Louis-Lucien Klotz, when informed of this discovery, protested to the president about having been left out of the loop. He went so far as to threaten to resign. Poincaré claimed to know nothing, which was true. As a result of the crisis, Stephen Pichon had to resign, and Klotz barred his secret service from decoding diplomatic correspondence. The Holy Alliance had succeeded in getting the troublesome Pichon out of the way.
Another Holy Alliance operation uncovered by the French was also the work of Monsignor Montagnini. Montagnini had been secretary to the nuncio, Lorenzelli, and when Lorenzelli left Paris after the break in relations, the secretary took his place under the title of “Attache of Religious Affairs and Custodian of the Nuncio’s Archives.” In truth, Monsignor Montagnini was a Holy Alliance spy, the Vatican’s unofficial eyes and ears in France.
Benedetto Lorenzelli’s successor was, however, a frivolous and indiscreet man, rather too fond of collecting information at social events. The new Vatican secretary of state, the Spanish cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, was not particularly impressed; he characterized Montagnini as “frivolous, shallow, and a complete muff.” 21
The French spy services were convinced that Montagnini was organizing underground resistance movements to counter the anticlerical laws and was conspiring with conservative politicians to overthrow the Republic, although they did not have sufficient evidence to present. 22
One afternoon in December, the French espionage service and police decided to storm the papal embassy in Paris and confiscate all the documents they could find inside. Some Vatican documents did demonstrate contacts between French politicians and the Vatican secret service, but the most compromising papers had disappeared. Still, the French made copies of coded messages sent by Monsignor Carlo Montagnini to the Holy Alliance.
One of these, which Montagnini was not able to keep out of French hands, mentioned the possibility of paying significant sums of money to Liberal Action party leader Jacques Piou, and to others by way of him, in return for their blocking new anticlerical legislation under consideration in the parliament. Piou specifically referred to Georges Clemenceau, the politician who would lead France to victory in the First World War, as possibly being susceptible to a bribe. 23
In the late nineteenth century, many governments experienced significant declines in their intelligence services, but in the case of the Vatican during Leo XIII’s papacy, this deterioration was much sharper. The Holy Alliance’s capabilities disappeared along with the papal states and the pope’s temporal powers. An instrument designed to protect and maintain those powers became nearly superfluous. At the dawning of the twentieth century, the espionage networks of papal delegates were almost a thing of the past. In those years, many experienced agents of the Holy Alliance donned the bright uniforms of the pope’s bodyguards, the Holy See’s security, or the guardians of palaces and papal offices. Espionage was left to the nuncios, which brought important changes to the philosophy of strategic information gathering for papal diplomacy. 24
On the death of Pius IX in 1878, the Vatican maintained full diplomatic relations with fifteen countries, seven of them in Europe, with Catholic majorities or with important Catholic communities in terms of numbers and political influence. 25 The rest were in South America, divided among three nuncios. The papal ambassador in Argentina was also accredited in Paraguay and Uruguay; the one in Peru, also in Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador. The problem had to do with the parts of the world where there were no papal nuncios and that, therefore, had to be covered by experienced Holy Alliance agents—such as London, Berlin, or St. Petersburg.
Papal authorities under Leo XIII, who did more damage to the papal espionage organization than most others during its three centuries of existence, preferred to send “apostolic delegates” rather than spies to nations with whom there were no diplomatic relations. The apostolic delegates funneled better religious information to the Holy Alliance, while the nuncios supplied better political analysis.
In those years, after Pope Pius IX’s encyclicals rigorously condemning modernist ideas, progressives and traditionalists contended for power within the Catholic Church. Pope Pius X, defender of the ideas of Pius IX, chose as his secretary of state a Spanish cardinal, Rafael Merry del Val. In a historic moment when the Central Powers and the Entente were about to go to war, Merry del Val showed a marked preference for the German and Austrian monarchies. 26
The secretary of state’s closest collaborators included an Umbrian priest named Umberto Benigni who over time would become one of the pope’s best spies and the founder and director of Vatican counterespionage service. Benigni had a perfect profile as an orthodox traditionalist. With a modest reputation as journalist and polemicist, Umberto Benigni had come from Perugia to Rome in 1895 in search of opportunity. A priest employed in the Vatican Library offered him a job worthy of his ambition and ability. 27
In 1901, Benigni won a post as history professor in the prestigious Roman Seminary, the elite institution attended by all aspirants to careers in the curia. At the same time, he began writing opinion articles in the ultraconservative newspaper La Voce della Verità .
His polemical articles and reactionary social and religious viewpoint attracted the attention of the so-called integralists in the court of Pope Pius X. The integralists defended the pope’s temporal powers and opposed all political and theological reform. The intelligent Benigni soon became a favorite of the powerful secretary of state, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, and of Gaetano de Lai, the influential prefect of the Consistorial Congregation, the Vatican department in charge of choosing bishops.
Benigni was named minutante in the Congregation de Propaganda Fide, the department in charge of missionary activity. As a professor, he also taught the priests who would be dispatched to foreign missions. Soon the obscure Umbrian priest became a true celebrity within conservative intellectual circles in Rome, who made up the so-called black nobility around the Throne of St. Peter.
In 1906, Umberto Benigni was catapulted into the heart of the Vatican bureaucracy by his appointment as undersecretary of state for extraordinary affairs. 28 Though he lacked any experience in diplomatic issues, Benigni set about cultivating contacts that would smooth his ascension through the curia. The secretary of state, Merry del Val, had two secretaries directly below him: the secretary of extraordinary affairs, who dealt with relations with foreign states, and the sostituto , or “substitute,” for ordinary affairs, who saw to the administrative tasks of the Vatican. Benigni’s job, therefore, was to assist Monsignor Pietro Gasparri, who had moved from a post as director of the Vatican Seminary to the job of secretary of extraordinary affairs. That was how Gasparri met Benigni, whom he considered most efficient. 29
When the nuncio’s office in Cuba fell vacant, Gasparri offered the post to Umberto Benigni, but the priest had his sights set higher, in the secretariat of state. He had recently seen how the directorship of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide had been denied to him.
In those years, the office of secretary of state for extraordinary affairs was of great importance, yet mysteriously Pietro Gasparri was put in charge of revising and publishing a new code of canon law, a very absorbing task.
With Gasparri so busy, Benigni became Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val’s main collaborator. The obscure priest and journalist who had come to Rome to seek his fortune now circulated in the corridors of power. The new undersecretary moved his office to the apostolic palace so as to be closer to the secretary of state and only four doors away from the supreme pontiff’s office. 30
In 1909, Monsignor Umberto Benigni, acting on the orders of Cardinal Merry del Val, created a spy network devoted to identifying all those within the Vatican or Church institutions who preached modernism. Very shortly, Benigni’s agents began to denounce clergymen working in universities, communications media, and political institutions in France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy. Nearly three hundred such names appeared in their reports. The secretary of state, given his complete antipathy toward political and theological innovation, authorized his subordinate to organize a counterespionage service that would operate only inside the Vatican and Church organizations, while foreign espionage would remain the responsibility of the Holy Alliance. 31 The name of the new counterespionage organization was Sodalitium Pianum (sodality, or community, of Pius). Within the walls of the Vatican, it was known for short as the S.P.
Sodalitium Pianum’s first efforts went toward formulating a set of arguments that could be used to counter modernist ideas and thus dominate any future public debate within the Church or in the larger society. Separately, the S.P. was to carry out secret recruitment of agents in Europe, North America, and South America who would identify modernists, expose their connections and conspiracies, and frustrate their plans. Umberto Benigni applied himself to this task with the zeal of a fanatic. Soon his functions as undersecretary for extraordinary affairs gave way to others, in the espionage sphere, which had to be kept secret from his colleagues in the secretariat of state and even from his immediate superior, Monsignor Pietro Gasparri.
Recognizing the potential influence of the press, Benigni believed the Vatican needed to use it effectively in the battle against modernism and liberalism. The S.P. chief appointed himself unofficial press director of the secretariat of state. For years, he fed the journalists covering papal events the line they should follow in their articles. Benigni labeled the correspondents of liberal newspapers and news agencies as “enemies” and those of conservative media as “friends.”
Another important step of the S.P. was to create its own paper, Corrispondenza Romana , which Benigni directed through a straw editor. He filled its pages with attacks on modernism and liberal politics, while defending papal prerogatives openly and without pretense. When criticisms began coming in from countries such as France or Italy itself, Pope Pius X denied that the paper was an official Vatican organ or even a semiofficial one. The pope was lying, because he himself had authorized his secretary of state Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val to finance Corrispondenza Romana. 32
Finally, Monsignor Umberto Benigni wrote an article that expressed his “integralist” and conservative perspective on world religious and political affairs. The article was very well written, in truth, and was distributed by S.P. agents to many foreign correspondents. Many of them published the entire article or a summary thereof under their own names, often without citing the source. Benigni’s thesis was read by millions in Argentina, Spain, Austria, Belgium, and the United States. 33
While such propaganda and disinformation operations played their role in discrediting modernism, Benigni and his superiors in the inner recesses of the Vatican also needed to control that movement’s influence within secular organizations and religious institutions. The integralists needed to identify the adherents of modernism and oust them from any powerful positions by applying strong papal sanctions. The S.P.’s main sources of information were bishops, apostolic delegates, and nuncios, yet many of these were not eager to name names for the counterespionage service.
What integralists like Merry del Val and Benigni needed was a quality spy network functioning in the heart of the Holy See, but since the loss of the papal states, no such body existed. In fact, Monsignor Umberto Benigni’s arrival in the corridors of power brought the operations of the Holy Alliance to a halt, with the two services often acting at cross purposes. Papal counterespionage became the main enemy of papal espionage, because the Sodalitium Pianum agents competed for sources with the spies of the Holy Alliance.
In truth, the clandestine S.P. had no official name or official headquarters or nameplate identifying any of its offices or any administrative departments. Its creation received no mention in the Anuario Pontificio , the publication containing the Vatican organizational chart. Its expenses were paid out of secret funds that the secretary of state, Cardinal Merry del Val, funneled to Monsignor Benigni. If anyone in authority asked Benigni directly about his activities, the counterespionage chief answered that the only ones who could give an answer were “God, Pope Pius X, and Cardinal Merry del Val.” The questioners desisted rather than have to confront any of that trio.
Benigni employed in the Vatican the same techniques used by the intelligence agencies of powers such as Great Britain, France, Germany, or Russia. Only on rare occasions did the S.P. share information with Italian security services.
Espionage, interception of mail and telegrams, and surveillance of individuals were some of the tasks carried out by papal counterespionage agents. From bishops’ palaces, priests’ sacristies, lecture rooms, seminaries, and nuncios’ offices around the world, they kept the S.P. informed about superiors or colleagues suspected of embracing modernism—including some of Benigni’s own employees.
One of the Sodalitium Pianum’s little-known spy operations took place toward the end of 1909. Through several informants, Benigni learned of a ring of modernist priests in Rome led by a man named Antonio de Stefano, a noted medievalist and former priest then living in Geneva. The S.P. chief sent a young priest named Gustavo Verdisi to penetrate de Stefano’s organization. Verdisi, himself close to the ideas of the modernists, informed Monsignor Benigni that the network run from Switzerland had fallen apart, but the counterespionage chief was not satisfied. He decided to send another priest, Pietro Perciballi, who had been a classmate of de Stefano’s in the Roman seminary. 34 In those days, Perciballi had also come to know other defenders of modernism, such as Ernesto Buonaiuti, whose books and writings had been declared heretical by the Holy Office, the Vatican department responsible for maintaining Catholic orthodoxy.
Armed with money, a false passport, and a camera, Perciballi traveled to Geneva to renew his old acquaintanceship with de Stefano. In his first report back to Benigni, Father Perciballi emphasized de Stefano’s desire to launch a magazine called the Revue Moderniste Internationale . The report also explained how Antonio de Stefano had invited the agent to leave the place where he’d taken up residence in Geneva and move into de Stefano’s own house. During de Stefano’s long absences, Perciballi spent his time photographing the titles of the books in his target’s private library and sifting through the papers in his desk. These included correspondence with Ernesto Buonaiuti. When Perciballi returned to Rome, he brought Benigni copies of de Stefano’s private correspondence.
The S.P. archives soon became a treasure trove of information on reformist priests, liberal seminary teachers, and suspicious intellectuals and journalists. Among those named in the reports were a number of cardinals: Amette, the Archbishop of Paris; Ferrari, Archbishop of Milan; Mercier, Archbishop of Brussels; Maffi, Archbishop of Pisa; Piffle, Archbishop of Vienna; and Fischer, Archbishop of Cologne. So were the rectors of the Catholic universities of Louvain, Paris, and Toulouse. Another figure punished for his ties with the “modernists” was Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa, who was dispatched to Bologna as archbishop because Cardinal Merry del Val wanted to separate him from the Roman curia. In 1914, Cardinal della Chiesa would become supreme pontiff after the death of Pope Pius X. 35 Benigni even went so far as to investigate his superior and patron Monsignor Pietro Gasparri, without express orders from either Merry del Val or Pope Pius X.
The S.P.’s daily reports included such information as the development of the Catholic Center Party in the German Reichstag; the Catholic student organization Sillon in France, which defended social reform and Catholic reconciliation with the Third Republic; the inauguration of a new Uruguayan president who proposed to separate church and state and suppress religious festivals; and tensions in Russia arising from Tsar Nicholas II’s security forces’ persecution of Catholics in Poland and Lithuania. 36
Soon, high officials of the Roman curia began referring to the S.P. as the “Holy Terror.” Among its main defenders, aside from Pope Pius X himself, were Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, secretary of state; Cardinal Gaetano de Lai, prefect of the Consistorial Congregation; and Cardinal José de Calasanz Vives y Tutó, a Spanish Capuchin in charge of the department of religious orders. 37
With the knowledge and complicity of Pius X, Monsignor Umberto Benigni acquired tremendous power. His enemies and victims regarded him as “the pope’s evil genius.” Every week, Benigni handed exhaustive reports to the pope, to Merry del Val, and to Monsignor Giovanni Bressan, the pope’s private secretary and one of Benigni’s most loyal allies. The counterespionage chief had more protectors in the highest spheres than he had friends, and so there was much surprise in the halls of the Vatican when the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano , on March 7, 1911, published the news that Monsignor Benigni was no longer undersecretary for extraordinary affairs in the secretariat of state. His replacement was a young Vatican official named Eugenio Pacelli, who over time rose within the Roman curia until reaching the office of pope twenty-eight years later as Pius XII. Meanwhile, Pope Pius X named Monsignor Umberto Benigni protonotary apostolic 38 and allowed him to remain at the head of the counterespionage unit. To Benigno’s “friends,” this news implied a promotion and high honor, while to his “enemies,” it seemed to mean a fall into disgrace or exile into purgatory.
The rumor mill—as active then as it is today in the halls of the Vatican—held that Benigni had been dismissed from his important post because he had been caught passing secret papal documents to the Russian imperial representative in the Holy See. The only thing known for sure is that Monsignor Umberto Benigni formally requested leave from his responsibilities in the secretariat of state so as to devote more time to the papal secret services. 39
From then on, the operations, organizations, and agents of the Holy Alliance and the Sodalitium Pianum were united toward a single goal: defense of the Church, the Vatican, and the Pope. Monsignor Benigno continued to have access to the documents and staff of the secretariat of state. He requested a salary of seven thousand lire per year and an increase in operating funds to support his intelligence activities. 40 Cardinal Gaetano de Lai became his new chief contact and protector, while his direct contact with Cardinal Merry del Val was limited to responding to requests for information about bishops in line for promotion or other papal honors. In the spring of 1912, Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, lover of intrigue and espionage, asked his precursor about a priest who was going to be named bishop. Some weeks later, Pacelli again contacted Benigni to let him know that the secretariat of state was preparing a declaration on workers’ movements in Germany and that a replacement for a German archbishop was being sought.
Umberto Benigni’s problems were only beginning. A former Catholic priest turned Methodist confessed to the journalist Guglielmo Quadrotta that, when he had been Monsignor Umberto Benigni’s private secretary, he had served the Vatican counterespionage service by infiltrating certain Italian circles suspected of modernist tendencies. Another brouhaha affecting Benigni’s image and that of Vatican intelligence was fomented by a group of Belgian and German liberals.
This group, in carrying out an investigation of the Sodalitium Pianum , had infiltrated a Dominican friar, Floris Prims, into the secret agency. The Dominican made friends with a Belgian lawyer named Jonckx who worked in the city of Ghent. Thanks to this connection, Prims learned about the workings of the S.P. in detail and, therefore, about those of the Holy Alliance. Prims, shocked by his findings and believing that Monsignor Umberto Benigni was operating without authorization or protection from above, decided to go to Rome and request an audience with the pope to tell all.
Rafael Merry del Val rescued Benigni by blocking Floris Prims’s attempts to see Pope Pius X. He also refused to see the Dominican himself or to accept any of the documentary evidence Prims had gathered. 41 In 1912, the secretary of state cut off financing for the newspaper Corrispondenza Romana . Soon afterwards, he ordered Benigni to close it. Evidently, Umberto Benigni’s star was losing its luster. If Pope Pius X had publicly recognized the existence of the Sodalitium Pianum , that would have conferred invaluable power on the organization and its founder. Instead of legitimizing the S.P., the pope preferred simply to send his “best apostolic wishes”—always by way of Cardinal de Lai—to the counterespionage service and its chief.
As Benigni’s life moved further and further underground, he began to suffer from debilitating paranoia. From his small apartment on Corso Umberto I, he tried to keep his network of informers afloat and maintain his contacts in papal circles, but many of the latter had closed their doors to him by now. He came to believe that modernist agents in the postal services of France, Germany, and Italy were intercepting and opening his mail. For fear of his enemies inside and outside the Vatican, Umberto Benigni traveled abroad to meet his informants personally, and he kept all such visits to Brussels, Paris, or Geneva strictly secret.
By early 1914, Benigni was surviving by seeing to minor papal matters. The former spymaster was now a pathetic and paranoid shadow of his past self. His clear-sightedness in creating an intelligence service similar to those of Russian, France, or Germany had turned chimerical. He had personally seen to the recruitment of informants, oversight of their activities, reading of their reports, care of crucial documents, direct reporting to the secretary of state, and carrying out of covert operations. What he had not done was keep a close watch on the ground under his feet.
When Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa—a victim of repression by the Sodalitium Pianum —became Pope Benedict XV, Umberto Benigni departed from Vatican service. He left behind a secret service in ruins, a Holy Alliance whose operations had been reduced almost to nothing, and broken friendships and eternal suspicion among members of the Roman curia, thanks to the history of internecine accusations. Unfortunately, Benigni’s 42 outsized vision of an effective papal espionage service remained only a dream. Curiously, the outbreak of the First World War would breathe new life into the Holy Alliance and espionage operations in general. 43 But a unique opportunity had been lost just when the Horseman of the Apocalypse, sword in hand, was about to drive the world into a global conflagration.