Long before the church became a capitalist holding company in which men like Calvi flourished, the Vatican was a semifeudal secular empire.1 For more than a thousand years popes were unchallenged monarchs as well as the supreme leaders of the Roman church. Their kingdom was the Papal States. During the Renaissance, Popes were feared rivals to Europe’s most powerful monarchies. And at its height in the eighteenth century the church controlled most of central Italy. Popes believed that God had put them on earth to reign above all other worldly rulers.2
The Popes of the Middle Ages had an entourage of hundreds of Italian clerics and dozens of lay deputies. In time, they became known as the Curia, referring to the court of a Roman emperor. They assisted the Pope in running the church’s spiritual and temporal kingdoms. Those outside the Vatican thought of the Curia simply as the bureaucracy that administered the Papal States. But that simplistic view minimized the Ladon-like network of intrigue and deceit composed largely of celibate single men who lived and worked together at the same time they competed with each other for influence with the Pope.3
The cost of running the church’s kingdom while maintaining the profligate lifestyle of one of Europe’s grandest courts pressured the Vatican always to look for ways to bring in more money.4 Taxes and fees levied on the Papal States paid most of the empire’s basic expenses. The sales of produce from its agriculturally rich northern land as well as rents collected from its properties throughout Europe brought in extra cash. But over time that was not enough to fuel the lavish lifestyles of the Pope and his top clerics. The church found the money it needed in the selling of so-called indulgences, a sixth-century invention whereby the faithful paid for a piece of paper that promised that God would forgo any earthly punishment for the buyer’s sins. The early church’s penances were often severe, including flogging, imprisonment, or even death. Although some indulgences were free, the best ones—promising the most redemption for the gravest sins—were expensive.5 The Vatican set prices according to the severity of the sin and they were initially available only to those who made a pilgrimage to Rome.6
Indulgences helped Urban II in the eleventh century offset the church’s enormous costs in subsidizing the first Crusades. He offered full absolution to anyone who volunteered to fight in “God’s army” and partial forgiveness for simply helping the Crusaders. Successive Popes became ever more creative in liberalizing the scope of indulgences and the ease with which devout Catholics could pay for them. By the early 1400s, Boniface IX—whose decadent spending kept the church under relentless financial pressure—extended indulgences to encompass sacraments, ordinations, and consecrations.7 A few decades later, Pope Paul II waived the need for sinners to make a pilgrimage to Rome. He authorized local bishops to collect the money and dispense the indulgences and also cleared them for sale at pilgrimage sites that had relics of saints.8 Sextus IV had an inspired idea: apply them to souls stuck in Purgatory. Any Catholic could pay so that souls trapped in Purgatory could get on a fast track to Heaven. The assurance that money alone could cut the afterlife in Purgatory was such a powerful inducement that many families sent their life savings to Rome. So much money flooded to Sextus that he was able to build the Sistine Chapel.9 Alexander VI—the Spanish Borgia whose Papacy was marked by nepotism and brutal infighting for power—created an indulgence for simply reciting the Rosary in public. The new sales pitch promised the faithful that a generous contribution multiplied the Rosary’s prayer power.10,I
Each Pontiff understood that tax revenues from the Papal States paid most of the day-to-day bills, while indulgences paid for everything else. The church overlooked the widespread corruption and graft inherent in collecting so much cash and instead grew ever more dependent on indulgences.12 And as they got ever easier to buy and promised more forgiveness, they became wildly popular among ordinary Catholics.13
Indulgences were, however, more than a financial lifeline. They also helped medieval Roman Popes withstand challenges to their secular power. So-called antipopes—usually from other Italian cities—claimed they, rather than the pope elected in Rome, had the political or divine right to rule the Catholic Church.14,II Although some antipopes raised their own armies and had popular backing, they never mustered the moral authority to issue indulgences. Repeated efforts over centuries by pretenders to the Papacy to package and sell forgiveness for sins failed. Few Catholics believed that anyone but the Roman Pope had the direct connection with God to offer a real indulgence.16 And when the Pope’s armies were called upon to sometimes crush an antipope, it was usually the flood of cash from indulgences that paid for the war.
By the reign of Leo X—the last nonpriest elected Pope in 1513—a growing chorus of critics condemned indulgences as a shameless ecclesiastical dependence. Leo, a prince from Florence’s powerful Medici family, was a cardinal since he was thirteen. He was accustomed to an extravagant lifestyle by the time he became Pope at thirty-eight. Leo made the Papal Court the grandest in Europe, commissioning Raphael to decorate the majestic loggias. The Vatican’s servants nearly doubled to seven hundred. Assuming the role of a clerical aristocracy, cardinals were called Princes of the Church.17 Leo had no patience for critics who demanded he curb the sale of indulgences. He tried silencing his detractors by threatening excommunication.18 When that failed, he pressed ahead with a futures market by which diminution was available for sins not yet committed.19 So much cash flooded in that he could build St. Peter’s cathedral.20
Pope-Kings unvaryingly were scions of a handful of powerful Italian families. When one of their sons became Pope, the by-products of a Papacy often included rampant corruption, pervasive nepotism, and unbridled debauchery.21 The cash from indulgences mostly became a bottomless pit.22
The licentious lifestyle of the Papal Court and the widespread abuses in selling indulgences became a rallying cry for Martin Luther and the Reformation.23 Pope Leo responded by excommunicating Luther.24 One of the few benefits from the schism was that since Protestants condemned indulgences, the Holy See remained unopposed when it came to selling forgiveness to believers in Christ.
The steady flow of cash became ever more important as the Vatican suffered from the repercussions of the liberal political and social upheaval that swept Western Europe in the late eighteenth century, climaxing in the 1789 French Revolution. Monarchies friendly to the church were either toppled or greatly weakened. When Napoleon came to power in France in 1796 he demanded the Vatican pay millions a year in tribute to him. When the church could not afford to do so, he dispatched troops to Italy to strip many churches and cathedrals of anything of value and return the plunder to France. Worse, Rome’s real estate income in post-revolution France was extinguished as the nascent republic nationalized many church properties.25 The new National Assembly banned French bishops from sending to Rome any of the money they raised. It was not much better in other countries. In Austria, cash-strapped Emperor Joseph II undercut Papal authority by diverting the Vatican-bound money to his own treasury. Revenue from Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany slowed.26 Even Italy’s Prime Minister—personally approved for the office by Pope Pius VI—imposed a tax on church properties in a bid to stem the country’s financial crisis. Pius VI denounced the new tax as “the work of the devil.”27
The fallout continued as political unrest in Europe spilled over into the first half of the nineteenth century: Papal income fell in a remarkable forty of the century’s first fifty years.28 A few lay advisors worried that the social instability that wreaked havoc with church finances would not pass quickly. They recommended exploring ways by which the church might become less dependent on donations from the faithful. But such suggestions were invariably dismissed. Most ranking clerics believed that modern economic theory was a pernicious and reprehensible component of the liberal secular movement that had infected Europe. The Vatican had consigned to the inviolable Index of Prohibited Books John Stuart Mill’s seminal Principles of Political Economy.29 Pope Benedict XIV, in a much heralded encyclical,Vix Pervenit (On Usury and Other Dishonest Profit), reiterated the long-standing church ban on loaning money with interest. By condemning interest-bearing loans as “illicit,” “evil,” and a “sin,” Benedict ended any internal debate.30
The Vatican’s antiquated view about money meant that it did nothing to encourage fiscal growth or industrial development in the Papal States. The economy stagnated, and over decades tax revenues steadily declined.31
By the time Gregory XVI, the son of a lawyer, became Pope in 1831, the situation was so dire that he felt compelled to do something remarkable: he borrowed money from the Rothschilds, Europe’s preeminent Jewish banking dynasty.32 The £400,000 loan ($43,000,000 in 2014) was a lifeline to the church.33 The Rothschilds had a solid reputation when it came to bailing out distressed governments. They had steadied Austria’s finances after the Napoleonic Wars and provided enough money to squash two rebellions in Sicily.34
James de Rothschild, head of the family’s Paris-based headquarters, became the official Papal banker.35 One of his brothers, Carl, who ran the family’s Naples branch, began traveling to Rome to consult with the Pope. Their financial empire prompted a mixture of envy and resentment among church officials. Most traditionalists, who referred to James as the leader of “international Jewry,” were appalled that the church had resorted to “Christ-killers” for financial succor.36 French Poet Alfred de Vigny wrote that “a Jew now reigns over the Pope and Christianity. He pays monarchs and buys nations.”37 German political writer Karl Ludwig Börne—born Loeb Baruch but changed his name upon becoming a Lutheran—thought that Gregory had demeaned the Vatican by giving Carl Rothschild an audience. Börne noted that “a wealthy Jew kisses his [the Pope’s] hand” whereas “a poor Christian kisses the Pope’s feet.” He fanned the distrust among many of the faithful: “The Rothschilds are assuredly nobler than their ancestor Judas Iscariot. He sold Christ for 30 small pieces of silver; the Rothschilds would buy Him, if He were for sale.”38
It had been only thirty-five years since the destabilizing aftershocks from the French Revolution had led to the easing of harsh, discriminatory laws against Jews in Western Europe. It was then that Mayer Amschel, the Rothschild family patriarch, had walked out of the Frankfurt ghetto with his five sons and established a fledgling bank. Little wonder the Rothschilds sparked such envy. By the time Pope Gregory asked for a loan they had created the world’s biggest bank, ten times larger than their closest rival.39
Church leaders may not have liked the Rothschilds but they did like their cash. Shortly after the first loan, the Pope bestowed on Carl the medal of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George. For their part, the Rothschilds thought the Vatican was the most disorganized and chaotic mess they had ever encountered. They were startled to discover the church had no budgets or balance sheets. The prelates who controlled the money had no financial training. There were no independent reviews or audits. The combination of secrecy and disorder was ripe for abuse. When the Papal States fell into debt, the Pope sometimes simply repudiated the obligation and refused to pay. It was little wonder that the number of countries or banks willing to loan to the church had shrunk. Still, the Vatican rebuffed all financial reforms the Rothschilds suggested. Pope Gregory was suspicious of modernity, thought democracy was dangerous and destabilizing, and condemned even railroads as the work of the devil.40
Gregory died in 1846. His successor was Pius IX. Pius, the fourth son of a count, confronted a new problem: a surging tide of Italian nationalism that threatened the church’s control of the Papal States.41 Since the eighth century, the Papal States had been the earthly symbol of the church’s power. By the time Pius became Pope, the Vatican’s land spread east from Rome in a broad swath that split Italy in half. It was sandwiched between two colonial powers, the Hapsburgs to the north and the French to the south. Pius was barely on the Papal throne when popular uprisings erupted across Italy. A loosely knit federation of anticlerical anarchists and intellectuals hoped to expel the colonial powers and establish a unified Italian republic with Rome as its capital. In their vision there was no room for the Papal States. Pius viewed the nationalists with alarm and disdain.42
Determined not to lose the church’s empire and all its income, Pius tried dampening the widespread nationalist fervor with a conciliatory step: he introduced some reforms in the Papal States.43 His decrees established the first ever city and state councils and lifted some restrictions on speech. He freed more than a thousand political prisoners and created a Consultative Assembly composed of twenty-four elected lay representatives.44 The standing gallows in the center of each city were demolished, and the Pope loosened the censorship on newspapers. The changes were popular. But they were a decade too late.
Sicily exploded in full rebellion in January 1848. There was a revolt in Palermo that same month.45 Pius scrambled to stay ahead of the deteriorating situation by making more concessions. He set forth the outlines for a constitution that alluded vaguely to limiting his own secular power.46 But the compromises from Rome got lost in the escalating violence. The nationalists drove the Austrians from Milan that spring. Fearing the Austrians might try to seize some of the church’s lands in retaliation, Pius dispatched ten thousand troops. Word spread fast that the church’s army was on the march. Ordinary Italians were enthusiastic. But almost as quickly as Pius had sent them, he reversed himself, declaring that he did not think the church should be at war with a devoutly Catholic nation such as Austria.47
Popular sentiment boiled when Pius wavered. Romans, in particular, were furious and condemned the Pope as a reactionary posing as a reformer. Large crowds protested daily outside St. Peter’s and breakaway gangs clashed frequently with the Vatican’s Swiss Guards. On November 15, 1848, a mob surged into the Palace of the Chancellery and chased down Count Pellegrino Rossi, the Papal Prime Minister. They cornered him on a staircase and slit his throat.48 The next day an armed gang swarmed near the Palazzo del Quirinale and killed several Swiss Guards as well as the Pope’s personal secretary.49 Some in the mob insisted the Pope be taken prisoner. A few days later, disguised as a common priest—and with his face partially concealed by a large scarf and dark glasses—Pius fled Rome in a carriage for the remote sea fortress at Gaeta in southern Italy. The king of Naples guaranteed his safety.
France’s Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III) commissioned an expeditionary force of nine thousand troops and sent them to battle the Italian nationalists so Pius could return to Rome. The fighting was bitter and it took eight months before the French retook Rome and toppled the fledgling Republic. French army officers and three senior cardinals (the so-called Red Triumvirate) ran the city while the Pope was in exile. The French would not allow Pius to return until they were confident all the nationalist cells were eliminated.50
Pius returned to the Vatican nine months later. He was now the reactionary that people mistakenly thought he was before the fighting had forced him to flee for his life. The Pope would never again consider any reforms nor would there be any more compromises. The disarray he witnessed upon his return to Rome further convinced him that modern thought caused disorder. Crime was rampant. Price gouging over food exacerbated widespread hunger. Jews, a favorite scapegoat, received most of the blame, especially since some had worked with the nationalists.51 Pius even made Rome’s Jews pay the cost of his return since he contended they must have somehow been the agitators responsible for his exile in the first place.52
Worries about the chaos in Rome were soon replaced by concerns over the dire condition of the church’s finances. The bedlam meant sales of indulgences had plummeted. Collection of taxes in the Papal States had been badly affected. There was an enormous pile of two years of unpaid bills as well as new obligations to pay for the French garrison that now protected Rome. The Vatican desperately needed an infusion of cash. The Catholic bank to which Pius hoped to go for help, Paris-based Delahante and Company, had collapsed from the fallout of the Third French Revolution.53 Although the aristocratic Pius was an unrepentant advocate of a medieval view of Jews as the evil architects of everything from rationalism to Freemasonry to socialism, he reluctantly agreed that only the Rothschilds could again keep the Church afloat.54
The new Rothschild loan was 50 million francs—more than $10,000,000. That was more than the Vatican’s entire budget for a year. Two additional loans were soon forthcoming, totaling another 54 million francs.55,III
The Rothschilds, meanwhile, were criticized by some Jewish leaders who felt as though the family simply profited from the church without making any effort to change its harsh policies toward Jews. So the Rothschilds tried leveraging their influence to beseech the Holy See to improve conditions for the fifteen thousand Jews in the Papal States.57 They asked that the Pope cancel extra taxes levied solely on Jews, the prohibition on taking property from the ghetto, and the ban on working in professions, and that he abolish onerous evidentiary standards that put them at tremendous disadvantage in court cases. Pius sent a written assurance to the Rothschilds through the Papal Nuncio in Paris that he would help.58 Privately, he told some of his aides that he preferred martyrdom to acceding to the Rothschild requests.59 Pius ultimately made only a single concession: he tore down the walls and chained gates that ringed Rome’s notorious Jewish ghetto, the last in Europe set apart by a physical boundary.60 But it had no practical effect, as Jews were prohibited from moving anywhere else.61 When Carl Rothschild visited Rome four months later and complained that little had changed, Pius mollified the family by lifting a long-standing requirement that Jews attend proselytizing sermons every week on their Sabbath.
Pius bristled at the church’s dependency on the Rothschilds. So did prominent Catholic bankers, like the Belgian André Langrand-Dumonceau, who declared it “shameful” to borrow money from Jews.62 Church leaders believed Jewish financiers were Freemasons, part of a larger international effort to destabilize the Vatican and push a secular philosophy in which worship of money replaced that of God.63 To make the church less reliant, Pius appointed a deacon, Giacomo Antonelli, as his Cardinal Secretary of State (roughly the Pope’s Prime Minister) as well as chief of the Papal Treasury.IV Antonelli, who came from a prosperous Napolitano family, had been one of Pius’s few trusted aides in exile.65 It was a controversial selection. According to Antonelli’s biographer, Frank Coppa, “In pride he was considered a match for Lucifer, in politics a disciple of Machiavelli.”66 But he had the backing of Pius, the only person who mattered. The Pope gave him broad leeway to make the church self-sufficient.67
Antonelli began by ending the Vatican’s financial subsidies for clerical orders such as the Jesuits and Franciscans. They had historically been a costly drain.68 Although it caused a furor among the religious orders that relied on getting money from Rome, Pius refused any entreaty to reverse the decision. And as part of an ambitious restructuring of the church’s debt—and against the advice of a majority in the Curia—Antonelli raised taxes and introduced new tariffs in the Papal States. He negotiated with the Rothschilds to consolidate some of the Vatican’s outstanding debts into a single forty-year loan.69 It was for a then staggering 142,525,000 francs (around $30,000,000, some 40 percent of the church’s outstanding debt) at a 5 percent interest rate.70 Antonelli proved as tough a negotiator as James Rothschild. He resisted the bankers’ demands that the Vatican’s extensive real estate serve as collateral. In 1859, with the new loan in place, Antonelli balanced the Papal budget for the first time since the start of the century.71
Antonelli soon devised a plan to entirely bypass the Rothschilds: the church would sell interest-bearing debt directly to the faithful without using an investment bank. Two Catholic newspapers offered the chance to test his do-it-alone proposal. In 1861, the Vatican brought the Jesuits’ fortnightly La Civiltà Cattolica (Catholic Civilization) to Rome. And it purchased L’Osservatore Romano (The Roman Observer), a paper that became required reading in far-flung Catholic communities.72 Besides generic articles about faith, Antonelli crammed both papers with appeals for donations. The cash that came in was double his target.73 The Pope approved the sale of future debt without the Rothschilds.
In 1860, the church issued 60 million lire in Vatican “bonds.” Priests urged the faithful to buy them as their “religious duty.” Bishops collected the money and sent it to Rome.74 And when the church eventually needed help managing its debt, Antonelli and Pius ushered in two Paris-based Catholic bankers, the Marquis de la Bouillerie and Edward Blount.75 Free of the Rothschilds, it was not long before Pius rebuilt some of the wall around Rome’s Jewish ghetto.76
Catholics gave money to the church despite Pius’s unpopularity. Italians longed for a unified Italy. They knew the Papal States were an obstacle to achieving that. The Pope’s likability quotient had also suffered after a widely publicized incident in 1858 in which the Papal police in Bologna forcibly seized a six-year-old boy, Edgardo Mortara, from his Jewish parents after a Catholic housekeeper told friends she had secretly baptized the child years earlier when he had been gravely ill as an infant.77 Once children were baptized the church considered them to be Catholic and therefore Jewish parents could not be trusted to raise them. For centuries, children allegedly baptized in the Papal States had been taken from their birth parents and raised either by a Catholic family or placed into a church-run institution dedicated to the conversion of Jews.78
What made the Mortara case different was that the youngster’s confinement to a Rome conversion center had sparked appeals to Pius personally to intervene and order the boy returned to his parents. Pius instead directed the boy be brought regularly to the Vatican’s Esquiline Palace, where he promised to personally raise him as a Catholic.79
The boy was, of course, awed by the splendor of the Papal Court, and Pius steadfastly ignored many appeals for his release. Napoleon III, who found it galling that the French garrison made it possible for the youngster to be held, condemned the kidnapping, as did his devout and popular wife, Empress Eugénie. The Prime Minister of the Italian state of Piedmont—seeing this as an opportunity to weaken the Papacy—promised to return the boy to his parents.80 And Catholics in America and Britain denounced the boy’s taking. Pius dismissed the outcry as a conspiracy of “freethinkers, the disciples of Rousseau and Malthus.”81 Later, in a reference often used about Jews, Pius chided his critics as “dogs” and complained there were too many in Rome.82
When a delegation of Roman Jews visited Pius and pleaded for the boy’s release, the Pope erupted in anger, accusing them of stirring up popular sentiment against the Papacy. Personal appeals from the Rothschilds went unanswered. La Civiltà Cattolica fed the widely held belief that Jews murdered Christian children in order to use their blood in rituals. It reported Eastern European Jews had kidnapped and crucified children and suggested that the child’s parents wanted him back only so they could torture him since he was now a Catholic.83 The paper also published a story about Edgardo’s early months in Rome, claiming that “he begged to be raised in a Christian home,” and that, supposedly, without any coaxing, he said, “I am baptized and my father is the Pope.”84
Antonelli knew the impassioned controversy was bad for business. Contributions from the faithful had plummeted due to the international outrage. Antonelli asked the Pope to reconsider. But Pius would not budge. “I have the blessed Virgin on my side,” he told his Secretary of State.85 And as for those who might not want to give money to the church because they were alienated by the taking of the boy, Pius told Antonelli that was his job to fix it.86,V
The Pope had picked a bad time to test the limits of his secular power. Although the French had returned Pius to Rome, the nationalists had not abandoned their quest to unite Italy. A new wave of bloody insurrections kicked off across the peninsula in 1859. The resurgent instability caused distress inside St. Peter’s. Napoleon’s armies joined Sardinian militias in fighting Austrian troops and soon all of Italy was engulfed in civil war. The Hapsburgs eventually lost Lombardy. And the Bourbons relinquished control of Naples. Venice and Sardinia fell into the nascent unified Italian Republic. In 1861, the nationalist army annexed most of the Papal States. The Pope was now the secular king only of Rome.
Antonelli beseeched Pius to liberalize the Vatican’s investments. Having lost the Papal States’ income, the church would either have to downsize the Pope’s court and Curia or find creative ways to bring in more cash. Approving Vatican “bonds” as he had the previous year was only the first step, Antonelli told the Pope. Antonelli confided to a colleague that he thought Pius would give him more leeway over the finances so long as the Pope did “not consult the Holy Spirit.”88
Pius gave his answer later that year in an encyclical, Quanta Cura (Condemning Current Errors) and an attached Syllabus of Errors. The Syllabus caused an uproar.89 It, relied on edicts of previous Popes to denounce eighty tenets of modern life, including freedom of speech, divorce, the right to rebel against a lawful government, and the choice of people to practice religions other than Catholicism. Syllabus deplored materialism, science, liberalism, and democracy. Its eightieth statement declared there was no reason any “Roman Pope” should ever have to “harmonize himself with progress . . . [or] recent civilization.”90
Syllabus was an unrelenting broadside condemning the modern world and held stubbornly to the notion that the church could thrive according to the standards of a bygone century.91 Its harsh tone was particularly startling since Pius understood the church’s history better than many of his predecessors. Some had hoped that Pius might revert to the reformer traits that marked his early Papacy. But Syllabus crushed such expectations. Antonelli knew that Western governments were dumbstruck by the denunciations of freedom of thought and of conscience.92 In private, he tried explaining away Pius’s anti-intellectual diatribe.93 But much in the same way that the kidnappings of the Jewish children had undermined the Pope’s moral standing, Syllabus undercut his intellectual integrity. Italian university students burned copies in protest. A few priests left their orders citing Syllabus. Secular newspapers trashed it.
As with the kidnappings, Pius dismissed all criticism. He boasted that Syllabus was a seminal pronouncement and the attacks only reinforced his view that he alone had been divinely selected to guide the church. Eventually, to settle any simmering internal dissent, he ordered all bishops and cardinals to Rome in 1869 to debate the church’s role in opposing rationalism. Seven hundred ninety-two made the journey.94 The First Vatican Council—held in the acoustically dreadful St. Peter’s—focused instead on whether a Pope’s authority had limits. After seven months of raucous debate a majority of the bishops voted in favor of a declaration that on all issues of faith the Pope could unilaterally invoke infallibility.95
But there was little time inside Pius’s inner circle to celebrate. The day after the infallibility vote France declared war on Prussia.96 The war was the ideal pretext for Napoleon to withdraw his garrison and leave Rome undefended.97 Pius pleaded in vain to other Catholic countries for help. None did. Appalled by the two kidnappings and convinced that the Pope was an obstructionist, no leaders had any incentive to risk the lives of their troops to save a Pontiff who was so incredibly at odds with modern society.
The Vatican was defended now by Zuavi Pontifici—Papal light infantry—several thousand young, unmarried Catholic volunteers from more than two dozen countries. Few thought the ragtag force could withstand a sustained assault. The Italian king sent an emissary who offered to spare the church a humiliating military defeat by pretending the nationalist army took control of Rome under the guise of protecting the Pontiff. The nationalists even offered to recognize Papal sovereignty, the right of the Vatican to have ambassadors, and to pay some money to offset the income the church had lost from the Papal States. Pius would hear none of it. Instead, he let loose with a vicious verbal assault. The King’s envoy was so shaken that in his rush to get away from Pius he almost walked out a third-story window instead of a door.98
Rebuffed by the Pope, Italian troops massed outside Rome. Pius could not be dissuaded of his delusion that no Italian army would dare attack Rome—a sacred city—so long as he was there.99 When nationalist troops breached the city’s outer perimeter, the Pope urged his garrison to resist the “vipers.”100 Rome fell in a day. The Pope ordered the white flag raised over St. Peter’s at 9:00 a.m. on September 20. For the first time in a millennium, the church had no sovereign seat of power. Its sixteen thousand square miles of feudal empire had been reduced to a tiny parcel of land.
To soften the blow, the new republic offered the Pope the Leonine City, a large Roman district around which the ninth-century Pope Leo IV commissioned the Leonine Wall. But Pius worried that if he agreed to anything it would imply he endorsed the legitimacy of Italy’s rule over his former kingdom.
Some cardinals and the Father Superior of the Jesuits advised that he flee and establish a Papacy in exile. Antonelli advised against abandoning Rome.101 Pius needed little persuasion. He quickly refused. His exile in Gaeta had been too unsettling. He felt too old at seventy-eight to leave Italy. And he had a different plan. Although Italian officials assured him he was free to come and go as he wanted, Pius declared himself the “prisoner of the Vatican”—a victim Pope—and remained shuttered inside St. Peter’s.102 He excommunicated those who had played key roles in the conquest of Rome. And when the new government wanted to move into the Quirinale—built in the sixteenth century as a Papal summer palace—Pius petulantly refused to hand over the keys.103
Pius and his advisors had every reason to resort to high theatrics: Italy’s unification was disastrous for the church. And to their great frustration, there was little they could do about it. As Antonelli feared, the seizure was more than just a blow to the Vatican’s prestige. The Papal States had included the Vatican’s wealthiest regions and almost all its population.104 Antonelli knew the loss meant the church was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, some 20 million lire in debt.105 The situation would have been worse had Antonelli not secretly met with an Italian aristocrat, Baron Alberto Blanc, and through his efforts got Italy to return 5 million lire belonging to the Holy See, all in bank accounts seized by the secular government.106
Pius seemed oblivious to the bad news.VI He wanted money for a new militia of mercenaries to counter the nonexistent threat that Italian armies might appropriate the Vatican itself.108 He also thought it important to preserve the spectacle of the sumptuous Papal monarchy. Pius refused to dismiss any workers. And he insisted on paying salaries and pensions for officials who had been fired by the new Italian government, as well as for those who resigned out of loyalty to the Vatican. In less than a year, 15 percent of the church’s budget went to salaries of ex-employees of the Papal States.109
Antonelli knew it would take too long to raise money with another debt issue. After much debate, Pius and his advisors settled on an unexpected solution: to rekindle Peter’s Pence. It was a fundraising practice that had been popular a thousand years earlier with the Saxons in England (before Henry VIII had banned it). “Obolo di San Pietro” in Italian, “offerings from the faithful,” Peter’s Pence consisted not only of donations, but also of fees paid by loyal Catholics for services such as weddings, funerals, and confirmations.110 Special taxes levied during the Crusades were tallied as part of Peter’s Pence.111
In better times, the Vatican set aside money raised from Peter’s Pence only for extraordinary costs.112 Now it was needed to pay day-to-day operating expenses. Catholic journals, local churches, and even Catholic politicians throughout Europe, South America, and the United States pleaded to bail out the Pope. Not only did Pius need money to survive, the pitch went, but the church also required a professional army to protect what little it had left. Cash poured in. Austrian Archduke Maximilian and most of the French aristocracy gave generously. The poor and uneducated were induced to donate by tales that Italian inquisitors had chained the Pope to a prison wall. One fraud even sold samples of “Holy straw” from the nonexistent cell’s floor.113 Catholics in different countries competed with one another to see who could raise the most.114
The revival of Peter’s Pence was the first time ordinary Catholics felt as though they individually could help the “imprisoned” Pope. Pius adopted the unfamiliar mantle as a popular fundraiser. He acknowledged the most generous donations. The advent of photography allowed key contributors to receive signed pictures. And he doled out framed letters, personal benedictions, Papal titles of nobility, and knighthoods. The Italian ambassador to the United States noted, “Because they have no aristocracy, the Americans are particularly susceptible to this form of flattery.”115 Philadelphia’s Protestant Mellon family gave a large enough contribution to earn a Papal Marquis. Still, Antonelli knew it was not wise to fund the church on the hope that the faithful would steadily send in a lot of money. For the first three years of the reinstituted Peter’s Pence, the annual receipts covered on average just four months of the church’s annual deficit.116 Another of Antonelli’s ideas was to have European bishops appeal to Catholic worshippers for separate contributions—dubbed loan subscriptions—to pay down the Vatican’s outstanding debt. The bishop of Autun assured his congregants “The Pope is a good risk.”117
In Rome, Catholic financiers pitched more money-raising proposals to the Pope. Pius rejected one for a worldwide lottery to supplement Peter’s Pence. He judged it a volatile mixture of capitalism and gambling.118 And he also said no to the idea of capitalizing the remaining Papal properties throughout Europe so they could be leveraged to produce more revenue. Pius thought that violated Catholic doctrine forbidding business speculation.
Some of the Vatican resistance to capitalism was a leftover of Middle Age ideologies, a belief that the church alone was empowered by God to fight Mammon, a satanic deity of greed. And some doctrine, such as its ban on usury—earning interest on money loaned or invested—was based on a literal biblical interpretation.119,VII
Pius was especially distrustful of capitalism since he thought secular activists used it as a wedge to separate the church from its integrated role with the state. In some countries, the “capitalist bourgeoisie,” as the Vatican dubbed it, had even confiscated church land for public use.121 When leading Catholic banker André Langrand-Dumonceau went bankrupt in 1870 under the weight of too much debt, it further confirmed to the Pope that free market concepts were dangerous.122 Also behind the resistance to change was the church’s traditional view that capitalism was mostly the province of Jews. La Civiltà Cattolica regularly denounced the financial business as the evil dominion of Jews. Typical was this: “It [international Jewry] is the giant octopus that with its oversized tentacles envelops everything. It has its stomachs in the banks . . . and its suction cups everywhere. . . . It represents the kingdom of capital . . . the aristocracy of gold. . . . It reigns unopposed.”123
Running parallel with the ingrained anti-Semitism was a vituperative anti-Protestantism. Protestants did not promote capitalist principles, but certain Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines were receptive to the activities that collectively emerged as capitalism. Protestants embraced private ownership of property and the right to earn profits, and allowed borrowing and lending money as well as earning interest on it. German sociologist Max Weber contended that the surge of capitalism in northern Europe was a direct result of the tenets of Protestant Christianity. He tracked how the growth of Calvinism and Methodism ran parallel to the rise of capitalism in those countries.124 Protestants encouraged workers to find well-paying jobs and contended that employers should endeavor to provide decent working conditions.125 They invested in ventures for profit and then used those earnings for more investments.126 Catholic theology, in contrast, downplayed the rights of individuals, contending instead that workers should consider that one benefit of low paying work was that it contributed to the common good of fellow worshippers and the church. Vatican traditionalists condemned the capitalism that took hold in Protestant countries.127
But capitalism was only a financial philosophy. The more fundamental struggle among many nineteenth-century church philosophers was whether the Vatican should even be part of the modern world. The internal debate was fierce and long. Pius led the traditionalist camp. But in 1871, a new temporal crisis overshadowed that divisive argument. In May, under pressure from Italy’s enormous Catholic population, a divided parliament passed the Law of Papal Guarantees.128 It recognized the Pope as a “sovereign Pontiff,” granting him the same privileges as an Italian King; extended special territorial status to the Vatican and the Papal summer villa; and issued Vatican envoys immunities and honors. The law also exempted all church property from taxation and set aside an annual subsidy of 3,225,000 lire to help offset the income lost from the Papal States.129
The Pope detested the law, telling aides that it was a shameless effort to leave him a denuded figurehead with only a “royal palace.”130 It was not a treaty between equal partners, he contended, but a unilateral act that any future parliament could undo. Pius issued a hastily drafted encyclical repudiating the law and reiterating his demand that Italy instead restore the Papal States to the Vatican’s control.131 He warned the faithful that “wickedness” was afoot and that the guarantees were “unholy” and the government leaders who offered it were “stigmatized [by] their absurdity, cunning and mockery.”132 The Pope excommunicated more Italian officials he labeled as antichurch and even refused the annual subsidy—money the church needed desperately and for which Antonelli lobbied hard.133
Italy pressured the church. It seized dozens of monasteries and nunneries and converted them to government offices. In 1874, Italy banned mandatory religious classes in schools. It eliminated the exemption for the clergy serving in the military as well as abolishing the religious oath in courtrooms. And much to the Vatican’s fury, the state recognized civil marriages, an institution over which all Popes had insisted the Catholic Church alone had authority.134 Every time Pius lashed out with more invectives—he denigrated government ministers as everything from “monsters of hell” to “satellites of Satan in human flesh”—the state pushed back with more restrictive legislation. In 1876, parliament came short by only a few votes from passing a statute of Clerical Abuses that would have banned all political statements from the pulpit as well as abolishing the inviolable secrecy of the confessional.
Still, Pius refused to recognize the Italian state. Nor would the Pope allow Catholics to vote in national elections. Without a Catholic counterweight at the polls, the most anticlerical politicians were elected.
By the time the eighty-five-year-old Pius died in 1878, after a record thirty-two-year reign, devout Catholics revered him as an uncompromising Pope. And most of Italy’s leaders reviled him. Even his funeral was not free of drama. Hundreds of thousands turned out for his memorial procession. Army troops had to forcibly stop some in the crowd from snatching the coffin and tossing it into the Tiber River.135
Spies had penetrated the Vatican and reported back that some hard-line prelates were talking about boycotting “occupied Rome” for the Conclave of Cardinals to elect the new Pope. If they convened in another country, officials fretted it could lead to the first non-Italian Pope, someone who might be more aggressive than even Pius in challenging Italy’s sovereign claim to the Papal States. Italy sent a message to the senior cardinals: the government guaranteed not to meddle in the conclave, but if the cardinals held it elsewhere, they could never again gather in Rome. The clerics decided to stay in the Eternal City.136
I. Historians credit Johann Tetzel, a popular sixteenth-century Dominican priest and dispenser of indulgences, with the first advertising jingle: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs.”11
II. The Holy See’s official directory lists thirty-nine antipopes and 265 Popes. Other sources list as many as forty-seven antipopes. An accurate count is difficult because standards for electing Popes changed frequently for more than a thousand years. Some Pontiffs were later classified as dissidents. The antipopes peaked during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, with two or more antipopes sometimes claiming the Papacy.15
III. The Vatican issued the equivalent of bonds that paid between 5 and 8 percent interest. The Rothschilds bought the commercial paper from the church at a 75 percent discount. What they paid the Vatican constituted the loan. The Rothschilds then resold the paper as bonds to the public, with their profit being the difference between what they paid the church and the final sales price. The interest to the buyer was in the form of a discount from the full face value. That arrangement allowed the Vatican to maintain the farce that it followed scripture and did not earn or pay interest on its investments.56
IV. Antonelli was one of the last deacons to become a cardinal. Benedict XV, in 1917, ruled that only ordained priests could be cardinals. Many clerics never fully trusted Antonelli since he was not a priest, and many believed he was secretly a Freemason.64
V. In 1864, as the pressure on Rome increased, Pius defended the seizure of another Jewish boy. This time it was nine-year-old Giuseppe Coen, who lived in Rome’s ghetto. The church claimed the boy wanted to become a Catholic and had voluntarily sought out a priest. The public outcry was again fierce. European Catholics led by the French beseeched Pius to release Coen. He again ignored them.87
VI. Corrado Pallenberg, in a 1971 book, Vatican Finances, reported that Pius quipped, “Sarò forse infallibile, ma sono certamente fallito (I may be infallible, but I am certainly bankrupt).” There is no citation, however, and the author cannot find it in any previous history.107
VII. The ban on earning interest was not relaxed until the mid-1800s and not lifted entirely until the middle of World War I. As late as 1903, when Pius X became Pope, the anticapitalist theme continued in Sacrorum Antistitum (The Oath Against Modernism). That decree required all priests to swear an oath denouncing “Americanism,” something Pius considered an insidious slide toward modernism.120