1 Statement of Anthony Huntley to Metropolitan Police (London), June 23, 1982, copy provided to author by Carlo Calvi. Huntley told the police, “This didn’t really register at first but on taking a second and longer look, I saw there was a complete body hanging by the neck.” See also Philip Willan, The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Mason and the Killing of Roberto Calvi (London: Robinson, 2007), 1–2.
2 Larry Gurwin, The Calvi Affair: Death of a Banker (London: Pan, 1983), 122; see also Willan, The Last Supper, 2.
3 Metropolitan Police Report on the death of Roberto Calvi, London, June 19–22, 1982, copy provided to author by Carlo Calvi; see also statement of Police Constable (PC) John Palmer, City of London Police, June 23, 1982.
4 Statement of PC Donald Bartliff, City of London Police, June 28, 1982; see also Willan, The Last Supper, 2.
5 Peter Popham, “The Case of God’s Banker: Roberto Calvi the Trial Begins,” The Independent (London), October 6, 2005.
6 Statement of PC John Palmer, City of London Police, June 23, 1982.
7 Rupert Cornwell, God’s Banker (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1983), 198.
8 Metropolitan Police Report on the death of Roberto Calvi, London, June 19–22, 1982.
9 If the police had more thoroughly examined his clothing they would have known his true identity a day earlier. His name was printed on a label of his suit’s breast pocket. Public Prosecutor’s Office, Preliminary Hearing File, Public Prosecutor’s memorandum on the murder of Roberto Calvi, Rome, December 28, 2004, 2–3. See also Willan, The Last Supper, 3, 5.
10 Lieutenant Colonel Francesco Delfino, an Italian military intelligence officer (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare, known by the acronym SISMI), arrived two days after Calvi’s body was found. He did not assist Scotland Yard, but instead monitored the probe’s progress with his British colleagues at MI5.
11 The court before which he had been tried on criminal charges had impounded Calvi’s passport nearly a year before he arrived in London. Calvi’s fake was good enough to fool customs agents.
12 Popham, “The Case of God’s Banker.”
13 Minutes of the Ambrosiano Board from June 17, 1982, published in Il Mondo, July 12, 1982.
14 Charles Raw, The Moneychangers: How the Vatican Bank Enabled Roberto Calvi to Steal $250 Million for the Heads of the P2 Masonic Lodge (London: Harvill/HarperCollins, 1992), 414–19; see also Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust: Bankers and Their Close Associates: The CIA, the Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians, and the Vatican (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 192.
15 Calvi, who had a house account at London’s Claridge’s Hotel, detested his 120-square-foot Chelsea Cloisters room with two single beds. Testimony of Silvano Vittor and Margaret Lilley, Coroner’s Inquest of June 13–27, 1983, courtesy of Carlo Calvi.
16 Author interview with Carlo Calvi, September 27, 2005.
17 A month later the police admitted they might have unbuttoned the vest when they first searched the body at the bridge, and then incorrectly rebuttoned it before taking any photos. Italy’s L’Espresso published a front-page photo of the corpse with the incorrectly buttoned vest, sparking the first round of frenzied murder speculation. Report of Detective Inspector John White, July 20, 1982, cited in Willan, The Last Supper, 8.
18 Metropolitan Police Report on the death of Roberto Calvi, London, June 19–22, 1982; filed London Police investigation/case summaries dated July 1982.
19 Testimony of Fabiola Moretti, cited in Willan, The Last Supper, 183–84.
20 One of the sightings that has become part of the widely accepted “facts” about Calvi’s whereabouts is the recollection twenty years after the event from a waiter who worked at San Lorenzo, a popular Knightsbridge trattoria. Tracked down by Italian investigators who were reexamining the case, the former waiter identified Calvi from a photo. He also picked out Umberto Ortolani, a member of a secret Masonic Lodge, as one of several of Calvi’s supposed dinner mates that night. Because of the long time lapse, and since the waiter admitted he had seen photos of Calvi in the media before the investigators showed him any pictures, the San Lorenzo sighting is at best speculative. See generally Willan, The Last Supper, xxxi–xxxiii.
21 The policy was for 4 billion lire, approximately $3 million at the time of death.
22 Thomas T. Noguchi and Joseph DiMona, Coroner At Large (Coroner Series) (Premier Digital Publishing, 1985; Kindle edition, location 2756 of 2971).
23 Unfortunately for the police, the telephone system at the Chelsea Cloisters was antiquated and operated through a switchboard. The operator put incoming calls through to the rooms and no record was kept of them. As for outgoing calls, guests had to request an outside line from the operator, and rates were priced by units according to whether the call was local or international. No records were maintained of the numbers called. Records reveal that Calvi made seventeen requests for outgoing calls, although it could not be determined if all of those had been successfully completed or if in some instances they went unanswered. Calvi used 463 billing units, more than enough for the calls to which his wife and daughter testified. As for the remaining credits, police never determined whom he called. Raw, The Moneychangers, 431–32; Cornwell, God’s Banker, 196; Author interview with Carlo Calvi, September 27, 2005.
24 See generally statement of Police Constable Donald Bartliff in Willan, The Last Supper, 6–7.
25 In handwritten notes Simpson later made about the case he indicated that during the first call he received the morning the body was discovered, the constable indicated that the death was “Nothing very unusual” and “Doesn’t look like a crime, sir, but would you like to look at it?” See also Colin Evans, A Question of Evidence: The Casebook of Great Forensic Controversies, from Napoleon to O.J. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003), 191.
26 Transcript summaries from Coroner’s Inquests, July 23, 1982, and June 13–27, 1983, courtesy of Carlo Calvi; see also Associated Press, International News, A.M. cycle, July 23, 1982.
27 Transcript summary from Coroner’s Inquest, July 23, 1982, courtesy of Carlo Calvi.
28 “The Vatican’s Business; Ambrosia Again,” The Economist, April 25, 1992, 58 (UK edition, 56).
29 Evans, A Question of Evidence, 195.
30 Gurwin, The Calvi Affair, 147.
31 “Jury in London Declares Italian Banker a Suicide,” The New York Times, July 25, 1982, 5.
32 Barnaby J. Feder, “Calvi’s Family Asks New Inquest,” The New York Times, Section D, March 29, 1983, 5.
33 David Willey, God’s Politician: John Paul at the Vatican (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 213.
34 In 1988, a Milan civil court ruled that Calvi was likely murdered and entered a judgment ordering the insurer, Assicurazioni Generali, to pay Calvi’s family the full amount of the policy.
35 Lt. Colonel Francesco Delfino, who monitored the London investigation, thought that the British detectives were handling the case as if it were “the suicide of a tramp.” Willan, The Last Supper, 9–10. See also Paul Lewis, “Italy’s Mysterious, Deepening Bank Scandal,” The New York Times, July 28, 1982, A1.
36 See generally “Banco Ambrosiano Liquidated,” Facts on File World News Digest, Nexis, August 13, 1982.
37 Richard Owen, “Plea to Pope from ‘God’s Banker’ Revealed as Murder Trial Begins,” The Times (London), October 6, 2005.
38 Andrea Perry, Mark Watts, and Elena Cosentino, “Help Me. Murdered Banker Calvi’s Last Desperate Plea to the Pope,” Sunday Express (London), April 16, 2006, 39.
39 Owen, “Plea to Pope from ‘God’s Banker’ Revealed as Murder Trial Begins.”
40 Lefteris Pitarakis and Philip Willan, “So Who Did Kill Calvi?,” The Sunday Herald, June 10, 2007, 28; Perry, Watts, and Cosentino, “Help me.”
41 “Italy Liquidates Ailing Banco Ambrosiano,” The Globe and Mail (Canada), August 10, 1982.
42 “Banco Ambrosiano: Come Again?,” The Economist, August 14, 1982, 61.
43 In Italy, the press previously called Calvi the “Vatican’s Banker” or the “Pope’s Banker.”
44 “Calvis Claim New Evidence Shows Banker Was Murdered,” United Press International, International Section, A.M. cycle, March 28, 1983.
45 Ed Blanche, “Judge Accepts Family’s Challenge to Suicide Verdict,” Associated Press, A.M. cycle, January 13, 1983; Barnaby J. Feder, “Calvi’s Family Asks New Inquest,” The New York Times, Section D, March 29, 1983, 5; Michael Harvey, “Star Solicitor of Causes Celebres,” Press Association, September 26, 1994.
46 “Court Orders New Inquest in ‘Hanging’ Italian Banker’s Family Wins Reopening of Case,” Miami Herald, March 30, 1983, A9.
47 “Inquest Jury Undecided on Calvi,” The New York Times, Section D, June 28, 1982, 1; “Open Verdict in Italian Banker’s Death,” Associated Press, P.M. cycle, International Section, June 27, 1983; see also “Calvi Inquest Indecisive,” The Globe and Mail (Canada), June 28, 1983.
48 Author interview with Carlo Calvi, September 27, 2005.
49 Chester Stern, “New Forensic Evidence May Reopen Calvi Case; ‘God’s Banker’ Murder Probe,” Mail on Sunday (London), October 18, 1992, 2.
50 Michael Gillard, “Calvi—The Tests That May Point to Murder,” The Observer (London), January 31, 1993, 27; see also David Connett, “Calvi Was ‘Murdered,’ Tests Find,” The Independent (London), October 18, 1992, 3; Willan, The Last Supper, 8–9. In 1994, Kroll sued the Calvi family in federal court in New York for the nonpayment of $3 million of its $4.5 million fee. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount. See Chris Blackhurst, “Cash-Strapped Kroll Sues Calvis for Pounds 2M,” The Observer (London), August 7, 1994, 1.
51 Gillard, “Calvi—The Tests May Point to Murder.”
52 “Italy Exhumes ‘God’s Banker’ to Review Earlier Suicide,” The New York Times, December 17, 1998, A19; Bob Beaty, “Mystery Extends from Alberta to Italian Mafia: Family of Roberto Calvi Allege Vatican Also Involved in Banker’s Death,” Calgary Herald (Alberta, Canada), December 31, 1998, B5.
53 Philip Willan, “DNA May Solve Banker’s Murder,” The Guardian (London), December 30, 1998, 11; “Bruising Found on Remains of Italian Banker Calvi,” Agence France-Presse, English edition, International News, January 25, 1999; see also “New Evidence Supports Theory Death of ‘God’s Banker’ Was No Suicide, Family-Hired Expert Says,” Associated Press Worldstream, International News, December 10, 2000.
54 Jim McBeth, “Who Killed God’s Banker,” The Scotsman, October 1, 2002, 2; Peter Popham, “ ‘God’s Banker’ Believed Murdered; New Autopsy Rejects Suicide Theory,” Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada), February 18, 2003, 4.
55 John Phillips, “Mason Indicted over Murder of ‘God’s Banker,’ ” The Independent (London), July 20, 2005, 20. Four men were indicted, with a fifth added several months later. “Italy: 4 Charged in Banker’s 1982 Death,” World Briefing, The New York Times, April 19, 2005, A11. Carboni, and Pippo Calo, a reputed mob boss, had been charged in 1997 with conspiracy to murder Calvi. But the case was never prosecuted for lack of evidence. The 2002 indictments were superseding counts and included expanded charges. “Italy Exhumes ‘God’s Banker’ to Review Earlier Suicide,” The New York Times, December 17, 1998, A19.
56 “ ‘God’s Banker’ Murder—Five Cleared,” Sky News (U.K.), June 6, 2007.
57 “Italy: 5 Acquitted in Banker’s 1982 Death,” World Briefing, The New York Times, June 7, 2007, A17; Frances D’Emilio, “Jury Acquits All 5 Defendants of Murder in Death of Italian Financier Called ‘God’s Banker,’ ” Associated Press, International News, June 7, 2007.
58 “ ‘God’s Banker’ Was Murdered, Judges Say,” ANSA English Media Service, July 15, 2010.
59 Ibid.; Tony Thompson, “Mafia Boss Breaks Silence over Roberto Calvi Killing,” The Guardian, May 12, 2012.
1 The name “Vatican” comes from the ancient Roman name for the hill—Vaticanus—on which St. Peter’s is built. Pope comes from the Greek pappas for “father.”
2 Paul Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican: An Irreverent View of the Holy See (London: Robert Hale, 1985), 16.
3 The Roman Curia didn’t officially exist until 1089 when Urban II named the bureaucracy. But it remained small until the mid-sixteenth century, when its first formal division, the Congregation of the Inquisition, was formed. It has increased forty-fold since then. The “pontifical court” was officially dropped by Pope Paul VI in the 1960s.
4 John F. Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22–23.
5 Robert W. Shaffern, “ ‘Buying Back’ Redemption,” as part of a discussion, “Sin, and Its Indulgences,” The New York Times, February 13, 2009.
6 “In reality, however, no one has ever purchased an indulgence, but may have made a money contribution to a pious or charitable cause that asked for donations, such as the relief of the poor or the construction of a church”: ibid.
7 J. N. D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 231–32.
8 Martin Luther condemned such pilgrimage sites, noting that although there were only twelve apostles, there were twenty-six “apostles” buried in Germany alone. Bartholomew F. Brewer, Pilgrimage from Rome (Greenville, South Carolina: BJU Press, 1986), 132.
9 Dominique Chivot, Vatican (New York, Assouline, 2009), 81.
10 The rules regarding the Rosary indulgence changed over time. According to AgeofMary.com, a website dedicated to “The Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary”: “Plenary Indulgence: A Plenary Indulgence may be gained (under the usual conditions) when the Rosary is prayed in a Church, in a family group, or in a religious community. The ‘usual conditions’ refers to (1) being in the state of grace, (2) going to confession within eight days (before or after) of performing the indulgenced act, and (3) actually intending to gain the indulgence. Additional conditions for gaining the Rosary Plenary Indulgence are the following: Five decades of the Rosary must be prayed continuously. The prayers of the Rosary must be prayed vocally and one must meditate upon the Mysteries of the Rosary. If the recitation of the Rosary is public, the Mysteries of the Rosary must be announced. Partial Indulgence—One may gain a partial indulgence for the Rosary’s recitation in whole or in part in other circumstances,” http://holyrosary.ageofmary.com/indulgences-of-the-rosary/.
11 Tetzel sources: James MacCaffrey, History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, Vol. 1 (Maynooth, Ireland: St. Patrick’s College, 2011); John Woolard, “Luther’s Protest For The Ages; Stand Up: He questioned the Catholic Church, leading to a new religious direction,” Investor’s Business Daily, December 14, 2007, A3.
12 John L. Allen Jr., “Part of a Culture War? Hardly,” as part of a discussion, “Sin, and Its Indulgences,” The New York Times, February 13, 2009; see also MacCaffrey, History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, 73–74.
13 John L. Allen Jr., All the Pope’s Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 99: “Outlandish requests for indulgences, which was part of the landscape that led to the Protestant Reformation.”
14 All the confusion over antipopes has occasionally led to the existence of two Popes with the same name (Innocent III, an antipope in 1179 and a Pope in 1198; John XXIII, a 1410 antipope and a 1958 Pope; and two antipopes named Victor IV, in 1138 and 1159). For some specific instances of challenges: Urban VI (1378–1389) and Boniface IX (1389–1404) were opposed by Robert of Geneva (“Clement VII”) (1378–1394) as well as Pedro de Luna (“Benedict XIII”) (1394–1417) and Baldassare Cossa (“John XXIII”) (1400–1415); Innocent VII (1404–1406) was opposed by Pedro de Luna (“Benedict XIII”) (1394–1417) and Baldassare Cossa (“John XXIII”) (1400–1415); Gregory XII (1406–1415) was opposed in part by Pedro de Luna (“Benedict XIII”) (1394–1417) and Baldassare Cossa (“John XXIII”) (1400–1415), but mostly by Pietro Philarghi (“Alexander V”) (1409–1410); and Eugene IV (1431–1447) was opposed by Amadeus of Savoy (“Felix V”) (1439–1449); see also Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. A digital chronological list of some antipopes is at http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/a13.htm.
15 Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes; Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
16 “Working Out the Road to Salvation: A Study of the Catholic Christian Faith,” July 11, 2012, http://catholicischristian.wordpress.com/.
17 Chivot, Vatican, 81.
18 MacCaffrey, History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, Vol. 1, 79.
19 Ibid., 72–73.
20 “For German-speakers the Basilica of St. Peter is an especially bittersweet sight, because it was the sale of indulgences to pay for its construction that helped trigger the Protestant Reformation”: Allen, All the Pope’s Men, 79.
21 The word nepotism had its origins in the Papal Court; the Latin nepos refers to both nephew and grandson. Through the Renaissance, Popes thought it normal to have a “Cardinal Nephew.”
22 Joseph McCabe, “The Popes and Their Church,” Rationalist Encyclopædia, 1948, p. 6e.
23 John Julius Norwich, Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy (New York: Random House, 2011), Kindle edition, location 5557 of 8891.
24 Shaffern, “ ‘Buying Back’ Redemption”; McDowell, Inside the Vatican, 38–39.
25 Cameron, “Papal Finance”; see also “Modern Rome and the Papal Government,” Foreign Quarterly Review 11 (1833): 661–62.
26 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 23.
27 Pius VI quoted in Chivot, Vatican, 82.
28 Edward Elton Young Hales, Revolution and Papacy, 1769–1846 (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1960), 247–54.
29 Bolton King, A History of Italian Unity—A Political History of Italy from 1814–1871, 2 vols. (London, 1909), Vol. 1, 75.
30 The early church made it illegal for clergy to charge any interest on loans (in 314 in the Councils of Arles and 325 at Necaea). The Council of Vienne in 1311 extended the ban to any Catholic, declaring that anyone who charged interest was a heretic. In light of that unyielding history, some contemporaneous historians thought that Vix Pervenit created a small loophole because Benedict defined usury as “an exorbitant rate of interest.” An English translation of Vix Pervenit in its entirety is at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Ben14/b14vixpe.htm.
31 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 23.
32 David I. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 80. According to Kertzer, “Prohibited by law from owning land and kept out of trades controlled by the guilds, the Jews found in finance and money-lending the only economic path to prosperity open to them.” (79). See also David Willey, God’s Politician: John Paul at the Vatican (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 206.
33 Niall Ferguson, House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets 1798-1848, Kindle edition, Vol. 1, 6419 of 14008). The Rothschilds worked with an Italian banker, Torlonia, on the Papal loan.
34 Egon Caesar Corti (Count), The Rise of the House of Rothschild (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1928), in which several instances are discussed about how the Rothschilds helped stabilize secular governments facing financial crises from the political tumult of the mid-nineteenth century; see also Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds: A Family of Fortune (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); The Rothschilds’ Paris-based branch served as the principal banker for Sardinia, and ultimately provided a unified Italian republic its first loan. See Rondo E. Cameron, “French Finance and Italian Unity: The Cavourian Decade,” American Historical Review, Vol. LXII, no. 3 (April, 1957).
35 See generally Niall Ferguson, House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets 1798-1848, Vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1998); Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: The World’s Banker, 1849–1999, Vol. 2 (New York: Viking, 1999).
36 Cameron, “Papal Finance,” 133.
37 Ferguson, House of Rothschild, Kindle edition, Vol. 1, 6419 of 14008.
38 Both quotes from Ludwig Börne are from Ferguson, House of Rothschild, Kindle edition, Vol. 1, 6425 of 14008.
39 Ibid., 6685 of 14008 and Vol. 2, locations 92, 195-96 of 15319.
40 Michael P. Riccards, Vicars of Christ: Popes, Power, and Politics in the Modern World (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 5–6; Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 50.
41 For a good synopsis of Pius’s life before becoming Pope at the age of fifty-four, see Jason Berry, Render Unto Rome, The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church (New York: Crown, 2011), 41–42.
42 Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 309.
43 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 15; Mario Rossi, “Emancipation of the Jews in Italy,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1953, 121.
44 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 7; Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 64.
45 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 73.
46 Edward Elton Young Hales, Pio Nono: A Study in European Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1954), 71.
47 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 74–79.
48 The opulent Palazzo della Cancelleria (Palace of the Chancellery) was built for Cardinal Raffaele Riario, who was the Cardinal Chancellor for his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV. The money to build it reportedly came from a single night of high-stakes gambling by Riario with some of Europe’s wealthiest aristocrats.
49 David Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican: Espionage and Intrigue from Napoleon to the Holocaust (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 11.
50 Norwich, Absolute Monarchs, Kindle edition, location 7162 of 8891.
51 Rossi, “Emancipation of the Jews in Italy,” 131.
52 John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking 1999), 300. Pius reinstituted medieval laws greatly limiting the professions available to Jews and punished them with special taxes. He also gave new impetus to a program of compulsory baptisms. See generally Rossi, “Emancipation of the Jews in Italy,” 130.
53 Annuaire de l’économie politique et de statistique (Paris: Guillaumin, 1859), 279–80.
54 Pius IX canonized Pedro de Arbués for sainthood, a decision that prompted protest from Jews worldwide and even from some Catholics. That was because de Arbués was the First Inquisitor for Aragón during the Spanish Inquisition. He was personally responsible for torturing and killing thousands of Jews, and was himself killed by a Jewish merchant whose sister he had sentenced to death. Some in the church oddly defended the canonization by claiming there were worse inquisitors than de Arbués. Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 554–56.
55 Corti, The Rise of the House of Rothschild, 279; Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Kindle edition, location 2337, 2341 of 15319.
56 Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Kindle edition, Vol. 2, 2331–2348 of 15319.
57 The estimate on the number of Jews in the Papal States is from Statistica della popolazione dello Stato Pontifico dell’anno 1853 (Rome: Ministerio del Commercio e Lavori Pubblici, 1857).
58 Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Kindle edition, Vol. 2, location 13169 of 15319, n. 10.
59 Frank J. Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli and Papal Politics in European Affairs (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 82.
60 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 128–29.
61 Ferguson, The World’s Banker, vol. 2, 27–29, 590; see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 29; Norwich, Absolute Monarchs, Kindle edition, location 6954 of 8891. The unwalled Rome ghetto survived through World War II.
62 Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Kindle edition, Vol. 2, location 2854 of 15319.
63 Giancarlo Galli, Finanza Bianca. La chiesa, i soldi, il potere (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2004), 17.
64 Cameron, “Papal Finance.” The portion about distrust and Masonry is from Frank J. Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli and Papal Politics in European Affairs (New York: New York University Press, 1990).
65 Carlo Falconi, Il Cardinale Antonelli: Vita e carriera del Richelieu italiano nella chiesa di Pio IX (Milan: Mondadori 1983); Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 28; Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 18. The title Secretary of State had come into regular use at the Vatican during the Papacy of Innocent X in the mid-seventeenth century. Originally, the position was called Domestic Secretary.
66 Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, 2.
67 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 92–93; see also Peter Godman, Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives That Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church (New York: Free Press, 2004), 14.
68 Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, 225–29.
69 Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Kindle edition, Vol. 2, location 2348 of 15319.
70 Isadore Sachs, L’Italie, ses finances et son développement économique,1859–1884 (Paris, 1885), 456; Cameron, “Papal Finance,” 134.
71 Cameron, “Papal Finance,” 134–36; see also Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, 51, 85.
72 See generally L’Osservatore Romano in English at http://www.vatican.va/en/; and at http://www.osservatoreromano.va/it/; also see La Civiltà Cattolica at http://www.laciviltacattolica.it/it/. In the twentieth century, L’Osservatore Romano was sometimes mockingly referred to as Pravda, the Soviet Union’s official newspaper. John L. Allen Jr., the Vatican reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, wrote that the comparison was made since L’Osservatore Romano “is filled with pictures and speeches by the Great Leader and because it muffles criticism.” Allen cited an instance in 1914 when the paper printed a “stinging editorial” denouncing a report that Pius X had a cold. The Pope died the next day. Allen, All the Pope’s Men, 48.
73 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 8–9.
74 Cameron, “Papal Finance,” 136.
75 Blount was British, but had moved to Paris as a young banker and was one of the era’s most successful French-based financiers.
76 James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 442.
77 Garry Wills, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 40. There were fewer than two hundred Jews living in Bologna. The Vatican had decimated the flourishing community with a series of restrictive laws during the sixteenth century. Pope Clement VIII finally expelled them from the Papal States in 1593, but some had gradually returned.
Families like the Mortoras thought they were safe since the church’s policy was not to baptize a child living with his birth parents without the parents’ consent. What they did not know was that the Vatican carved out an exception for children who were baptized when they were seriously ill. Even in instances without any apparent illness, church officials consistently upheld the baptisms. David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), Kindle edition, 59. The Mortara child had been baptized with tap water when he was only eleven months old. The church did not learn about it until he was nearly seven. Rossi, “Emancipation of the Jews in Italy,” 130.
78 Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, Kindle edition, 32-33-34, 55, 255. Kertzer writes “[t]he taking of Jewish children was a common occurrence in nineteenth-century Italy.” Many of the children forcibly taken from parents, such as the 1844 case of a nineteen-month-old Jewish girl, ended up confined to the Casa dei Catecumeni (House of the Catechmen). That was a sixteenth-century Catholic organization started by Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and dedicated to converting non-Catholics. Jewish parents were barred from visiting their birth children. See also Cesare, The Last Days of Papal Rome, chapter XII, 176–84. In the case of Edgardo, he lived most of the time with seminarians in a Roman Catechmen and each Christmas stayed with the Pope.
79 The church dangled the possibility that if the parents converted to Catholicism their son might be returned. Without an ironclad promise that they would be reunited, they passed.
80 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 130–31. A decade later, one of the most popular plays in Rome was “A Hebrew Family,” a loose adaptation of the Mortara affair. The Vatican and its clerics were cast as villains. Cesare, The Last Days of Papal Rome, 179.
81 Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 158.
82 Kenneth Stowe, Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages: Confrontation and Response (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 57–59.
83 Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 113, 136–37; Wills, Papal Sin, 41.
84 “Il piccolo neofito, Edgardo Mortara,” Civiltà Cattolica, ser. 3, vol. 12 (1858), 389–90, cited in Kertzer.
85 Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 32, 81, 85, 157; see also Giacomo Martina, SJ, Pio IX (1851–1866), Miscellanea historiae ecclesiasticae in Pontifica Universitate Gregoriana 51 (1986).
86 When Edgardo was with Pius in the Papal Court, the boy sometimes hid under the Pontiff’s clerical robe. The Pope enjoyed asking visitors, “Where is the boy?” Then he would lift his vestment to reveal the youngster. Edgardo became a priest, adding Pio to his name in honor of the Pope, whom he referred to as his “Father.” Most of his life was spent as a missionary dedicated to converting Jews, and he even tried unsuccessfully to convert his own mother. Catholics in many countries became familiar with him as he regaled audiences with the tale of his conversion. He lived long enough to testify in the beatification process of Pius IX: “I greatly desire the beatification and canonization of the Servant of God.” Mortara died in 1940 at an abbey in Belgium.
87 Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 257–59.
88 Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, 82.
89 Norwich, Absolute Monarchs, Kindle edition, location 7314 of 8891.
90 “The Catholic Church and Modern Civilization,” The Nation, September 19, 1867, 229–30; Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 175–77; Wills, Papal Sin, 239–44.
91 For a copy of Pius IX’s 1864 encyclical Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors, see http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9quanta.htm and http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9syll.htm. Before he issued the Syllabus, Pius had consulted with his bishops about the contents. Ninety-six refused to give an opinion, and of the 159 who did reply, a third were opposed.
92 Wills, Papal Sin, 244.
93 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 176–78.
94 Ibid., 195–98.
95 It is impossible to obtain an accurate vote since there was no public tally. An early report had the bishops in favor 451 to 88. But some historians believe 62 of those preferred an amended version with a more limited power of infallibility.
96 Hales, Pio Nono, 244.
97 Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Kindle edition, location 2792 of 15319.
98 Frank J. Coppa, The Italian Wars of Independence (New York: Longman, 1992), 139–41.
99 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 216.
100 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 28.
101 Carlo F. Passaglia (trans. by Ernest Filalete). De l’obligation pour le Pape Eveque de Rome de rester dans cette ville quoque elle devienne la capitale du Royame Italien (Paris: Molini, 1861), 77–82.
102 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 51; Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 226.
103 Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli and Papal Politics in European Affairs, 165.
104 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 30; Cameron, “Papal Finance,” 137.
105 Carlo Crocella, Augusta miseria: aspetti delle finanze pontificie nell’età del capitalismo (Milan: Nuovo 1st ed. Italia, 1982), 66.
106 Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, 169.
107 Corrado Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1960).
108 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 30.
109 Segreteria di Stato (SdS), Spoglio di Pio X, b. 4, fasc. 16, Pensioni, undated, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Vatican City, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
110 Obolo dil San Pietro [Peter’s Pence]: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/obolo_spietro/documents/index_it.htm; see also Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 145. Until the eighteenth century, church historians referred to it only by its Latin name, Denarius Sancti Petri.
111 Ralph Della Cava, “Financing the Faith: The Case of Roman Catholicism,” Church and State 35 (1993): 37–61. Through the 1990s, Peter’s Pence was all cash. Many times, Catholics granted an audience with the Pope passed large gifts of cash (which the Pope in turn handed to someone in his entourage). In the twenty-first century, the Vatican has adapted Peter’s Pence to the digital age, allowing the faithful to use credit cards or bank wire transfers for their contributions. On the Vatican’s website, Peter’s Pence is described as “an ancient custom still alive today” and is “the financial support offered by the faithful to the Holy Father as a sign of the sharing in the concern of the Successor of Peter for the many different needs of the Universal Church and for the relief of those most in need.” See http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/obolo_spietro/documents/index_en.htm.
112 Thomas J. Reese, SJ, Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 225; Benny Lai, Finanze Vaticane: Da Pio XI a Benedetto XVI (Rome: Rubbettino Editore, 2012), 9.
113 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 24. There were also sales of coupons that could be cashed in once the buyer arrived in Heaven. It is not clear if that was done with the church’s blessing. Nino Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire (New York: Trident, 1968), 57–58.
114 Crocella, Augusta Miseria, 108.
115 Ambasciata d’Italia agli Stati Uniti, Pacco 33, 1903–07, April 17, 1903, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Archive of the Italian Foreign Ministry (Rome), cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
116 Sachs, L’Italie, ses finances, 456; see also Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 54–56.
117 Cameron, “Papal Finance,” 137.
118 James Gollin, Worldly Goods: The Wealth and Power of the American Catholic Church, the Vatican, and the Men Who Control the Money (New York: Random House, 1971), 63–70.
119 On November 1, 1745, Pope Benedict XIV issued Vix Pervenit: On Usury and Other Dishonest Profits. It is available in its entirety at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Ben14/b14vixpe.htm; see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 210, n. 1. Earning interest is still a contentious issue in Muslim countries, because the Koran bans it. But Muslims have largely skirted the prohibition since Islamic banks and investment companies deem the interest paid as “profits” from the money deposited, a financial transaction not prohibited by the Koran.
120 Joseph Clifford Fenton, “Sacrorum Antistitum and the Background of the Oath Against Modernism,” CatholicCulture.org. See www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_x/motu_proprio/documents/hf_p-x_motu-proprio_19100901_sacorum-antistitum_it.html/.
121 Guido Mazzoni, Papa Pio IX, 1849, pamphlet collection at Duke University Libraries, E.331.VI.
122 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 38.
123 Ibid., 211; see also Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews; and see also Wills, Papal Sin, 37–38.
124 David Chidester, Christianity, A Global History (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 479-480.
125 Donald A. Nielsen, “Sects, Churches and Economic Transformations in Russia and Western Europe,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2, no. 4 (summer 1989), 496–97, 503–04, 517. The symbol of Protestant encouragement that workers get involved in free enterprise is the 1904 book—The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—written by German sociologist Max Weber.
126 Chidester, Christianity, 480.
127 Samuel Gregg, “Did the Protestant Work Ethic Create Capitalism,” The Public Discourse, January 21, 2014. See generally Chidester, Christianity, 487.
128 The law passed 185 to 106, with 217 abstentions.
129 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 228–29.
130 Falconi, Il Cardinale, 488; see also Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, 118. Pius prayed that Jesus might show mercy to the “perverted and adulterous” lawmakers who had passed the legislation.
131 The encyclical, Ubi Nos, is available in English at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9ubinos.htm.
132 Ibid.
133 The only thing to which Pius did not protest was the portion that converted the Church’s large debt into an obligation assumed by the government: Cameron, “Papal Finance,” 139.
134 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 231–34.
135 Ibid., 271–72; see also John Thavis, The Vatican Diaries: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church (New York: Viking, 2013), 7.
136 Collections in Segreteria di Stato, Archivo Nunziatura Napoli, scatole 125–27, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Vatican City (ASV), cited in Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican.
1 Reese, Inside the Vatican, 96.
2 Chivot, Vatican, 49.
3 Norwich, Absolute Monarchs, Kindle edition, location 7538 of 8891.
4 Carlo Fiorentino, La questione romana intorno al 1870: studi e documenti (Rome: Archivo Guido Izzi, 1997), as relates to footnote f, 215.
5 Cameron, “Papal Finance,” 13; Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 35.
6 Phillipe Levillain and François-Charles Uginet, Il Vaticano e le frontiere della Grazia (Milan, 1985), 100–101.
7 R. de Cesare, The Last Days of Papal Rome (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 259. A full digital copy of The Last Days of Papal Rome is made available by the Sage Endowment Fund at http://archive.org/stream/lastdaysofpapalr00dece#page/n7/mode/2up. See also Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, 3, 80; Michael Walsh, The Cardinals: Thirteen Centuries of the Men Behind the Papal Throne (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2011), 188.
8 The Black Nobles reached their peak of power in the late nineteenth century. Benedict XIV slashed their numbers in the early twentieth century. In 1968, Pope Paul VI eliminated most of the titles still in use.
9 Falconi, Il Cardinale, 494–95.
10 Crocella, Augusta miseria, 177–78.
11 Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, 181.
12 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 93–94; Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, 181. The sensational court case brought by Lambertini captivated the public. The judges thought it likely she might be Antonelli’s daughter but said the evidence fell short of certainty. As a result, they let his original will stand.
13 Benny Lai, Finanze e finanzieri vaticani tra l’ottocento e il novecento da Pio IX a Benedetto XV (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1979), 87, 89 n. 2 (this book was updated in 2012 to Finanze Vaticane: Da Pio XI a Benedetto XVI, both are cited separately in these notes).
14 Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Grove, 1990), 285; iBooks edition, 513.
15 Freemasonry was founded in England in the sixteenth century and before long it counted as members prominent rationalists and secularists throughout Europe. In Austria and France, in particular, Freemasons worked to destabilize the church and promote atheism. Since 1738 Catholics have been threatened with excommunication if they became Freemasons. See generally Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 304–7 and John J. Robinson, Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry (New York: M. Evans, 1989), 307–12, 344–59.
16 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 63.
17 Alberto Caracciolo, Roma capitale. Dal Risorgimento all crisi dello stato liberale (Rome, 1956), 162–64.
18 Richard A. Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 1908–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 154–55.
19 Malachi Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984), 175–76; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 58.
20 The fascists had a small network of agents inside the city-state, all run by Arturo Bocchini, Rome’s police chief. Through World War II, a midlevel cleric, Monsignor Enrico Pucci, directed three others: a Secretary of State employee, Stanislao Caterina; Virgilio Scattolini, a journalist at L’Osservatore Romano; and Giovanni Fazio, a Vatican policeman. Eric Frattini, The Entity: Five Centuries of Secret Vatican Espionage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 265, 460. See generally Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 53–55.
21 Levillain, and Uginet, Il Vaticano e le frontiere della Grazia, 104.
22 The Irish Catholic Directory and Almanac for 1900 with Complete Directory in English (Dublin: James Duffy and Co., 1900).
23 Mocenni quoted in Lai, Finanze e finanzieri vaticani, 178.
24 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 67, n. 66.
25 Pius had an antiquated view even of the appropriate music to be played in the church. In addition to ending the practice of using castrati, he also banned women from choirs. Orchestras were abolished, as were pianos. Pius preferred only organs and Gregorian chants.
26 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 280.
27 Michael Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 138–39; see full encyclical at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html; see also Berry, Render Unto Rome, 51. For a fuller discussion of the encyclical and its impact on Catholic trade unions in the political context of that era, see Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 312–20.
28 Historians seem perplexed at the apparent contradiction. See generally Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 76–77.
29 Giovanni Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1961), 26.
30 John F. Pollard, “Conservative Catholics and Italian Fascism: The Clerico-Fascists” and “Religion and the Formation of the Italian Working Class,” in Martin Blinkhorn, ed., Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2003), 45, 171.
31 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 281–84; 32030; 516–17.
32 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 38–39.
33 Leo XIII condemned Americanism in January 1899. He addressed the issue of Christian democracy in Italy in January 1901 (Graves de Communi). Leo feared that “an era of liberty” meant that “spiritual direction . . . was less necessary.” See also Allen, All the Pope’s Men, 315; “Religion: America in Rome,” Time, February 25, 1946.
34 Thomas T. McAvoy, “Leo XIII and America,” in Leo XIII and the Modern World, ed. Edward T. Gargan (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961); see also John Tracy Ellis, The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, Vol. 2 (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1952); John C. Fenton, “The Teachings of the Testem Benevolentiae,” American Ecclesiastical Review 129 (1953): 124–33.
35 Diuturnum, an encyclical on Civil Power, issued June 29, 1881. A digital copy is at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_29061881_diuturnum_en.html.
1 Reese, Inside the Vatican, 88; The longest conclave was in the thirteenth century in which eighteen deadlocked cardinals argued for three years before settling on Gregory X.
2 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 59–60.
3 Francis X. Seppelt and Klemens Löffler, A Short History of the Popes (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1932), 498; Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 332–41.
4 Kelly, Dictionary of Popes, 313.
5 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 58.
6 Katherine Burton, The Great Mantle: The Life of Giuseppe Melchiore Sarto, Pope Pius X (New York: Longmans, Green, 1950), 157–58; Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 345.
7 For a detailed discussion of the history of the Curia, see Reese, Inside the Vatican, 106–39, 158–72; Norwich, Absolute Monarchs, Kindle edition, location 1736 of 8891; Allen, All the Pope’s Men, 28–44, 68.
8 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 367.
9 Norwich, Absolute Monarchs, Kindle edition, location 7544 of 8891.
10 Francis Xavier Murphy, “A Look at the Earth’s Tiniest State,” Chicago Tribune, August 31, 1982, 11.
11 In Sapienti Consilio (Wise Counsel) Pius wanted to eliminate eighteen dicasteries (departments of the Roman Curia). He managed to close ten and created two new ones. But the number of Curial workers stayed virtually the same. See a digital English translation at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_x/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_p-x_apc_19080629_ordo-servandus-normae-1_lt.html.
12 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 73–74.
13 Anthony Rhodes, The Power of Rome in the Twentieth Century (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983), 195.
14 Lamintabili Sane (Lamentable Certainly—Syllabus Condemning the Errors of the Modernists), July 3, 1907. A digital copy is at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10lamen.htm.
15 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 36–39.
16 Norwich, Absolute Monarchs, Kindle edition, location 7544 of 8891.
17 It was the Oath Against Modernism (Motu Proprio Secrorum Antistium). Fewer than fifty priests refused to take it, most of them German. See generally Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 355–59; see also Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 39–40.
18 Historian John Cornwell theorized that the decree from Pius to lower the confessional age to seven inadvertently “prompted sex complexes” and that pedophile clerics used it to target their victims. John Cornwell, The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
19 M. De Bujanda and Marcella Richter, ed., Index librorum prohibitorum: 1600–1966, Vol. XI (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002).
20 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 356.
21 In a 1907 decree, Pius branded the burgeoning “modernist movement”—represented in part by the works of Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Friedrich Nietzsche—as heresy. Intellectuals universally castigated Pius’s thinking as a giant backward step for the church.
22 Archivo Segreto Vaticano, SdS, Spoglio di Pio X, fasc. 1, letter of April 2, 1905; fasc. 10, three receipts for a total of 500,000 lire, dated August 14, 1907, and September 28, 1914; see Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
23 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 67.
24 Pius concentrated on Catholics in Poland, then under Russian control. The tsar considered it to be Papal interference in Russia’s westernmost province.
25 Lai, Finanze e finanzieri vaticani, 262; see also Burton, The Great Mantle, 157, 205–6.
26 Lai, Finanze e finanzieri vaticani, 210–13. It is quoted slightly different in Spadolini, ed., Il Cardinale Gasparri e la questione romana: Con brani delle memorie inedite (Florence: 1971), 234: “The Vatican is merely a palace with a garden on the edge of Rome.”
27 Lai, Finanze e finanzieri vaticani, 207.
28 Ibid., 259–60; Author interview with Benny Lai, September 20, 2006.
29 SdS, Spoglio de Pio X, fasc. 1, letter from Pius of September 28, 1912, ASV; see Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
30 Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 1870–1925 (Oxford: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 323.
31 Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 323; Lai, Finanze e finanzieri vaticani, 262–63.
32 Daniel A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 157–58. Seemingly everyone in the church noted that Karl Marx was Jewish. Although he was a secular Jew, most prelates incorrectly thought that his faith was instrumental to his political treatises that fueled socialism. The 1848 The Communist Manifesto—which Marx co-wrote with Friedrich Engels—was the anti-bible to the Vatican. It reinforced the widespread prejudice that Jews were inherently revolutionary, seeking by design the destabilization of established monarchies and the church. Anti-Semites pointed to Marx’s celebration of the assassination of Paris’s archbishop in 1871 by members of a revolutionary worker’s commune. “The Jew is behind it all,” wrote the hugely successful Catholic populist Edouard Drumont. See Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 426–38.
33 Richard A. Webster, The Cross and the Fasces: Christian Democracy and Fascism in Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 14–15; Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 404.
34 Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 388–89.
35 John F. Pollard, “Conservative Catholics and Italian Fascism: The Clerico-Fascists,” in Martin Blinkhorn, ed., Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2003), 32–33.
36 Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 232; ibid., Lai, Finanze e finanzieri vaticani, 242, 243, n. 3; Italia e Principato di Monaco, 43, 80–84, Archivio degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari, Archive for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, Vatican Archives, Secretariat of State, Vatican City.
37 The formal title for the cleric who ran the Holy Office of the Inquisition was Inquisitor General. Some prelates preferred Secretary of the Inquisition. Inquisitor General, which raised connotations of the dark Spanish crusade to convert Jews, was last used in 1929.
38 Luigi De Rosa and Gabriele De Rosa, Storia del Banco Di Roma, Vol. 1 of 3 (Rome: Banco di Roma, 1982), 268; Account summaries listed in SdS, Spoglio di Pio X, fasc. 7, Rendiconto per il primo Trimestre del 1912, ASV, Rendiconto del secondo Trimestre del 1913, cited Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
39 Alberto Theodoli, A cavallo di due secoli (Rome: La Navicella, 1950), 49.
40 Richard A. Webster, “The Political and Industrial Strategies of a Mixed Investment Bank: Italian Industrial Financing and the Banca Commerciale, 1894–1915,” VSWG: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 61. Bd., H. 3 (1974), 354. See note 25, Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 367; Anna Caroleo, Le banche cattoliche dalla prima guerra mondiale al fascismo (Venice: Studio Bibliografico Malombra, 1976), 30.
41 Lai, Finanze e finanzieri vaticani, 259; Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 100.
42 Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 157.
43 Webster, The Political and Industrial Strategies of a Mixed Investment Bank, 357–59, 362, 364.
44 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 69.
45 Annibale Zambarbieri, “La devozione al papa,” Part of the collection of Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII, Catalogo pregresso della Biblioteca Giuseppe Dossetti (1953–2000), Location G-I-a-29bis-(22/II), Bologna, 71.
46 Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 150–55.
1 Much is known about the behind-the-scenes politicking at the conclave that led to Benedict’s election since Vienna’s Cardinal Friedrich Gustav Piffl violated the rules by keeping a daily diary.
2 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 86–87.
3 Walter H. Peters, Life of Benedict XV (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1959), 32–35.
4 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 74; see also Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 59.
5 John Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash: Bernardino Nogara and Papal Finances in the Early 1930s,” The Historical Journal, 42, 4 (1999), 1081.
6 George Seldes, The Vatican—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (New York: Harper & Bros., 1934), 246; John N. Molony, The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy: Partito Popolare, 1919–1926 (London, Croom Helm, 1977), 59.
7 John F. Pollard, The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV (1914–1922) and the Pursuit of Peace (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 115.
8 Molony, The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy, 59–61; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 6263; see also Gollin, Worldly Goods, 437. For a counterview of Benedict’s financial directorship of the church, see Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 110–26.
9 Douglas J. Forsyth, The Crisis of Liberal Italy: Monetary and Financial Policy, 1914–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 330.
10 Klaus Epstein, Matthias Erzberger and the Dilemma of German Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 103–5.
11 De Rosa, Storia del Banco di Roma, Vol. 1, 82.
12 Ibid., Vol. 3, 101.
13 Il Massager (Pisa), L’Eco di Bergamo and Il Corriere d’Italia (Rome), Il Momento (Turin), and L’Avvenire (Bologna); Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1081.
14 Records of the Apostolic Delegation in Washington (DAUS), b. 70, Prestito a favore dell’Unione Editoriale Romana (1915–16), letter of Archbishop Farley to Archbishop Bonzano, January 5, 1916, ASV; see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy,118–19.
15 Archives of the Vatican Secretariat of State, 1914–1918, 335, 833, 930; cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
16 Franz von Stockhammern was a German diplomat, based in Rome, responsible for intelligence and propaganda programs in Italy. Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 92–94, 98.
17 Ibid., 91–93, 95–96.
18 Henri Daniel-Rops [Henri Jules Charles Petiot], A Fight for God, trans. John Warrington (New York: E. P. Dutton,1966), 234.
19 Dragoljub Zivojinovic, The United States and the Vatican Policies: 1914–1918 (Boulder, CO: Colorado Associated University Press, 1978), 12–14.
20 Forsyth, The Crisis of Liberal Italy, 120.
21 Gaetano Salvemini, Chiesa e stato in Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1969), 384.
22 General Directorate of Public Security (DGPA), H4, Vaticano, Notizie, Commissarato del Borgo, 1915, October 22, 1915, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Italian Central State Archives, Rome (ACS).
23 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 92.
24 William Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword: Italy’s Neutrality and Entrance into the Great War 1914–1915 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 156–58; Epstein, Matthias Erzberger, 102.
25 Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword, 156–57; Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 92, 305.
26 Peters, Life of Benedict, 127–38; Pollard, The Unknown Pope, 103–7.
27 Memo (unsigned), March 24, 1917, Uffico Centrale d’Investigazione, busta 3, f. 39, Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza, Archivo Centrale dello Stato, cited in Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican.
28 Letter, Monsignor Giuseppe Aversa to Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Gasparri, January 1917, Guerra Europe, 1914–1918: Iniziative Pace Santa Sede, January 1916–April 1917, Archivio degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari, ACS.
29 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican.
30 Frank J. Coppa, ed., Controversial Concordats: The Vatican’s Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 84.
31 Italian intelligence received reports that three ranking clerics in Switzerland, with covert connections to Vienna and Berlin, had drafted the Pope’s peace plan. That was never confirmed. When John Francis Charles, the British Envoy Extraordinary to the Holy See, later heard that, he dismissed it as ludicrous. See generally Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 107.
32 Ibid., 110–11.
33 Memorandum, Eastern Report No. 37, Foreign Office, October 11, 1917, 24/144/12, 109–11, British Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK; see also Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 110.
34 Pollard, The Unknown Pope, 68.
35 Ibid., 103.
36 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 112. Italy’s anticlerical Foreign Minister, Baron Sidney Constantino Sonnino, was the force behind Article XV of the Treaty of London, the clause barring any Papal participation.
37 For the widespread fear about the spread of communism in the aftermath of World War I, see Directorate of Intelligence, A Monthly Review of Revolutionary Movements in British Dominions Overseas and Foreign Countries, No. 32, June 1921, (CP 3168), 24/126/70, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
38 Giovanni Spadolini, ed., Il Cardinale Gasparri (Grassina, Italy: Le Monnier, 1997), 376–77; Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 121.
39 Molony, The Emergence of Political Catholicism, 59–60.
40 Ibid., 59.
41 Zambarbieri, “La devozione al papa,” 72; Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 398.
42 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 121; Scottá, ed., La Conciliazione Ufficiosa, Vols. 2, 3, January 3, 1917.
43 James J. Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 234–36.
44 DAUS, letter of Bishop John T. McNicholas to Cardinal Giovanni Bonzano, September 27, 1919, Box 284, ACS, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
45 Berry, Render Unto Rome, 61; Seldes, The Vatican, 249; see also “Una firma per l’Italia pensando al mondo,” L’Osservatore Romano, http://www.vatican.va/news_services/or/or_quo/cultura/2009/034q04a1.html); see also Indice Dei Fondi e relative mezzi di descrizione e di ricerca dell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano 2011, for additional reference points for Bonaventura Cerretti in the Vatican Archives, http://www.archiviosegretovaticano.va.
46 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 114.
47 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 12; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 62, 131, 280. Some historians contend that no loan was necessary, and that Gasparri found the money he needed in a locked box in the late Pope’s desk. But Gasparri himself said there was only 75,000 lire in the Pope’s quarters, and he needed millions for the burial and ensuing conclave. Others suggest the American bishops made up the difference. But a loan from the Chicago Archdiocese did not come until 1928, six years after Benedict’s death. Professor John Pollard, a Papal historian, says the report of the loan is “almost certainly an exaggeration,” since a Rothschild archivist wrote him a letter in 1998 saying the bank had no record of it. However, if any loan was issued, it likely came from the Vienna branch of the Rothschilds. That cannot be confirmed since the Nazis seized those bank records in 1939 and they were never recovered.
48 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 103.
49 Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (New York: Random House, 2014), Kindle edition, location 1628 of 10577.
50 Ministry of the Interior, Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza (General Directorate of Public Security), 1926, Box 113, H4, Notizie Vaticane, reports of October 3, 1926, and November 1, 1926, ACS; Luigi Lazzarini, Pio XI (Milan: Sesto San Giovanni, 1937), 312.
51 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 132.
52 John F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 1929–32: A Study in Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22.
53 Peter C. Kent, The Pope and the Duce: The International Impact of the Lateran Agreements (New York: St. Martins, 1981), 5.
54 See generally Thomas B. Morgan, A Reporter at the Papal Court: A Narrative of the Reign of Pope Pius XI (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937).
55 See generally E. Pacelli, Erster Apostolischer Nuntius beim deutschen Reich, Gesammelte Reden, ed. Ludwig Kaas (Berlin, 1930), 58 (“Primate des Reichsgedankens/Triumph über den düsteren Dämon der Gewalt”).
56 Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini, Kindle edition, location 1684 of 10577; Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience: Italian Society and Culture, 1922–1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 186–88.
57 William Teeling, Pope Pius XI and World Affairs (New York: Fredrick A. Stokes, 1937), 129.
58 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 20–21.
59 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 133.
60 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 22–23.
61 Alexander J. De Grand, Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 46; Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy, 139–40.
62 Pollard, “Conservative Catholics and Fascism: The Clerico-Fascists,” 39.
63 William Teeling, Pope Pius XI, 112–13.
64 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 133.
65 Pollard, “Conservative Catholics and Fascism: The Clerico-Fascists,” 38–39; John N. Molony, The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy: Partito Popolare 1919-1926 (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 130-31.
66 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 130, n. 9; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 59–61.
67 Caroleo, Le banche cattoliche, 120.
68 Leone Castelli Quel tanto di territorio: ricordi di lavori ed opera eseguiti nel Vaticano durante il Pontificato di Pio XI (1922–1939) (Rome: Edizioni Fuori Comercio, 1948), 46–50.
69 See generally Italo Insolera, Roma Moderna (Turin, 1971); see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 134–35.
70 DAUS, b. 70, Prestito a favore dell’Unione Editoriale Romana (1915–16), letter of Bonzano to Gasparri, January 10, 1916, ASV, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
71 Edward R. Kantowicz, Corporation Sole: Cardinal Mundelein and Chicago Catholicism (North Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 47, 562; Berry, Render Unto Rome, 64; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 59. The Pope even asked a young American monsignor, Francis Spellman, for three cars. See Berry, Render Unto Rome, 64.
72 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 117.
73 Ibid., 49; see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 136–37.
74 Thomas E. Hachey, ed., Anglo-Vatican Relations, 1914–1939: Confidential Annual Reports of the British Ministers to the Holy See (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1972), 70–71.
75 Seldes, The Vatican, 23.
76 Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini, Kindle edition, location 1067 of 10577; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 64.
77 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 94. The suggestion that the fascists might reach an accommodation with the church caused an uproar at the party’s first national congress in 1919. For a fuller history of the fascist opposition to any accord with the church: Arnaldo Suriani Cicchetti, “L’Opposizione italiana (1929–1931) ai Patti Lateranensi,” Nuova Antologia, July 1952; see also Berry, Render Unto Rome, 63.
78 The OSS concluded later that Tacchi Venturi was one of two ranking Jesuits who was a “tireless supporter of Fascist political movements in every country including Italy” and that he “initiated the negotiations for a concordat between the Vatican and the Fascist State.” J.C.H. to A.W.D. (Allen Dulles), OSS, September 10, 1942, RG 226, E217, Box 20, Location 00687RWN26535, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, DC/College Park, Maryland. See also Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 107; “Why the Pope Chose to Sign the Concordat,” The New York Times, March 31, 1929; citations to the Lateran Treaty: a digital copy is available at http://www.vaticandiplomacy.org/laterantreaty1929.htm. It is an accurate English translation of the original maintained in the Vatican Archives.
79 F. Pacelli, Journal de la réconciliation—With an appendix of records and documents, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City 1959: these are notes of the negotiations by Francesco Pacelli, inherited from Eugenio Pacelli, under direction not to be made public until 1959, at which point they were published by Monsignor Michele Maccarrone, Director of the “Journal of the History of the Church in Italy.” See the discussion in Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 103.
80 Francesco was a cousin to Ernesto Pacelli, who had been the financial advisor to Pius X. Salvatore Cortesi, “Italy to Indemnify Church, Rome Hears,” The New York Times, February 11, 1928, 4. The Times referred to Tacchi Venturi as “a scholar in history and literature” who was the Vatican’s “chief negotiator” but was also someone who “remains in the dark and is almost unknown.” It was not possible for the Pope to send his Secretary of State to the talks since the church did not yet recognize Italy’s sovereignty and it was considered more likely for there to be a leak if a high ranking official represented the Vatican. See Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini, Kindle edition, location 1872 of 10577.
81 The retiring Secretary of State, Pietro Gasparri, was Pacelli’s mentor and had strongly backed his appointment.
82 Arnaldo Cortesi, “Vatican and Italy Sign Pact Recreating a Papal State: 60 Years of Enmity Ended,” The New York Times, February 12, 1929, 1. An original of the Lateran Pacts is maintained by the Vatican.
83 Chivot, Vatican, 70; P. C. Kent, The Pope and the Duce: The International Impact of the Lateran Agreements (London: Macmillan, 1981), Ch. 9, 10.
84 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 95–99.
85 Thomas J. Reese, SJ, Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
86 Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 19.
87 Gerhard Besier, with the collaboration of Francesca Piombo, translated by W. R. Ward, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 67–71.
88 Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1079. Pollard estimates the conversion was 19 lire to the dollar.
89 Mussolini later tried discounting how much Italy gave the Vatican by claiming in a speech to Parliament that the billion lire in bonds was really worth “only” 800 million lire. Others tried minimizing the impact of such an enormous payout to the church by arguing that the Vatican would end up spending much of it back into Italy between employment, construction, and property purchases. Ibid, 1080; See also M. McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” The Historical Journal 55, no. 4 (December 2012): 1030; Gollin, Worldly Goods, 438. See the text of the Lateran Financial Convention at http://www.concordatwatch.eu/showtopic.php?org_id=878&kb_header_id=39241.
As a concession, the Vatican agreed not to sell the bonds it received as part of the settlement for at least ten years. That meant that the church had a direct stake in Mussolini’s success; see “Pope and Politics,” The Nation, December 11, 1937, 662.
90 Francesco Pacelli, Diario della conciliazione (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1959), 19, 26, 39. See generally Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 138–43, and Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 8; see also Salvatore Cortesi, “Italy to Indemnify Church, Rome Hears,” The New York Times, February 11, 1928, 4.
91 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 67.
92 L’Osservatore Romano, February 12, 1929; “Pope Praises Agreement,” The New York Times, February 14, 1929; Il Monitore Ecclesiastico, March 1929; see also Berry, Render Unto Rome, 65.
93 Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 15.
94 Ronald J. Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Columbus, MS: Genesis, 2000), 36–37.
95 Ludwig Kaas, “Der Konkordatstyp der faschischten Italien,” in the Zeitschrift fur auslandische offentliches Recht und Volkerrecht (Berlin: 1933), 510–11.
96 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 66.
97 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 115; see generally Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini, Kindle edition, location 2065 of 10577.
98 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 109.
99 Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy, 186.
100 Quoted in Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 11; see also Paul Blanshard, “The Roman Catholic Church and Fascism,” The Nation, March 1948, 392.
101 Robert Dell, in The Nation, made an assumption that was widespread at the time about the concordat: “It seems hardly doubtful that this agreement ties the church up with Fascism and that henceforth they stand or fall together in Italy. It becomes the interest of the Papacy to support Fascist policy at home and abroad, for, although any regime that might succeed to Fascism might well accept the ‘Vatican City,’ no other regime would accept the Concordat.” Dell and others were right that the concordat inextricably bound the church and the fascist state. The mistake was in believing that no future secular government would embrace the deal Mussolini brokered. In fact, although Italians abandoned fascism in 1943, no subsequent Italian government has challenged the substance of the Lateran Pacts. See generally Robert Dell, “The Papal-Fascist Alliance,” The Nation, March 27, 1929, vol. 128, no. 3325, 368–69.
1 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 105–6.
2 While an undergraduate student, he also had a brief mining job at Brescia.
3 At that time, BCI was far more than simply a bank. It was the financial element in an international syndicate, giving BCI interlocking ownership and management stakes in many industries.
4 Nogara worked for Volpi in several ventures. In Bulgaria it was a mining operation (Société Minière de Bulgarie), and in Istanbul the BCI-funded conglomerate Società Commerciale d’Oriente. In Montenegro, Nogara had small equity with Volpi in a government tobacco monopoly. Volpi also used Nogara as a consultant at Thessaloniki Limited Partnership G. Volpi, A. & C. and Corinaldi at Geneva.
5 BCI was the primary financier for Volpi’s business ventures since the start of his career. Sometimes the bank even took small ownership interests in the projects. In Istanbul, BCI had enormous sums at stake. Professor Richard Webster, in his definitive history of industrial development in Italy at the start of the twentieth century, called Volpi and Nogara “the great international agents of the Banca Commerciale.” Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 158. Volpi’s surviving papers and correspondence are split between the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome, and the private archives of Banca Commerciale and the Banca d’Italia (Bank of Italy), most of which are in Rome. See also Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 105–6.
6 The Rome Chamber of Commerce was the representative of the Italian creditors to the Ottoman Empire. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); see also Memorandum, Treaty of Peace with Turkey from the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers, February 17, 1920, 24/98/65, 253, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK; see also Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 195, 255.
7 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 145; and “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1078.
8 Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1079. Nogara also had briefly bought some bonds for the Vatican in 1914, while he was working in Istanbul. It is not clear whether Pius knew about that work or if it played a factor in his hiring of Nogara.
9 Alessandra Kersevan and Pierluigi Visintin, Giuseppe Nogara: luci e ombre di un arcivescovo, 1928–1945 (Udine: Kappa Vu, 1992), 10–11.
10 Gollin, Worldly Goods, 439–40.
11 Chernow, The House of Morgan, iBooks edition, 513.
12 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 108, citing an interview by Lai of Massimo Spada, March 7, 1979.
13 See generally Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 143–49; see also Giovanni Belardelli, “Un viaggio di Bernardino Nogara negli Stati Uniti” (November 1937), in Storia Contemporanea, XXIII, (1992), 321–38.
14 Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1080.
15 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 13.
16 Chernow, The House of Morgan, iBooks edition, 514.
17 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 10–11.
18 Nogara took notes of his meetings with Pius XI, stopping when Pius XII became Pope in 1939. The journals are in the custody of the Nogara family, which has selectively made them available to historians, most extensively for John F. Pollard in his 2005 book, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Renzo De Felice also cited information from Nogara’s journals in “La Santa Sede e il conflitto italo-etiopico nel diario di Bernardino Nogara,” Storia Contemporanea, 4 (1977): 823–34; as did Belardelli in “Un viaggio di Bernardino Nogara,” 321–8. My inquiries to the Nogara family went unanswered. I asked Professor Pollard for assistance. In February 2013, he informed me by email that he had “tried to persuade” the family to publish the papers, but they had declined. Since I was unable to personally review the journals, the citations to the Archivo Famiglia Nogara (AFN) are from Pollard’s book, unless otherwise indicated.
19 Tardini quoted in Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 110.
20 Corrado Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican (New York: Hawthorn, 1960), 188.
21 Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for January 18, 1933, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 156.
22 Nogara did not then expect that the different Curia departments would still run a deficit and expect a subsidy from his well-funded ASSS. His diary reveals his frustration at the lack of adequate oversight inside the Vatican. See generally Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1084.
23 Massimo Spada, a layman who started working in 1929 in the Special Administration, said at that time “there were only bonds.” Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 107; Benny Lai interview with Spada, March 7, 1979.
24 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 14, 17; Hachey, Anglo-Vatican Relations, 202, 226; Chernow, The House of Morgan, 286.
25 Seldes, The Vatican, 307–8.
26 See generally Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks (New York: St. Martin’s/Griffin, 1998), 294–95.
27 Ibid., 294–95.
28 Giuseppe Guarino and Gianni Toniolo, eds., La Banca d’Italia e il sistema bancario, 1919–1936 (Bari and Rome: 1993), 582–83. See digital copy at http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/pubsto/collsto/docu/coll_sto_docum.pdf. Also Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1083.
29 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 150.
30 See generally ibid., 150–53; Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1082–83.
31 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 13.
32 Not all the expansion worked as planned. The telegraph office, for instance, sat mostly dormant, used only for sending out devotional prayers. The post office workers who sold the Vatican commemorative stamps kept the money instead of putting it into the church’s coffers. And the railway never turned a profit. See generally Cameron, “Papal Finance.” The Vatican prison, seldom used, was closed in the 1960s (in 2012, the prison was briefly reopened). Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 42–48. But the expansion of Vatican City was impressive, eventually counting between eleven and twelve thousand rooms in the connecting buildings.
33 Castelli, Quel tanto di territorio, 47–49.
34 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 151, n. 5; The building frenzy was not limited to the property inside the mini-state’s walls. On church land in Trastevere, the Palazzo San Calisto was built for the expanding Vatican bureaucracy. The Papal villa, Castel Gandolfo, was restored, and near it a modern observatory erected. Eventually, the Via della Conciliazione was built, creating a triumphal avenue from the Tiber River to the Vatican.
35 Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1082.
36 Hachey, Anglo-Vatican Relations, 228.
37 Arnaldo Cipolla, “Due Giorni in Vaticano,” La Stampa, November 16, 1931.
38 Binchy, Church and State, 514, 517–22.
39 See a digital copy of the encyclical at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius11/P11FAC.HTM.
40 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican. 159–65.
41 The previous month, Pius had issued another encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (The 40th Year), that included an oblique criticism about Jewish control of international finances: “[I]t is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure. This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will.” See Quadragesimo Anno at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno_en.html.
42 Kent, The Pope and the Duce, 119–24; see Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini, Kindle edition, location 1173, 1912 of 10577.
43 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 157.
44 Hachey, Anglo-Vatican Relations, 229.
45 Ibid., 259.
46 R. J. B. Bosworth, “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of Totalitarian Culture,” Contemporary European History 6, no. 1 (March 1997): 17. Holy Years are always profitable for the church, and normally held every twenty-five years. Sometimes, new saints were rushed through the canonization process in order to attract pilgrims and tourists. For instance, to meet the 1950 deadline for a Holy Year celebration, Pius XII crammed through in near record time the sainthood of Maria Goretti, an eleven-year-old Italian girl who had been killed while resisting a rape. Many church elders were skeptical of her qualifications for sainthood. However, her case drew front-page newspaper coverage and her elevation to a saint resulted in record numbers of Italian worshippers at that year’s event. See Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 118. See also Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini, Kindle edition, location 1567 of 10577.
47 Archives of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Mundelein Papers, 1872–1939, 3/36, letter of Pius to Cardinal Mundelein, December 12, 1933; Pius reveals in that letter that he had seriously underestimated the impact of the Great Depression, especially as it had affected America, a country whose Catholics he considered a reliable source of money.
48 Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for February 25, 1931, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
49 Ibid., March 23, 1932; see also Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1086.
50 Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1086.
51 Ibid., April 6, 1933.
52 Ibid., August 19, 1932, and July 30, 1933.
53 Pollard, “Conservative Catholics and Fascism: The Clerico-Fascists,” 39.
54 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 13.
55 Pius might have considered it a relief not to be bothered with too many details of what Nogara was doing. A trait that one author noted in his book about the modern-day Vatican was also true about church officials then: “Vatican officials would sooner talk about sex than money.” Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 110.
56 Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for September 21, 1933, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
57 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 108. This was a long-term strategy, picking up steam with even larger purchases in 1933.
58 The church still owns some of the property Nogara bought. David Leigh, “How the Vatican Built a Secret Property Empire Using Mussolini’s Millions,” The Guardian, January 21, 2013, 1; Regarding the actions undertaken by Nogara at the time, see Nogara’s diary, entry of Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for July 24, 1933, as cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, AFN; McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” 1033.
59 Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for February 15, 1932, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy; Gollin, Worldly Goods, 442–44.
60 Nogara’s eight years of diary entries do not provide details about how, where, or why he invested the Vatican’s money. It is instead a generic listing of his audiences with Pius XI, one about every ten days. It resembles more an expanded day journal than a comprehensive personal diary.
61 John F. Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash: Bernardino Nogara and Papal Finances in the Early 1930s,” The Historical Journal 42, no. 4 (December 1999): 1087–88.
62 Nogara first used a shell corporation in 1913 when he was in Constantinople and bid on government contracts that could be issued only to Ottoman subjects. By the time he was utilizing shell and holding companies at the Vatican almost twenty years later, he was as knowledgeable as any banker of his day.
63 In March 1939, not long before Henri de Maillardoz moved from Credit Suisse to the Vatican, he presided over a special board meeting of Grolux, Nogara’s Luxembourg holding company. Maillardoz ensured that the company’s bylaws were amended so it could operate in secrecy from Switzerland for the remainder of the war. The Luxembourg holding company’s full name was Groupement Financier Luxembourgeois (Grolux S.A.). Grolux also worked in tandem with another of Nogara’s Swiss-based holding companies, Profima. Memorial du Grand Duché de Luxembourg, Recueil Special, 1931. 1037–44, 1177–78; see also Ernest Muhlen, Monnaie et circuits financiers au Grand Duché de Luxembourg (Luxembourg, 1968), 105; Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 161; and McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” 1032–35.
64 Companies House, London, File 270820, British Grolux Ltd., Annual Returns, 1932–33; 1936–37; 1945–46; Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 160–61; see also Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for April 20, 1932, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
65 Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 1088.
66 OSS files, Box 168, XL 1257, report from Berne, July 7, 1945, NARA.
67 Chernow, The House of Morgan, 96, iBooks edition, 514.
68 Ibid., hardcover edition, 495–97.
69 Chernow, The House of Morgan, iBooks edition, 514.
70 ScdA, “CV di Bernardino Nogara,” November 14, 1958, Archivo Storico della Banca Commerciale Italiana, Historical Archive of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, Milan, ASBCI. Nogara became a director on the board of Montecatini Company, later Montecatini Edison. His experience there encouraged him to subsequently invest in synthetic resins, textiles, and electric power.
71 Nogara was a director, among others, of a leading bank, Istituto Italiano di Credito Fondiario; Italy’s biggest insurance firm, the Assicurazioni Generali; one of the country’s largest railway companies, the Società Italiana per le Strade Ferrate Meridionali; the property behemoth Istituto Romano per di Beni Stabili; chemical conglomerate Società Elettrica ed Elettrochimica del Caffaro; petrochemical society per l’Industria Petrolifera e Chimica; the mining company Società Mineraria e Metallurgica de Pertusola; the papermaker Cartiere Burgo; and the electrical supply utility Società Adriatica di Elettricità.
72 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 173.
73 Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy, 1860–1990: Recovery After Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 300–3.
74 Gollin, Worldly Goods, 445–46.
75 See generally De Rosa and De Rosa, Storia del Banco di Roma, Vols. 1–3, an authorized history of the bank.
76 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 70–71.
77 Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 172–73.
78 Ibid., 173; Christopher Kobrak and Per H. Hansen, eds., European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk 1920–1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 225–26.
79 Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: How Open Financial Markets Challenge the Establishment and Spread Prosperity to Rich and Poor Alike (New York: Random House, 2003), 213.
80 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 69–70.
81 Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for September 21, 1933, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy; Grilli, La finanza vaticana, 71; Some of the key directors Nogara selected included Felippo Cremonesi, the Marquis Giuseppe Della Chiesa (Benedict XV’s nephew), Giuseppe Gualdi, Francesco Mario Odasso, Giovanni Rosmini, Prince Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, and Count Franco Ratti (Pius XI’s nephew).
82 Gianni Toniolo, L’economia dell’Italia fascista (Bari, Italy, 1980), 135; Gollin, Worldly Goods, 446–47.
83 Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for November 4, 1931, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: The church was the most powerful financial force in Rome. In Milan, Nogara installed his son-in-law as head of a holding company that became the city’s largest purchaser of real estate.
84 Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 154, 187–89; Pallenberg, Inside the Vatican, 31. Pacelli helped Pius XI draft a series of anticommunist decrees. See generally Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 99.
85 See generally, Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 176–77.
86 Owen Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 28.
87 Frederic Sondern Jr., “The Pope: A Great Man and a Great Statesman Works for the Peace of the World,” Life, December 4, 1939, 86–87. For Pacelli’s attitude toward communism, and how it affected his tenure later as Pope, see Ludwig Volk, Das Reichskonkordat von 20 Julie 1933 (Ostfildern: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1976), 64–65. See also the concerns of the Vatican about unrelenting oppression of religion in Russia: Memorandum, Alleged Religious Persecution in Russia, Arthur Henderson, Foreign Office, March 3, 1930, 24/210/24, 171–74, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
88 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 130–31, 133, 141–43; Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 27.
89 Quadragesimo Anno, May 1931; Nova Impendet, October 1931; and Caritate Christi Compulsit, May 1932.
90 Claudia Carlen, IHM, ed., The Papal Encyclicals, 5 vols. (Ypsilanti, MI: Pierian Press, 1990), vol. 3, 431–32, 475.
91 Ibid., Vol. 3, 481.
92 Gollin, Worldly Goods, 440; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 26.
93 Gollin, Worldly Goods, 131, 451–52; Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 165–66.
94 Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for February 15, 1932, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
1 Quoted in Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 106.
2 Ibid.
3 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 495–97; Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 139.
4 Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 1922–1945 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), 167; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 133.
5 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 22–23; see generally Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 52–73; 146–67.
6 There is some dispute among historians as to whether the Nazis or the Vatican made the first overture to negotiate a concordat. The credible evidence is that the Third Reich put out a feeler to which the Vatican was receptive. The talks with Germany were important for Secretary of State Pacelli, since he feared that his career would be finished if the agreement turned sour and he was also blamed for having chased the Third Reich for the deal. For a summary of the conflicting sources, see generally Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 129–30; and Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 165–67.
7 Germania 1937–38, Pos. 720, fasc. 329, 23–24, ASV, AES. Pacelli negotiated on his own, much to the consternation of the German bishops, who were largely shut out of the agreement by which they would be most affected: Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 145–46. See also Reinhold Niebuhr, “Pius XI and His Successor,” The Nation, January 30, 1937, 120–22.
8 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 508.
9 The storm troopers included SS, Schutzstaffel, and SA (Sturm Abteilung).
10 Clifford J. Hynning, Germany: Preliminary Report on Selected Financial Laws, Decrees and Regulations, Vol. 2, Appendices (Washington, DC: Treasury Department, Office of the General Counsel, 1944), E48.
11 Gregg J. Rickman, Conquest and Redemption: A History of Jewish Assets from the Holocaust (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 10.
12 Hynning, Germany: Preliminary Report, E48-50. See also Gerald D. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67.
13 The Nazis created different categories. A person with two Jewish grandparents was considered fully Jewish. Those Germans were classified as Geltungsjude (legally Jewish). One Jewish grandparent meant the descendant was not Aryan and those were called Mischlinge (mixed breeds). The Nazis did not apply their racial laws to the groups uniformly. An estimated 150,000 German soldiers who fought for the Reich were either Mischlinge or Geltungsjude who had earlier converted. See Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 7. Document Archives, Laws and Legislation, NSDAP, 1933–1936, Archives, National Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC. See also Klaus Hentschel, editor, and Ann Hentschel, editorial assistant and translator, Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Berlin: Birkhäuser, 1996). The church had considered a blood definition for Jews during the Inquisition, but decided against it since it diminished the lure of converting to Catholicism. However, as late as World War II, the Jesuits applied “purity of blood” restrictions to aspiring priests. See generally Robert A. Maryks, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2009).
14 Appeals for condemnation of the Nazi persecution were made to Pius XI that April from prominent rabbis in New York and Vienna. An Austrian rabbi, Dr. Arthur Zacharias Schwarz, knew Pius from when he was Milan’s cardinal. Pacelli’s office intercepted the letters and decided that such matters were better left to the German bishops. However, neither were the appeals ever passed to the German clerics. Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 126–27.
15 The Nazis banned not only Jewish authors; many non-Jews were also put on the prohibited list. Thomas Mann was taboo because he had a Jewish wife. Helen Keller was deaf blind and her handicap got her listed. Ernest Hemingway was banned because A Farewell to Arms was judged as antiwar. Jack London’s socialist politics got him blacklisted. “Book Burnings in Germany, 1933,” PBS: American Experience, April 25, 2006.
16 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 508, n30, 684.
17 Bertram quoted in Ibid; see also Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 32–34.
18 Faulhaber quoted in Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 41. Cardinal von Faulhaber emphasized during his 1933 Advent sermons that he was interested only in defending the Old Testament, not commenting on any contemporary matters affecting German Jews. And the cardinal—who believed Hitler was a gifted leader—began inserting anti-Semitic clichés into his weekly sermons. Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 124.
19 Ernest Christian Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler: Background, Struggle and Epilogue (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 276–77.
20 One of the many things that Pius could have done to slow the Nazis was to instruct parish priests across Europe to destroy or hide their baptismal records once it became apparent they were being used to uncover Jewish ancestry. A few priests did try to keep their records from the Nazis, but they were the exception. See generally Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 154.
21 AES, Germania 1932–36, Pos. 632, fasc. 150, 3–5; see also Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 36–37.
22 AES, 51; see also Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews.
23 Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage, 1983), 75, 282.
24 Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 40–42, 47; See also Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation (New York: Berg Publishers, 2005).
25 For an English language translation of the Concordat Between the Holy See and the German Reich, July 20, 1933, see http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_ss33co.htm.
26 Although the Nazis affirmed the right to a Catholic education, they did their best to undermine it. They often demanded that parents explain why they had chosen a Catholic over a state school. The pressure worked. In the Catholic stronghold of Munich, for instance, in the four years following the Reichskonkordat, the number of families who sent their children to Catholic schools dropped from 655 to 20. See Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 148.
27 Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 102–23; Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 139–42.
28 David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, the Third Reich, and the Catholic Church (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010), 60.
29 Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 54–57; see also Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones, Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 322.
30 Margherita Marchione, Man of Peace: Pope Pius XII (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2004), 15; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 164.
31 Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 3; Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 126–27; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 10.
32 Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 71–72. See also Robert A. Krieg, “The Vatican Concordat With Hitler’s Reich,” America, September 1, 2003.
33 John Jay Hughes, “The Reich Concordat 1933: Capitulation or Compromise?,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 20 (1974): 165.
34 The Reichskonkordat did not address the relationship between the Catholic press and the Third Reich. Evidently, the church intended that papers concentrate only on religious matters, and as such, did not expect any problems. The Nazi control of the Catholic press began with state qualifications for journalists. On April 24, 1934, nine months after the Reichskonkordat was signed, the Third Reich shuttered all Catholic dailies.
35 Pierre Blet, SJ, Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 153. Blet, who passed away in 2009, was a French Jesuit and leading church historian. He assisted in the compilation of the Vatican’s first multivolume release of documents from the Secret Archives about World War II and Pius, Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Blet’s 1997 book was essentially a 392-page condensed version of the eleven-volume Actes.
36 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 509–10.
37 The church tried to stake a claim to baptized Jews. Whenever bishops and other church officials criticized the Third Reich it was always in language about “racism” (since the definition of race included converts), as opposed to “anti-Semitism” (which would have condemned only anti-Jewish actions). Walther Hofer, Der Nationalsozialismus Dokumente, 1933–1945 (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1957), 130; see also Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich: Preliminary History and the Time of Illusions (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 228, 240. As for the Nazi view on the threat posed by converted Jews, see Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 10. Catholic converts who were forced to later wear yellow Stars of David identifying their Jewish ancestry were frequently shunned by other Catholics (some refused to kneel next to them when attending a Mass or waiting to receive the Eucharist).
38 German historian Michael Hesemann was granted special access to the Vatican’s Pius XII archives and in 2008 made headlines with his discovery of four letters from the Pope seeking exit visas. Defenders of the Pontiff seized on those letters to contend that “non-Aryan Catholics” was a code word for persecuted Jews. But there is no evidence that the Pope used the terms interchangeably. Only to the Nazis, with their strict race interpretation of Jewishness, were non-Aryan Catholics the same as Jews. Pacelli’s effort saved the lives of baptized converted Jews, or in the eyes of the church, Catholics. For more on the letters, see generally Michael Hesemann, Der Papst, der Hitler trotzte. Die Wahrheit über Pius XII (Augsburg: Sankt Ulrich Verlag GmbH, 2008); David G. Dalin, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis (Washington, DC: Regenery; annotated edition, 2005).
39 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 130.
40 Ibid., 507.
41 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 499–506.
42 The British were disappointed that the Reichskonkordat eliminated the possibility the Vatican would marshal their rank-and-file followers to oppose Hitler: Memorandum, The German Danger; A collection of Reports from His Majesty’s Embassy at Berlin between the accession of Herr Hitler to Power in the Spring of 1933 and the end of 1935, January 17, 1936, 24/259/13, 60–61, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
43 See generally Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (New York: Back Bay, 1993), 40; see also, Ludwig Volk, Das Reichskonkordat; Klaus Scholder, “The Churches and the Third Reich,” Vol. 1, Ch. 10, “Concordat Policy and the Lateran Treaties” (1930–33); and Vol. 2, “The Capitulation of Catholicism” (February–March 1933); see also Krieg, “The Vatican Concordat With Hitler’s Reich,” America.
44 Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 104; see also Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 142.
45 Walther Hofer, ed., with commentary. Der Nationalsozialismus Dokumente, 1933–1945 (Frankfurt: Fisher Bucherei, 1959), 129–30; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 130, 152.
46 Cymet, History vs. Apologetics, 94.
47 Ludwig Volk, Das Reichskonkordat vom 20, Juli, 1933. Von den Ansätzen in der Weimarer Republik bis zur Ratifizierung am 10, September 1933, Veröffentlichung der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte (VKZ), B, 5 (Mainz, 1972).
48 Cymet, History vs. Apologetics, 95. The Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica had gone so far as to criticize Nazi anti-Semitism as not being ecclesiastically pure since it did “not stem from the religious convictions or the Christian conscience.” La Civiltà Cattolica had published stories about supposed Jewish ritual murders of Christian children. Benedict XV had banned in 1914 any Vatican newspaper from printing anything about blood libel, but in the decades after his death the prohibition was not strictly enforced.
49 Archivo della Congregazione per la dottrina della fede, S.O., 125/28 [R.V. 1928 n. 2], vol. 1.
50 Kevin J. Madigan, “Two Popes, One Holocaust,” Commentary, December 1, 2010; see also Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 25.
51 Theodor Herzl, Account of Audience with Pope Pius X (1904), Dialogika, Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, online at http://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/primary-texts-from-the-history-of-the-relationship/1253-herzl1904.
52 Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 24–26.
53 “Obelisk arrives back in Ethiopia,” BBC, April 19, 2005.
54 The Vatican often encouraged Mussolini’s grander ambitions, supporting him in one of his first disputes with the British, over Malta in 1933. Cabinet 50 (33), September 5, 1933, 23/77/1, 29–30, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
55 Bernard Bridel, “Le Temps Les ambulances à Croix-Rouge du CICR sous les gaz en Ethiopie,” International Committee of the Red Cross archives, August 13, 2003.
56 Six years later, in 1941, Nogara applied for an exemption to U.S. wartime Treasury restrictions. The Vatican wanted to import for safekeeping to New York’s J. P. Morgan some of the stocks that had been transferred to it during the early stages of the Ethiopian invasion. In a written statement to U.S. officials, Nogara said the securities were a gift from an unidentified donor. Since receiving them, the Vatican had supposedly kept the stocks on deposit at the Banque de l’Etate de Fribourg in Switzerland. McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” 1031–32.
57 For instance, when the League tried issuing sanctions on oil, the British and French successfully argued that if they were not allowed to sell oil to the Italians, then America—which was not a League member—would simply fill the void and make all the profit.
58 Gollin, Worldly Goods, 447.
59 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 115; see also Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 69.
60 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War, 8.
61 Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 77.
62 Paul I. Murphy, La Popessa: The Controversial Biography of Sister Pascalina, the Most Powerful Woman in Vatican History (New York: Warner, 1983), 138; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 72.
63 Murphy, La Popessa, 140. British professor John F. Pollard, in his study of modern Vatican finances (Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy), believes the loan “is highly unlikely” and that references to it in other accounts refer to the fact that the church was “indirectly propping up the war effort through its massive holding of Italian government stock and IRI bonds.” However, Paul Murphy, in his biography of Sister Pascalina, Pius XII’s confidant (La Popessa) describes the loans as having been initiated by the fascist government, and that the church agreed only to protect its other investments that were intertwined with Italy.
Massimo Spada, Nogara’s deputy, told Benny Lai in 1979 that he had opposed making the wartime loan to Italy. He thought it too risky for the Vatican. Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 109, citing Lai interview with Spada, March 7, 1979.
64 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 132.
65 See generally Renzo De Felice, “La Santa e il confitto Italio-Etiopico del diario di Bernardino Nogara,” Storia Contemporanea 9 (1977): 821–34.
66 Archivo Famiglia Nogara, Personal Papers of Bernardino Nogara, Rome, diary entry for November 23, 1935, cited in Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy.
67 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 170.
68 Cooney, The American Pope, 66–71; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 176–77.
69 Western governments also noted that the Vatican tacitly supported Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War, 8–9.
70 Belardelli, “Un viaggio di Bernardino Nogara,” 321–38.
71 Ibid., 327; see also Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, 180–81.
72 Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash,” 117.
73 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 159; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 180–81; see also Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 63–64.
74 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 163–65.
75 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 122.
76 “The Holy Office’s First Proposed Condemnation of National Socialism 1935,” ACDF, R.V. 1934, 29; Prot. 3375/34, Vol. 1, fasc. 3b (May 1, 1935), 16–26; “The Holy Office’s Revised Condemnation 1936,” ACDF, R.V., 1934; Prot. 3375/34, Vol. 4, fasc. 13 (October 1936); “The Holy Office’s Comparison Between Its Draft Condemnations and Mit brennender Sorge 1937,” ACDF, R.V., 1934; Prot. 3375/34, Vol. 4, fasc. 18 (April 1937); see also description of early drafts at Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 141–49.
77 See the English translation of the encyclical at the Vatican’s archival online website: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge_en.html.
78 Allen, All the Pope’s Men, 201–2. Paul Beecher Blanshard, an editor of The Nation, said about Mit Brennender: “It is this encyclical that is used in American Catholic propaganda to prove that the Pope was anti-Fascist. Actually, the Pope rebuked Mussolini not as a Fascist but as an anti-clerical.” “The Roman Catholic Church and Fascism,” The Nation, April 10, 1948, 393.
79 Ludwig Volk, “Die Enzyklika Mit brennender Sorge,” in Katholische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus, ed. Dieter Albrecht (Ostfildern: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1987), 34–55.
80 Martin Rhonheimer, “The Holocaust: What Was Not Said,” First Things, November 2003, 18–28.
81 Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 167.
82 Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 93–94; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 182–83.
83 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 157–58.
84 In July 1941, Hitler publicly expressed what he had told others privately. “Christianity is the hardest blow that ever hit humanity. Bolshevism is the bastard son of Christianity; both are the monstrous issue of the Jews.” A few months later he warned, “The war will come to an end, and I shall see my last task as cleaning up the Church problem.” Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 261; John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–45 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 236–39; 243–44; 254–61; Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 178.
85 Bergen to Berlin, July 23, 1937, Documents of German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, Series D, Vol. 1, 990–92.
86 Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 94; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 183.
87 Wills, Papal Sin, 29.
88 Robert G. Weisbord and Wallace P. Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust: An Era in Vatican–Jewish Relations (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992), 36. Pacelli did not show any sign that he was reconsidering the issue of anti-Semitism and the church. That May, he was the Papal Delegate at the International Eucharistic Conference in Budapest. More than 100,000 of the faithful attended, including 330 bishops and fifteen cardinals. That conference coincided with the Hungarian legislature passing the country’s first slew of anti-Semitic laws. Pacelli made a reference that some interpreted as a slight toward Jews when he castigated those people “whose lips curse [Christ] and whose hearts reject him even today.” See “Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.” Online at www.general-books.net/sw2.cfm?q=Pope_Pius_XII_and_the_Holocaust.
89 Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 166; see Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 35.
90 Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (New York: Picador 2003), 70.
91 Peter C. Kent, “A Tale of Two Popes: Pius XI, Pius XII and the Rome-Berlin Axis,” Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988): 600.
92 Osborne sent a coded cable to London describing Pius’s transformation over a couple of years from “a Fascist Pope” to “an old and probably dying man, for whatever reasons he is following a policy in international affairs which on the major issues of principle corresponds very closely indeed with our own.” Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 25–26. Osborne’s official title was Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Holy See.
93 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 190; see also Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 160; and Berry, Render Unto Rome, 66.
94 John LaFarge, Interracial Justice as a Principle of Order (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1937); see also Wills, Papal Sin, 30.
95 One was a German, Gustav Gundlach, who had worked on Pius’s 1931 Quadragesimo Anno, in which he presented nonsocialist alternatives to equality and workers’ rights under capitalism. The other Jesuit, Gustave Desbuqois, was French, and had worked on the same 1931 encyclical, as well as an anticommunist encyclical, the 1937 Divini Redemptoris.
96 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 167. The source, who provided among other things the confidential minutes of the annual meeting of the German bishops, remains unidentified. It is one of the war’s great unsolved espionage mysteries.
97 J.C.H. to A.W.D. (Allen Dulles), OSS, September 10, 1942, RG 226, E217, Box 20, Location 00687RWN26535, NARA; see Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 36; and Wills, Papal Sin, 31. German intelligence managed to place an agent in Ledochowski’s inner circle; see Report of Interrogation of Walter Schellenberg, June 27 to July 12, 1945, Top Secret, RG 226, E119A, Folder 2051, NARA.
98 Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, translated from the French by Steven Rendall, with an introduction by Garry Wills (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 124–35; see also Wills, Papal Sin, 38.
99 Some historians believe Pius was afflicted since childhood with epilepsy. A few anecdotal accounts support this conclusion, but there are no verified reports of seizures associated with the condition. Instead, there are many instances during his tenure marked by a fierce and uncontrollable temper as well as assaultive verbal explosions filled with invective and cruelness. Whatever their cause, those outbursts and fits became his feared trademark as Pope. Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 133, 143; Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War, 43, 56.
100 Wills, Papal Sin, 39; Lo Bello, The Vatican Papers, 23.
101 Maura Hametz, “Zionism, Emigration, and Anti-Semitism in Trieste: Central Europe’s ‘Gateway to Zion,’ 1896–1943,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Indiana University Press 13, no. 3 (Spring–Summer, 2007): 121–24. Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 103–5, 130.
102 “Italy’s ‘Race Laws Take 15,000 Jobs: Jews to Be Restricted to Labor and Small Trade—Police Warn ‘Aryan’ Servants,” The New York Times, November 20, 1938, 33.
103 Germania 1938, Pos. 742, fasc. 354, 40ff, ASV, AES; see also Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 185.
104 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 16, n. 90.
105 Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 103.
106 The day before Chamberlain met Pius, the Prime Minister met Mussolini. In that meeting, Il Duce told Chamberlain, “Another European war would mean the destruction of civilization.” Chamberlain was joined by his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and Mussolini by his Secretary of State, Count Galeazzo Ciano. They also talked about “the Jewish refugee problem,” and Mussolini pushed the British representatives to consider a “sovereign Jewish state” in some country that had a lot of spare land. Il Duce suggested Brazil, Russia, or the United States. Chamberlain asked Mussolini if he might intercede with Hitler to see if he would not only let German Jews leave Germany, but also take some of their money with them. Mussolini said, “It would not be of much use to ask for a great deal as the Germans had suffered great hardships and had become very poor in consequence of the actions of Jews.” The persecution of the Jews, said Mussolini, was “an internal policy in Germany,” “The Visit to Rome of the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from January 11 to January 14, 1939,” Foreign Office, War Cabinet, January 11, 1939, 24/282/8, 81–82, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK. Chamberlain returned to London “very favorably” impressed with Mussolini. Cabinet 1 (39), January 18, 1939, 23/97/1, 4, Cabinet papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
107 “The Visit to Rome of the Prime Minister,” 86.
108 On the morning that Pius XI died, Massimo Spada later recounted that Pacelli had found money left behind by the Pope: “Monsignor Angelo Pomato and I took all the money that Camerlengo Pacelli found in the study of the deceased Pope. Wrapped inside a handkerchief were Italian bank notes for 1,650,000 lire and also $1,200. That lire was deposited into the bank account number 1617 made payable to the Secretary of State, and the dollars to the current account 51170, with the same header as the other. It all went to pay homage to the mortal remains of the deceased.” Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 111, citing an interview by Lai with Massimo Spada, March 7, 1979. As for Pius’s desire to personally deliver a speech to the cardinals on February 11, see Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini, Kindle edition, location 274, 295 of 10577.
109 Jean Charles-Roux, “How the Rumors Began that Pius XI was Murdered,” The Catholic Herald, July 7, 1972; Peter Eisner, “Pope Pius XI’s Last Crusade,” Huffington Post, April 15, 2013.
110 Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust, 36; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 192.
111 Jim Castelli, “Unpublished Encyclical Attacked Anti-Semitism,” National Catholic Reporter, December 15, 1972, 1.
112 Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, “The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI,” available at washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/hiddenencyclicalofpiusxi.htm; Wills, Papal Sin, 32.
113 Archivo della Congregazione per la dottrina della fede, S.O., 125/28 [R.V. 1928 n. 2], Vol. 1.
114 Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, translated by Steven Rendall (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 247–49; “Humanis Generis Unitas,” paragraphs 133–36; Wills, Papal Sin, 36.
115 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 191.
116 Passelecq and Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical, 251–53; “Humanis Generis Unitas,” paragraphs 141–42; Lo Bello, The Vatican Papers, 22–23.
117 “Humanis Generis Unitas,” 88. A copy of the encyclical is available at the Father Edward Stanton papers at Boston College (Burns Library).
118 The writer and editor Conor Cruise O’Brien thinks the failure to release the encyclical was “one of the most tragic missed opportunities in history.” He argues that millions of Jewish lives would have been saved. Father Walter Abbot, an editorial writer at the Jesuits’ America, believes that Hitler would have cracked down even harder in the wake of the release of such an encyclical. This time the victims would not only be Jewish but also bishops and lay Catholic. Conor Cruise O’Brien, “A Lost Chance to Save the Jews?,” The New York Review of Books, April 27, 1989, 35. And see generally Weisbord and Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holcaust, 38.
1 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 205–8.
2 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 170–71.
3 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 40–42.
4 Pius was a master linguist. He was fluent in German, Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. He also had given short speeches in Swedish, Dutch, and Danish. Before his death he studied Russian, hoping to address the Russian people.
5 Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 184.
6 Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican, 168–70.
7 See generally, Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 32–38.
8 John P. McKnight, The Papacy: A New Appraisal (New York: Rinehart, 1952), 218.
9 Frederic Sondern Jr., “The Pope: A Great Man and Great Statesman Works for the Peace of the World,” Life, December 4, 1939, 88.
10 Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 2–3.
11 La Conciliazione Ufficiosa: Diario del barone Carlo Monti “incaricato d’affari” del governo italiano presso la Santa Sede (1914-1922), (Vatican City: Antonio Scotta, 1997), 51; see also Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 62. Defenders of Pius try to discredit Monti since he bore Pacelli a personal grudge. Moreover, they claim the Pope could not have been that upset since he did not rebuke Pacelli. See Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 293.
12 Sondern “The Pope,” 86–95.
13 Ibid., 91; Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 20.
14 Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 107–8.
15 Pius XII had telephones installed in his study by International Telephone & Telegraph. His private phone had a solid gold receiver on which was engraved the Papal coat of arms. He used it over the Vatican’s internal switchboard to call Curia officials, usually for short, all-business monologues. See Paul L. Williams, The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia (New York: Prometheus, 2003), 59; see also Sondern, “The Pope,” 91; and Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 19.
16 Murphy, La Popessa, 60, 88.
17 Ibid., 66. Some Italian priests working in the Curia did live at home with their parents for years while tending to duties inside Vatican City, but Pacelli bypassed living quarters offered to him by the Vatican in order to stay at home.
18 Carl Steinhouse, Improbable Heroes: The True Story of How Clergy and Ordinary Citizens Risked Their Lives to Save Jews in Italy (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2005), 30.
19 Murphy, La Popessa, 54. She was born Josefine Lehnert and took the name Pascalina when she took her vows as a nun. And although she was never a mother superior of a convent, it became part of her widely accepted title. Canon code 133, set forth by Pope Benedict XV, ordered that the women who took care of the households of ranking clerics be beyond “canonical age,” lest it might give rise to suspicion of “something evil.” Canon Law encouraged that priests use their mothers, aunts, or elderly women for overseeing their households. Canonical age was the church’s oblique way of referring to menopause. See generally Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 134.
20 After Pius had become Pope, the U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles met with him at the Vatican. During that meeting, Mother Pascalina entered unannounced and leaned over to Pius and spoke to him sternly in German. His soup was on the table. The Pope excused himself. Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 22; “Pope Takes Orders from Housekeeper,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, UPI, April 25, 1954, 32.
21 Pius appointed Pascalina as the head of Vatican housekeeping. But she was much more than that, serving as a trusted confidante. Paul Hoffman covered the Vatican for The New York Times during the 1970s and later penned a book about the church (Anatomy of the Vatican). Hoffman wrote that while only a few women ever wielded “influence in the papal entourage”—such as the fourteenth-century mystic Catherine of Siena, and the seventeenth-century Swedish Queen Christina—that Pascalina was the “one woman alone in modern times [who] has exercised considerable, if unofficial, power in the Vatican.” See generally “Pope Takes Orders from Housekeeper,” 32. Also, Pascalina wrote a hagiographic account of her service for Pius after his death. An English language edition was not published until 2014. Pascalina Lehnert and Susan Johnson, His Humble Servant: Sister M. Pascalina Lehnert’s Memoirs of Her Years of Service to Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2014).
22 Peter C. Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943–1950 (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2002), 64.
23 “Religion: America in Rome,” Time, February 25, 1946.
24 Murphy, La Popessa, 54–55, 57, 59. Two dozen reporters had camped out at Rome’s main rail station to capture Pacelli’s and Spellman’s return. They got past the reporters unnoticed, with Pacelli dressed as an ordinary priest and hiding behind large sunglasses, and Spellman disguised as a layman. A visiting New York priest remarked to friends back home that Spellman was utterly entranced by Pacelli, and jokingly said that Spellman seemed to be like a poodle being shown off and walked on Fifth Avenue by his owner. As for Spellman, he wrote to his mother about Pacelli: “He is very kind and pleasant and confidential with me.” And Spellman wrote home somewhat facetiously that the Pope (Pius XI) called him “Monsignor Precious.” One of Pacelli’s first acts as Pope was to appoint Spellman the Archbishop of New York in 1939—that caused a ruckus among senior clerics who knew that Pius XI had intended to appoint Cincinnati’s Archbishop John McNicholas, but the Pope had died before he signed the papers. Seven years later, when the war ended, Pacelli made Spellman a cardinal (see generally, Francis Beauchesne Thornton, Our American Princes: The Story of the Seventeen American Cardinals [New York: Putnam, 1963], 200–202). John Cooney, Spellman’s biographer, recounted several secondhand stories that Spellman—an exacting public moralist—was in fact gay: John Cooney, The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman (New York: Crown, 1984). The allegation caused an uproar when it was published. Spellman’s longtime clerical personal assistant dismissed it as “utterly ridiculous.” New York journalist Michelangelo Signorile followed up the leads in Cooney’s book and concluded in 2002 that Spellman was “one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church’s history,” a closeted gay man who was “known as ‘Franny’ to assorted chorus boys and others.” Michelangelo Signorile, “Cardinal Spellman’s Dark Legacy,” New York Press, May 7, 2002. The information provided about Spellman by author Paul Murphy in La Popessa is based in part on Murphy’s exclusive access to personal papers, diaries, and letters of Cardinal Spellman, provided by the cardinal’s brother, Dr. Martin Spellman.
25 Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 9; see also Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 2–3.
26 Domenico Cardinal Tardini, Memories of Pius XII, trans. Rosemary Goldie (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1961), 73. Many thought Pacelli was too influenced by his cautious and accommodating predecessor, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri. Gasparri was also an energetic Secretary of State, but few of his colleagues thought him capable of administering the church. See Frank J. Coppa, The Policies and Politics of Pope Pius XII: Between Diplomacy and Morality (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 57.
27 Godman, Hitler and the Vatican, 82–83.
28 Osborne quoted in Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 222–23; McKnight, The Papacy, 257, 291; Tardini, Memories of Pius XII, 73.
29 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 50–52.
30 A two-thirds majority of the eligible sixty-two cardinals was necessary for selection as Pope. Pacelli polled the most votes from the first ballot, but it took two additional ballots before he garnered the necessary forty-eight votes. See Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 207. Pacelli’s coronation was the first time the U.S. government sent an emissary. FDR dispatched the Catholic Joseph Kennedy, then ambassador to the U.K. The British, recognizing that having a friendly relationship with the new Pope was critical given the tensions in Europe, appointed the Duke of Norfolk to the new post of Special Ambassador to the Vatican for the Papal Coronation. Cabinet 1 (39), January 18, 1939, 23/97/1, 380, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
31 J. N. D. Kelly, Dictionary of Popes, 318. Pacelli’s coronation was the grandest in modern times, principally because it was the first since the Lateran Pacts and as a result was the only one in a century to be held outdoors. See also G. A. Borgese, “Pius XII and the Axis,” The Nation, March 11, 1939, 285–88.
32 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 57; see also The Pope Speaks, with a preface by Cardinal Arthur Hinsley (London: Faber & Faber, 1940), 60–63.
33 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 53–54.
34 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 208–9.
35 Pie XII à Hitler (minute de letter), Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War (Vatican City: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1965–1981), Vol. 2, Appendix No. 6, 420.
36 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 165; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 45; Pius XII and Franklin Roosevelt had maintained a cordial correspondence since their meeting during the Pope’s 1936 trip to the U.S. A month after Pacelli became Pope, FDR wrote asking for his support for Roosevelt’s request to Hitler and Mussolini that they agree to no further aggression for at least a decade. Pius declined, telling him that the Vatican would address both Hitler and Mussolini in good time, and on its own terms. See generally Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 9–10.
37 Sondern, “The Pope,” 91, 93–94. Pius did not trust the telephones for calls outside the Vatican, convinced that Italy’s security services monitored them. During the war he learned that the Soviets regularly intercepted phone calls between the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo. See Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 253.
38 Sondern, “The Pope,” 91, 93–94.
39 Mother Pascalina later recounted that during Pius’s nineteen-year tenure, he only broke his silent meal tradition once, inviting Munich’s Cardinal von Faulhaber to stay for dinner after a meeting had run late. Even those who knew him best, like his secretary Father Robert Leiber, a German Jesuit who met with him daily, observed that it was tough to break through his great reserve: “One of his classmates said that as a boy he had been difficult to approach. He stayed that way. . . . He remained solitary. It was hard to penetrate the depths of his soul.” Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 21–22, 140.
40 Chernow, The House of Morgan, iBooks edition, location 789.
41 Murphy, La Popessa, 85.
42 Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 153, 58.
43 Giovanni Preziosi, Germania alla Conquista dell’Italia: Con prefazione di G.A. Colonna di Cesaro’ e con nota del prof. Maffeo Pantaleoni (Florence: 1915).
44 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 28; Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 41–42; Gollin, Worldly Goods, 453–54.
45 Giovanni Preziosi, Germania alla Conquista dell’Italia: Con pefazione di G.A. Colonna di Cesaro’ e con nota del prof. Maffeo Pantaleoni (Florence: 1915). Preziosi, a former priest who left the order to become the chief anti-Semitic spokesman for Mussolini’s Fascist Party, set forth the nationalist suspicions about foreign, Jewish, and Freemason influence at Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI). Mussolini rewarded Preziosi with a 1942 appointment as Minister of State. He committed suicide after the war when his arrest by the Allies was imminent.
46 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 28; Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 41–42; see also Murphy, La Popessa, 76.
47 Lai, Finanze Vaticane, 21–22; see also Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 42.
48 The most likely replacement was Monsignor Alberto di Jorio, the Curia bureaucrat who was Nogara’s most trusted colleague. He kept the finances balanced while Nogara was under scrutiny.
49 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 42. Gollin, Worldly Goods, puts the sum as low as $150 million, while Lo Bello, The Vatican Papers, puts it as high as $2 billion.
50 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 42.
51 McGoldrick, “New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions During the Second World War,” 1031. Nogara kept notes of his meetings with Pius XI for a decade. It is not clear whether the decision to leave no written record was made by Pius or Nogara. The answer is possibly sealed inside the Vatican’s Secret Archives. The Vatican has not even released a log of the days and times during Pius’s Papacy during which the two met.
52 Pius had floated a diplomatic proposal several months before Hitler invaded Poland. He wanted the Vatican to mediate negotiations with Germany over contested lands in Czechoslovakia and Austria. France and Britain rejected the idea. Cabinet 27 (39), May 10, 1939, 23/99/6, 161, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK. Pius also suggested a truce that December, after the Nazis had taken Poland and were marching on Finland. The Allies thought it a terrible idea, as a lull would provide the Germans a short rest, after which they could renew the fighting with vigor; Notebook, Foreign Policy in Europe, December 11, 1939, (WP-39-155), 66/4/5/1, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
53 Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Series A, Vol. 34, 550–51.
54 The following month the Third Reich instituted its euthanasia program (Gnadentod, “mercy death”), with a goal of eliminating those with physical abnormalities or mental illnesses. It was supposed to be a closely held secret within the Reich, but that was impossible since the program employed more than a thousand people in its administration and execution. Rumors of what was happening were soon widespread throughout Germany. German bishop August von Galen ignored entreaties from the Vatican to stay silent and condemned the program in his sermons. Some top Nazis, including Martin Bormann, wanted Galen arrested and executed, but the Nazis did not move against him because they feared they would lose popular support if they harmed him. Over time, the public denunciations of the “secret” murders grew. Hitler’s response was to end the German program after two years, with a tally of 70,273 dead. The Nazis moved the killings to Poland and Russia, where they were lost under the chaos of the fighting there. Another 130,000 were killed before the war’s end. But that the Nazis had to backpedal in Germany has been cited by some scholars as evidence that wider Catholic protests might have slowed or even stopped the Holocaust; see Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 195–99.
55 See Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series C, Vol. 1, No. 501; Series D, Vol. 13, No. 309, cited in George Kent, “Pope Pius XII and Germany: Some Aspects of German-Vatican Relations, 1933–1943, American Historical Review 70 (October 1964). Pius never used the church’s influence with prominent Italians to try and stem Il Duce’s embrace of the Führer. Instead, the Pope merely complained sub rosa to the British. The U.K. government took notice, but of course had no sway when it came to Mussolini. Summary of the War Cabinet, March 6, 1940 (WM-40-61), 65/6/6, 39–40, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
56 Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 223.
57 Moshe Y. Herczl, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, trans. Joel Lerner (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 118.
58 American diplomat George Kennan was assigned to Prague until the Nazis took control. In his memoirs, he recounted that Rudolph Mikuš, the influential chief of the Jesuits in Slovakia, gave a “carefully prepared interview” in 1939 to the country’s semi-official newspaper. Mikuš “favors the segregation of the Jew and the elimination of their influence in political and economic life in Slovakia.” He only allowed an exemption for baptized Jews. George F. Kennan, From Prague After Munich: Diplomatic Papers, 1938–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 51–52.
59 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 87; Gabriel Wilensky, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust (San Diego, CA: Qwerty Publishers, 2010), Kindle edition, 3906 of 8032.
60 Quoted in Ladislav Lipscher, “The Jews of Slovakia: 1939–1945,” The Jews of Czechoslovakia, ed. Avigdor Dagan, Vol. 3 of Historical Studies and Surveys (New York: Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, 1984), 166.
61 Michael Robert Marrus, The Nazi Holocaust, Part 8: Bystanders to the Holocaust, Vol. 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989), 1313.
62 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 46.
63 See generally Le nonce à Berlin Orsenigo au cardinal Maglione (Report of Apostolic Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo regarding his meeting with Hitler), Vol. 1, No. 28–29, 128ff, Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War, Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Le Saint Siège et la guerre en Europe (Vatican City: Liberia Editrice Vatican), (ADSS); Notes du cardinal Maglione (Note of the Italian Ambassador [Ciano] the Vatican Secretary of State [Maglione]), May 9, 1938, No 36, 138, Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War, ADSS; Sir Neville Henderson to the British Foreign Office, Series 371/23790/190, file of the Foreign Office, National Archives, Kew, UK. French suspicions about Pius and Maglione working with Italian intelligence were largely based on the extent to which the Vatican was intertwined with Mussolini’s government during the summer of 1939, just before the breakout of hostilities. See generally the archival documents relating to British Foreign policy, 3rd Series, 1919–1939, Vol. 7, National Archives, Kew, UK; see also Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 65, 68.
64 Ronald Modras, The Catholic Church in Poland and Anti-Semitism, 1933–1939 (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2000), 186.
65 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 82.
66 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 25.
67 Memo, Harold H. Tittmann, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, Europe, 1942, University of Wisconsin, Digital Collection, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=turn&entity=FRUS.FRUS1942v03.p0783&id=FRUS.FRUS1942v03&isize=text.
68 Walter Hannot, Die Judenfrage in der katholishen Tagespresse Deutschlands and Osterreichs, 1923–1933 (Mains: Grünewald, 1990), Series B of Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 51, 286ff.
69 Modras, The Catholic Church and Anti-Semitism, 195. In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the Polish clergy issued a formal apology for not having condemned the Nazi slaughter of Polish Jews.
70 The Polish cardinals who promoted blood libel included Józef Sapieha and Karol Radonski. Paper presented by Andrzej Bryk, “Polish-Jewish Relations During the Holocaust: The Hidden Complex of the Polish Mind,” at the History and Culture of the Polish Jews, 1988, Jerusalem; see also Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 47–48; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 14–15. Hlond later tempered his anti-Jewish remarks and became a critic of Nazi crimes. Hlond’s rant about Jews was part of a 1936 pastoral letter that was read during Sunday mass at churches across Poland. Cymet, History vs. Apologetics, 152. See generally Besier, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 134–35; Natalia Aleksiun, “The Polish Catholic Church and the Jewish Question in Poland, 1944–1948,” Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem, vol. 33, 2005.
71 The Nazis had begun targeting clerics they thought were not enthusiastic about the new German General Government. Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939–1944 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 13–14; August Hlond, The Persecution of the Catholic Church in German-Occupied Poland. Reports presented by H. E. Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, to Pope Pius XII, Vatican Broadcasts and Other Reliable Evidence—preface by Cardinal Hinsley (New York: Longmans, Green, 1941), 110–17; see also Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 22–23; and Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 21–24, 28.
72 George La Piana, “Vatican-Axis Diplomacy,” The Nation, November 30, 1940, 530–32.
73 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 25.
74 Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust, 16.
75 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 29.
76 Burzio’s most detailed warning was an early March 1942 letter in which he reported the imminent deportation of 80,000 Slovakian Jews, Burzio to Maglione, March 9, 1942, Vol. 8, 153, ADSS; see Livia Rothkirchen, “The Churches and the Deportation and Persecution of Jews in Slovakia,” Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies, 2000; Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, 78–81; Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 205, citing the diary of British envoy D’Arcy Osborne.
77 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 87.
78 Ibid., 88. See also Livia Rothkirchen, “Vatican Policy and the ‘Jewish Problem’ in ‘Independent’ Slovakia 1939-1945, Yad Vashem Studies, 6 (1967), 36. Secretary of State Maglione made a more direct appeal in May 1943.
79 “Notes de Mgr Tardini,” Vol. 8, Doc. 426, 597–98, Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War, ADSS; see also John S. Conway, “The Vatican, Germany and the Holocaust,” in Papal Diplomacy in the Modern Age, ed. Peter C. Kent and John F. Pollard (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 113.
80 Phayer, Pius XII, The Holocaust, and the Cold War, 10.
81 Marco Aurelio Rivelli, L’arcivescovo del genocidio: Monsignor Stepinac, il Vaticano e la dittatura ustascia in Croazia, 1941–1945 (Milan: Kaos, 1999), 12–13. It appears that Pavelić made two appointments as military vicar. One was Monsignor Stipe Vučetić, and subsequently Stepinac. When Stepinac was charged after the war with war crimes, his position as military vicar was cited in the indictment. See generally Stella Alexander, The Triple Myth: A Life of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1987), 86-87.
82 Mussolini also was an early Ustaša supporter, providing them with logistical and military support.
83 Alexander, The Triple Myth, 57-58, citing Katolički List, the semi-official journal of the Zagreb diocese, as KL 8 (92) 20.2.41, 93.
84 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 108; see also Harold H. Tittmann Jr., Inside the Vatican of Pius XII: The Memoir of an American Diplomat During World War II (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 2010), Kindle edition, location 746 of 3089.
85 Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 108–9.
86 Quoted in Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 71.
87 Miha Krek passed the request to Pius XII through Ljubljana’s Bishop Gregory Rozman; see Mark Aarons, Sanctuary: Nazi Fugitives in Australia (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1989), 19.
88 Alexander, The Triple Myth, 59–60.
89 Menachem Shelah, “The Catholic Church in Croatia, the Vatican and the Murder of the Croatian Jews.” Included in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocides, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Pergamon, 1988), 266, 274.
90 Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity, 71–72; On the same day as Pavelić saw Pius, Secretary of State Maglione issued a letter declaring the visit did not constitute an official recognition of the new Croatian government. Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 109.
91 Alexander, The Triple Myth, 63-65. See also Raul Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 710–11; see also Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 32–33. Besides meeting Pavelić that day, Pius blessed a delegation of the Great Crusader’s Brotherhood, a Croatian nationalist group whose goal was to convert Serbs to Catholicism.
92 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 193–95; see also Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 39–40.
93 According to statistics compiled by the German High Command, from the time of the invasion, June 1941, through the end of the war, more than 90 percent of all Nazi casualties were on the Eastern Front.
94 Fritz Menshausen to State Secretary Weizsäcker, September 12, 1941, Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945, Series D, Vol. 13 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1964), 489.
95 Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 39.
96 Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941–43 (London: Routledge, 2002), 36; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 33, n. 11
97 Aarons, Sanctuary, 61–62: During the first months of Pavelić’s regime, there was no doubt that an anti-Jewish and intra-Slavic race war was under way. Serbs were ordered to wear blue armbands and Jews yellow Stars of David. All public transport and retail stores had to post signs that announced, “No Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and dogs allowed.”
98 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 250–51. The Vatican did not even officially express its disapproval of forced conversion until 1942. See Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 303, citing a memorandum from the Vatican Secretary of State to the Legation to Yugoslavia, January 25, 1942.
99 Quoted in Shelah, “The Catholic Church in Croatia, the Vatican and the Murder of the Croatian Jews,” 266–80; see also Aarons, Sanctuary, 59–60. Sarić appropriated real estate and bank accounts from Jews. After the war he found safe haven at Rome’s Pontificium Institutum Orientalium, a Pontifical school that studies Eastern Christianity. Wilensky, Six Million Crucifixions, Kindle edition, 3207 of 8032.
100 Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII, English translation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 273–75, 307–8.
101 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 254; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 34–35, 38.
102 Williams, The Vatican Exposed, 67; the three priests were Josef Culina, Zvonko Brekalo, and Zvonko Lipovac.
103 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 34, n. 14.
104 Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII, 308.
105 Branko Bokun, Spy in the Vatican, 1941–45 (London: Vita, 1973), 11.
106 Through 1941, Bokun tried repeatedly to get the file to Pius, even once trying to hand it to him during a public blessing. The Pope’s advisors blocked Bokun’s efforts to pass the documents. See generally Bokun, Spy in the Vatican; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 255–57.
107 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 37.
108 Aarons, Sanctuary, 62; see also Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder: The Second World War in Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), in which he cites Pavelić bragging to the Italian Foreign Minister that only twelve thousand Jews are still in the territory controlled by the Ustaša; see also Sergio Romano, Giuseppe Volpi: industria e finanza tra Giolitti e Mussolini (Milan: Bompiani, 1979) and Sergio Romano, Giuseppe Volpi et l’Italie moderne: Finance, industrie et état de l’ère Giolittienne à la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1982). Author Ronald Rychlak cites an August 4,1942 letter from Miroslav Freiberger, the chief rabbi of Zagreb, to Pius, in which he thanked the Pope for the “limitless goodness that the representatives of the Holy See and the leaders of the Church showed to our poor brothers.” Rychlak omits, however, the rabbi’s urgent appeal to the Pontiff: “Now, at the moment when the last remnants of our community find themselves in a most crucial situation—at a moment when decisions are being made about their lives—our eyes are fixed upon Your Holiness. We beseech Your Holiness in the name of several thousand women and abandoned children, whose supports are in concentration camps, in the name of widows and orphans, in the name of elderly and the feeble, to help them so that they may remain in their homes and spend their days there, even, if necessary, in the most humble circumstances.” The Vatican responded through a Benedictine Abbot, Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone, who acted as the de facto nuncio to Croatia. The church always did what it could to help the suffering, he told Freiberger, and would continue to do so. Freiberger and his wife died at Auschwitz the following year. See Mordecai Paldiel, Churches and the Holocaust: Unholy Teaching, Good Samaritans, and Reconciliation (Brooklyn, NY: Ktav Publishing House, 2006), 302.
109 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 283. From 1944 on the Germans were furious at Pius for his failure to explicitly condemn the Allied carpet-bombing of German cities, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died. It is not clear if Pius’s silence late in the war was due to a shift in his view of who would prevail on the battlefield. See generally Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 198–99, 207.
110 Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 193–95; see also Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 39–40.
111 The Minister in Switzerland (Harrison) to the Secretary of State, March 19, 1942, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, Europe, 1942 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 785–86.
112 Report by Oliver Lyttelton, MP, on his Period of Office as Minister of State, Oliver Lyttelton, (WP-42-139), 66/23/19, 79–80, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
113 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 45.
114 Letter, Robert Leiber to Cardinal Konrad Graf von Preysing, October 28, 1945, Diözesanarchiv Berlin, V/16-4, Collection of Preysing, Berlin.
115 Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 45–46.
116 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 163–65, 177; see also Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 67–81. Some German bishops cited what happened in Holland in 1942 as a reason not to act. There, bishops issued a condemnation of Nazi racial policies and deportations. The Germans responded by accelerating the roundup of Jews, sending some twenty thousand to their death in Auschwitz. Among them was Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun who had converted from Judaism before the war (she was canonized in 1998). After the war, Pius’s personal aide and housekeeper, Pascalina Lehnert, claimed that Pius had intended to publicly condemn Nazi atrocities but had destroyed his handwritten statement in the Vatican kitchen after the Nazi response in the Netherlands made him fear the consequences of such a denunciation. According to Pascalina, the Pope said, “I now think that if the letter of the bishops has cost the lives of 40,000 persons, my own protest, that carries an even stronger tone, could cost the lives of perhaps 200,000 Jews.” She told that story for the first time in 1968, twenty-six years after it allegedly happened. She disclosed it during her testimony before the beatification tribunal completing Pius’s first stage toward sainthood. Pascalina never explained how Pius supposedly knew that the Dutch Jews had been gassed. Their ultimate fate was only confirmed from Nazi records after the war. In any case Maria Conrada Grabmair, a domestic worker who was there that evening, testified that she had seen Pius burn some papers but did not know what was in them, nor did she hear him say anything. Pius’s nephew also testified before the beatification tribunal. While he also could not confirm Pascalina’s account, he said his uncle should be credited for doing more than merely staying silent during the war. He claimed that in the middle of the night, in the Papal chapel, Pius often performed a customized type of exorcism to cast the devil out of Hitler. See also Pascalina Lehnert, Pio XII il privilegio di servirlo, trans. Marola Guarducci (Milan: Rusconi, 1984), 148-49.
117 Alexander, The Triple Myth, 102. Accompanying Stepinac on his trip to Pius was Father Krunoslav Draganović, one of Bishop Ivan Saric’s personal secretaries. Draganović would play an important postwar role in helping Ustašans charged with war crimes evade justice. See Chapter 12, The Ratline. Also Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 169.
118 See “Fate of the Wartime Ustaša Treasury,” Report of U.S. State Department, June 2, 1998, 2–4; see also, Alexander, The Triple Myth, chapter 8, “The Disenchantment,” 88–106; Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope, 304; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 31–40 and Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, 11–12. Although Stepinac was convicted of war crimes in 1946 by the communist government that came to power in the reassembled Yugoslavia, the Vatican maintained he was the victim of a Soviet-inspired witch-hunt against church officials. He died in 1960 while still under house arrest.
119 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 230–31; Robert S. Wistrich, “Reassessing Pope Pius XII’s Attitudes Toward the Holocaust,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, October 19, 2009.
120 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 231.
121 Carlo Falconi, The Popes in the Twentieth Century: From Pius X to John XXIII (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 260.
122 Although Pius did not authorize any condemnation of the civilian murders, he was so pleased with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union that he allowed Archbishop (later Cardinal) Celso Constantini, the Secretary of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, to give a speech in which the cleric praised German troops as “brave soldiers” locked in a war with “Satan’s deputies.” The Allies pleaded with the Pope to tone down any language that might convert the German aggression into an anticommunist crusade that generated support among the Catholic faithful: Memorandum, Reports for the Month of June 1941 for the Dominions, July 21, 1941 (WP-R-41-48), 68/8/48, 50–51, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK.
123 Conclusion, Confidential Annex (WM-43-114), 65/39/10, 47, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK. U.S. Intelligence intercepted a 1941 church cable expressing concerns that a priest known only as Father Hoffman, who supposedly worked for the Gestapo and was also a prior of a large Benedictine monastery, had penetrated the Vatican. See NNO32947, September 29, 1941, RG 59, IWG (Nazi war crimes working group), FBI Secret Intercepts, NARA.
124 See generally “Le president de la Unione delle comunità israelitiche Alatri au cardinal Maglione,”(interpretation over the failure of the church to reply to a plea for help in August 1941 from the Union for the Israelite Community of Altari), Vol. 8, 250, Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War, ADSS.
125 Le métropolite de Léopol des Ruthènes Szeptyckyj au pape Pie XII (Szeptycyki to Pius XII), August 29–31, 1942, (Vatican City: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1965–1981), Vol. 3B, Doc. 406, 625, ADSS. Three years earlier Szeptycyki had asked Pius in vain for permission to kill himself as a sign of protest against the Nazi crimes. Pius ignored that entreaty. In his August 1942 letter, he also informed the Pope that the Nazis had killed or rounded up “hundreds of thousands of Christians.” The Pope’s response two weeks later congratulated Szeptycyki on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination as a priest and empathized over the hard time that “pastors” were undergoing in Russia. There was no mention of the Jews or the Nazi murders.
126 See generally “La Nonciature en Italie au Ministère des affaires étrangères,” 8, Doc. 276, 431, Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War, ADSS; John F. Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1980), 136–37; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 47–48.
127 Sereny, Into That Darkness, 139.
128 Memorandum of Sir R. Geoffrey A. Meade, British Foreign Office, August 12, 1942, Foreign Office collection, National Archives, Kew, UK, cited in Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, 209.
129 Harold Tittmann, Taylor’s assistant, had remained in Rome when hostilities broke out and found sanctuary inside Vatican City. He was joined by D’Arcy Osborne and other diplomats who had stayed behind. Some envoys, like Taylor, had returned to their native countries and conducted diplomacy from a distance, only occasionally visiting Rome. Since the Vatican did not have an airport, Mussolini’s government—as a courtesy to the church—had to approve each of Taylor’s landings and departures.
130 Harold Tittmann to the U.S. State Department, Memo No. 114, September 15, 1942, Myron C. Taylor Papers (also available at the Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO); also listed as The Minister in Switzerland (Harrison) to the Secretary of State, August 3, 1942, Foreign Relations of the United States, Vol. 3, 1943, 926–28, NARA; Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican, citing diary of D’Arcy Osborne, 204–5.
131 See Memorandum, Mr. Myron Taylor’s visit to Rome, Anthony Eden, October 13, 1942 (WP-42-466), 66/29/46, 228–32, Cabinet Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK; Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, 159.
132 Riccards, Vicars of Christ, 135. Although Pius did not excommunicate either Hitler or Mussolini, when the Western powers asked him after the war to do so to communist leaders, he obliged with a 1949 decree that excommunicated all of them from the church. And in 1955 he did the same to Juan Perón, not because the Argentine dictator was pro-Nazi and provided safe haven to war criminals, but because Perón had introduced a divorce law, banned religious education in schools, and issued an edict that the Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi was no longer a national holiday. See generally Records of the German External Assets Branch of the U.S. Allied Commission for Austria (USACA), Section 1945–1950 in USACA Semi-Monthly Flash Reports 15 January–31 July 1949, No. 21–34, File 28, Roll 113, 3–4, NARA.
133 Coppa, Controversial Concordats, 175; Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 288–90; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 49, 39.
134 “A Summary of the Conversations Between His Holiness Pope Pius XII and Myron Taylor, Personal Representative of the President of the United States of America to His Holiness Pope Pius XII at Vatican City, September 19, 22, 26, 1942,” 25, Vatican: Taylor, Myron C.: Report on 1942 trip (i467) Index, Box 52, Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
135 “Memorandum of His Holiness Pope Pius XII re Prisoners of War,” September 26, 1942, 25, Vatican: Taylor, Myron C.: Report on 1942 trip (i467) Index, Box 52, Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY; see also Pope Pius to Myron Taylor, 7001/42, 723, ADSS, cited and reprinted in Margherita Marchione, Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2000), 240.