God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

by Gerald Posner

  With the battle for Rome over, Pius basked in the unabashed adoration of Romans, most of whom hailed his role in saving the city from destruction. Newspapers bestowed on Pius a medieval title, Defensor Civitatis (Defender of the Citizenry), and it stuck.244 But it did not take long before Allied representatives at the Vatican brought Pius back to earth, turning his attention again to the mass deportations under way in Hungary. Pius told Osborne that he was not sure why everyone seemed so agitated only about the Jews in Hungary. What about Soviet atrocities against Catholics in Poland? Even Osborne, accustomed to the many ways by which Pius avoided taking any responsible action over the mass murder of Jews, was surprised at this latest canard. He told the Pope that the British had seen no evidence of Russian crimes, and whatever might have been done to Catholics did not compare to the systematic slaughter of the Jews.245

  Pius consulted with Cardinal Maglione, Monsignor Montini, and some other aides. He would not, Osborne was told, criticize the Nazis. On June 25, the Pope instead sent a short telegram to the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy: “We personally address Your Royal Highness, appealing to your noble sentiments and being fully confident that you wish to do all in your power in order that so many unfortunate people be spared further afflictions and sorrows.”246

  Western governments sent their own warnings to Horthy alluding to criminal consequences for helping the Nazis move against the country’s Jews.247 Horthy dithered for several weeks before he stopped cooperating with the German deportations. By that time, half of Hungary’s Jews had been murdered. The hiatus was short lived. That October, a hard-line Arrow Cross government shoved Horthy aside and resumed the transports to Auschwitz. The Allies asked the Pope for another note since the Arrow Cross leadership was mostly Catholic. Pius refused. He resented that he felt pressured into his first plea to Horthy. Once was enough he decided. Although the Papal Nuncio, Angelo Rotta, continued to send a steady stream of ghastly details to the Vatican, Pius did not again react.248,IX

  Other than his short and generic telegram over the Hungarian deportations, there is no journal entry or other contemporaneous account of Pius or any of his top advisors anguishing over what else they might do to stem the genocide. Pius’s public silence and inaction in the face of such barbarity has sparked for decades a fierce debate among historians and theologians as to why he did not do more. The extremes are on the one hand the depiction by British historian John Cornwell of Pius as “Hitler’s Pope,” and the other is the Vatican’s move to anoint Pius a saint (in 2009 Benedict XVI bestowed on him the title of “Venerable,” meaning the church has officially acknowledged his Heroic Virtue, the first step in Pius becoming a saint).250

  Most historians search for the truth somewhere between those two poles. Those less partisan than the Vatican, but still sympathetic to the Pope, contend that he was convinced his cautious approach spared the Jews even greater atrocities. In 1940, Pius had told the Italian ambassador to the Vatican that if he had forcefully spoken out, he feared “making the plight of the victims even worse.”251 And he worried—with some justification—that the Nazis might use such a Pontifical statement to declare him an enemy and to wage a war against the church, arresting clergy, limiting the rights of Catholics to worship, bombing or seizing Vatican City, and possibly imprisoning him.252

  Some explain away Pius’s wartime actions by noting that his great love for Germany made him resistant to believing the gory details that filtered into the Vatican, and then reticent to act. The public silence of Pius was no worse, others assert, than that of the Allied governments, which before the end of the war knew as much as the Vatican about the atrocities. The Allies still said little publicly and refused to bomb the railway lines on which the packed deportation trains kept running on schedule to Auschwitz.

  But the Vatican had a unique power to influence events compared to the Allies. As the head of the world’s then largest religion, Pius wielded a moral authority far beyond the scope of any Western government. The church counted millions of loyal worshippers inside Nazi Germany and the occupied countries. They had become accustomed to Popes setting policy on critical and often divisive issues. Catholics dominated the leadership of every puppet government allied with the Nazis. Many devout Catholics maintained their faith at the same time they worked at concentration camps and ran the Third Reich’s bureaucracy of mass murder. Some priests were involved in both fascist politics and the civilian slaughter. The Pope’s passive behavior did nothing to disabuse them of that contradiction. In an era in which the faithful were more likely to follow Pontifical decrees, an unequivocal declaration from Pius that it was a mortal sin for any Catholic to aid in the killing of Jews might have dealt a serious blow to Hitler’s Final Solution.

  The justifications offered for Pius’s silence seem insufficient to explain why he failed in his spiritual and moral duty to condemn in public a genocide that unfolded during his Papacy. Pius did not symbolically excommunicate Hitler and Mussolini or banish Mein Kampf to the Vatican’s list of disapproved books. He did not renounce the Reichskonkordat even after it was evident the Nazis had violated every substantive article. The best Pius could do was muster vague appeals against the oppression of unnamed victims.

  There is little doubt that Pius’s diplomatic training taught him to write and speak in periphrases and so as not to offend anyone.253 He might have better served the church during the war as the Vatican’s Secretary of State rather than as the leader of hundreds of millions of Catholics who considered him the Vicar of Christ. The tool he knew—diplomacy—was useless when dealing with Hitler and institutionalized mass murder.

  Pius believed—as had all Popes before him—that his first obligation was to protect Catholics. He would do nothing that might heighten the risks for the church in Germany, Austria, and the occupied countries. Western diplomats privately dubbed this “the faith of a long perspective.” It was the idea that the church had survived nearly two thousand years of wars, horrendous Popes, the persecutions by unfriendly Kings, and the sacking of Rome by foreign armies. “The Vatican thinks in centuries and they regard Fascism as a transitory interlude,” concluded British envoy D’Arcy Osborne.254

  A further consideration that likely pushed the Pope to stay silent was rooted in the church’s own tortured history of anti-Semitism. Pius and his top advisors had been raised and inculcated with a religious bias against Jews that was an integral part of Catholic theology and liturgy. Centuries of Catholic traditions had helped sow the seeds of Hitler’s hatred toward Jews. It was a Pope, Paul IV, who had in the sixteenth century issued a decree that created ghettos. He ordered Jews under Papal control into them, ruling they were condemned to “eternal slavery” for crucifying Jesus.255 Pius XII—when still a cardinal—had written and talked at length about how Jews were the masterminds of Russia’s godless Bolshevik Revolution, and that their main goal was to destroy Christian civilization.256 That learned anti-Semitism meant there was little urgency to help the Jews.257 And it might even have contributed to a sense that the horrible events unfolding in Europe were somehow God’s will—what Catholics called divine law—against the people who had rejected Christ.258

  There is another factor, however, that likely influenced Pius to remain silent in the face of overwhelming evidence of mass murder: money. A similar dynamic had played out in 1935 when Pius XI remained quiet during Italy’s brutal aggression into Ethiopia. The church then had investments in munitions companies and was inextricably bound with Mussolini’s government. Any moral duty for the Pontiff was lost in the pursuit of profits.

  In World War II, Pius XII’s silence helped protect a complex web of interlocking business interests with the Third Reich, relationships that yielded significant profits for the Vatican. In some cases they are dealings the Church has denied to this day. And some of the biggest returns came from Nazi-occupied countries, the same ones in which the Pope mostly turned a blind eye to mass murder. It was in the killing fields of Eastern Europe that Bernardino N
ogara created a labyrinth of multijurisdictional shell companies that kept profits, bloody and not, flowing into the Vatican’s coffers.

  * * *

  I. In the twentieth century, the term Vaticanologists also came into wide use. It is most commonly used to refer to journalists who cover the Vatican.

  II. A year later, Tiso passed new laws banning marriage between converted Jews and Catholics. Pius understood that unless Jews were assured that conversion spared them from discrimination and punishment, the church would have a tough time getting converts. Since Tiso was a priest, Pius expected him to be receptive to that argument. But Tiso was unmoved. The Pope stripped Tiso of his monsignor’s title, demoting him to merely a priest.62

  III. The best the activist clerics mustered from their repeated entreaties was a private letter by Pius nearly two years later. He authorized five thousand copies be distributed through the church’s underground. In that letter, the Pope expressed his solidarity with Polish Catholics. Even then, he did not mention Jews or criticize the Nazi violence against both Jews and the church.75

  IV. “Pastor Angelicus” came from supposed prophecies by St. Malachy O’Morgair, a twelfth-century monk, to describe a future Papacy that Pius believed was his. Although some Catholic scholars have dismissed the “prophecies” as a sixteenth-century forgery, Pius wholeheartedly embraced them, believing they forecast that he had a divine destiny.146

  V. It was eight years, 1950, before Pius announced that he believed St. Peter’s grave had likely been found. He did not mention any bones. They were still in his apartment. There they remained for another fourteen years until an Italian anthropologist examined them and concluded they belonged to several people and even some animals. That same year, 1964, Margherita Guarducci, a professor of Greek epigraphy at the University of Rome, published a book asserting that some of the bones were indeed those of the apostle. She based her case on a questionable translation of Greek graffiti at the excavation site. Although leading anthropologists ridiculed her conclusion, it carried much weight inside the Vatican. On June 26, 1968, Pope Paul VI (who, as Monsignor Montini, had joined Pius at St. Peter’s during the dig) declared that the church had recovered the bones of St. Peter. In November 2013, Pope Francis concluded a Year of Faith by displaying the bones publicly for the first time since their discovery.156

  VI. As for Stepinac’s nine-page document, not only did the Vatican lock it inside the Secret Archives, it is still sealed, “accidentally” withheld from a postwar Vatican production of documents. The Secret Archives are estimated to contain fifty-two miles of shelving packed with documents, some dating back to the seventh century. The collection is stored today in temperature-controlled, fireproof underground chambers dubbed the “Bunker.” Over the centuries important files were lost. Much of the Inquisition’s history was burned in 1559. Part of the archive was lost in 1810 when it was transported to Paris by Napoleon’s troops. Some documents were lost in transit or later sold in bulk for the value of the paper itself. Most files about Pius XII were sealed for seventy-five years from the beginning of his pontificate. The date upon which they would have been made public was March 12, 2014. It passed without any documents released by the Vatican.

  It was during this time—May 1943—that Ante Pavelić, the murderous head of Croatia, wanted to again visit the Pope. Although the Vatican had by then been inundated with firsthand accounts of the slaughter in Croatia, Secretary of State Maglione inexplicably assured Pavelić there would be no problem, but reminded Pavelić that he could not “be received as a sovereign.” And Pius promised Pavelić another Apostolic Blessing. Only the deteriorating conditions on the battlefield caused Pavelić to cancel the trip.179

  VII. Some historians have thought any offer of help in gathering the gold was out of character for the risk-averse Pius. Defenders of Pius have often distorted the offer of a loan by converting it instead into an outright gift. Some have Zolli skipping Nogara entirely and appealing directly to the Pontiff. Others claim Pius added a million lire as a gift on top of the gold. On the other hand, hard critics of Pius refuse to credit the Vatican with any role. That is because the story relating the Vatican’s offer of assistance was not told until 1954, eleven years after the incident, in a book by the former Chief Rabbi. By then, Zolli and his wife had made a stunning 1945 conversion to Catholicism, and he had taken the Pope’s given name, Eugenio. He even had a job in the church’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. Zolli was simply concocting the story, some claimed, to buttress the church’s philo-Semitism during the war. But a contemporaneous letter from Nogara to Secretary of State Maglione leaves no doubt that Zolli’s recollection is fact based. In that September 29, 1943, letter, Nogara confirmed that the Vatican had completed accumulating the gold Zolli had requested.201

  VIII. Defenders of Pius XII claim that there were no more roundups of Rome’s Jews because the Pope covertly intervened. In fact, another thousand Jews were seized after October 16, with not a single word of protest by Pius. The other 2,500 to 3,000 Roman Jews not found by the Nazis went into hiding. Some found safety in monasteries and nunneries. A diary from the Augustinian nuns of the Roman convent of the Santa Quattro Coronati—leaked by the church in 2006 from the Secret Archives—claims that Pius ordered “hospitality be given in the convents” to “his children, also the Jews.” In 2013, Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial softened the text in an exhibit to acknowledge that “the lack of overt and unequivocal guidance by the Vatican left the decision to initiate rescue of Jews to the heads of Catholic institutions. Some superiors of convents, monasteries and other institutions opened their doors to Jewish fugitives, sometimes with the knowledge of the Vatican.” Contemporaneous wartime documents reveal that the Curia was divided over whether Catholic institutions should shelter Jews. The credit for saving many Roman Jews belongs to Père Marie-Benoît, the priest who had beseeched Pius three months earlier to intervene on behalf of Jews in the Italian-occupied French zone. Israel honored him in 1966 as one of the Righteous Among Nations for his brave work. A mostly spontaneous network of lay Italians and parish priests helped those on the run.222

  IX. When Secretary of State Maglione died in August 1944, Pius considered his old friend Cardinal Spellman for the role. An internal FBI memo dated April 12, 1945, reported a “persistent rumor” that Spellman was at the top of a short list. But the opposition to Spellman inside the Curia was furious. Pius was so confident of his own diplomatic capabilities that he decided not to appoint anyone, instead assuming the duties, assisted by Maglione’s two undersecretaries, Monsignors Domenico Tardini and Giovanni Montini. “I don’t want advisers,” Pius told Tardini. “I want people who do as I say.” Pius left the Secretary of State office empty for the rest of his tenure, another fourteen years.249

  9

  The Blacklist

  A fast-thinking financial savant like Bernardino Nogara was tailor-made for the violent chess game that became World War II. An Italian patriot, he recognized that Mussolini had inalterably bound the nation’s fate to Germany. And Nogara knew firsthand about Pius’s special affection for Germany. But he was unsentimental when it came to money. He did not make his investments based on which army he hoped would prevail. His loyalty was to the church and to accumulating and protecting its wealth.

  In the early spring of 1939, after the commission of cardinals cleared him and Pius restored his full authority as head of the Special Administration, Nogara scrambled to safeguard the Vatican’s money. Not only would the war complicate successful investments and steady profits, he knew that armed conflicts had historically caused a drop-off in Peter’s Pence. The fighting might disrupt income from his commercial real estate ventures in France and England, two countries certain to be combatants. All the uncertainty highlighted the importance of the money the church got from the Kirchensteuer, the 8 to 10 percent tax imposed on every German Catholic. The revenue to the church had risen sharply since the Nazis had made it mandatory and collected it on behalf of the church. Just
before the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, Nogara checked the amount: that tax alone returned enough money to Rome to pay for most of the church-state’s operating expenses.1,I

  The start of the war in September only heightened Nogara’s sense of urgency. He feared that Germany would repeat its World War I strategy and claim neutral Luxembourg as an early victim. So he closed Grolux S.A., the holding company he had established there in 1933 to invest some of the Lateran Pacts millions in Paris, London, and Lausanne real estate.3 Six months later Nogara began consolidating some at-risk assets in neutral countries. He put Société Privée d’Exploration Immobilière, a successful Paris-based real estate firm he had created in 1932, under the control of Profima, one of his Swiss holding companies (under Swiss law there was no requirement for any public accounting, and when the Allies later suspected that the Vatican might be laundering some Aryanized Jewish assets from Paris through Société Privée, its closed books stymied the investigation).4 And in May, Nogara moved some other scattered European operations under Profima’s umbrella, as well as to one of his early Swiss holding companies, Lausanne Immobilier.5

  Nogara’s hunch was right. Germany invaded Luxembourg as part of a broad offensive that overran the neutrals Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Hitler’s divisions then swept into France. The breadth of Nazi aggression prompted Nogara to protect the church’s movable assets, mostly gold and stock certificates. America seemed safe. It was solidly neutral, with most Americans thinking the country’s interests were best served by staying out of “Europe’s war” (the United States had not yet even condemned the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia or the invasion of Poland).6 Nogara traveled to London with the House of Morgan’s Roman representative, Giovanni Fummi. They arranged to transfer to the United States $7.7 million—the 2014 equivalent of $126 million—of the Vatican’s gold held by Morgan’s British affiliate, Morgan Grenfell.7 Nogara also soon sent a “sizable amount” of the church’s Italian gold reserves to America. He consolidated most of the Vatican’s smaller stocks of gold scattered around Europe to Switzerland’s Credit Suisse.8 Tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian stock certificates were transferred from Lausanne to Rome, where Nogara directed they be locked inside the Vatican vaults.9