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

by Gerald Posner

  But no theory rivaled the power and prevalence that the frail Pontiff had been stunned into resigning after the three cardinals he had appointed to investigate Vatileaks gave him what was said to be a jaw-dropping three-hundred-page top secret report exposing in detail a “gay network” of ranking clerics. In that report were details about regular sex parties and the charge that as a group, not only did they exert “undue influence” in the Curia but that some of them were blackmailed by lay outsiders.29 Adding to the smoke was La Repubblica’s account that the report—consisting of two volumes with red covers stamped “Segreto Pontificio” (Pontifical Secret)—were presented to Benedict the previous December 17, the very day on which he had decided to step down. The books were packed with notes of dozens of confidential interviews conducted by the investigating red hats. Enough, Benedict was supposed to have said after poring over the lurid details, leave it all to someone else.30 Evidence of his anger and frustration, some contend, is that a few days later he denounced homosexuality and same sex marriage, calling it a “manipulation of nature.”

  Other than finding out from Benedict, no one can definitively say why he decided to control when he left the Papacy as opposed to waiting for God to let him know the “best time” through his death.II Conversations in Rome—seven months after the resignation—by the author with several well-placed Curial employees, and two advisors of Benedict, indicate that it was not prompted by a single scandal. Instead, each of the bandied-about theories had some element of truth. All of those matters weighed on a Pontiff who had always recognized that his strength was as a teaching Pope. It had been his misfortune to be selected to lead the church at a time when infighting had turned the Curia into what one senior prelate called a division of “little Borgias.”32 In this view, popular with senior officials, Benedict’s resignation was a selfless act since he had come to realize he was not capable of leading the modern church and making the tough decisions that were needed. “It wasn’t one thing, but a whole combination of them,” concluded Paolo Rodari, Il Foglio’s veteran Vatican reporter. Vatileaks, said Rodari, “was a constant drumbeat on the Pope.”33

  “Ratzinger was afraid to intervene on a deadlocked Roman Curia, with reformers on one side, and the money changers on the other,” wrote author Gianluigi Nuzzi. “So he decided to create a clean slate by bowing out and paving the way for the election of a strong Pope.”34

  Father Federico Lombardi, the press spokesman, alluded to something similar at a press conference: “The Church needed someone with more physical and spiritual energy who would be able to overcome the problems and challenges of governing the church in this ever-changing modern world.”35

  Once he broke the news of his resignation in a February 11 talk with some cardinals, everyone assumed that until he stepped off in seventeen days that he would be a caretaker Pontiff. Considering that he was not much of a firebrand during his previous eight years, it was likely that he would go out quietly. But just four days after announcing that he would resign, he surprised many Vaticanologists by ratifying the recommendation of his commission of cardinals and at long last appointed a new IOR president: fifty-three-year-old Ernst von Freyberg, a devout Catholic and German aristocrat who was a well-respected businessman and lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions.36 He was also a ranking member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and in his spare time escorted pilgrims on tours of the healing waters at Lourdes.37 In finding Freyberg, the Vatican had used its first-ever headhunting firm, and it had whittled down a group of forty solid finalists. Brülhart thought the choice was inspired. Freyberg had a solid reputation as the chairman of the executive board of German shipyard Blohm + Voss.III

  With his IOR chief in place, Benedict set the conclave to start on March 12, just under two weeks from when he became Pope Emeritus (after some frenzied debate about what to call him) and turned over the keys to the Vatican to his Camerlengo, Secretary of State Bertone.

  * * *

  I. A codefendant, Claudio Sciarpelletti, a computer technician from the Secretariat of State, was tried separately for making a false statement to the gendarmes when asked who gave him a file folder that ended up with Nuzzi. He received a two-month suspended sentence.8

  II. Six months after he resigned, a Catholic news agency, Zenit, reported that Benedict stepped down because of a “mystical experience” in which God ordered him to do so. It was picked up as the “definitive answer” as to what was behind the resignation. A week after it broke, Monsignor Gänswein told Italian TV that it was a fake story, “made up from alpha to omega.”31

  III. News accounts reported that his company was involved in building Nazi warships eighty years earlier. Freyburg was a descendant of one of the firm’s founders. He was also criticized for keeping his day job at the firm since it built modern warships for the German navy and the Vatican had steered clear of all armaments investments. The controversy petered out quickly.38

  42

  “The People’s Pope”

  It was a wide-open field, with more than a dozen cardinals discussed as frontrunners. Benedict’s resignation had caught the red hats by as much surprise as the lay public. Those who had the ambition to be Pope had not had the opportunity to politick that often arises in the final weeks of a Pope’s terminal illness. Everyone was running a short race from the same starting line.

  Buenos Aires’s cardinal, Jorge Bergoglio, who had finished second eight years earlier to Benedict, did not seem to be a contender this time. The wide consensus was that although Latin America had more Catholics than anywhere else, it was unlikely that the College of Cardinals would select their next leader from there. Only nineteen of the 117 cardinals were Latin American, and it was not even certain that they would vote as a bloc geographically.1 The National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen, who provided sober commentary as on-air CNN consultant, wrote a story about Bergoglio’s second-place finish in 2005. Allen was in the know as much as any Italian Vaticanologist, with excellent Curial sources. His view was given wide credence. In summarizing Bergoglio’s chances, Allen wrote that while he “at least merits a look” it was unlikely that he would emerge as Pope.

  Fifty of the cardinals from the last conclave were voting again. Allen noted, “They may be skeptical that the results would be any different this time around.” Although Allen set forth a long list of reasons why Bergoglio might attract some votes, in the end, he said, “there are compelling reasons to believe that Bergoglio’s window of opportunity to be pope has already closed.” To the extent exhaustion and age caused Benedict to resign, it was yet another strike against an older candidate like Bergoglio, who would be only two years younger than Benedict when he was selected. According to Allen, there was “the standard ambivalence about Jesuits in high offices,” and the fact he had never worked inside the Vatican. The final factor working against the Buenos Aires cardinal was that “doubts that circulated about Bergoglio’s toughness eight years ago may arguably be even more damaging now, given that the ability to govern, and to take control of the Vatican bureaucracy, seems to figure even more prominently on many cardinals’ wish lists this time . . . there may be concerns about his capacity to take the place in hand.”2

  Bergoglio may have agreed with Allen’s assessment. After he finished second to Ratzinger in the conclave, he returned to Buenos Aires and told colleagues he looked forward to retirement. An old-age home for clerics in Las Flores, a small town just outside Buenos Aires where he was born, was where he intended to move after he stepped down. In 2010 he said, “I’m starting to consider the fact that I have to leave everything behind.” He had handed his resignation letter to the Pope when he turned seventy-five in 2011, but Benedict had done nothing about it.3

  Few of the “inside shortlists” included Bergoglio. The names that did get bandied about the most included two American cardinals, New York’s glad-handing populist Timothy Dolan and his polar opposite, Boston’s unassuming Sean O’Malley. The Italians seemed to be split between two powe
rful cardinals, Milan’s Angelo Scola—who it was said had been John Paul II’s personal selection to replace him—and Genoa’s Angelo Bagnasco, who had benefited from his recent condemnation of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s poor morals. There was, as in every lead-up to each conclave since the 1960s, speculation about whether the church was ready for its first black Pope. Ladbrokes and Paddy Power had Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Appiah Turkson as the frontrunner at 5 to 2. Right behind was Canada’s Marc Ouellet at 3 to 1, and Nigeria’s Francis Arinze was 4 to 1. The odds for the others covered a wide range, from Timothy Dolan’s 25 to 1 to the semiretired eighty-year-old Cormac Murphy O’Connor, who was a long shot at 150 to 1.4 Bergoglio was not on the list.

  On Tuesday, March 12, the 115 voting cardinals met in the Sistine Chapel. They did not get under way until the afternoon, and managed only one vote. It resulted in black smoke. No one had gotten the support of two thirds of all cardinals. News reports that night said Italy’s Angelo Scola and Brazil’s Odilo Scherer were in a tight race. Scola was a solid favorite of many Italian cardinals who wanted the Papacy back after thirty-five years under a Pole and then a German. Scola’s problem was that reformers feared he was too much a Vatican insider, while traditionalists thought he would embark on too radical a redo of the Curia. In fact, he had garnered fewer votes on the first round than most cardinals expected, ending in a virtual tie with Canada’s Marc Ouellet. Bergoglio surprised everyone as a strong third.5

  On the second day, Scola’s support started peeling away.6 The cardinals agreed that it would be a good sign to the faithful if they showed unity by settling on someone quickly. By the third ballot it was a two-person race between Ouellet and Bergoglio. On the fourth ballot Bergoglio moved ahead, and Ouellet threw his support to him (there was speculation later that the two had struck a deal by which Ouellet would become Secretary of State; in fact he received no appointment from the new Pope).7

  So it took one more vote, the fifth ballot, to put Bergoglio over the top, making him the first non-European Pontiff since a Syrian, Gregory III, 1,300 years earlier.

  “It was very moving as the names were sounding out,” Ireland’s Cardinal Sean Brady recounted later to reporters. “Bergoglio, Bergoglio, and suddenly the magic number of 77 was reached. The cardinals erupted into applause. “I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house,” said New York’s Timothy Dolan.8

  Brazil’s Claudio Hummes was sitting next to Bergoglio. He leaned over, embraced his Argentine friend, and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Don’t forget the poor,” Hummes said.

  “And that struck me . . . the poor,” Bergoglio later recalled. “Immediately I thought of St. Francis of Assisi. Francis was a man of peace, a man of poverty, a man who loved and protected creation. How I would love a Church that is poor and for the poor.” When he was asked for his new name, he did not hesitate with Francis.9

  When word filtered out the news wires carried headlines such as “unexpected choice” and “surprise election.”10 Some of the stories rehashed allegations from the 2005 conclave. “Already Francis’s brief papacy has been touched by controversy.” They were stale charges that he was somehow complicit in the kidnapping by the Argentine military junta of two leftist Jesuits. A troubling variation of this story was that in the mode of Pius XII and the Holocaust, he had remained silent during the junta’s human rights abuses.11

  The Vatican dismissed the accusations the following day as baseless and libelous. Lombardi went so far as to suggest the charges were a smear by a “left-wing, anti-clerical” plot.

  Bergoglio seemed unfazed by the controversy. He had heard it before. Having run a diocese in a major urban center—with a thriving media and robust tabloids—he was accustomed to sometimes rough and tumble public treatment. While ordinary Catholics did not yet know what to make of him, inside the walls of the Vatican—even during his first week—Francis was a sharp contrast to the dour Benedict. He smiled, laughed, went out of his way to talk to even the lowliest workers, cracked jokes, and seemed genuinely interested in the lives of those he met.

  Born in 1936—the eldest of five children—in Buenos Aires to Italian immigrants (his father was a railroad worker and his mother a homemaker), Bergoglio planned to be a chemist, but at twenty-one decided instead he wanted to be a Jesuit. He was motivated by a desire to serve the poor, something he did not think he could do as well in private business.12 Among other subjects he taught philosophy and psychology, and for six years starting in 1973 he was Argentina’s Jesuit provincial before becoming the rector of the seminary from which he had graduated.13 Bergoglio was never swept up in the progressive liberation theology that flourished among many of his contemporaries. No group was more radicalized throughout Latin America than the Jesuits. But the limit of his own activism was to mix into his faith a theme of strong social justice for the underprivileged.

  Twelve years later, 1992, he was named Buenos Aires’s auxiliary bishop. When Cardinal Antonio Quarracino died of a heart attack in 1998, Bergoglio took his place. And John Paul gave him the red hat three years later. He had by this time earned a deserved reputation as an unwavering traditionalist on church dogma, not only in condemning homosexuality, same sex marriage, and abortion, but even giving a spirited defense of no contraception.14 (In 2010, Argentina’s President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, admonished him for his contention that gay adoption was a form of discrimination against children.)

  What did surprise the 13.5 million Catholics in Buenos Aires was the reception Francis received at the Vatican. He had been a likable enough cardinal in Argentina but there was no indication that he would morph into such a popular Pope on the world stage. Francis benefited from the contrast to the besieged Benedict. But it was far more. He was a populist who knew how to play to the crowd. On the day he was elected, at his first appearance on the balcony of St. Peter’s, he refused to wear the traditional ermine-trimmed red cape and silk slippers, nor would he carry the jewel-encrusted gold cross. He shunned the grand Papal living quarters in the Apostolic Palace and instead moved into a simple apartment at Casa Santa Marta, the city-state’s modest guesthouse. He told Monsignor Georg Gänswein, who remained as his Papal Secretary, to put away all the ornate vestments, instead donning only the simplest white cassock and skull cap. The jeweled triple tiara was put in storage. There would be no trappings of an imperial Papacy so long as he was in charge.15

  If Benedict seemed not only burdened but at times even defeated by the modern world, Francis showed he was a master of twenty-first-century tools. And he demonstrated an innate talent at managing his own public image. He hugged a man with a terribly deformed face at St. Peter’s; washed the feet of female convicts; and celebrated his seventy-seventh birthday by inviting a homeless man to breakfast in his private apartment. He seemed an ordinary man, giving friends a lift in his car and even taking selfies with babies and visitors at St. Peter’s Square. His first trip outside of Rome was to meet the impoverished “boat people” of the Italian island of Lampedusa. Images of him there praying with migrants went viral. He sent out his own tweets. A small plenary indulgence was offered for those who followed him on Twitter. Another indulgence was provided to Catholics who attended World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, where he gave a talk to a million people. Francis surprised even his aides by telephoning at random some of those who had written him letters (four nuns retold dozens of reporters how startled they were to return to their convent and have a New Year’s message from the Pope on their answering machine). The unpredictability that so endeared him to the faithful at times unnerved his personal staff, who were accustomed under Benedict to strictly timed schedules from which no variation was permitted.16

  But it was more than symbolism that so endeared him to both Catholics and non-Catholics alike. During spur-of-the-moment press conferences, or at times during a prepared speech when he tossed away the paper and spoke extemporaneously, the self-effacing Pontiff invariably said something that sounded tolerant and d
ifferent. About gays, “If a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, who am I to judge?” Gays, he said, “feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this.” What about women who consider abortion because they were raped? “Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?”17 On the divisive question of whether divorced and remarried worshippers can again take the sacraments, he held out hope for reform, saying that Communion was “not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”18 He told the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica that many Catholics and social conservatives were obsessed “only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods” and that instead they should focus on “a new balance . . . [a] pastoral ministry.”19

  In each of these instances Francis’s words were carefully crafted. He never promised to make any substantive reforms or alter long-established doctrine, nor did he ever commit to radically change course from the traditional positions he championed for decades in Argentina. But the lay public was unaccustomed to a Pope talking frankly—much less so empathetically—on issues that under previous Pontiffs had been matters on which Catholics only got lectures and rules to follow.

  Francis’s openness captured people’s imaginations. And the notable difference in style instilled in many a belief that a change in substance was imminent. In some ways, he became a Rorschach test. People saw in him what they wanted in a Pope. On the online world, there were thousands of blogs predicting what the church would look like in a few years under a Francis Papacy. Most were no more than wish lists by the bloggers who created them, but they reflected the promise that millions had invested in Francis. Gays believed he might soften his predecessor’s condemnation of homosexuality as an “objective disorder” and open the door to same sex marriage. Women were convinced that Francis would be the first Pontiff to loosen absolute bans on contraception for the poor and the prohibition of abortion in cases of rape and incest. Some predicted that he would break tradition and consider women as priests. Every special interest group had something online dedicated to the new Pope. He would end celibacy for priests. Sex abusers would be tossed out of the priesthood and turned over to civil authorities. Catholicism would focus on lifting the poor and chastising the rich.