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

by Gerald Posner

  Chapter 2: The Last Pope King

  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.