Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  As he called off the Modernist witch hunt, Benedict XV staked out a position of neutrality for the Holy See in calling for an end to a war marked by “hideous butchery.”67 The French, who had twenty-five thousand priests in active service, were hostile to Vatican neutrality; they saw it as favoring the German coalition that was using submarine attacks. In 1916 Benedict denounced the arms trade as “contrary to the law of nations.”68 Trying to bring Austro-Hungarian and German bishops to support a negotiated peace, Benedict saw a sharp drop in Peter’s Pence. Fewer bishops visited Rome; papal audiences shrank in size. Banco di Roma losses were sapping the Holy See’s financial base.

  American Catholics sent $300,000 a year to Peter’s Pence during the war, giving Benedict funds for hospitals and relief projects; his gifts were in the $20,000 range. He provided small loans to Italy and authorized two thousand priests to mobilize as medical orderlies. In August 1917 Benedict issued a Peace Note, calling for negotiations to halt the “useless carnage,” laying out a seven-point plan for disarmament to include an international court of justice. Furious, Italian generals called for his execution. German officials withdrew interest as the battling gained momentum. On October 24, 1917, Austro-Hungarian troops, backed by Germans, smashed Italy’s defenses at Caporetto, blasting through with a ferocity that saw 300,000 die in a nightmare of slaughtered corpses sunk in muck, bunched along roads, and wedged among dead horses; bodies choked the swollen rivers as 600,000 civilians fled in terror.69

  In Milan, a wounded soldier who had resumed his post as a newspaper editor, one Benito Mussolini, derided “His Holiness Pope Pilate XV.” Mussolini called for a leader with “the delicate touch of an artist and the heavy fist of a warrior … A man who knows the people, loves the people and can direct and bend it—with violence if necessary.”70 Italy’s industrialization mobilized nearly a million workers to manufacture matériel and vehicles. As the German alliance went down, a fleeting sense of triumph swept Italy; the papacy was dependent on American support. For Italy, the costs of maintaining a large navy and army began squeezing the economy.

  As nations gathered for the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Benedict was distressed at being denied a place. President Woodrow Wilson adopted several of the pope’s 1917 planks in his Fourteen Points for Peace, and later visited the pope. Versailles instead produced a treaty distorted by fines that drove Germany deeper into poverty, laying punishment over defeat rather than fostering a peaceful rebuilding, as the pope helplessly looked on. In an encyclical, Benedict brooded on the “immense areas utterly desolate, uncultivated and abandoned … innumerable widows and orphans bereft of everything.”71

  Italy was reeling from inflation and Mussolini’s Fascists were gaining ground using terrorist tactics against Catholics and leftists when Bishop Walsh of Maine gave Benedict the news of Cardinal O’Connell and his corrupt nephew.

  Rarely does the pope remove an ecclesial prince or even a bishop. Temptations of hubris—pride rationalizing a cover-up for “the good of the church”—are enormous. Imagine, too, Benedict’s frustration at handcuffed diplomacy from Pio Nono’s intransigence of a bygone era: he was still a geographic prisoner. In 1920, after 10 million deaths in the Great War, Benedict held a huge ceremony at the Vatican to make Joan of Arc a saint. He hoped it would ease tensions between France’s monarchists and the modern Catholics sympathetic to a “free church in a free state.” Eighty French officials attended the sainthood rites. Against this backdrop, when the Holy Father turned his attention to the matter of Boston’s cardinal, it must have seemed small-scale.

  Benedict soon sent word: the U.S. bishops must agree on the cardinal’s guilt before a Vatican intervention. In a war-tested response, the pope was telling the princes and bishops who powered his financial base to decide if they wanted what amounted to a court-martial. Abuses revealed in “the internal forum” were not public. Sins of the nephew had not made the press. To punish Cardinal O’Connell would not mean disclosing the facts; far from it: avoiding scandal to the church was paramount. But some reason must be given. Removing a prince also meant finding him a face-saving job in the Vatican. Here was the papal mind: the rare punishment of a prince must be soft-gloved and as subtle as possible.

  By throwing the decision back on the bishops, did Benedict assume they would stall? In the logic of apostolic succession, the bishops considered themselves the descendants of Jesus’s apostles. Who among them compared with Judas? In 1921 O’Connell sent a whopping $60,000 to Peter’s Pence. Time passed. O’Connell stayed in Boston. An affair of state, his funeral in 1944 drew 25,000 mourners who sat in Holy Cross Cathedral, with 10,000 more outside.72

  The fears of some bishops that infallibility would wreck the church did not materialize. Antipapal rhetoric ran like brushfire as bishops established dioceses from the Reconstruction years into the 1920s economic boom. In affirming freedom for all churches rather than the superiority of any one, the U.S. Constitution liberated ethnic immigrants to worship rather than work for their lives under a clergy overseer or distant pope. The democracy Pio Nono so reviled gave the American church a new lease on life. Mass attendance in Italy, France, and Spain declined in the early 1900s amid a hardening anticlericalism, while in America a church with blue-collar foundations had a 75 percent attendance at weekly Mass. With a papal endorsement in Rerum Novarum, labor unions won the support of American priests and a good number of bishops.

  In 1916 the newly installed archbishop of Chicago, George Mundelein, sent $62,000 to Benedict for Peter’s Pence.73 Mundelein created his own banking system with procedures for pastors to build or expand on churches, schools, and parish complexes. No parish could exceed $200,000 in debt; the chancery had to approve all construction costs. Mundelein floated church-backed bond issues. With a banker’s eye, he pooled surplus parish funds, facilitating loans from wealthier to poorer parishes. “Mundelein treated most pastors like financial idiots,” states his biographer Edward Kantowicz.”74 As cardinal he made the archdiocese a financial powerhouse. Mundelein presided over Chicago’s expansion; his contributions to Peter’s Pence ran to six figures through the 1920s. But of all the American contributions in that era, the largest came in 1921—the year Boston’s scandal-tainted O’Connell sent $60,000—when Archbishop Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia, on becoming the third U.S. cardinal, sent a stunning $1 million in Peter’s Pence. In the aftershocks of World War I, Benedict needed every dollar of it.75

  Like Boston, Philadelphia was about one-fourth Irish, yet more tightly woven and more prosperous, as financial writer Charles R. Morris reports in American Catholic. The percentage of Irish in the general population before the Civil War was roughly the same in the two cities (about 20 percent), but the Irish accounted for 18 percent of grocers in Philadelphia, as opposed to just a single percent in Boston.76 The Irish flourished in Philadelphia’s construction trades; an entrepreneur by the name of Rafferty organized thirty-five parish loan societies with funding of at least $15 million. With solid blue-collar and middle-class well-kept neighborhoods, topped off by wealthier precincts, Catholic Philadelphia threw out a huge welcome for Archbishop Dennis Dougherty. A native of Scranton, Dougherty studied in Rome, was made a bishop there and dispatched to the Philippines, then served in Buffalo before he detrained at Philadelphia on a winter day in 1918 with 150 priests in escort. En route to the cathedral, he was cheered by 150,000 Catholics as he “sat in an open limousine, ruddy and smiling, behind an entourage of roaring motorcycles, fifty brass bands, and seventy-five automobiles,” writes Morris. “Old ladies broke through the police line all along the way to run up and kiss the ring.” Civic leaders turned out, four thousand strong, “including the governor-elect, the state attorney general, the mayor and all the important ministers and rabbis … that night for a grand reception.”77

  Spectacles like that do not happen today. The abuse crisis and issues of financial honesty have sapped the American hierarchy of the moral stature by which an archbishop comes a hero to his grateful city. In
another time, Mundelein, O’Connell, Spellman, and the building bishops bestrode the public square as symbols of a triumphal church. Dougherty made his archdiocese one of Pennsylvania’s largest landowners. The cardinal bought acreage in outlying areas before suburbanization, anticipating tracts to one day site a parish, and leased sections “back to the previous owners until he was ready to use [them]—the strategy of a cash-rich, long-term player.” Dougherty foresaw the trend of developers allocating large tracts in a subdivision for a parish, calculating that home owners wanted churches: build, and they will come. Dougherty was his own developer, selling land to a planned parish, which the archdiocese financed, with any excess property sold for whatever the market would bear. Dougherty jocoseriously called himself “God’s bricklayer.” God’s banker is just as apt. Charles Morris calls him “something of a tycoon” in real estate. When he died in 1951 the archdiocese, virtually debt free, had assets with fair market values in the “several hundred million range.”78

  The support ethnic Americans gave to their parishes registered an approval of Romanità, its trappings of royalty and the beauty of liturgical rituals that ran through the year. The church was a spiritual anchor with aesthetic grace to uplift people from the grit and stresses of workaday life. As the generations advanced to the middle class, embezzlement by clerics like the Boston cardinal’s nephew and priests’ sexual transgressions were aberrations quietly covered “for the good of the church.” Philadelphia under Dougherty, Chicago under Mundelein, Boston under O’Connell, and large dioceses in California, the Northeast, and the Midwest signaled Catholic triumphalism.

  THE FAUSTIAN PACT WITH FASCISM

  Liberal Italy had ended Pio Nono’s suppression of Jews. Under Benedict XV, “the anti-Semitic campaign in the papally-linked press was soon suppressed,” writes David Kertzer.79 As the first pope in a global war, Benedict XV controlled little land; he made quiet moves through intermediaries for a financial resolution with Italy over the lost territory, while Italy blunted his overtures to Britain and France for peace negotiations. After the war, Benedict broadened the church’s global role, sending missionaries to poor countries. In Italy, he saw Socialists and Communists gaining strength, stirring fears of Russian persecution of the church under Lenin’s Communist regime. In Italy, the pope gave covert support to unions and peasant groups that coalesced behind a Catholic political movement. Money, or the lack of it, still hounded the pope. In 1919 he sent an emissary to America seeking a $1 million loan. The bishops were hard-pressed, but the Knights of Columbus provided $250,000 in a lavish ceremony; dressed in knightly regalia, they received Holy Communion from the Supreme Pontiff in the Apostolic Palace.

  In 1920, with papal finances still a juggling act, a charismatic priest named Luigi Sturzo, who had won a mayoralty in Sicily, galvanized a national movement, Partito Popolare Italiano, also known as the Catholic Party. In an extraordinary surge, Sturzo’s PPI won 1.1 million votes to capture a fifth of the Chamber of Deputies, becoming Italy’s second-largest party almost overnight. A brilliant organizer, Sturzo pushed land reform and workers’ rights. The Chicago Tribune’s legendary correspondent George Seldes was struck by Sturzo’s pacifism and loyalty to the pope.80 As violence spread against churches and Catholic groups, Benedict wanted Italy to ensure security. The war had boosted his prestige; twenty-seven countries had posted ambassadors to the Holy See.

  In 1921, the year Benedict sent 5 million lire for famine relief in Russia, Mussolini and thirty-five Fascists won seats in the chamber. Mussolini (who had called priests “black microbes”) considered the church his chief threat as he used terrorism to cement a political base. “His squadristi descended upon towns and villages, burning, looting, killing,” wrote Seldes. “Catholics as well as Socialists were always the victims.”81 The prime minister, who had secretly facilitated Fascists’ weapons purchases, sent feelers to Benedict, seeking support from Sturzo to form a new government. Averse to taking a direct role in electoral politics, Benedict knew that Fascist attacks on Catholic groups, which had deposits and loans at Banco di Roma and many smaller banks with predominantly Catholic clientele, were killing innocent people as part of a broader assault on the church. The pope steered funds to assist cash-strapped Catholic newspapers. But he held back from endorsing Father Sturzo’s PPI. Many bishops shrank from a Catholic party amid the Fascist assaults. For all of his resolve in shaping a vocabulary for peace, Benedict’s detachment from the Catholic Party stemmed from the papacy’s long political isolation. But between Fascism and pluralism, why not take a stand? In the 1920s Catholic independent parties offered a democratic alternative to Fascists and Nazis.

  While his thugs murdered with impunity, Mussolini decried Bolshevism and advocated land reform. In January 1922, with Sturzo steering his party on a middle course, Benedict, “the pope of missions,” died at age sixty-seven, of pneumonia caused by flu. He was one of history’s greatest popes. The February conclave elected Achille Ratti, a former Vatican archivist whose career Benedict had transformed by dispatching him to Poland as the papal nuncio, then naming him archbishop of Milan. Ratti in Kraków witnessed the Bolshevist fist bent on crushing the church. In Bologna, during a 1921 commemoration of Italy’s victory in the Great War, he allowed Fascists to drape a banner in the cathedral. Behind his bookish background, the eleventh pope to take the name Pius was a stern authoritarian skeptical of a “free church in a free state.” Pius XI wanted Catholic solidarity behind his office, a lordly vision that saw democracy as a sideshow. He was also determined to end the stalemate with Italy.

  “A myth is a faith, a passion,” Mussolini declared. “Our myth is the greatness of our nation.”82 In 1922, with a ragtag army of 30,000 Fascisti, Mussolini marched into Rome, a power strut that Italy’s generals could have halted well before its arrival in symbolic triumph, but in a country so politically fragmented, Mussolini’s militant charisma straddled many lines. Substantially poorer than France and Britain, Italy faced severe unrest: 400,000 engineering workers occupied factories in September 1920.83 The society hungered for order, a center, stability to feed prosperity. “Violence is a brutal necessity to which we have been driven,” Mussolini told parliamentarians in 1922. “We are prepared to disarm if you, too, are prepared to disarm.”84

  As snakes peel their skin, Mussolini the arriviste prime minister shed his raw anticlericalism. He awarded stipends for parish priests; he advocated restoring religious education in public schools and a crucifix in every class. Mussolini had his three out-of-wedlock children baptized; he married their mother. Where Liberal Italy held to a negotiating posture no prewar pontiff would embrace, the Fascist strongman saw a Catholic-majority country and decided to convert it to his agenda. In the mating ritual of demagogue and pontiff, Mussolini met secretly with Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the secretary of state, in 1923, and sent a message: if His Holiness broke with the Catholic Party, Il Duce would seed government funds in the faltering Banco di Roma, where Vatican investments teetered. Pius XI ordered Father Sturzo to quit the PPI. Sturzo withdrew from politics; later on he moved to America.

  When the Fascists murdered the leader of the Reformist Socialist Party, the PPI withdrew from the parliament in protest, throwing Mussolini’s government into a crisis. Just when a movement was gelling around the Catholic Party for an alliance against Fascism, Pius XI denounced any collaboration between Catholics and the left. The pope equated Lenin’s persecutions in Russia with even a democratic form of Socialism in Italy. Despite Catholic parties in Italy and Germany pushing for alliances with the moderate left against the Fascist right, Pius wanted the church as the absolute center of Catholic lives. Politics, coalitions, closing ranks to thwart political gangsters, all eluded the pope’s purview. Imagine Mussolini’s delight: the pope was hammering his Catholic enemies. Pius saw Fascism as corrupt, but considered it the lesser of two evils whose leader signaled a receptivity to restoring the church’s high role in society. Aloof from ground-level politics, Pius failed to see the value of
pluralism over a unilateral dealing with Il Duce for Catholic interests. When Sturzo’s party collapsed, Catholic trade unions and peasant groups became more vulnerable. Seventy-four small banks with Catholic clientele folded. The killings continued.

  After installing Fascist officers at Banco di Roma, Mussolini shored up its holdings, which helped stabilize Vatican finances. He gained support on Wall Street and with the Hoover administration for a break on Italy’s war debt. The State Department took an “at least he’s our bastard” approach to Mussolini, prizing rough unity over the Fascist homicides. King George V gave Mussolini a medal in Rome. Such cynicism on human rights would plague Anglo-American foreign policy for generations. Deported by Mussolini, George Seldes published Sawdust Caesar, a prophetic 1935 biography of Il Duce.

  In pushing for church unity, Pius XI showed a comfort with power. Exasperated by retrograde French monarchists in a group called Action Française, Pius XI excommunicated the leader (an anti-Semite at that) and his followers. He summoned the superior of the French seminary in Rome and told him to fire the rector, an AF sympathizer. “Yes, Holy Father,” answered the old priest. “I’ll see what I can do.” Grabbing his beard, the pope snarled, “I said, ‘Fire him!’ ”85