Render Unto Rome (9 page)

In 1860 Cavour’s coalition of Piedmont-Sardinia was allied with the nationalist Garibaldi’s southern forces as the Risorgimento captured two-thirds of the Papal States. Garibaldi, who had once worked as a candle maker on Staten Island, became a hero in America. “The new birth of Italy is already the grandest event of the modern period,” asserted the Dante scholar Charles Eliot Norton. “The claim for Peter’s Pence may well remind us of the Crusades,” the
New York Times
drily opined. “But today when the Holy City is attacked, it is by Catholics—Catholics from the South and from the North.”
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Pio Nono shifted from benevolent despot to reactionary monarch. He struck back (without identifying Cavour, Garibaldi, or republicans)
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in the 1864
Syllabus of Errors
, an edict that cracked the whip against the emergence of European democracy. Garry Wills calls the
Syllabus
“grand in its crazy way” for its declaration that the pope should never have to “reconcile himself, or agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”
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Antonelli, however, had a new marketing asset: the papal image. The distribution of pictures and small cards bearing Pio Nono’s face, combined with newspaper coverage, made him “a popular icon better known than that of any pope in history.”
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As bishops in Europe and America rallied to the cause, Peter’s Pence averaged 8 million lire yearly from 1859 to 1870.
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Although initially conceived to provide military defense for the pope, the money was his to use as he wished.

Despite Pius’s intransigence on freeing Jews, Rothschild took a long view. His bank also lent to the royal house of Piedmont. For a French bank to have an embattled pope among its clients did not hurt, even if his betrayal did. With two-thirds of the Papal States controlled by Italian forces, Pio Nono stood helpless at the birth of the Kingdom of Italy. Thus, in 1861 he excommunicated its king, Victor Emmanuel II. Pio Nono rebuffed overtures by the new leaders for the Law of Guarantees, which pledged 3.5 million lire a year to papal coffers and defense of the Vatican. Count Cavour, the leader pushing for a rapprochement, called for “a free church in a free state.” Antonelli the shrewd bargainer might have cut a better deal had he only had papal support. But Pio Nono believed in his kingship. He refused to concede his lost control of the territories.
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Money for daily operations, notably the salaries of Vatican lay workers,
was a pressing need. The Holy See turned to French bishops, seeking subscription loans to be raised by the laity, a scheme quickly quashed for the conflict posed to Peter’s Pence. Catholic financiers suggested a worldwide papal lottery; the Vatican said no. In this quagmire Antonelli gave the order for a massive minting of silver coins “with less than the prescribed amount of necessary metal.”
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French and Swiss banks rejected the quick-fix cheap coins. Money spread, inflation rose: the papacy by 1870 had a public debt of 20 million lire.

Amid the tribulations, Pio Nono kept his odd sense of humor. “How is it,” the pope asked a British envoy in early 1866, “that the British can hang two thousand Negroes to put down an uprising in Jamaica, and receive only universal praise for it, while I cannot hang a single man in the Papal States without provoking worldwide condemnation?” At his own question he burst out laughing, repeating it, shaking a lone finger.
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The envoy wondered if the pope was sane. In 1871 the pope ordered Italians not to vote in parliamentary elections, a decree that magnified his detachment from politics and undercut Vatican influence on party development as democratic changes swept through Europe.

French troops supplied the garrison that defended the pope. In 1869 Pio Nono summoned all of his bishops to a Vatican Council. He wanted their support for infallibility—that the pope could not err on a pronouncement of dogma, and could issue articles of faith entirely on his own, without the collegial advisory of cardinals and bishops. American bishops were not thrilled. Many of them were establishing dioceses in areas where raw sentiments flared against “popery”—the king of a religion who would menace America’s democracy. “In my humble opinion,” the bishop of Rochester, New York, writing from Rome, confided to a friend, “and almost every American Bishop whose opinion I have heard agrees with me, [infallibility] will be a great calamity for the Church.” The bishop of Pittsburgh was more stark: “It will kill us.”
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A mist of irony suffused the Vatican Council. Pius, the antirepublican, wanted the bishops
to vote
, as if in a parliament, for investing his office with a superhuman power. When an Italian cardinal spoke in opposition, Pio Nono bristled at his “error.” Then he declared: “I,
I
am the tradition!”
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Such hubris may have sparked a revolt on a preliminary vote on the wording of the papal text, in which the first ballot had 88 votes against
Pius, 62 for, and about 85 bishops absent—on account of their leaving Rome. The French troops packed up, heading out for war with Prussia. The Vatican was unprotected. Fifty-seven bishops opposed to infallibility left before voting. A lopsided number of bishops Pio Nono had appointed in Italy and Spain rallied to his position; he won, 533–2.
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But the margin could not offset the misgivings of those who had left. “There was something hollow about this victory, which prevented even the hardliners from showing ebullience,” writes Wills.
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Antonelli the money manager warned the pope that infallibility would alienate many people. “I have the Blessed Virgin on my side,” rejoined Pio Nono.
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Indeed, the infallibility doctrine applied retroactively to the pope’s 1854 declaration of Mary’s birth without original sin (the Immaculate Conception). Otherwise, none of his pronouncements after the Vatican Council carried the stamp of infallibility. (To date, its only other invocation was in 1950 when Pius XII announced that Mary ascended bodily into heaven.) Such decrees of a spiritual realm stood apart from an emerging age of science. As the geography controlled by the Supreme Pontiff shrank to the size of a small town, the idea of papal perfection enlarged his power, suggesting a reach no president, prime minister, or dictator could rival.

As the papacy’s financial struggle deepened, Pio Nono quipped, “I may be infallible, but I am certainly bankrupt.”
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Infallibility, however, produced an ironic silver lining. As a popular misconception arose that the pope could never make a mistake, the papacy became a symbol of pure truth. Funds poured in from Catholics in Europe and the Americas, registering support for the pope.

The Vatican Council ended. Liberal Italy swallowed Rome and the remaining Papal States. Shorn of the ancient lands, a king without an army, Pio Nono crossed the Tiber into tiny Vatican City—the 108 acres encompassing St. Peter’s Basilica, the Apostolic Palace, gardens, and historic buildings—a self-proclaimed “Prisoner of the Vatican,” vowing bitterly not to reenter Rome proper until Italy returned the land. This was Pio Nono’s full-throated sympathetic coda to the dying age of European monarchy.

“The Achilles’ heel of the Roman theory of infallibility is in the last resort lack of faith,” the eminent theologian Hans Küng would write many years later in assessing Vatican I, as the council is called. “True, God acts
on the Church through the Holy Spirit … But the human beings who constitute the Church can err, miscalculate and blunder, mishear, misunderstand and go astray.”
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Pio Nono, the blundering geopolitician, had won election as the infallible dogmatist. Priests in Ireland and Germany handed out palm cards of His Holiness in a dungeon on a straw bed, a prisoner of evil Italians.
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Popular myth produced its opposite: a stunning 1.7 million lire for Peter’s Pence yielded at an 1874 Catholic congress in Venice.
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Incensed by Pio Nono’s hostility, the Kingdom of Italy’s parliament debated legislation to outlaw Peter’s Pence; it failed to pass. Meanwhile, the idea of a spiritually perfect pope, standing on the rock of dogma in a fast-changing world, transformed the papal image from landed sovereign to sainted royalty at poverty’s edge. The pope became a magnet for donations amid the spread of urban capitalism, despite a counterwind of dissent by theologians and intellectuals against infallibility to this day.

From his elegant bunker with the garden paths and great Vatican buildings, Pio Nono carved out a global map, creating more than two hundred new dioceses and appointing bishops to run them, a religious expansion in contrast to his tiny kingdom. He named more saints than all popes in the previous 150 years combined, a breathtaking pace unmatched until the twenty-seven-year pontificate of John Paul II. When a Jesuit adviser suggested a truce with Italy over reparations for the Papal States, Pio Nono sacked him, declaring, “In Rome, the Head of the Church must be either ruler or prisoner.”
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The Cambridge historian John F. Pollard calculates that in the seven years following the 1870 fall of Rome, the Vatican saved 4.3 million lire annually from Peter’s Pence income. Antonelli’s investment strategy ignored Italy, still a semifeudal agrarian economy, for more industrialized countries. The nuncios, or papal ambassadors, played a pivotal role. Writes Pollard:

Much of the Vatican’s money was deposited in foreign banks, especially Rothschilds in Paris, the Société Générale in Brussels and the Bank of England; little or no money was sent to the United States at this juncture, though there is evidence that Antonelli did contemplate depositing money there. Antonelli used the papal nuncios as the agents of his financial operations abroad, especially
in the matter of seeking attractive bank accounts and stocks and bonds, rather than company shares. Two Roman financial middlemen … performed various necessary operations, smuggling in Peter’s Pence when the Italian governmental authorities showed hostility, exchanging currencies, cashing stocks and bonds which formed part of Peter’s Pence, and selling precious objects donated by the pious faithful.
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Pio Nono refused to negotiate reparations, stubbornly demanding the return of Rome and the ancient plantation belt, unfazed about the bleak peonage on which the lost kingdom had rested. Antonelli streamlined papal finances, steering investments into credit and commerce. Blind to the chance for a diplomatic rapprochement, Pio Nono rebuffed the king’s family in their request that he preside at Victor Emmanuel’s funeral in 1878. Two hundred thousand people thronged the streets for the procession as he was laid to rest in Rome’s Pantheon—another chance to make peace squandered. Splits were surfacing in America, too. When Pittsburgh’s bishop denied Italians a Mass for the king, they met in a Presbyterian church. In Chicago, four thousand Italians held a memorial parade with two hundred decorated carriages and a dozen marching bands, as the governor of Illinois and the mayor watched from a reviewing stand.
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What a paradox: Italian Americans in a parade of eulogy for the king of their unified homeland, many if not most of whom would attend Mass and say prayers for the pope, Pio Nono, a recalcitrant monarchist. Such people giving shape to U.S. cities wanted the social guarantees of a liberal democracy
and
the spiritual certitude of their faith. The loyal folk in the pews lived beyond the contradictions of a Vatican that was hostile to republican birth pangs in Italy. New World laity waited for the Old World hierarchy to find a faith in pluralism, even as they sent Peter’s Pence donations over to Rome.

A few months after the king’s death, Pio Nono died on February 7, 1878, at age eighty-six. Anticlerical protesters engulfed the funeral procession; a riot erupted at a bridge on the Tiber, and radicals almost dumped the pope’s coffin into the river. Litigation over Pio Nono’s personal estate by several family members ran nearly a decade in the Italian courts. Cardinals finally settled the claims.
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Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci, who was elected in the conclave after
Pio Nono’s death, showed greater intellect and vision. Taking the name Leo XIII, he served for twenty-five years, sequestered in the Vatican. A voracious reader who pored through newspapers and novels, Leo had “superb eyes, brilliant like black diamonds,” the novelist Émile Zola noted after a visit. Striving to bring the world and papacy into some accord, he sent nuncios to various countries and a small delegation to Washington.
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Yet he also defended the Christian Social Party in Austria, whose leader pushed an anti-Semitic agenda that some of the Austrian bishops opposed.
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A paradox deepened, as the United States recognized Liberal Italy as a nation, while priests, nuns, and editors of diocesan newspapers protested the Holy Father’s isolation. Leo XIII cast lines to Germany and France to regain Rome and the lost lands. But by the lights of modern Europe, Italy belonged to Italy. As waves of Italians settled in America, Leo refused to negotiate the Law of Guarantees. Italian authorities put away funds in anticipation of an agreement.

In 1891 Leo XIII released
Rerum Novarum
, one of the papacy’s most influential encyclicals. The pope aligned Catholic social teaching with workers’ rights during an era of burgeoning trade unions. Leo’s emphasis on the sanctity of private property put the church squarely against Marxism, signaling support for Italy’s Catholic-owned banks and credit associations. In America,
Rerum Novarum
positioned many priests and even bishops behind organized labor.