The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia (3 page)

Nearly everything within the Lateran Palace was in a state of disrepair. The upper floors were damaged by leaks and covered with mounds of guano from thousands of pigeons that roosted in the
attic. Electrical fires, caused by faulty wiring, regularly erupted in
the basement, kitchen, reception areas, the dining halls, and even
the papal chambers.

The Holy Father could hear rats scurrying through the walls.
Rats had even infested other buildings in the Vatican complex,
including St. Peter's Cathedral.' The pests had even managed to
gnaw on the remains of the popes who had been entombed in glass
within the side altars.

Because of the rats, it was no longer safe to keep the consecrated
Host in the altar for the Forty Hours' devotion. The sanctified body
of Christ being chewed by vermin was a nightmare too horrible to
imagine. The Host, elevated and blessed by the ringing of bells and
the sprinkling of incense, became the actual body and blood of the
crucified Savior when a priest spoke the words of consecration: Hoc
est corpus, words that Protestants mockingly transmuted into hocuspocus. It was too holy to be touched-let alone chewed-by the
common laity. Every part represented the whole. Every crumb was a
communion. And the thought that some crumbs might not have
been swept from the altar cloth by an inattentive priest made the
pope shriek with alarm: "Ratti!"

The door to the papal chambers opened and a guard appeared:
"Your Holiness. Are you well?" The pope dismissed the attendant with
a wave of his hand. In accordance with the standards of papal exaltation
set by Leo XIII (pope from 1878-1903), he was forbidden to speak a
word to menial servants, including members of the Swiss Guard.

Rats in the Lateran Palace and the Basilica of St. Peter! Yet there
were no funds available for an exterminator. There was not even
enough money to protect the priceless paintings and tapestries from
mold and mildew. There was not enough money for repairs-not
even enough to purge the clogged sewer system. There was not
enough money for a new heating system so that Vatican business
could be conducted in a modicum of comfort. There was not enough
money for cleaning supplies, let alone maintenance personnel and
chambermaids. There was not enough money to repair broken fixtures and furniture or to replace the moth-eaten draperies.

"Ratti." It was the Latin word for rats and also the pope's family
name. He had been born Achille Ratti in Milan, the son of a silk factory manager. After his ordination, Ratti served in the Vatican library
as a paleographer and an archivist. In 1919 Pope Benedict XV sent
him to Poland, where he distinguished himself as a diplomat. Ratti
was appointed archbishop of Milan in 1921 and, several months later,
elevated as a cardinal. One year later he ascended to the papal throne
and assumed the name Pius XI.

Pope Pius XI was short and thickset with a high forehead and
penetrating eyes. He possessed a quick and probing intellect and a
love for scholastic disputation.2 A prelate mentioned that preparing
for a meeting with the Holy Father was like preparing for an examination.' The pope's cross-questioning was fierce and relentless, and
his wrath was unleashed on any cleric who could not provide suitable
answers. Many prelates hated and feared him.

At the age of seventy-one, Pius XI was still physically imposing. In
his youth he was a mountain climber. He once stood on the summit
of Mount Rosa and had spent a night on a narrow ledge during an
Alpine storm. Broad-shouldered with a ruddy complexion, he seemed
out of place among the ascetic bureaucrats in the Vatican. He had
been an unpopular choice and only ascended to the holy office
because the cardinals had been divided between the ultraconservative
Cardinal Merry del Val and the liberal and congenial Cardinal Gasparri, who served as the Vatican's secretary of state. He was a compromise candidate, and it took fifteen ballots to secure his election.4

As a pope he proved to be intransigent, stern, and demanding,
accepting as his motto, "Christ's peace in Christ's kingdom." The
motto reflected his belief that the Church should be active in the
world, not isolated from it. The call to activism, Pius XI believed, was
necessitated by the threat of atheistic Communism and its appeal to
the oppressed populace of Christian countries. He would later address
this threat in his encyclical Divini Redemptoris (1937). Indeed, Pius
XI's virulent hatred of Communism would provide Catholic scholars
with a means to justify his concordats with two of the most notorious
Fascist leaders of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and his full support to a third, Spain's Francisco Franco.

From the start of his reign, Pius XI displayed a strong commitment to missions and required every religious order to engage in missionary work. He consecrated the first native Chinese bishops in
1926 and a native Japanese bishop in 1927-almost as an effrontery
to the Catholic Caucasian hierarchy. During his pontificate the total
number of native priests in mission lands increased from three thousand to over seven thousand.5

Unlike his predecessors, Pius XI made efforts toward ecumenism.
He called for a union with the Eastern Orthodox and did everything
he could to support Eastern-rite (Uniate) churches in union with
Rome. But Pius XI did not extend his efforts at reconciliation to
Protestants. In his encyclical Mortalium animos (1930), the pope forbade any Catholic involvement in ecumenical conferences, synods,
and services with Protestants of any denomination. Also unlike his
predecessors, he was committed to the advancement of science and
scholarship. He modernized the Vatican Library, founded the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology, and established the Vatican
Observatory at Castel Gandolfo.

Pius XI performed all this on a miserly annual budget of $1 million.6 There was so much more that needed to be accomplished. But
the coffers were empty. And the banks were demanding payment on
the delinquent loans.

Ratti realized that he must deal with the rats in more ways than
one. In his chambers before celebrating the Holy Feast of Christ's
Circumcision, the pope knew the agreement with the Fascists-with
Mussolini and his Blackshirts-had to be consummated as soon as
possible. He was ready at long last to do what must be done. He was
ready to restore the Roman Catholic Church to a position of wealth
and power. He was ready to sign the deal with the devil.

For twelve hundred years-from Constantine's issuance of the
Edict of Milan in 312 to Luther's issuance of the ninety-five Theses
for Disputation in 1517-the popes were the most powerful potentates on earth. Kings and emperors knelt at their feet to receive the
papal blessing and the kiss of peace. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran
Council proclaimed that the bishop of Rome possessed absolute
authority not only over spiritual matters but also temporal issues. "The Lord left to Peter," Pope Innocent III said, "the government
not only of all the Church but of all the world."7

For centuries it was assumed that popes had the right to dethrone
any king, to annul any secular decree, or to cast aside any constitution.

The Roman Church was established as an absolute monarchy
with all lines of authority leading to and from the popes. The power
of parish priests to bind and loose sins came from the authority of the
bishops who ruled their diocese. The bishops, in turn, derived their
authority solely from the supreme pontiffs, who ruled as the vicarious
representatives of Jesus Christ.' Throughout the massive edifice
known as Christendom, all clerics-priests, monks, friars, abbots,
bishops, archbishops, and cardinals-were united in one great spiritual army under the supreme pontiffs in Rome.

The popes were also temporal sovereigns. They ruled over the
Papal States, the sixteen thousand square miles that comprise much
of modern Italy. The area was divided into eighteen patrimonies, or
estates, such as the patrimony of Tuscany, the patrimony of Perugia,
the patrimony of the March of Ancona, the patrimony of Romagna,
the patrimony of Bologna, and the patrimony of Rome.

In addition to these jurisdictions that were governed directly by
the popes, the Holy Fathers throughout the medieval epoch possessed feudal power over most of Portugal, the Navarre and Aragon
provinces of Spain, England, Ireland, Corsica, Sardinia, and the
Kingdom of Sicily, all of which provided yearly financial tribute as
vassal states to the See of St. Peter.' The popes presided over a massive array of bureaucrats who governed papal towns and villages, sold
papal services, and collected taxes.

Millions poured into the papal treasury from every nook and
cranny of Christendom. The successors of St. Peter became richer
than any sultan or suzerain. They lived in palaces with thousands of
servants and attendants to cater to their every whim. They dressed
in ornate gowns, sumptuous robes, and ermine stoles. They wore
tiaras (papal diadems surmounted by orbs and crowns of sovereignty, surrounded by three crowns) that outweighed many kingdoms and fiefdoms in worth. At their command, large armies were
amassed to suppress rebellion; fleets were dispatched to conduct trade; and inquisitions, crusades, and pogroms were conducted to
purify Christendom of all heretics, all upstarts, and all those who
would question the supreme authority of the supreme pontiff.

After the Reformation, the wealth and power of the Roman
Church (now no longer catholic since the word means "universal")
began to erode. The revenue from taxes, tributes, legacies, and gifts
from much of northern Europe was lost. Because of the prohibition
on usury (making money from interest), the Church refused to invest
in foreign colonized markets or to engage in international commerce.

Moreover, as a feudal institution, the Church remained averse to
new technology. In the wake of the industrial revolution, it failed to
take advantage of such innovations as the steam engine, the flying
shuttle, and the water frame that revolutionized means of production. For this reason the Papal States fell into a state of stagnation,
and the papal coffers became depleted of funds.

At the beginning of Pope Clement XI's reign in 1700, the papal
debt stood at 15 million scudi (a scudo being comparative in value to
a dollar). By 1730 the debt increased to 60 million scudi. Thirty years
later the debt hovered around 100 million scudi.

Greater hardships for the papacy lay ahead. On November 2, 1789,
with the advent of the French Revolution, all Church property in France
was declared "at the disposal of the Nation." The National Assembly in
Paris forbade French bishops to send funds to the pope in Rome. The
situation worsened for the Vatican in France with the arrival of Napoleon
in 1796. The emperor demanded the payment of an annual tribute of 21
million scudi from the Papal States? When the pope failed to come up
with the funds, Napoleon sent his troops to Rome to strip the palaces,
churches, cathedrals, and convents of gold, silver, and precious stones,
and to remove art works-paintings, sculptures, tapestries, manuscripts,
and ceramic treasures-as well as to transport all articles of value from
Rome to Paris. The Bride of Christ was left ravished and bare.

After the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, the Congress of
Vienna (1815) restored some of the priceless treasures and offered
Rome inadequate indemnities. Although the eighteen provinces of
the Papal States remained intact, the days of the temporal glory of
Roman Catholicism were quickly coming to an end.

The last Pope-King (il Papa Re) was Pius IX (Giovanni Maria
Mastai-Ferrati), who reigned from 1846 to 1878. Like his predecessors, the new pope, popularly known as "Pio Nono" (his papal name
in Italian), asserted that the territorial holdings of the Holy See were
indispensable to its spiritual independence. "If the Supreme Pontiff
were merely an inhabitant of a `foreign' country," Pio Nono argued,
"how could he be free of local influence?""

The quick-tempered and epileptic Pio Nono objected to all
attempts to create a unified Italy and to grant the inhabitants of the
Papal States the right to suffrage. This position prompted his refusal
to support the nationalists in the war to expel Austria from Italian
lands. The nationalists responded by open rebellion against papal rule.
On November 15, 1849, an angry mob killed Count Perigrino Rossi,
a lay government minister of the Papal States. The next day, republican revolutionaries stormed and sacked the pope's Quirinale summer
palace, and Pio Nono was forced to flee from Rome in disguise.12

Pio Nono, in exile at Gaeta, appealed to Catholic powers for help.
French troops restored papal rule to Rome on July 15, and the pope
returned to the city and his throne on April 12, 1850. But, despite
bulls, blasts, and threats of excommunication, Pio Nono could not
maintain control of his temporal holdings. One by one, the Papal
States broke away and declared their independence. By 1860 all of
the Papal States, except the patrimony of St. Peter, had been lost.

The pope responded to this development by issuing the Syllabus
of Errors in which he condemned modern civilization, freemasonry,
rationalism, liberalism, and the concept of progress. Error number 77
was spelled out as follows: "It is an error to affirm the following: `It
is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be treated as
the only religion of the state, all other worships whatsoever being
excluded."' Error number 80 was defined in this manner: "It is an
error to affirm the following: `The Roman Pontiff can and ought to
reconcile himself with modern civilization."' 13

To maintain his position as the supreme ruler of all earthly things,
despite the loss of his holdings, Pio Nono convened the First Vatican
Council to affirm his spiritual authority over all creation. In its dogmatic constitution, called Pastor Aeternus ("Eternal Pastor"), the council declared that the pope has "full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, not only in matters that pertain to
faith and morals, but also in matters that pertain to the discipline and
government of the Church throughout the whole world." This
power, the council proclaimed, is "ordinary" (that is, not delegated)
and "immediate" (that is, not exercised through some other party
rather than "from this day forward").14 The council went on to
declare the dogma of papal infallibility: