The Vatican Empire
Some Preliminary Words I
Contents
IN 1956, SHORTLY after moving to Rome with my wife and children to take up my duties as a business news correspondent, I was faced with a household crisis—we were without water in our apartment for twenty-eight days. Calls to Acqua Marcia, the company that supplied the water in our Piazza Bologna neighborhood, were all but futile. A few times a weary technician from Acqua Marcia came around to putter with the water governor on our balcony just off the kitchen. Each time, he left us with a tiny trickle, which stopped within hours after his departure.
As with many houses in Rome served by the Acqua Marcia water works (or to give it its full name, La Societa dell’Acqua Pia Antica Marcia), the problem was in the main trunk ducts below the ground. They were too narrow. Installed nearly two thousand years earlier, the pipes once formed part of ancient Rome’s aqueduct system, and were still being used to provide much of modern Rome with its water. Like other apartment buildings, ours had a series of covered receptacles on the roof, each of which corresponded to one of the apartments on the floors below. The tank for our apartment held sixty gallons of water, and it filled during the night at a speed that was determined by the water governor, which was kept under lock by Acqua Marcia. By dawn, with no one having used the faucets, the tank would usually be replenished, and for that day we would have water—provided we didn’t use all sixty gallons too soon. This meant not flushing the toilet after every visit. It also meant not taking a bath in more than two inches of water.
I didn’t know during those first arduous weeks that the Acqua Marcia company belonged to the Vatican.
Compounding our woes during this period was the fact that my wife’s cooking activities were severely restricted. The flow of gas in our stove was so limited that only two burners functioned at the same time, and for a reasonably steady flame she had to resort to one burner. Grumbles to the gas company were of little use. We had a poor flow of gas because the pressure was low.
I didn’t know then that our gas company also belonged to the Vatican.
In lodging my various complaints and pleas for help, I had to use the phone a great deal. Unhappily, my telephone suffered from a variety of speech defects. More often than not, it was impossible to understand the crackly sounds that came out of the faulty earpiece. And frequently the undulating voice at the other end of the line simply disappeared in the middle of a sentence. Nor does this take into account the many times I would suddenly be cut off by a mechanical click or an electronic tic.
I didn’t know then that our telephone company was also largely controlled by the Vatican. Later I was to discover that the building in which I lived belonged to a front company operating for the Vatican and that the same company owned the entire block of houses on both sides of the street.
Like millions of other Roman Catholics, I had never given any thought to the Vatican and its commercial affairs. But perhaps I should have realized earlier that the Church was indeed a financial institution. I can remember now, quite vividly, the eighteen months my Uncle Angelo, an ordained priest, spent as a special visitor to the United States, serving as an adjunct assistant pastor with a church in Brooklyn. After officiating at masses on Sundays he would return to our house, where he was staying, and place his week’s pay—a sackful of coins—under his bed for safekeeping. By the time he was ready to return to Italy, the floor under the bed was completely covered with bulging sacks. What he did with the money I don’t know, but I do recall that my brother and I used to play with the coins, making believe the dimes, nickels, and pennies were pieces of gold. I should have realized then the importance of money to the clergy, but at that time I was too young— and by the time I was old enough, I had forgotten about Zio Padre’s money bags.
So, until the aforementioned incidents in Rome, I had never given thought to the Vatican as a landlord, to the Vatican as a moneyed institution, to the Vatican as a nerve center for finance, to the Vatican as an organization concerned with profits and losses, assets and liabilities, receipts and expenses. The idea that the Vatican was the headquarters for big business just never occurred to me. Nor had I ever entertained the notion that the Pope might be wealthy or the notion that his church, my church, was not only a religious, charitable, and educational institution but also a tremendous financial empire.
The Vatican is not only in the business of selling God. Its total enterprise goes beyond God.
Secrecy surrounds the financial phases of the Vatican’s operation. The only sovereign state that never publishes a budget, the Vatican is the one organized church that keeps its money affairs strictly to itself. And so ramified and complicated are those affairs that it is doubtful whether any single person, including the Pope, has a complete picture of them.
Although I had never previously questioned the Church’s finances, I began, soon after the Piazza Bologna ordeals, to wonder, How rich is the Pope? Or, put another way, How much money does the Roman Catholic Church, the oldest and largest corporation in the world, possess? To be frank, I do not have an answer to this question. Nor can I state with precision how much the Vatican earns each year. Neither will I make a calculated guess as to how wealthy the pontifical empire is. On the question, How rich is the Pope?, suffice it to say that it has become increasingly clear he doesn’t even know himself.
At best, this report on Vatican finances, which I have arduously pieced together during the past ten years, will reveal this venerable organization as one of the greatest fiscal powers in the world.
On the face of it, the Vatican today is vastly different from what it was a century ago. Yet it still keeps its financial operations carefully hidden behind a veil of obscurity. The fact that the Vatican has been able to maintain this secrecy in an age when business and economics are of prime interest is indeed remarkable. But at last, tiny tears in the veil are beginning to appear, and the two-thousandyear- old structure, hitherto known solely for its sacerdotal functions, is being exposed as a locus of financial power.
As employed here, the term “Vatican wealth” should not be confused with the so-called Church patrimony, which consists of churches, ancient buildings, and art treasures. The Church’s art treasures, many of which are in the Vatican Museum, include literally thousands of masterpieces—paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and maps — to which no dollar amount can be assigned. Priceless indeed are such works of art as Michelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s, the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, and the paintings by Raphael in the Apostolic Palace. One could also mention the Church’s invaluable collections of antiquities —gold and silver crosses, Byzantine jewelry, altar pieces, furniture, chalices and other vessels. The five hundred thousand aged volumes and sixty thousand old manuscripts in the Vatican Library are also part of the Church patrimony. Because none of the treasures will ever be put on the market, it is folly even to hazard a guess as to the cumulative worth of these items. But, conceivably, they could bring a billion dollars under an auctioneer’s gavel.
In terms of the frame of reference used here, “Vatican wealth” is the money that the world headquarters of the Catholic Church is in business to make—the profits that the Vatican has assembled all its heavy artillery to pursue and protect. It is not the task of this book to expose the Church as an economic dinosaur or a hand-rubbing collection of moneylenders. Still less is the book intended to be an attack on either the papacy or the Church itself in the traditional and predictable manner of the anti-clericalists. Rather, my purpose here is to explore the Vatican’s relationship with the sign of the dollar, a symbol as powerful in today’s world as that of the Cross. Mind you, this is not intended as criticism of the Vatican, for the Vatican has every right to engage in activities from which revenue can accrue.
I shall never forget the first time I stood in a Vatican City bank and watched the tellers at work, dealing with nuns, Jesuits, missionaries, and bishops. During a quiet moment I said to one of the tellers, “I guess some of your clients, being of the religious calling, don’t know very much about money.”
The young man had the correct answer for this display of naivete. “Sir,” he said with adding-machine accuracy, “it is my experience that everybody knows a lot about money.”
Laymen like myself have a tendency not to equate their religion, or the dedicated people who administer it, with practical, down-to-earth matters like money or economics. Yet the popes of the last hundred years have never been able to divorce themselves from these matters. Perhaps the most prophetic words ever written by a pope, as far as the Vatican’s present-day position of economic strength is concerned, are those of Pius XI in a now-famous encyclical, Non Abbiamo Bisogno (We Don’t Have Need). Published in France, the encyclical had to be smuggled out of the Vatican because it denounced the Fascist regime. It reads:
Immense power and despotic economic domination are concentrated in the hands of a few, who for the most part arenot the owners, but only the trustees and directors of invested funds, which they administer at their own good pleasure. This domination is most powerfully exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, also govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the life blood to the entire economic body and grasping intheir hands, as it were, the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will. This accumulation of power is the characteristic note of the modern economic order. Pius XI was speaking of another world, in another period, yet his words have meaning when applied to the Vatican empire as it exists today. Thanks to his successors (Pius XII, John XXIII, and Paul VI) and their financial guardians, who subscribe to the theory that what’s good for General Motors is also good for the Vatican, the Church is now big business.
In writing this book, I have left the well-trodden paths of theology and entered the hallways of modern economics, Vatican style. To the Vatican men who normally walk these halls, a story on the price of tin in Malaya has as much significance as the story of the moneychangers being chased out of the Temple. In gathering material for the book, it was necessary to infiltrate, like a spy, into the Vatican’s deepest recesses. Contacting people within the Vatican is an experience like no other, and I can only hope that some of the excitement will rub off on the reader.
When it comes to acknowledgments for help received, I am a hopeless bankrupt, for I cannot enumerate the names of the Vatican citizens who helped me. The seal of silence will keep their identities sine nomine perpetuus. I feel, however, I must mention my debt to Bela von Block, Paul Gitlin, Gene Winick, Cynthia White, Joseph Wechsberg, Walter Lucas, Barrett McGurn, Bob Neville, Irving R. Levine, Bill Pepper, Corrado Pallenberg, Walter Matthew Schmidt, Ernesto Rossi, Stellina Orssola, Lidia Bianchi, Milo Farneti, William McIlroy, Avro Manhattan, and Father John Smith (not his real name), who read portions or all of the manuscript or who other wise provided assistance. I must also express my deep gratitude to my wife, Lefty. With her able and conscientious examination of the manuscripts, she has added much to improve the book and has provided more specific services than can be enumerated here. The shortcomings of the following attempt and the judgments as to matters of fact set forth remain, of course, the responsibility of the writer.
