Money And The Rise Of The Modern Papacy

This the first scholarly study of the finances and financiers of the Vatican between 1850 and 1950. Dr Pollard, a leading historian of the papacy, explores the transformation of the Vatican into a major financial power and the part this played in the developement of the modern papacy. Using hitherto unexplored sources, he sheds new light on tensions between the Vatican's engagement with capitalism and the Church's social teaching and conflicts between the Vatican and the Allies during the Second World War and the early Cold War.

New York Times Bestseller: A “deeply researched” exposé of the money and the clerics-turned-financiers at the heart of the Vatican (Chicago Tribune). From a master chronicler of legal and financial misconduct, a magnificent investigation nine years in the making, God’s Bankers traces the political intrigue of the Catholic Church in “a meticulous work that cracks wide open the Vatican’s legendary, enabling secrecy” (Kirkus Reviews). Decidedly not about faith, belief in God, or religious doctrine, this book is about the church’s accumulation of wealth and its byzantine financial entanglements across the world. Telling the story through two hundred years of prelates, bishops, cardinals, and the popes who oversee it all, Gerald Posner uncovers an eyebrow-raising account of money and power in one of the world’s most influential organizations. God’s Bankers is a revelatory and astounding saga marked by poisoned business titans, murdered prosecutors, and mysterious deaths written off as suicides; a carnival of characters from popes and cardinals to financiers and mobsters to kings and prime ministers; and a set of moral and political circumstances that not only clarify the church’s aims and ambitions, but reflect the larger tensions of more recent history. Posner also assesses Pope Francis’s potential to overcome the resistance to change in the Vatican’s Machiavellian inner court and rein in the excesses of its seemingly uncontrollable financial quagmire. “As exciting as a mystery thriller” (Providence Journal), this book reveals with extraordinary precision how the Vatican has evolved from a foundation of faith to a corporation of extreme wealth and power. “Reads like a sprawling novel, full of complex characters and surprising twists. . . . Readers interested in issues involving religion and international finance will find Posner’s work a compelling read.” —Library Journal “An extraordinarily intricate tale of intrigue, corruption and organized criminality. . . . Posner’s gifts as a reporter and storyteller are most vividly displayed in a series of lurid chapters on the American archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the arch-Machiavellian who ran the Vatican Bank from 1971-1989.” —The New York Times Book Review

AN INVESTIGATION OF EPIC FINANCIAL INTRIGUE, RENDER UNTO ROME EXPOSES THE SECRECY AND DECEIT THAT RUN COUNTER TO THE VALUES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. The Sunday collection in every Catholic church throughout the world is as familiar a part of the Mass as the homily and even Communion. There is no doubt that historically the Catholic Church has been one of the great engines of charity in history. But once a dollar is dropped in that basket, where does it go? How are weekly cash contributions that can amount to tens of thousands of dollars accounted for? Where does the money go when a diocese sells a church property for tens of millions of dollars? And what happens when hundreds of millions of dollars are turned over to officials at the highest ranks, no questions asked, for their discretionary use? The Roman Catholic Church is the largest organization in the world. The Vatican has never revealed its net worth, but the value of its works of art, great churches, property in Rome, and stocks held through its bank easily run into the tens of billions. Yet the Holy See as a sovereign state covers a mere 108 acres and has a small annual budget of about $280 million. No major book has examined the church’s financial underpinnings and practices with such journalistic force. Today the church bears scrutiny by virtue of the vast amounts of money (nearly $2 billion in the United States alone) paid out to victims of clergy abuse. Amid mounting diocesan bankruptcies, bishops have been selling off whole pieces of the infrastructure—churches, schools, commercial properties—while the nephew of one of the Vatican’s most powerful cardinals engaged in a lucrative scheme to profiteer off the enormous downsizing of American church wealth.

In March 2013, millions of people sat glued to news channels and live Internet feeds, waiting to see white smoke rise from the Sistine Chapel, signaling the election of the new pope. For two millennia, the papacy, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has played a fundamentally important role in European history and world affairs. Transcending the religious realm, it has influenced ideological, philosophical, social, and political developments, as well as international relations. Considering the broad role of the papacy from the end of the eighteenth century to the present, this original history explores the reactions and responses it has evoked and its confrontation with and accommodation of the modern world. Frank J. Coppa describes the triumphs, controversies, and failures of the popes over the past two hundred years—including Pius IX, who was criticized for his campaign against Italian unification and his proclamation of papal infallibility; Pius XII, denounced for his silence during the Holocaust and impartiality during World War II; and John XXIII, who was praised for his call to update the Church and for convoking the Second Vatican Council. Examining a wide variety of sources, some only recently made available by the Vatican archives, The Papacy in the Modern World sheds new light on this institution and offers valuable insights into events previously shrouded in mystery.

The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958 examines the most momentous years in papal history. Popes Benedict XV (1914-1922), Pius XI (1922-1939), and Pius XII (1939-1958) faced the challenges of two world wars and the Cold War, and threats posed by totalitarian dictatorships like Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Communism in Russia and China. The wars imposed enormous strains upon the unity of Catholics and the hostility of the totalitarian regimes to Catholicism lead to the Church facing persecution and martyrdom on a scale similar to that experienced under the Roman Empire and following the French Revolution. At the same time, these were years of growth, development, and success for the papacy. Benedict healed the wounds left by the 'modernist' witch hunt of his predecessor and re-established the papacy as an influence in international affairs through his peace diplomacy during the First World War. Pius XI resolved the 'Roman Question' with Italy and put papal finances on a sounder footing. He also helped reconcile the Catholic Church and science by establishing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and took the first steps to move the Church away from entrenched anti-Semitism. Pius XI continued his predecessor's policy of the 'indigenisation' of the missionary churches in preparation for de-colonisation. Pius XII fully embraced the media and other means of publicity, and with his infallible promulgation of the Assumption in 1950, he took papal absolutism and centralism to such heights that he has been called the 'last real pope'. Ironically, he also prepared the way for the Second Vatican Council.

Using inside sources and extensive field reporting about the secretive, high-stakes world of international diplomacy, Vatican reporter Victor Gaetan takes readers to the Holy See to explicate Pope Francis's diplomacy, show why it works, and to offer readers a startling contrast to the dangerous inadequacies of recent U.S. international decisions.

John Pollard's book surveys the relationship between Catholicism and the process of change in Italy from Unification to the present day. Central to the book is the complex set of relationships between traditional religion and the forces of change. In a broad sweep, Catholicism in Modern Italy looks at the cultural, social, political and economic aspects of the Catholic church and its relationship to the different experiences across Italy over this dramatic period of change and 'modernisation'.

When the British thought of themselves as a Protestant nation their natural enemy was the pope and they adapted their view of history accordingly. In contrast, Rome's perspective was always considerably wider and its view of Britain was almost invariably positive, especially in comparison to medieval emperors, who made and unmade popes, and post-medieval Frenchmen, who treated popes with contempt. As the twenty-first-century papacy looks ever more firmly beyond Europe, this new history examines political, diplomatic and cultural relations between the popes and Britain from their vague origins, through papal overlordship of England, the Reformation and the process of repairing that breach.