It's a troubling indicator of how I am starting to take it for granted that the Vatican - through any of its media channels - is not likely to come (promptly) to the defense of truth when facts about the Church, the Vatican, and the Pope are openly and wildly misrepresented in the MSM. I didn't even note that the Vatican newspaper had failed at all to respond to the UK Guardian's malicious 'reporting' about Vatican investments in London - tracing them to mythical 'Mussolini's millions'.
I did report Fr. Lombardi's reaction, which fell far short of what I expected the Vatican spokesman to do, since he did not even bother to correct the idea of 'Mussolini's millions' invested by the Vatican, which was the whole point of the Guardian's misbegotten story - that the Vatican got rich by investing personal funds paid by the Fascist dictator to 'buy' Vatican recognition of his regime. A blatant falsehood to anyone who has any knowledge at all of the Lateran Agreements of 1929 (about which I had to learn on the 80th anniversary of the Agreements in 2009).
So, in tomorrow's issue, the OR finally speaks up on the matter - with a commentary by editor Giovanni Maria Vian and an article on material recently unearthed from the British Archives about how Pius XII invested millions during World War II to promote the Allied cause against the Nazis. It would be charitable to say that perhaps Vian wanted to wait until he had a legitimate news item by way of countering the Guardian canard, instead of merely speaking out right away to protest that newspaper's inveterate lie-mongering about the Church... Here first is Mr. Vian's commentary.
Hiatory should not be mistreated
by Giovanni Maria Vian
Translated from the 1/30/13 issue of
The Vatican, finances and fascism, all of it wrapped in secrecy and intrigue - these were the lip-smacking ingredients of a supposed 'scoop' by The Guardian, the
authoritative [???? Really?] London daily, which published a story that has been taken up by some media outlets but which really deserved little attention.
It is a melange of inexact or unfounded reports put together awkwardly to give the impression that the Vatican built an international real estate empire from "Mussolini's millions", a fortune that was supposed to have been obtained in return for recognition of Mussolini's regime by the Holy See in 1929, and which has since then been hidden under layers of secrecy.
To round up the picture of Vatican duplicity depicted by the above, the article cites unspecified articles supposedly from British war archives attesting to Vatican activities against the Allies by a company controlled by the Vatican.
Even the most summary reading of the article would show its inconsistencies, but unfortunately, its resonance has damaged not only the perceptions of many readers but the most elementary historical truth.
It would have taken the writers (and editors) no effort to check out that the Lateran Pacts which in 1929 closed the so-called "Roman question' between post-unification Italy and the Papacy since 1870, included a financial agreement, according to which the Kingdom of Italy indemnified the Holy See with cash and property titles equivalent to 1.2 billion euro today. A sum which, according to the financial agreement itself, was 'much less' than what the State owed the Holy See
[for all the Church properties confiscated in the former papal states which were absorbed by the unification of Italy in 1860-1870] as established by an Italian law passed in 1871, but which the Popes had rejected consistently.
The Lateran Pacts were far from a 'shameful' agreement between the Church and fascism, but a necessary and balanced solution [to the Roman question].
[What Vian fails to point out, because he assumes that OR readers should know their history, is that 1) the agreement was between the Apostolic See and the State of Italy, then a Kingdom under Vittorio Emmanuele, not with 'fascism' which was the political movement led by Benito Mussolini, who happened to be the King's Prime Minister in 1929; and 2) the Lateran agreements created Vatican City State as a sovereign state.]
The content of the Lateran Pacts was largely incorporated into the Constitution of the Italian Republic in 1947. The Pacts themselves have been favorably judged by historians of various tendencies and overchanging times, as well as by all Italian governments since 1929, including postwar leaders Alcide De Gaspari
[the exemplary Christian Democrat] and Palmiro Togliatti
[head of the Italian Communist Party].
[For the sake of completeness, Vian should have added the 1984 updating of the Lateran Pacts which, other than rescinding the provision that Catholicism is the state religion of Italy, also institutionalized the 'otto per mille' or 0.008% annual share of Italian tax revenues that devolve to the Church in Italy through the Italian bishops' conference, in continuing compensation for the Church's confiscated properties. This is a detail that is hardly ever pointed out in Anglophone reporting about the Vatican.]
Finally, as to the alleged activities of the Holy See against the Allies in World War II, it is timely that in the December 2012 issue of the trimestral
Historical Journal from Cambridge University, historian Patricia McGoldrick of London's Middlesex University has published a lengthy and detailed study of the Vatican's financial activities during World War II, about which Luca Possati writes on this page.
Based on a series of documents recently made accessible by the British National Archives, the article confirms what has been emerging in earlier historical research, and demonstrates the exact opposite of what the
Guardian article claims with such superficial lightness. And that is, that through wartime investments made mostly in the United States, the Holy See under Pius XII directly supported the Allied cause against Nazism.
Apropos, this is a post on this thread on the occasion of the anniversary of the Lateran Pacts in 2011:
At the Vatican, February 11 is not just a religious feast day. For the state of Vatican City, it is also its birthday as a sovereign state...
The Lateran Pacts:
a bird's eye view
11 FEB 2011 (RV) - On February 11th 1929, the Lateran pacts were signed by Cardinal Gasparri for the Holy See and by Benito Mussolini for the Italian State (at the time, the Kingdom of Italy). It was a major milestone in the Papacy of Pope Pius XI.
The Pacts take their name from the Lateran Apostolic Palace attached to to the Lateran Basilica (the Cathedral of the Bishop of Rome), the venue for negotiation and final signing of the pacts .
In an interview with Vatican Radio, a Professor of History at the University of Virginia in the United States, Jesuit Father Gerald Fogarty focuses on these pacts and specifies the difference between the Treaty and the Concordat signed eighty two years ago:
"...The Lateran Treaty guaranteed the creation of Vatican City State, and therefore, the spiritual and political sovereignty of the Holy See. The Concordat regulated relationships between the Church and the Italian government within Italy...and then finally there was an agreement, a third pact that was signed in regard to financial remuneration and so forth ... so this definitively ended the Roman Question."
[The Roman question refers to the dispute between the Papacy and the new unified Italy, a dispute that lasted from 1861 to 1929. Italian reunification had abolished the papal states found all over Italy, but Pius IX had opposed the establishment of the Italian monarchy. For almost 10 years, the Pope 'held' Rome, protected by the troops of Napoleoo III, In 1870, the very year of the First Vatican Council, Napoleon was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War. Without his protection, Italian troops took Rome and made it the capital of Italy. Pius IX never recognized the legitimacy of the Italian government, and neither did his successors, until Pius XI began the negotiations that led to the Lateran pacts, through which the Holy See and its protector state, the Vatican, also formally recognized the sovereignty of Italy over the former papal states.]
Father Fogarty highlights the importance of these pacts for the Universal Church : "...The little plot of land was to guard the spiritual sovereignty of the Pope and his communication with the Church throughout the world... In order to guarantee the spiritual autonomy, authority, freedom of communication of the Pope, there had to be some type of sovereign state to safeguard all that, and so Vatican City State was created..."
Finally our historian explains how by becoming an independent state, Vatican City acquired the right to communicate with other states. That's why the day after the signing of the pacts Pius XI entrusted Guglielmo Marconi - the Italian physicist who won the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics for developing radio communications and wireless telegraphy - with the task of setting up the Vatican's radio station, inaugurated two years later.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/01/2013 00:12]