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The umpteenth misadventures, let’s call them euphemistically, of the Vatican finances indirectly shed light on an important fact: the disappearance of a certain catholic Italy of aristocratic and bourgeois mold whose powers the Church used in various ways until not too distant times, and which served the Church and the destiny of Catholicism to teach a strong ethical commitment and a substantial lack of personal interest. That Catholic Italy had its strongholds especially in Lombardy-Veneto and in the Papal States (in the ancient and less ancient families of the Gallarati Scotti, the Casati, the Valmarana, the Falck, as well as in not a few bourgeois circles of the professions and culture), and although the faith traditionally linked that Italy with the Holy See, after the Unification – a liberal Catholic orientation prevailing in its ranks – it did not cease to provide important services to the new State. The Christian Democracy of Alcide De Gasperi, for example, made extensive use of not a few of its members for a number of important positions and generally with excellent results. One makes one think of all this when one learns from the newspapers how the conspicuous funds of the Holy See used to be administered by prelates of all ranks.
All evidently very fast in financial matters (and some certainly honest, as I insist on believing Cardinal Becciu) that for years, as if nothing had happened, have been used to entrust millions and millions to companies based in the most suspicious places, to the most unlikely characters, to middle-class bankers, to intermediaries with a more than dubious profile, to types introduced by other guys, and so on. To a group of figures, in short, that anyone, as soon as they were warned, would have put the door in place instantly, taking care not to give them a penny. Imagine, instead, that the Vatican seems to have been tasked each time with manipulating mind-boggling figures: obviously regularly doing what any reasonable person would have expected, and that some of those figures remained illegally in their pockets. That in some of the protagonists in cassocks there was at the origin a fraudulent intention (to trust the cheaters to cheat and steal in turn) more than possible. But ingenuity, ignorance, and I would almost say that gullibility in choosing the people to turn to seem to have been so widespread and constant over time as to touch on the improbable.
In contrast to this mass of scammers of various kinds who roam the sacred palaces How can we forget, just to name the figure of a man like Bernardino Nogara? Very few, I think, know who he was, but this is perhaps his greatest title of glory. Bernardino Nogara, from a Como family of twelve children, with deep-rooted Catholic traditions, after a successful career in the world of industry and finance during which he was also able to collaborate with Giolitti on important foreign policy issues, was the one who in 1929 Pius XI entrusted the task with full powers of reorganizing the finances of the Vatican. That in addition to understanding the San Pedro Pennies precisely in that 1929 they were enriched by the astronomical figure conferred on them by the Italian State after the Lateran Pacts. Well, Nogara put order, avoided dangers, invested himself with prudence and foresight, administered with the utmost honesty, and at the end of twenty-five years of service he left the Holy See in conditions of incomparable prosperity.
Nogara is just one example that the events of these days remember. An example of that aristocratic and bourgeois style Catholic Italy that I mentioned at the beginning, which at the parish level as well as at the diocese level and finally in the Vatican for a long time supported the Church in many ways, and in which the Church knew it could count instead of the shadowy strangers you’ve grown used to turning to for far too long. An Italy that today seems to have disappeared or really is. Partly because she probably no longer feels (or does not feel) Catholic or because her children have experienced the secularization process that the entire country has experienced. But partly because both in the center and in the periphery the Church has decided to do without it. By implementing a choice behind which it is easy to see the effect of two concomitant processes.
The first was the attitude that spread in the Church after the Council. An attitude, however, oriented to the renewal as such, starting from the old patterns, to the repudiation of all the old habits. Above all, aimed at removing any suspicion of closeness to power, proximity to the ruling classes instead of the minors. Sooner or later, everything that smelled of tradition and seemed democratically ambiguous was thus put aside. It is no wonder that in this atmosphere, utilizing the services of a former nobleman or the skills of a wealthy professional known for his pre-conciliar faith and eminent social position ended up looking more inconvenient and inappropriate. And in fact since then any relationship between the Church and social figures of this type has substantially disappeared.
The second process was the internationalization of the papacy and the Curia together, It happened in the last half century after the election of Wojtyla: produced and accompanied by the diffusion in the world Catholic public opinion and increasingly in the same papal milieu by a tacit but strong anti-Italian prejudice.
The combined effect of everything that has occurred since the 70s the progressive internationalization also of the management of Vatican finances, whose symbol can be considered the role of more than twenty years that a man like the Lithuanian-American bishop Paul Marcinkus has played. An address, as we know, from the beginning marked by more than suspicious links with world financial circles of very low reputation when they are not engaged in real criminal activities. Except for brief periods of thirty years, everything has passed this way, with the punctual kit of criminals, scandals and robberies. The lack of real powers of an extra-religious nature, and at the same time the impossibility of having the powers of a now non-existent or distant Catholic civil society, condemn not only the financial management of the Holy See but more generally all its relations with the Holy See. Century of living dangerously, always on the verge of fraud or illegality or, in the best of cases, of the most heartbreaking clumsiness.
October 17, 2020 (change October 17, 2020 | 23:03)
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