Covering the Vatican

...Why should not the Vatican do likewise...

...Hovering in the shadows of the Vatican are a number of men of high finance, including representatives of such firms as J. P. Morgan and Co...

...Outside photographers are rarely permitted at Papal audiences...

...This article is abridged from Encounter...

...The story is told-and widely believed-that on the historic afternoon of September 8, 1943, a broad and satisfied smile came over the collective face of the Vatican...

...he almost never is called upon to use his typewriter...

...There are several ways of getting inside St...

...Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, when being interviewed by a young reporter several years ago, was asked whether he read L'Osservatore Romano He replied: "Good God No...

...The Church is also Italian by habit, Italian in its methods of work, in its thinking, in its politics...

...For example, the Vatican now has controlling interest in a series of important banks, namely the Banco di Roma, the Banco di Santo Spirito, the Credito Centrale del Lazio, etc...

...What is barely covered at all is the reign itself...

...Occasionally also it hands out a ticket...

...Economically speaking, the Italian Republic has been a decided success, and Italians even find the Church's political power tolerable and far from heavy-handed...

...A large part of the fault for this state of affairs lies with the press itself, especially the American press, which is passionately interested in the Vatican but not always in the truth about it...

...It backs the reactionary Franco in Spain at the same time that it also favors the fairly liberal Adenauer Government of Germany...

...These stories, true or not, have done and are doing an enormous damage to the good reputation of the pontificate...

...Editors seem obsessed by a passion for completely insignificant detail and are fascinated by the Graustarkian qualities of the Papal State...

...At the same time that permission is granted, however, it is made quite plain that the stringer's first and last loyalty belongs to the Holy See and that he can be expected to provide only such tidbits of news and information as the Vatican authorities deign proper which is usually precious little...

...Perish the very thought...

...Not only does the present Felici sell pictures by the thousands to all the faithful received by the Holy Father, but he also services all the agencies, newspapers, and magazines...

...It is not merely that the language is Italian or that the headquarter of the Church is geographically speaking, in Italy...

...Why should I?") He could even be one of the five or six men whom the Holy Father rails upon from time to time for early drafts of his many speeches...

...By and large the Church is happier about the United States, with its Protestant majority, than it is about many Latin American countries, with solid Catholic populations...

...To hint nowadays in print that the Vatican has other interests besides pure theology, that the Pope's time is not entirely consumed in prayer that (horror of horrors) cliques and rivalries and even intrigues exist within the sacred precincts of Vatican City, is to risk being accused of blasphemy and worse eventually being boycotted...

...The end of one Papal reign and the beginning of another are covered extravagantly...

...Vatican salaries are at such bare subsistence levels that any attempt to augment them is regarded sympathetically...

...since the war, its real estate holdings in and about Rome have enormously increased in value...

...In other countries, influence is wielded by fairly remote and therefore largely inefficient controls...

...There was also the popular plebiscite over the king and whether he should stay on...

...More likely yet the stringer may be one of the employes of the mistakenly named Press Office...

...The Vatican obviously now finds itself in a highly liquid position, but exactly how liquid nobody knows or can even hazard a guess...

...In short, the Rome bureaus of various news agencies and newspapers find themselves in the ridiculous position of paying the Vatican's own employes to gather for them what amounts to the Vatican's own propaganda...

...It was also one of Pucci's famous news-gathering gangs which managed, through the use of simple signals, to smuggle out minutes before the official announcement the news of the election of Eugenio Pacelli to the Papacy...

...The Vatican's measuring rod for countries seems to be neither economic nor political nor social...

...A few years ago Life magazine forked out, for example, a cool $15,000 for permission to photograph the latest result of the diggings in the grottos below St...

...The major trouble with all these arrangements, as Life and Oggi discovered, is that there is no assurance, once the money has been paid out, that one has really bought exclusive rights...

...Vatican State remains the one sovereign state which never bothers to let the public know its income or expenditures...

...The Church declared its neutrality, a decision which insured defeat for the Savoys...

...He may be a strategically placed functionary, clerical or lay, of the Secretariat of State, which is the largest and most active of the Roman Curia's five departmental offices...

...It also turned out to be the Pope's way of ameliorating, if not resolving, a serious quarrel which had developed between Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen...

...Approximately the same sum was paid by the Italian weekly magazine Oggi to a Jesuit-run putfit called "Movement for a Better World" in return for specially posed pictures of Pope Pius XII, together with matching text, to illustrate the latest vision of the Holy Father...

...This is generally fairly easy...

...The costs of running an institution like the Vatican, with a private army of its own, with huge palaces to maintain, with gigantic spectacles to mount, can be nothing short of stupendous...

...Peter's which Americans, but not Italians, find odd for a church...

...The Vatican is by nature extraordinarily secretive, but this accounts only in part for the fact that it is also probably the most under-reported important spot in the Western world today...

...A casual remark overheard by an eavesdropping servant is soon translated into headlines in New York...

...It was Pucci who sold to three different news agencies three different "inside" stories about the Italian-Vatican negotiations for the Lateran Treaty...

...Very often a stringer will serve simultaneously four or five newspapers or agencies...

...Everybody - day laborers, bank clerks, trattoria waiters and university professors-plays this engaging game...

...One chief difficulty in following events in the Vatican is that everything moves at such a snail's pace...

...There was to come, of course, the postwar challenge of the Communists, but that was to be defeated handily with the aid of American money and propaganda...

...Yes, the Vatican has what it calls a press office, but which no newspaperman would recognize as such...

...Additional evidence of the Church's temporal power can be found in the greatly increased Catholic influence over education, news media and entertainment even in a Protestant country like the United States...

...There's scarcely a bureau in Rome which has not been queried about the well-equipped bar in St...

...All this ownership is responsible for the Church's great interest in such matters as taxes, waiter rights, improvements in general in Rome...

...His is a most lucrative monopoly...

...Its agents run the most important of Italian real estate companies, the General Immobiliare...

...Politics as played by the Vatican vary according to the political complexion of the country concerned The Vatican has found itself at present for example able to support a Communist movement in Poland at the same time that it condemned one in Yugoslavia...

...the common denominator for its many likes and dislikes is simply whether in a given situation the Church can flourish or, in the case of Poland, at least survive...

...The right to photograph the Holy Father and those being received by him is the exclusive prerogative of the official pontifical photographer Luigi Felici, the latest representative of a once humble Roman family which has specialized in pictures of Popes as well as other clergy for 110 years...

...Recent maps printed in a few leftist papers of Rome show the Church as owning virtually both sides of several highways stretching from the capital down to the sea, plus numerous other immense plots...

...On that afternoon the Italian lay state had surrendered to the Allies...

...Most Vatican stringers receive a monthly fee ranging up to 20,000 lire or around $32, depending on the work they do...

...There are, indeed, a whole set of facts to support this thesis...

...They want to know how many rooms there are in the Apostolic Palaces (around 4000), how many times a year the Pope descends into St...

...in at least one case, a stringer was known to have been working for 14 separate Rome news offices at the same time...

...There is no spokesman to deny or confirm anything...

...This mainly consists of accrued funds that the Vatican received from the Italian Government at the time of the Lateran accord The amount was then roughly the equivalent of $2 billion, but according to various authorities, it has now by virtue of judicious investment grown to $11 billion, a considerable nest-gg for a small state...

...He certainly has not been aware of the fact that the Holy See is composed, apart from the Pope himself, of some twelve different sacred congregations, three apostolic tribunals and five departmental offices which exercise legislative, judicial and executive Dower over Church affairs...

...The Vatican obviously plays the American stock market...

...In Italy, on the other hand, the control can be quite direct, open and most efficient...

...Or, finally, the Vatican stringer may be somebody like the late Monsignor Enrico Pucci, a privileged character whose activities over the years inside the Vatican made him both rich and notorious...

...Only in Italy does one feel that the Vatican plays politics for keeps...

...Peter's for one of the big newsmaking convocations, like a consistory or a beatification, may cost up to $200, depending on how wealthy the donor is and how near the post is to the altar...

...All there is to go by is the briefest of medical bulletins issued hours earlier by a committee of doctors who it is gossiped, disagree with, distrust and even hate one another...

...The Vatican grants only grudging recognition of the perquisites of the Fourth Estate, and then proceeds to treat the working correspondent with both contempt and suspicion...

...In the United States and in Britain, churches, universities, foundations, charitable institutions all make a clean breast of what they receive, what they spend and what they need and are none the worse for it...

...Speculations about the outcome continue, of course, right up to the time that the balloting in the Sistine Chapel begins, but after that a Rome news bureau chief will feel happier if he has someone inside the Vatican, preferably a high official, prepared to signal to him in some pre-arranged manner the minute that the balloting has had positive results...

...The Vatican's great international bank is called, euphemistically, the Institute Opere di Religione (Institute for Works for Religion...

...Ordinarily the Vatican stringer works only over the telephone...

...There is news, and lots of it, in those few acres, but it is almost impossible to get at...

...In this ceaseless propagation of rumors, often neatly timed to make the latest editions, one suspects the dark hand of those Vatican stringers who are paid on space...

...Peter's, including the spot then believed to be St...

...First, the actual death is in itself a trial for the correspondent...

...A good spot within St...

...It owns stock in various water and gas companies, two or three electric power companies, several minor railroads, the important telephone company TETI...

...No balance sheet is ever produced...

...Adjectives are about all that are needed to cover the new sovereign's assumption of the triple tiara, symbolizing the Pope's sovereignty over the church militant, the church penitent, and the church triumphant...

...Added to all these properties are the investments in Rome...

...the only press in the Western world which often dares to suggest that the Vatican has some worldly interests, and that the men of the Vatican are of flesh and blood, is that of Italy...

...Curiously enough, Here Robert Neville, former foreign editor of Time, provides background to recent reports on the change in the Papacy...

...And most important of all the Church is run by Italians, which single fact alone gives the men of the Vatican a license for active interference in Italian affairs, which, if exercised anywhere else, would quickly backfire...

...The prevailing attitude is that the Church has been around for hundreds of years, will doubtless continue to be around for hundreds of years more, and that it is consequently rather indecent to make prompt or clear decisions about anything...

...Peter's Throne entails not one big story but rather three big stories which stretch over a period of several weeks...

...There is to be no unauthorized poking about odd places within the Vatican premises...

...Peter's Square...

...This was quite a news scoop, incidentally...

...The stringer is mainly expected, however, to be something of a guide for the news offices through the incredibly complex and very outdated labyrinths of religious administration...

...Vittorio Veronese, then chief of Catholic Action, that he should resign and allow the more dynamic Dr...

...One feature of the Vatican's acquisitions of postwar years is that it now owns industrial property in the north of Italy as well as in that part of Italy which used to belong to the Papal States...

...For other more substantial bits and pieces of information other arrangements are in order, and it is here that over the years there has evolved a tawdry system of Vatican informer also called, euphemistically, stringers...

...There is an easy out of this trouble-better public relations...

...The Italians alone seem to understand that the Pope's infallibility covers only faith and morals, and in any event does not extend to the acts of his inferiors...

...During the death watch, the Vatican literally seethes with rumors, all unconfirmable: A last-minute operation has been scheduled, new X-rays are being taken, extreme unction has been given the Pope has really died but the announcement is being delayed...

...This appointment, it soon became apparent, was the Pope's subtle manner of ending the long-established primacy among American prelates of New York's archbishop-cardinal, Francis J. Spellman...

...The old Roman saying has it that "he who enters the conclave a Pope comes out a cardinal," which is another way of hinting to beware of favorites...

...Permission to do a special photographic job like, let's say, taking the Michelangelo frescoes in the Sistine Chapel or the Pinturecchio paintings in the Borgia apartments can cost, again in donations to the right charities, several thousands of dollars plus all sorts of other favors, such as the right to use all the unused transparencies...

...The Vatican stringer system is also used to help answer the many queries which the Rome bureau of any newspaper or news agency invariably receives...

...He may be one of the editors of L'Osservatore Romano, that curious semi-official organ, the key to the understanding of which is held by only a handful of privileged souls...

...Before accepting the job of stringer for a mere secular news office the applicant must first obtain clearance from his superiors, who are clerics...

...The average news correspondent, upon arrival in Rome, scarcely knows the difference between a rite and a doctrine, a heresy or an error, between an ordinary church and a basilica, or between, let's say, Vatican State and the Holy See...

...This is possible because, when all is said and done, the Vatican is virtually an Italian institution...

...Only a day-by-day watch over the years of the things he does and the way he does them can give any real clue to what kind of person a Pope is...

...The judicious correspondent's list of papabili should therefore include some long shots...

...the fact that these employes also hire out informers may acount for their reluctance to perform in the Press Office for free...

...One editor of an American picture magazine has had a standing order to try and photograph the Vatican's "props department," reasoning that since the Vatican puts on periodically the greatest shows on earth, with frequent changes of costume, it must have an interesting storage room for the props...

...This does not mean, however, that the stringer can be depended on to do any spying...

...At this late date there can surely be no argument of the Vatican's political and social importance, leaving aside the purely religious aspects...

...Things have to some extent worked out this way...

...Another related difficulty in understanding the Vatican is the calculated subtlety of its moves: There must be no vulgar display of authority...

...Despite Stalin's cynical crack about the Pope's lack of armed divisions, there can surely be no doubt that he is an exceedingly important person...

...It has bought heavily into a number of utilities and real estate companies, including some of the biggest of Italy...

...In the face of the Vatican's secretiveness, the darkest of suspicions ferment very quickly in the popular mind...

...To get permission to take one's camera and equipment inside the basilica, however, is a tricky and complicated business, requiring patient negotiations, generally with the clerics, who are much tougher than the soldiers to deal with...

...Nobody for a moment would doubt that the headquarters of a world religious community of 400 million souls needs funds...

...But there is another feature of Vatican activity in Italy which is far from an open book, and that is its finances...

...The Church's maze of holy orders-180 male and 1,150 female-is also baffling, and it takes a bit of tutoring before one can distinguish between, lets say, a Jesuit and a Dominican, or a Benedictine and a Franciscan, or delineate the functions of the so-called Black Pope, who is General of the Jesuit order and those of the Red Pope, who is the prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation or the Faith...

...Likely as not the visitor to Rome who manages to cash a check will find, when he receives his check stubs, that the money has been cleared through this Vatican financial concern, famous for giving the best rates...

...On the subject of finances the authorities of the Vatican not only refuse to answer the most basic of queries but treat the questioner as if he were personally insulting the Pope...

...Naturally, too, the photographing outfit must pay for all the scaffolding, must foot the bill for extra lighting, and must pay for extra guards during the off hours...

...In recent years, with the emphasis on photography and with the entry of television into journalistic competition, the news agencies, newspapers, magazines and television bureaus have all put on their payrolls highly placed officers of the various guards units of the Vatican...

...Nothing that can possibly be done indirectly is ever done directly...

...There is nothing to prevent one from looking into the Vatican from a strategically placed balcony and there is still less to prevent one inside the Vatican from looking out during those fateful hours...

...The Italian votes for the preti (priests), as he familiarly calls the Christian Democratic party, with his eyes wide open as the only effective alternative to Communist rule...

...And it sensed that the Savoys' departure from Rome would eventually leave the field pretty much to the Church...

...One bureau in Rome was once asked to find out how many eggs the 300 New Hampshire hens of the 135-acre Papal estate at Castel Gandolfo lay a day and how many liters of milk the 40 Papal cows of Frisian breed give during the height of the summer...

...Even to do this means running into some very special problems...

...A thoroughly unglamorous President would from then on occupy the Quirinale, and a Chamber of Deputies would naturally sit at Montecitorio, but they would be mere agents of the ruling Christian Democratic party, organized, financed, directed by the Vatican...

...A Vatican stringer may be just about anyone...

...Many picture agencies, knowing that Felici has the run of the Vatican, pay good money merely for the privilege of assigning one of their men to act as Felici's assistant...

...They ask about the various guard units inside the Vatican (there are four separate sets of Guards) and in particular how many Swiss Guards there are (only 87 at this writing), and what each receives a month (about $70...

...The political activities of the Vatican are an open secret...

...The second big story, the election of the new Pope by a conclave of the Sacred College of Cardinals, is also a most complicated rumor-producing affair...

...The postwar roles of the great Catholic parties of Germany, Italy, France, Belgium and Holland constitute sufficient evidence that here is more than a vague and intangible force at work...

...The stringer is expected, of course, to inform his office about the comings and goings of the Pope, about whom the Pope is receiving, and more or less what His Holiness says in his frequent talks...

...Peter's with a camera, but the final permission is almost always facilitated by the presentation of a good-sized check to a Vatican charity...

...During these past few years the suspicion has taken shape among the Italians that what the Vatican is unable to accomplish by more or less open political methods it intends to accomplish by "secret financial infiltration...

...True, during the conclave the Vatican is supposed to be sealed tight, but of course no curtain can be lowered around the place...

...Peter's (around three times), how much money in salary and expense account a cardinal of the Roman Curia gets (about $16,000 annually...

...No correspondent can go strolling into an office of the Holy See and start asking questions, and not even the most aggressive reporter in Rome would dream of picking up the telephone and trying to get a responsible Vatican official on the wire...

...And why not at the same time, adopt a forthright, modern policy of answering questions and giving out explanations similar to those pursued by almost every institution in the Western world today...

...He edited Stars and Stripes' wartime Mediterranean edition and previously served on the N. Y. Herald Tribune...

...More significant, on that afternoon the reigning representative of the House of Savoy, that upstart family from the North which had dared to establish their capital in Papal Rome and had even presumed personally to occupy the Quirinale, had abandoned Rome and had fled southward, fearful of the Nazis...

...arrangements for the news coverage of the Vatican do not generally involved the Pope himself...

...Such information is usually also found, the next day, in L'Osservatore Romano, but the stringer can sometimes supply additional details or "color" in advance for local papers...

...The idea is that these militarv men who normally police the piazza can secure a good vantage point from which to photograph the big events in St...

...and Credit Suisse, who invest and manipulate the great Vatican treasure...

...Granted its weight, then, it follows that what the men who direct this force are like, how they react to given situations, what their relations to each other are, what their thinking is on various subjects-- that all this constitutes news in the purest and highest sense of the word And, still, the sad truth is that outside of four or five ranking journalists, mostly Italian, plus perhaps four or five diplomats of varied nationalities who have been stationed at Rome for the past eight or ten years, there is almost nobody who has the most elementary grasp of what goes on inside the Vatican...

...Peter's own tomb...

...About all that this office seems to do is to issue occasional mimeograph copies of Papal speeches, generally hours after their delivery...

...The end of a Papal reign is, for the correspondents, an ordeal involving impossible deadlines, lots of first and second guessing, much playing of hunches and, finally, various deals under, above and around the table...

...A few years ago, for example, a casual sentence dropped in a Papal speech about obstetrics was the chosen medium for hinting to Dr...

...Luigi Gedda to take over...

...Aware of the limitations placed on their work, most newspapermen assigned to Rome proceed to concentrate either on the purely religious or the purely trivial...

...All three Pucci versions turned out to be quite wrong...

...Or take the recent nomination of the late Cardinal Stritch, of Chicago, to be Pro-Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and thus the first American cardinal of the Roman Curia...

...Actually, a change of occupant of St...

...Somehow, the story goes the Vatican sensed that afternoon that the Savoys would never be able to return to Rome, or at least that if they ever came back they would never be able to rule...

...A Papal audience that lasts five minutes beyond the allotted time, a casual sentence in a letter from the head of one of the sacred congregations, an unexpected appointment to congratulations on one's birthday- these are the kind of gentle ways used to make Vatican policy known...

...About the only indispensable qualification for a stringer is that he have the run of the Vatican, that he be able to get inside the Bronze Gate when occasion demands...

...The third great story is the coronation, an unforgettable spectacle to describe which the journalistic witness can for once pull out all the stops...

...Few newsmen would know before coming to Rome that it is the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office which judges heresies and puts books on the Index, while it is before the Congregation of Rites that the lengthy and tedious business of making a saint takes place...

...At any rate almost any expedient and the payment of even an exorbitant fee would apparently justify half-hour beat on the election of a new Pope...