The Vatican’s Expenses XI

IN THE SUMMER of 1962, Vatican officials received a letter from Mrs. Elina Castellucci, a seventy-nine-year-old woman who lived twenty miles outside of Florence. Contending to be a direct descendant of Michelangelo, the woman wrote that she had a “small” claim on the Sistine Chapel but that she was not asking for it to be paid. All she wanted was a check for 300 lire (48 cents) to pay for a ticket to the Vatican Museum so that she could see her great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-uncle’s masterpiece.

“I would like the satisfaction of visiting the Sistine Chapel free,” she told a reporter. “Why should I buy a ticket to see something a member of my family painted?”

Although Mrs. Castellucci’s claim to being related to Michelangelo Buonarroti had been checked by genealogical experts and found to be true, Vatican officials did not answer her letter. One Italian critic chose to explain the Vatican’s silence this way: “The Pope economizes and saves his company three hundred lire!”

Among the Italians, particularly among the residents of Rome, the Vatican has a reputation for being “cheap,” “tight,” “stingy.” Without much provocation, the ordinary man in the street is likely to tell you, Il Vaticano riceve—ma non da a nessuno! (The Vatican receives— but gives to no one!) This is not true, of course. For the Roman Catholic Church is a practicing charitable institution— it receives charity; and it gives charity. In recent years especially, the Pope has made it a practice to allot gifts to countries hit by natural disasters, even where the people concerned are not Roman Catholics. These gifts have regularly been five-figure ones, most of them from $10,000 to $50,000. There is no way of ascertaining just how much money the Pope gives away in such outright grants, because the Vatican does not make the outlay public. Moreover, the Vatican offers little or no information about how much money it spends each year or each month. But it is known that there are sizable monthly expenditures.

To run any kind of business, to run a country of any size, large amounts of money must be spent. Running the Vatican is no exception. During one of his rare press conferences, the late Cardinal Tardini revealed the fact that the Vatican’s annual payroll came to about $7.25 million. It wasn’t clear, however, whether this figure referred only to the payroll for the State of Vatican City. Most likely it did, because veteran Vaticanologists are inclined to estimate the pope’s total expenses at somewhere close to $20 million a year.

What are some of the costs incurred annually by the Vatican? Those of keeping its huge palaces, offices, and residential buildings in repair, painted, and heated, and of having its spacious gardens groomed by a staff of lay workers. Those of maintaining a private army, the Swiss Guards and the Gendarmery, of about two hundred men, who receive some $260,000 in pay, according to rank and arm. Those of providing funds for an extensive diplomatic corps, including papal “ambassadors” in over eighty countries. Those of maintaining St. Peter’s Basilica and St. Peter’s Square, which alone must run to approximately $700,000 a year, of keeping a fleet of sixty cars in running order, of operating a powerful radio station, and of printing a newspaper six days a week. Churchmen, from cardinals down to ushers, must be paid. So must staff Latinists, throne bearers, lawyers, librarians, and myriads of others who provide their services inside and outside—and upon—the Leonine Walls, which, solid and thick as they are, need constant attention by a special crew of stonemasons.

Low as salaries are within the Vatican, no overtime is ever paid. Unharassed by unions, and not given to extravagance, the Vatican nevertheless granted several recent pay hikes. At the present time, a cardinal on the Pope’s immediate staff draws a monthly salary of $650, plus a $100 housing allowance if he lives outside Vatican City. If a cardinal also heads a congregation, he is allowed an additional $50. Thus some prelates earn salaries as high as $800 each month. This figure does not include donations and fees given to—and kept by— cardinals for lending their presence at such special events as weddings, funerals, and the laying of cornerstones.

The Vatican payroll reflects favoritism toward any married worker who has children. For instance, a gardener receives a base wage of $115 a month, but if he has four dependent children, his monthly salary is increased to $195. A Vatican usher in the lowest category receives, after ten years’ service, $235 a month; the editor of the daily paper draws $340, while a printer gets $120; a private in the Swiss Guards gets a monthly $120 and his food and board. Each of these employees is awarded an extra $20 a month for every child, with no limit imposed as to the number of children (or bonuses). Altogether there are some three thousand persons who draw paychecks from the pontifical treasury.

It was Pope John XXIII who awarded salary increases to Vatican employees, and in doing so, revealed his compassionate nature. Given to taking long afternoon strolls in the Vatican Gardens, the Pope never liked the fact that all the workers scurried away from him. One day when a group of path sweepers fled as he neared them, the Pope insisted that the men come out of their hiding places behind the bushes. One by one they emerged, timidly approached the pontiff, and went to their knees. But John was not one for ceremony; he asked the men about their families, and after several had boasted of their children, and of how many of them they had, he asked how much sweepers were paid for their work.

“What?” the Pope exclaimed when he heard that a day’s pay came to only 1,000 lire ($1.60). “No family with children can live on that. What has become of justice? Just wait . . . that’s going to change!”

The Pope went immediately to his office to get the full facts about his employees’ pay scale. On his order, a general review of all Vatican wages and salaries was made. Apprised of the figures, the Pope then ordered an across-the-board salary increase.

When he announced the new salary schedule, John told Vatican administrators, “We cannot always require others to observe the Church’s teaching on social justice if we do not apply it in our own domain. The Church must take the lead in social justice by its own good example.”

The pay raise, the first in many years, added an estimated $2.4 million a year to Vatican payroll expenses. Then in 1963, Pope Paul VI granted another raise, 20 percent to the entire staff. This increased the Vatican’s annual salary costs by another $1.44 million. It must be mentioned here that whenever such pay hikes are granted, the Vatican grants concomitant raises, in the form of “adjustments,” to former employees (civilian workers, not clergy) on pension. In another unprecedented move, Pope Paul, in December 1965, ordered that a special 100,000-lire ($160) bonus be paid to all Vatican staff to mark the successful end of the Ecumenical Council. This sum was over and above the tredicesimo, or thirteenth, an annual extra month’s pay that Italian law requires employers to give each employee.

The Vatican wage scale may be low by American standards, but the almost unbelievable fact about the papal payroll is that the Pope himself receives not a penny in salary. Therefore, when a ranking cardinal wins election to the pontifical seat, he earns a much-esteemed promotion— with a substantial reduction in pay.

Popes have had varying amounts of personal wealth, but probably no pope has had as little as Pope John. Before he assumed the papal throne, Cardinal Roncalli managed to get together enough money for his family to buy back the house in which he and his brothers had been born so that the Roncalli relatives could once again live under the same roof. Dr. Piero Mazzoni, the Roman physician who attended Pope John in his dying days, discovered that a fountain pen was one of John’s very few personal possessions of value.

“You have done much for me,” the peasant-like pontiff whispered to Dr. Mazzoni on his deathbed. “Take this pen—it’s all I have with which to repay you for your care and devotion. It’s almost new; I’ve hardly ever used it.”

The only other tangible possession John left behind was his pectoral cross, which he gave to Franz Cardinal Koenig, Archbishop of Vienna, who wears it at special events.

But personal funds are not a papal concern. It’s the Vatican’s expenses that engage popes in battles with the ledgers. To meet unforeseen expenses, the Vatican sometimes has to “rob Peter to pay Paul,” in the figurative sense, of course. During the final months of the Ecumenical Council, for example, the Vatican sold $4.5 million in gold to the United States government. The bills accrued by the council required dollar payments. For one thing, the Vatican had to pay transportation costs for most of the 2,200 prelates who had to travel long distances to take their council seats each session. Most of the representatives came on foreign airlines, which required payment in American dollars; the Vatican had to come up with $2.12 million for that expense alone. Additional outlays included those for electronic calculators and special precision devices. These were supplied by non-Italian companies, which would not accept Italian lire in payment. The $4.5 million did not, of course, represent the total cost of underwriting the Ecumenical Council. Miscellaneous expenses—foremost of which was the installation of a meeting hall on the floor of St. Peter’s —amounted to a staggering $7.2 million. A precise accounting of the expenses run up by the Ecumenical Council cannot be made—but speculations have placed the total between $20 and $30 million.

Apart from such special expenses as those of the Ecumenical Council, the Vatican treasury is constantly drained by the Church-sponsored organization that, with its staff of hundreds, spreads the Catholic religion to remote corners of the globe. This organization, known as the Congregation for the Evangelization of Nations or the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (known, too, by its Latin name, Propaganda Fide), was founded by Pope Gregory XV to attend to the financial requirements of Vatican missionaries. Operating in the red, because it will not take financial aid from the natives it serves, Propaganda Fide relies fully and completely on the Vatican’s pecuniary resources. While special collections are made in Catholic churches everywhere to help Propaganda Fide, and while a considerable sum is raised through this source, the Vatican still has to draw liberally on its own funds to make up deficits. Although the Vatican is known to be masterful in the practice of economy measures, it pours millions of dollars into its missions every year.

Does taking on such indebtedness have any justification in the Vatican scheme of things? Propaganda Fide missions are in most of Africa and in large portions of Asia. Although the number of colonial areas has been diminishing, the Catholic population of the mission territories has jumped by fifteen million in the last ten years and is now estimated at forty-five million. Much of this increase in population can be attributed to the creation of native priests and the naming of Asiatics and black Africans to high posts within the Vatican structure. The number of native-born priests in Africa, Asia, and the South Sea islands has increased by more than six thousand in the last twenty-five years, while the number of European priests in these territories has gone down by a third during the same period, according to the latest statistics. In the early nineteen-twenties, Africa and Asia had one native bishop; there are now seventy-five in Asia and about forty in Africa. The Vatican is willing to absorb the costs of the missionary army in order to achieve its purposes, even though, from a money standpoint, the loss is a total one.

Propaganda Fide is but one of the Vatican’s money- losing operations. Most of its charitable undertakings are under the wing of the Congregation for the Clergy (formerly called the Congregation of the Council), which administers such projects as the financing of new schools and hospitals to replace those that have been destroyed by natural catastrophes. Wherever a poor parish needs financial help, the Congregation for the Clergy stands ready to give aid, usually in the form of money. Ordinarily the Vatican does not provide succor to specific individuals, but upon occasion it may help a parish priest to get certain poor families back on their feet. The amount spent on this type of assistance is unknown, but the figure is surely sizable. Another organization that makes heavy demands on Vatican resources is Vatican Radio, the official station of the Holy See. The station broadcasts in Latin and thirty other languages and relays many programs to countries behind the Iron Curtain. On a given day, the powerful Vatican transmitters may beam two shows to Hungary, two to Czechoslovakia, and three to Rumania. In the course of a week, there will be four broadcasts in Byelorussian, three in Ukrainian, two in Bulgarian, and a half a dozen in the various Yugoslav dialects. Most of the broadcasts, however, are in Italian (with English in second place, for Far Eastern audiences). Newscasts on the Pope’s activities, special church ceremonies, masses, religious music, and papal messages are transmitted on twenty-four short-wave and three medium-wave bands, and are heard all over the world. The transmitters, which cost $3 million, are located on the highest ground in the Vatican Gardens and in a walled-in, two-mile-square plot north of Rome, which has been given extraterritorial status.

Unknown to most people, even regular listeners to Vatican Radio, is the fact that during the early morning hours of each day the office of the Vatican’s secretary of state broadcasts messages—some of them in code—to priests, nuncios, apostolic delegates, and cardinals in all parts of the world. Each Church dignitary knows about what time to expect special announcements pertaining to his region. He also receives coded signals from the Vatican to remind him of the “date” he has with his receiver.

In contrast with other stations, Vatican Radio often communicates private messages that will not be understood by anyone but the papal representative for whom they are intended. One might, for instance, hear something like this: “Father Tizio, with reference to the information in your letter of the eighth of September, re the peasant woman who sees visions of the Virgin Mary, we have considered your suggestion, but suggest that ad captandum vulgus. . . .”

Several years ago, when N.B.C. correspondent Irving R. Levine visited the station and was told that there was such a daily transmission to the United States, he asked in jest, “Is that when Cardinal Spellman gets his orders from the Vatican?”

The staff member who was acting as Levine’s guide replied with a grin, “No, sir, it’s just the other way around!”

Vatican Radio is a significant papal expense; so, too, is the unofficial Vatican newspaper. An eight- to ten-page evening paper printed six times a week, L’Osservatore Romano sells at 60 lire (10 cents) a copy on newsstands. An annual subscription in Italy costs $25, whereas, for copies that go abroad, the subscription rate comes to $40 a year. An incredibly dull publication, it has virtually no newsstand sales, but it does have a paid mail circulation of about fifty thousand copies, including four that are sent by air to Moscow. Issued in Italian, it frequently contains several columns in Latin, and it will often print speeches and reprint documents in the German, English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese in which they were first delivered or printed. The paper carries a very small amount of advertising and almost never runs photographs.

L’Osservatore operates at a loss of $2 million a year, and, despite the paper’s importance to the Vatican, this fact disturbed Pope Pius XII.

Pius, who tended to be a penny-wise-pound-foolish administrator, diligently watched every penny the Vatican spent. To save on electric current, for instance, Pius often made the rounds of the papal apartments flicking off the lights. Not infrequently he refused to make necessary repairs because he didn’t want to spend the money. “I cannot,” he said, “be extravagant with the funds of the Holy See.”

It was Pius XII who established the Vatican policy of reusing envelopes. Intra-Vatican communications were not to be sealed in such a way that the envelope could not be used again. It was also Pius who wrote his last will and testament on the back of an envelope that had made the rounds—and who once discovered, to his chagrin, that he had a drawerful of obsolete bank notes that would have been worth close to $1,000 if he hadn’t neglected to turn them in before the government’s redemption deadline.

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