GOD'S BANKERS Gerald Posner

GOD’S BANKERS: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican
GERALD POSNER
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 732 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

For an institution which proclaims that it is not possible to worship both God and Mammon, the Catholic Church has managed to do so just fine, according to the writer and attorney (and Catholic), Gerald Posner, in God’s Bankers.

The comfortable pomp-filled lifestyle of the ecclesiastical elite was vastly enhanced from the sixth century with the sale of indulgences to the lay faithful, which promised freedom from punishment for sin.  This monetising of salvation financed the building of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Cathedral.

With Italian unification in the 19^th century, the Catholic Church lost its vast and wealthy feudal empire in central Italy (the Papal States), leaving the remnant micro-state of the Vatican teetering on bankruptcy.  The bailout came from fleecing the poor through ‘Peter’s Pence’ (morally-coerced donations from the laity) and user-pays charges for Church services such as weddings and funerals.

Money from ‘Christ-killers’ was also acceptable as the doctrinally anti-Semitic Catholic Church took out loans from the Jewish Rothschild’s bank, where it was later joined by money from authentic Jew-killers - the Vatican was the first state to recognise Nazi Germany which reciprocated by collecting, and making mandatory, the Church’s tax on German Catholics.

This tax, which alone paid for almost all the Vatican’s operating expenses, influenced the Church’s complicity in the Holocaust.  Despite Hitler’s brutal reign of terror, the Pope and his most powerful cardinals stood by whilst the Vatican Bank, which was founded during the war, remained open to Third Reich circumvention of Allied anti-Nazi economic sanctions.  God’s bank went on to become a covert conduit and repository for Nazi wartime plunder, including gold coins, rings and dental fillings from death camp victims smelted down into gold bars emblazoned with swastikas.

In the Vatican’s host country, the anti-communist Catholic Church had struck a similarly ideological and mercenary deal with Mussolini’s fascists.  In return for granting tax-exempt status to the Vatican, compensation for the confiscation of the Papal States, and payment of the salaries of all Italy’s 25,000 parish priests, the fascists, in the 98% Catholic nation, got Vatican-bestowed political legitimacy and Church-delivered electoral support.

Financial self-interest also operated, along with anti-socialist animus, in the Vatican’s reactionary politics after the war.  Conservative Italian governments earmarked 1% of income tax as a direct subsidy to its Cold War religious ally whose opposition to the Italian Communist Party was in part motivated by fear of a communist government nationalising major industries and wiping out the Church’s vast corporate investments.

With exquisite hypocrisy, the morally-stern Catholic bank chased further dividend returns by investing in casinos, arms manufacturing, printing firms that published pornographic magazines, and pharmaceutical companies that made birth control pills.

The Pope-appointed private financiers in charge of the Vatican Bank were also vectors for a host of financial scandals, including political bribes fuelled with Church funds, corrupt joint ventures with corporate criminals, and money laundering for Illegal arms traders, narco-traffickers and Mafia bosses who took advantage of the Vatican Bank’s no-questions-asked policies and its opaque audit trail.  The Vatican Bank became one of the world’s ten most popular destinations for dirty money and offshore tax evasion.

Posner concludes his exhaustively-detailed forensic indictment of the Vatican Bank and its top moneymen on an optimistic note that the dismal Papal succession of doddering old reactionaries has ended with Pope Francis (the “People’s Pope”) and his appointment of the former Autralian Cardinal, George Pell, as the “uber-cleric of the Vatican’s money” heading a newly-created Secretariat of the Economy, to cleanse the bank of its financial abuses.

This rosy prognosis, however, seems more prayer than expectation.  Francis’ reformist zeal is much more about creating an impression of doctrinal modernisation and a tweaking at the policy margins than actually changing fundamental Church teaching or institutional culture.

Pell has been reported in L’Espresso as spending lavishly on offices, salaries, business class travel and champagne, quite out of keeping with Francis’ avowed advocacy of a Church of the poor, for the poor.  His record of denial and cover-up of clerical sexual abuse of children in Australia, in part driven by a concern that legal settlement costs would open the Catholic Church in Australia to massive financial exposure, should also be cautionary.

Francis’ denunciations of ‘the mentality of profit at any price’ is likely to be just pious rhetoric, given that the aim of Pell’s new outfit is to generate more income from its assets, swelling the sheer inertial mass of Church wealth - the Vatican Bank has a $60 billion real state and share portfolio, whilst, worldwide, the real-estate assets of the Catholic Church are around $2 trillion dollars, equivalent to the G.D.P. of Russia.

None of this inspires confidence that the money-changers will be tossed out of the temple any time soon.  If the Catholic Church really wants to get a fix on sin, they’ll find it sitting right under their pecuniary noses, in their bank’s ledgers, in their Bible of capitalist wealth accumulation, in their God of Profit.

LADY CONSTANCE LYTTON Lyndsey Jenkins

LADY CONSTANCE LYTTON: Aristocrat, Suffragette, Martyr
LYNDSEY JENKINS
Biteback Publishing, 2015, 282 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

When Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton was arrested, and went on prison hunger-strike, in 1909, for demanding women’s right to vote, she was, to prevent an embarrassing political fuss, released early so as to avoid one of Britain’s best-connected aristocrats being subjected to the government’s policy of force-feeding hunger-striking suffragettes.  When arrested again, but this time disguised as ‘Jane Warton’, a poor, unglamorous nobody, Lytton was treated exactly as were the rest of the nameless, powerless, force-fed suffragette prisoners. 

Lytton, says Lyndsey Jenkins in her biography of the rebel aristocrat, was having none of the government’s class-based double standards.  She was a defector from her class.  By her own admission, she was one of those privileged women of social status who lived ‘futile, superficial, sordidly useless lives’, resigned to an uneventful life of routine domesticity and tedious social rounds but who was quietly seething with frustration at the hollowness of it all. 

With the women’s suffrage campaign, however, Lytton connected her personal dissatisfactions with the broader oppression of women and became politically radicalised.  At age 40 and with a sense of purpose at last, Lytton discovered the world of political protest.  The shy, awkward wallflower became petition-taker, pamphleteer, public speaker, organiser and stone-thrower.  The latter, and the arrests it deliberately courted, was a tactic of the militant suffragettes in Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to dramatise women’s political exclusion by ‘making Britain ungovernable’.

Although the WSPU had dismissed working class women as agents of change and concentrated instead on the leisured class of women with wealth, power and connections, Lytton (the WSPU’s biggest recruit, offering “celebrity brand endorsement”) never lost sight of labouring women who, she said, ‘needed a political voice much more than did women of my class’.

Although the autocratic and conservative Pankhursts had remained permanently imprinted on a loyal Lytton since the moment of her political awakening, she supported many of their dissident former colleagues, including the youngest Pankhurst, and socialist, Sylvia.  When the WSPU suspended their suffrage campaign and fell into patriotic line during World War 1, Lytton supported conscientious objectors and sent money to German civilians in hardship.

Jenkins argues that the restricted female franchise (for women over thirty and university graduates) which was granted in 1918 was the result of the WSPU’s commitment to the war effort (recruiting, nursing, arms–making) proving that women were ‘worthy of citizenship’.  It is likely, however, that the voting reform had more to do with the government not wanting to rekindle an old war at home over women’s suffrage.  The winning of the women’s vote on the same terms as men eventually came in 1928 but not before Lytton, never a healthy person, died in 1923, barely a decade after, and hastened by, her torture by force-feeding.

Jenkins is prone to celebrating “heroic individuals”, thus reinforcing the already elevated role of the privileged class rebel, but, as Jenkins also notes, Lytton’s personal transformation, including her dramatic individual experiment in class inequality, was also part of a broader political and social transformation for women beyond just equality at the ballot-box.

MAX HARRIS Betty Snowden

MAX HARRIS: With Reason, Without Rhyme
BETTY SNOWDEN
Arcadia (Australian Scholarly Publishing), 2015, 518 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

In combining commerce and literature, Max Harris acted on the advice of his Adelaide University economics professor to ‘become a businessman and write poetry on the side’, says the art historian, Betty Snowden, in her biography of Australia’s controversial modernist poet, columnist, bookseller and publisher.

Before enlisting in the world of commerce, however, writes Harris, ‘I was in the communist business’ at Adelaide’s prestigious St. Peters’ College where ‘I went around collecting money for Republican Spain’ in the 1930s.  The scholarship boy of humble origins took great proletarian delight in outraging ‘the State’s Best Families’ at the elite secondary school.

Harris’ distaste for right wing class prejudice continued at university and earned him a dunking in the River Torrens by conservative students who objected to one of Harris’ leaflets criticising the anti-communist Prime Minister, Robert Menzies.  Harris’ solace, as always, was literature – after digging latrines as an undergraduate conscript to the Citizen’s Military Force during the war, Harris would hide in them to read Proust.

Complementing his political non-conformity, Harris promoted a literary radicalism of avant-garde poetry, writing and art.  Adelaide’s staid cultural establishment did not take kindly to Harris and the new artistic wave.  The Advertiser panned Harris’ poetry (which could, in truth, be intimidatingly obscure) as full of ‘turgid profundities’ and ‘tangles of surrealist imagery’ but it was the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax which subdued Harris.

In 1943, three conservative poets, one of them James McAuley, the “stridently anti-modernist and anti-communist” founding editor of the CIA-funded Australian cultural magazine, Quadrant, hoaxed Harris’ literary magazine, Angry Penguins, with a parody of modernist poetry, concocted from unrealted phrases culled from random books and presented as the work of ‘Ern Malley’, a fictitious mechanic and insurance-peddler.

In part, as the perpetrators claimed, the hoax was a ‘serious literary experiment’ which probed the weaknesses of modernism but it was also ideologically driven and, as Snowden observes, a “cruel trick” to play on the 23-year-old cultural experimenter.

The Ern Malley affair turned from embarrassment to potential prison-time when the state prosecuted Harris for obscenity, alleging that the poems were indecent and ‘suggestive of sexual intercourse’.  It was a moral witch-hunt driven by the Catholic right from which Harris escaped with a fine.

Poetry and literary journals were never going to pay Harris’ bills or court costs so he took to bookselling, using aggressive discounting, cheap remaindered books and an extensive mail-order business, to turn Adelaide’s iconic Mary Martin’s bookshop from a convivial cultural hub for poor artists and uni students into a national, commercial book-chain.

Not everyone was pleased by this foray into cultural corporatism.  Despite Harris’ social progressivism and poppy-lopping egalitarianism (he called the pedestal-dwelling Menzies a ‘towering non-entity’), the left were suspicious.  The Communist Party member and novelist, Judah Waten, in response to a politically hostile book review in one of Harris’ magazines, let rip against Harris (who could come across as a bit of a toff with his silver-topped cane and elite social circle) as ‘Quick Quid Maxie, the pet of the reactionary-moneyed highbrows’.

A full appreciation of Harris, who died in 1995, struggles to surface, however, from Snowden’s book, which is more a collection of letters strung together with lists (of house and bookshop locations, articles and acquaintances) than a synthesis of the raw biographical data.  The Harris that Snowden doesn’t quite pin down was ideologically eclectic (Rupert Murdoch gave him news-space for over two decades) and capable of both profundity and populism but stuffy convention was always his target.

Harris’ own self-assessment of initiating the ‘creative flowering and ideological renewal of a rather brutish and proudly anti-intellectual minor nation’ is close to the mark.  There was much in conservative Australia that could do with a vigorous shake-up and Harris did his colourful bit.  The millionaire entrepreneur and cultural provocateur, remained, at heart, ‘a stirrer’.  He deserves to be remembered as more than just the dupe of the Ern Malley hoax.