God's Banker Read Online Free Page B

last. But that, of course, is to put the end of the story almost before its beginning.
    Tovini's reason for founding both banks was the same, to provide a counter-weight to the great "lay", or non-Catholic, banks which had emerged along with the Italian nation three decades earlier. Such distinctions and antagonisms may seem odd to the non-Italian. But they are a constant of the country's history, of a land over much of which for centuries the Church was the State, and a dominant temporal power in the peninsula. Guelf had fought Ghibelline, the Reformation ran into the Counter-Reformation. The divide, though less evident, still exists today, 113 years after Italian troops had burst through Rome's walls at the Porta Pia to annex the citadel of Catholicism for the country's capital. But in Tovini's time, feelings ran much stronger.
    For their part, the "lay" banks were held to be strongholds of freemasonry, the movement which contributed greatly to the unifica­tion of Italy. Chief among them was the Banca Commerciale Italiana, whose newly scrubbed headquarters stand in Piazza della Scala barely a stone's throw away from Ambrosiano, nestling in the shadow of the great opera house.
    Tovini had named his new bank after Saint Ambrose, the patron saint of Milan and its archbishop in the fourth century, who had fought throughout his life for the freedom of his church from secular interference. And a guiding purpose of Banco Ambrosiano was "to provide credit without offending the ethical principles of Christian teaching", an explicit rebuke to the aggressive "lay" banks. To ward off the unwanted attentions of outsiders, Ambrosiano's original statute prevented any individual from owning more than five per cent of its capital. Shareholders were required to produce a certificate of Catholic baptism, plus a voucher for their good character from the parish priest. Thus armed, they had to submit themselves for indi­vidual approval by the board. This clausola digradimento , or "clause of consent", was not to disappear entirely from Ambrosiano's statute until what proved to be its last meeting of shareholders in April 1982, just two months before the end.
    And there were other, even more tangible connections with the Church hierarchy of Lombardy. This century two of Milan's arch­bishops have become Pope. One was Achille Ratti, who took the name of Pius XI when he ascended St Peter's Throne in 1922. He was to sign the Concordat on the Vatican's behalf in 1929, and his nephew, Franco Ratti, was later to become a chairman of Banco Ambrosiano. The other was Giovanni Battista Montini, better known as Paul VI. His family, furthermore, still retains ties with Banca San Paolo di Brescia, so intimately concerned with both the foundation and re-foundation of Ambrosiano itself.
    From the first, the new bank pursued its goal of "serving moral organizations, pious works, and religious bodies set up for charitable aims". A shareholder from start to finish was, for example, the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, the corporation responsible for the building and upkeep of Milan Cathedral, that Gothic extravagance with 135 separate spires, emblem of the bourgeois mercantile con­fidence of the city. Today, from the room on Ambrosiano's fourth floor which once was Calvi's office, you can look through the bullet­proof glass window, across a terrace to the Cathedral's central spire, topped with its copper-gilt painted statue of the Madonnina, the traditional protectress of Milan. When disaster struck in 1982, the Fabbrica del Duomo possessed over 180,000 shares in Ambrosiano, worth 4.7 billion lire on the basis of the bank's last-ever stockmarket quotation, but subsequently all but valueless. Thirteen other orga­nizations were listed as shareholders, including orphanages, missions and old people's homes, all run by the Church.
    Not surprisingly, Ambrosiano became known as the "priests' bank". And in a quiet, conservative fashion it prospered, attracting as its