Tuesday 12 May, 6.30pm
Papi, dollari e guerre by Massimo Franco
Massimo Franco presents his latest book Papi, dollari e guerre. Il potere dell’America in Vaticano, dai tabù del passato a Leone XIV, published by Solferino, in conversation with John Hooper, the Economist’s Italy and Vatican correspondent .
With the election of an American pope, the most recent Conclave has marked the end of the Eurocentric era of a Vatican that has grown impoverished and divided. Yet the new course set by Leo XIV must be understood in light of a long and troubled underground journey in which American Catholicism has often played a crucial—if not always visible—role. As Massimo Franco illustrates in a sweeping narrative that blends history and current events, the keys to understanding what has happened are strategic, doctrinal, and financial all at once.
The flow of contributions coming from across the Atlantic is a clue that cannot be ignored: from the funds sent to Rome in the 1920s and ’30s by a benefactress who was a friend of Roosevelt and of Pius XI and XII, to those that arrived during and after the Second World War through Cardinal Francis Spellman. More recently, the role of the Papal Foundation—created by John Paul II to cement the “axis of Good” with Ronald Reagan’s United States and now led by the cardinal of New York, Timothy Dolan—has come into focus. And the financial power of the Knights of Columbus and of the charitable and cultural institutions that have showered Vatican budgets with dollars also emerges.
Amid previously unpublished testimonies, documents from the Apostolic Archive, stories of spies, cardinals, emigrated gold bars, and clashes between popes and presidents, this book recounts how and why the taboo that once made the election of a “Yankee pope” seem impossible has fallen. It guides us through more than a century of history, leading up to May 2025 and an imposing, little‑known complex in the heart of Rome: the Pontifical North American College, where a sort of pre‑Conclave of U.S. cardinals took place. It is a fitting final chapter to a political‑religious epic that allows the election of the new pope to be analysed from a previously unexplored historical angle. All with the awareness that Leo XIV now faces the immense task of pacifying and stitching back together a deeply torn Church.
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About the Speakers:
Massimo Franco, political columnist for Corriere della Sera, has worked for Avvenire, Il Giorno, and Panorama. He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Among his books published with Solferino are L’enigma Bergoglio (latest edition 2023), C’era una volta Andreotti (2021), Il monastero (2022), Secretum (2024, with Sergio Pagano), and Il fantasma di Hammamet (2025).
John Hooper is the Economist’s Italy and Vatican correspondent, author of The Italians and The New Spaniards, and co-translator into English of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. He is a former lecturer at Stanford University’s Florence campus and an honorary fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.