The Pope at War, page 11
It was the moment Pius XII had been dreading. Not only was he horrified by the devastation of Poland and its largely Catholic population, but he knew that pressure for him to condemn the Nazi invasion would become almost unbearable. Mussolini himself had reason to believe the pope might speak out. “It is not improbable,” a secret police report informed the Duce, “that the Pontiff who, as is well known, has the existence of Poland close to his heart, will intervene publicly with a statement.”[4]
Mussolini need not have worried. On the day after the assault began, the French ambassador asked Cardinal Maglione if the pope would make his voice heard. No, replied the cardinal. It was not the pope’s style. He preferred “letting the facts speak for themselves.” The French ambassador was quickly followed by Poland’s own ambassador, there to make the same request. All he could get from the cardinal was the promise that the pope would have Poland in his prayers.[5]
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Germany’s attack left the Duce in an uncomfortable position. He was not ready to throw Italy into the war, but he dreaded being seen as too cowardly to join his ally in battle. On the day of the invasion, he had phoned his ambassador in Berlin. He needed Hitler to send him a message saying he had no need at the moment for the Duce’s help. The Führer quickly obliged.[6]
At three p.m. that day, Italy’s government ministers nervously gathered at Palazzo Venezia to learn what the Duce had decided. Mussolini arrived wearing his all-white summer military uniform. He looked, thought his justice minister, Dino Grandi, as though he had aged ten years, “his face pale, crossed by deep wrinkles that reflected the internal drama that had tormented him for two weeks and that he did not succeed in hiding behind the mask of his glacial calm.” Mussolini told them he had made Italy’s position clear to the Führer: the country would not be ready for war until the end of 1942. “While Mussolini spoke,” Grandi recalled, “his eyes and his face visibly betrayed an internal storm. Hitler’s telegram and Italy’s abstention from the war meant for him if not the first, certainly the greatest defeat of his life…. Contradictory feelings buffeted through him all at the same time: jealousy, anger, delusion, humiliation.”
The new watchword, said Mussolini, was “nonbelligerency.” “Neutrality” was not a term the Duce could ever abide.
Following the meeting, Mussolini waited nervously to see the effect his announcement would have. His aides suggested he summon an adulatory crowd to the piazza outside Palazzo Venezia for a triumphal address, but he dismissed the idea. The prospect of Fascists cheering a decision not to take military action was repugnant to him.[7]
Fears that Germany’s invasion of Poland would trigger a wider conflict soon proved well founded. On September 3, Britain declared war on Germany. That afternoon France did as well. But as the German army advanced rapidly through Polish territory, it remained unclear how either nation would be able to do anything to stop it.
For the Duce, the speed with which Germany’s massive offensive was churning through Poland proved intoxicating. Entering the dictator’s office on September 5, Giuseppe Bottai, minister of education, found him standing at a table looking down at a large a map of Europe. “The French,” he said, as he looked up to greet his visitor, “don’t know either where or how to wage this war, which, by the way, they don’t in any case want to do.” He looked down again at Europe. “Within a month,” he predicted, “the Polish game will be over.”[8]
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It did not take long following the war’s outbreak for Mussolini to deliver his first warning to the pope. On September 3, barely forty-eight hours after German troops crossed into Poland, Italian police came to arrest Guido Gonella, one of the Vatican daily newspaper’s most prominent writers. Along with Giuseppe Dalla Torre, the director of L’Osservatore Romano, Gonella had long been seen by Fascist officials as an irritant, an anti-Fascist voice protected by the Vatican.
Gonella oversaw the column of the Vatican paper that reported world events. His arrest was prompted by an article he had published the previous day, “First Reflections on the Grave Conflict.” Mussolini’s ambassador to the Vatican, angered by what he viewed as the paper’s unflattering view of the German invasion, suggested that Mussolini put pressure on the pope by arranging to have Gonella denounced in the pages of Il Regime Fascista.[9] Mussolini had regularly used the newspaper for this purpose, and its director, Roberto Farinacci, was always happy to oblige. It was the old strategy of the carrot and the stick, with Farinacci delighting in his role as the cudgel.[10]
Unfortunately for Gonella, the Duce thought a firmer measure was required. The day after the offending article appeared, he personally ordered the Vatican journalist’s arrest.[11] Gonella was locked into Rome’s venerable Regina Coeli prison, its ironic name—Queen of Heaven—deriving from its seventeenth-century origins as a Catholic convent. The news quickly reached the pope, and despite the lateness of the hour—after ten p.m.—Cardinal Maglione phoned the Italian ambassador to demand an explanation. The next day Ambassador Pignatti came to see the cardinal and told him that as an Italian citizen, Gonella had no right to publish an article harmful to the national interest.
The cardinal threatened to have the pope publicly protest the arrest, but this failed to move the ambassador. Maglione decided to take a more conciliatory approach. Given the delicate moment, he said, a public quarrel would be damaging for both sides. He promised that the Vatican paper would publish no such critical articles of the German invasion in the future.[12]
Pignatti soon noted the improved atmosphere, reporting that one could now read the pages of the Vatican newspaper without fear of any unpleasant surprises. Indeed, the men of the Secretariat of State themselves seemed properly chastened. Mussolini personally ordered Gonella’s release.[13]
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While the Italian dictator was pressuring the pope to remain silent about the German invasion of Poland, the Polish ambassador kept trying to convince him to speak out. Reports from his country were indeed alarming. As the German forces moved through western Poland, destined to be absorbed into the Reich, hundreds of priests, thought to be inspiring Polish nationalism and Polish resistance, were being arrested. German priests were being brought in to replace them. In the end, more than half the priests in western Poland would end up in concentration camps, where many would die, while many seminaries, church schools, monasteries, and convents were shuttered. Church charitable institutions were closed, and outdoor shrines, crosses, and other church ritual sites dismantled.[14]
The day after the invasion of his country, the Polish ambassador met with the pope, proposing that he allow the Polish press to print a statement that the pope had blessed Poland. Although Cardinal Maglione and Monsignor Tardini found this unobjectionable, Pius XII demurred, initially proposing he instead release a statement of his own saying that as the pope loved all peoples, he also loved the Polish people. In the end, nothing came of this. Ten days later, the Polish ambassador asked the pope to meet with a group of Poles living in Rome. “At a time of extreme agony,” said the ambassador, “they would like to gather around their common Father.” The pope refused. “One does not see,” reads a Secretariat of State note on the request, “how an Audience can be granted that would not then take on a political value of great resonance.”[15]
The French ambassador to the Vatican continued his own attempts to convince the pope to break his silence, visiting Pius XII twice in the first week following the invasion. Explaining his decision to say nothing, the pope cited his desire not to do anything that might worsen the church’s situation in Germany. It was a rationale that the prelates of the Secretariat of State would often repeat as well. “All in the end told me,” Ambassador Charles-Roux reported, “that there were now around forty million Catholics in the Reich and that the Holy See could not expose them to reprisals. In short, I spoke in terms of morality, rights, honor, justice; and they responded to me in terms of method, practicality, tradition, and statistics.”[16]
Sixteen days after the German invasion, Soviet troops crossed Poland’s eastern border, and the country began to be carved up from both sides. Still the pope remained silent. Cardinal Tisserant, the Curia’s lone non-Italian and its only outspoken anti-Fascist, sent his own impassioned plea: “Soviet troops entered Polish territory yesterday. The soldiers of Adolf the Apostate and those of the atheist State are uniting to destroy Catholic Poland. Will the Holy See not protest?”[17]
Oddly, despite the international crisis, Cardinal Maglione had returned to his summer vacation home near Naples, leaving his two deputies to fend off pleas for a papal protest. The French ambassador had heard that Maglione had decided to leave the field clear for his two deputies, thinking they had more influence with the pope. While Charles-Roux had doubts this was true, he noted that “there is not great mutual sympathy between Pius XII and Cardinal Maglione.” The French diplomat thought Monsignor Montini, the man closest to the pope, would have liked him to utter some words of protest, but “the Holy Father, in his isolation at Castel Gandolfo, remains silent.”[18]
At the end of September, the arrival in Rome of Poland’s cardinal primate, August Hlond, led to new hopes the pope might finally speak out. Meeting with the pope at his summer palace, the cardinal and the Poles he brought with him were disappointed. Pius XII, noted Britain’s envoy to the Vatican, offered them “no word of reprobation of either the German or the Russian invasion of Poland.”[19]
If many were surprised by the pope’s silence, Hitler was not. A week into the Polish campaign, the German ambassador to the Vatican had sent Berlin a telegram: “Pope’s refusal to take sides against Germany would be entirely in harmony with assurances he has repeatedly conveyed to me through trusted agent in recent weeks.”[20]
Although Mussolini was impressed by the Germans’ rapid advance through Poland, he was well aware of his countrymen’s lack of enthusiasm for their German ally. Rachele, his wife, who had recently been on a train filled with soldiers, had heard the same thing from enlisted men: “For the Duce we would certainly go off to kill, but for Hitler…not even if God Almighty sent us.”[1]
Italy’s dictator found himself in a difficult balancing act, eager to cast himself as the one man who could bring about peace in Europe without tarnishing the aggressive image of Fascism he had spent the past two decades crafting. “In a situation full of unknowns like the current one,” he told Fascist Party leaders in Bologna in a mid-September speech, their task was clear: “Prepare militarily to be ready for any eventuality, support all efforts for peace, be vigilant and work in silence.” Two weeks later he struck a more aggressive pose in meeting with Fascist Party leaders from Genoa: “We are prisoners of the Mediterranean. It is a large prison, but a prison just the same…. You must prepare the Italian people for the eventuality of war.”[2]
In the early years of his regime, one of Mussolini’s favorite boasts was that he had saved Italy from the Communists. Now some found it surprising that he seemed unbothered that Hitler had partnered with Stalin in dividing up Poland. Shortly after the Red Army crossed the Polish border in mid-September 1939, Mussolini explained the situation to Clara. “The Russians are Slavs, just like the Poles: great enthusiasm but no preparation.” The contrast with the Germans, he told her, was stark: “a German soldier has his own culture, he reads, he understands everything…. Of every ten Russian soldiers, at least eight or nine don’t know how to read or write: they’re illiterate.” Hitler’s alliance with the Russians, he predicted, would not last long: “You will see I am a prophet: I would put my hand over the fire to swear that Germany and Russia will attack each other like two beasts.”[3]
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Despite Cardinal Maglione’s promises that L’Osservatore Romano would not publish anything the Duce might deem offensive, the newspaper remained a point of friction between the Vatican and the Fascist regime.[4] A mid-September article on the war provoked yet another protest from the Italian ambassador, who thought the piece had an anti-German tone. Confronted with the new complaint, Maglione briefly lost his patience. The government, he told Pignatti, could hardly expect them to transform the Vatican paper into another organ of Italian propaganda.[5]
The Italian ambassador decided the matter was important enough to raise directly with the pope. The key to the continuing problems caused by the Vatican newspaper, Pignatti told the pontiff at his late September audience at Castel Gandolfo, was its director, Giuseppe Dalla Torre.[6] Ever since the new pope had so speedily heeded Mussolini’s request and dismissed the cardinal coordinating Italian Catholic Action, it seemed likely that Dalla Torre, long a point of friction with the regime, would be next on the papal chopping block. Mussolini viewed him as a dangerous anti-Fascist, and of Dalla Torre’s anti-Nazi sentiments there was no doubt. But although the pope had, over Dalla Torre’s protests, forbidden him from publishing any more articles critical of Germany, he was reluctant to remove him from his post.[7]
When Pignatti broached the subject of the Vatican newspaper, the pope responded by recalling the recent imprisonment of Guido Gonella, the writer for the paper. “The Holy Father,” reported the ambassador, “spoke to me of the Gonella affair with great calm, without making the least complaint, not even for the removal of his Fascist membership.” What bothered the pope, according to Pignatti, was the injustice of Gonella suffering for something that was really not his fault, but Dalla Torre’s.[8]
The focus of the ambassador’s new complaint was an article in the Vatican newspaper that cast President Roosevelt in a good light. Hearing Pignatti describe the offending piece, the pope lashed out with uncharacteristic vehemence at Dalla Torre. He had repeatedly warned him, he said, yet he kept pushing the boundaries he had clearly been instructed not to cross.
Pignatti offered the pope a simple solution: “Send him away.”
Pius XII would make no promises. The paper’s director was intelligent and able, he said, but undisciplined. If Dalla Torre were left on his own, “he would strike out at half the world with his sarcasms.” In an effort to show his goodwill, the pope promised to turn down Dalla Torre’s request to buy new printing machines to meet the increased demand for the Vatican newspaper, and he led the ambassador to believe he would order a reduction in the number of copies printed. The next day the pope confirmed that he had put measures in place to ensure that L’Osservatore Romano would give the government no grounds for further complaint.[9]
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Anger at Pius XII’s silence continued to build, both in Poland and among its allies. By mid-October, Hitler had annexed a large swath of western Poland to the German Reich while the rest of the country was divided by a ragged border separating the German and Soviet zones of occupation. The Polish ambassador to the Holy See had repeatedly urged the pope to speak out, but to no avail. Britain’s envoy to the Vatican complained that the pope “has carried caution and impartiality to a point approaching pusillanimity and condonation.” While Osborne rejected his French colleague’s belief that the pope had come under German influence, he acknowledged that “the Pope’s silence seems hard to explain and defend.”[10]
Pius XII defended himself by arguing that as pope it was his role to attend to spiritual, not political matters.[11] But the line separating the two was less than clear, as would be evident in the pope’s first encyclical, a message addressed to all the world’s archbishops and bishops. The Italian press treated the encyclical not only as a statement of the pope’s theology but as the program of his papacy. Dated October 20, 1939, and issued from Castel Gandolfo, Summi Pontificatus bore the subtitle “On the Unity of Human Society.” Composed of 117 numbered paragraphs, it attributed the evils of the world to the spurning of Christ’s teachings. The pontiff urged “the Soldiers of Christ,” as he termed loyal Catholics, to combat “the ever-increasing host of Christ’s enemies.”
Preaching the value of “universal brotherhood,” and the “unity of mankind,” the pope castigated those nations that would separate church from state. While citing the church’s teaching of “obedience and respect for earthly authority which derives from God its whole origin,” he condemned any attempt by the state “to attribute to itself that absolute autonomy which belongs exclusively to the Supreme Maker. It puts itself in the place of the Almighty and elevates the State or group into the last end of life, the supreme criterion of the moral and juridical order.”[12]
In reporting the encyclical to Ciano, Ambassador Pignatti highlighted the “beautiful words” the pope had devoted to Italy and to the Lateran Accords: “There can be no doubt of the political importance of the papal speech given the fact that the ‘Conciliation’ is not only accepted but exalted by Pius XII.” In its coverage of the encyclical, Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper that Mussolini himself had founded and that had launched his Fascist career over two decades earlier, likewise highlighted the pope’s praise for the Italian regime.
The government office overseeing the foreign press in Italy prepared a critique of foreign coverage. What naturally made the greatest impression among the correspondents for the democratic countries, it reported, were the pope’s remarks condemning those who would place allegiance to the state over allegiance to God. “They however make clear that the Holy Father intended to identify in his condemnation only Germany and Russia, it being implicit, when he spoke of the good relations existing with Italy, that he intended to exclude Italy from it.” But the Vatican’s own paper, in an apparent attempt to calm any ruffled German feathers, highlighted the positive German press reaction to the encyclical. It offered lengthy quotes from the positive review in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. The pope’s words, said the German newspaper, were in harmony with the aims of the National Socialist government. Even Farinacci’s Il Regime Fascista offered a respectful summary of the encyclical.[13]
