The Pope at War, page 19
The pope’s nervousness about the Congo reflected the Vatican’s continuing discomfort with the German government, seen as weakening church influence in the lands it conquered. The sharp-tongued Monsignor Tardini dubbed Hitler the “Motorized Attila.” Even among those Italians who were more positively inclined to the war, the Nazis were not particularly popular. A police informant reported that the image of King Victor Emmanuel in a newsreel at a Rome movie theater provoked enthusiastic applause. The subsequent projection of an image of the Duce prompted a similar reaction. “But Hitler’s appearance,” the informant recalled, “passed amid the most absolute indifference.” In an effort to do his patriotic duty, the informant said he had tried to encourage the audience by enthusiastically clapping, but “it was followed by barely a dozen people who immediately got tired of applauding.”[23]
Rome’s Catholic newspaper, L’Avvenire, July 21, 1940: “A Great Speech by Hitler”
Although not standing up and applauding for Mussolini, the Vatican authorities were doing all they could to remain in his good graces.[24] Attolico continued his stream of encouraging reports on the Vatican’s cooperation. On July 24 he sent a clipping from its newspaper featuring Father Gemelli’s new call to support the Axis war. “I want to immediately bring to your attention,” wrote Attolico, “how the attitude of L’Osservatore Romano not only no longer gives rise to concerns but has assumed, and I’ve been assured that it will always assume in the future, an attitude of greater understanding.” Father Gemelli’s well-publicized support for the war, he said, was priceless.[25]
Attolico, career diplomat, devout Catholic, unsympathetic to the Nazis, and never a true-believing Fascist, continued to be one of Mussolini’s most valuable assets. Showing increasing initiative, in late June he had written to Arturo Bocchini, Italy’s talented police chief. The Italian ambassador, who used the informal “tu” form in his note, had a request to make:
“Dear Bocchini, I know that an opportune surveillance is exercised by the Borgo police commissioner over Vatican City. Given the particular moment, do you think it possible to allow the Commissioner of Borgo to give me contemporaneously those reports that he may judge of interest to the Embassy?”
“Dear Attolico,” replied Bocchini, “I can assure you I have given instructions to the Commissioner of Borgo to act in accordance with your request.”[26]
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The pope, eager to avoid antagonizing Mussolini, was keeping a close eye on the pages of the Vatican newspaper. In mid-August, a rather minor infraction gave rise to a sharp papal rebuke to the paper’s director, delivered via Monsignor Montini. “It is not without pain this evening that I must echo what the Holy Father said about publication of the article on the third page reviewing the book by Seppelt and Loeffler, which lacked prior approval…. You were told, only this past June…not to publish anything regarding Germany or books by German authors without first getting approval from this office, such being the delicacy of that situation and all the interest that it attracts.” Thus chastised, Giuseppe Dalla Torre immediately sent a notice to the paper’s editorial staff warning them not to publish anything regarding Germany without his approval, not even a book review.[27]
By all reports, the pope had become depressed, despairing at the devastation Europe was suffering, but despairing too at his own plight. To criticize Mussolini would be to end the mutually beneficial relations the Vatican had long enjoyed with the Fascist regime. To criticize Hitler and the Nazis would be to risk further actions aimed against the church in the largely Catholic lands that the Germans had recently conquered and to turn the millions of German Catholics loyal to the Nazi government against him. To add to his hesitancy, he thought it only prudent to plan for protecting the interests of the church in a future Europe dominated by the Axis powers. His nervousness was heightened when, in mid-August, Germany began its massive air attacks on Britain. By the end of the month, over a thousand German sorties each day were dropping bombs on the island in preparation for a landing on British soil, a landing that seemed imminent. The end of the war, it appeared, might well be near.[28]
To understand the pope’s actions, it is also important to realize he shared a view largely prevailing in the Curia, one that distinguished between good Fascists and bad Fascists. The good ones—men like Attolico—were loyal, conservative Catholics who sought a close, mutually respectful collaboration between the church and the regime. The bad Fascists, men like Farinacci, frequently from socialist backgrounds, were anticlerics, regarded as left-wing Fascists by the Vatican. Although they often posed as defenders of the church, they were interested only in using the clergy, the pope included, as their lapdogs.
Monsignor Tardini explained all this to the French ambassador in late August. The Fascist Party, as he put it, was torn between two tendencies. One consisted of the bellicose, antireligious fanatics who were strong supporters of the Third Reich and adversaries of the Holy See. The other was composed of more moderate people who dreaded German hegemony, had advocated Italian neutrality, and were sympathetic to the church and the Vatican. With Italy’s entry into the war, it was clear it was the first group that had won Mussolini over.
In lamenting this situation with d’Ormesson, the tart-tongued Tardini may have said more than was prudent. “You see,” he told the French ambassador, “all the courtesy, the moderation, the benevolence, the goodwill, all that has no chance of success in dealing with the Fascist leaders. On the contrary! All that does is excite them…. Pope Pius XI sometimes spoke to them without mincing words, harshly…. And, well, they respected him and they feared him.” The monsignor did not need to draw the obvious conclusion. “It is clear,” observed d’Ormesson, “that Pius XII’s policy, which has consisted up to now of dealing carefully with the Fascist government and giving in to certain of its demands…does not seem, in Monsignor Tardini’s eyes, to have had happy results.”[29]
While anguish was the dominant mood behind the walls of Vatican City, and with it fears of what a Nazi-dominated Axis victory would bring, Italy’s Catholic laity had little idea the church was anything other than fully supportive of the Axis war. Bishops and other influential prelates continued to urge the faithful to rally to the nation’s armed cause.
The daily Catholic press joined in the chorus. As the summer of 1940 was coming to a close, Milan’s Catholic daily published a big front-page editorial, “The New European Order,” echoing the Fascist watchword. It incorporated many of the regime’s main propaganda points: “There has been much talk in recent times of a new European order, which will come about the day in which, with their definitive victory, the two Powers of the Rome-Berlin Axis prevail over the Anglo-Saxon plutocracy and will finally be in a position to reestablish a peace based on justice.” Axis victory, the Catholic paper predicted, would bring about the collapse of “the territorial political system based on the Peace Treaty that emerged from the world war of 1914–18 and on the League of Nations, ruled over by the two hegemonic Powers and by the Jewish-masonic international cliques.”[30]
In the three months since Italy’s declaration of war, the pope had said little publicly about it, but on September 4, 1940, he gave voice to the modus vivendi he had reached with Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Speaking at the Vatican to two thousand Catholic Action leaders and assembled church dignitaries, the pontiff stressed the duty all citizens had to their country. He quoted Romans 13:1: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” He urged members of Catholic Action to “offer loyal and conscientious obedience to the civil Authorities and their legitimate prescriptions.” They should show that they were “not only the most fervent Christians, but also perfect citizens, not exempt from the high duties of national and social life together, lovers of the fatherland, and ready as well even to give their life for it every time that the legitimate good of the Country calls for this supreme sacrifice.”
Warm applause greeted the pope’s remarks.[1]
Mussolini had reason to be pleased not only by the pope’s speech but by the police reports describing the vocal support other churchmen were giving to the war effort. “The clergy in general,” read one such report, “and the parish priests in particular have offered praiseworthy proof of patriotism ever since the declaration of war. In all the correspondence they are sending members of the military they are, yes, expressing the wish for world peace, but also for the victory of Italian arms.”[2]
Some idea of the pope’s thinking at the time comes from his remarks to the French ambassador. The London blitz had recently begun, with hundreds killed in the initial air attacks. The daily bombardment would continue to drive Londoners into shelters every night for many months to come. The blitz followed weeks of heavy German bombing of British military bases, airfields, and industrial plants. Commenting on the German assault, the pontiff expressed his admiration for the Britons’ courage, especially praising the example the king and queen offered by refusing to leave the capital. Even if the Germans did succeed in occupying the country, thought the pope, the British would likely continue their struggle. Perhaps they would make Canada their center of operations. There they could closely coordinate their efforts with the United States.
The pope then turned to a familiar theme, lamenting Germany’s continuing campaign of “de-Christianization,” especially in Catholic Austria. On the other hand, the pope told the French ambassador, Italy was a completely different story. Mussolini’s government had given the church a position of honor and made Catholic religious instruction obligatory in the nation’s schools. Finally, the pope turned to what he saw as the greatest threat the church faced, expressing his alarm at the advance of Russian troops in Europe. A month earlier the Soviet Union had annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, having earlier in the summer occupied portions of Romania. “One gets the impression,” reported d’Ormesson, “that for him, communism is ‘public enemy Number 1.’ ”[3]
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While Vatican relations with the Italian government continued to be good, Roberto Farinacci’s attacks on church figures in his front-page editorials in his newspaper, Il Regime Fascista, continued to anger Pius XII. If he wanted to upset the pope, he could do no better than the new target he chose late in the summer of 1940, Francis Spellman, whom the pope had appointed archbishop of New York the previous year. “He is a great friend of the Pope’s to which his unexpected promotion was undoubtedly due,” the British envoy to the Vatican observed. Indeed, Spellman was by far the member of the American church hierarchy whom Pius XII knew best. Not only had he served for years, beginning in the 1920s, in the Vatican Secretariat of State, but during Eugenio Pacelli’s grand tour of the United States in 1936, he served as the then cardinal’s companion and guide.[4]
In 1932 Pius XI had forced Spellman on William O’Connell, the strong-minded archbishop of Boston, to serve as his auxiliary bishop. To show his displeasure, O’Connell had refused to see his new number two for a month after his arrival. Seven years later, now in his new post in New York, the politically savvy Spellman won the confidence of the American president. Roosevelt came to see the talented and ambitious new archbishop as a valuable resource in garnering the support of America’s large Catholic electorate. In a typical message, in March 1940, Spellman sent Roosevelt a handwritten letter telling him of his St. Patrick’s Day speech “thanking you in the name of 21,000,000 Catholics for your logical and courageous action in sending Mr. Taylor to the Holy Father…. I took advantage of the occasion of a very important function with bishops in attendance from all over the US, 65 of them…to explain our gratitude to you.” Along with his note he sent the president a series of press clippings covering his speech.[5]
In the wake of Farinacci’s two editorials attacking him for his support of Roosevelt and charging him with being a stooge of America’s Jews, Spellman registered his displeasure with Italy’s consul general in New York. The archbishop’s complaint was later relayed to Mussolini’s son-in-law. The consul reported that Spellman had long been a friend of Italy and found it outrageous he should be attacked in the Fascist press.[6]
In late September the Duce received further news of the problems that the Regime Fascista attacks were creating for him in the United States. A group of prominent Italian American public officeholders and judges, presenting themselves as representing more than a million Catholics in New York City “of Italian race,” sent a telegram to Rome. They called on the Duce “to stop Minister Farinacci in his campaign against the Holy Father that wounds our Catholic sentiments and, provoking general resentment in America, increases antipathy toward Italy.”[7]
Monsignor Francis Spellman, Archbishop of New York
The pope himself soon made his unhappiness known. At a September 22 audience, Bernardo Attolico found Pius XII in an unusually combative mood. Italy’s ambassador had come with a request to make. Mussolini wanted the pope to raise the archdiocese of Bari, facing the Adriatic atop Italy’s heel, to the status of a cardinal’s seat. As the ambassador explained, the Duce wanted the port city to become the “ring linking west to east, the instrument of Italian expansion in the Mediterranean and beyond.” The pope seemed in no mood to discuss the question. He would study the proposal, he said impatiently, but he had something else on his mind, an article that had appeared the previous day in a Roman newspaper.
“I had barely received assurance that all polemics in Regime Fascista against my person and against the Holy See would be stopped,” said the pope, “when the polemics are reopened by the Popolo di Roma. This pains me. I deceived myself and harbored the illusion for all the past year that relations between Church and State in Italy could be perfect. This was my dream, the dream that has inspired all my speeches and all my actions.”
By way of example of the support he had lent the regime since the war began, the pope cited his speech earlier in the month to members of Italian Catholic Action. There, he told Mussolini’s ambassador,
in a perfectly national setting, I reminded the faithful that it is their duty to sacrifice for the Fatherland, even, if necessary, with their life. I have neglected nothing on my part, and I would be disposed to do even more. I reduced L’Osservatore Romano to a publication that now no one reads. In return, they feel free to insult me publicly without—even if they suspend the campaign for a few days—giving me any public satisfaction. They abuse me because I do not respond. But one day I might indeed speak and then I would speak without any worry for the human consequences.
While saying all this, the pope sat with one hand resting on a large folder filled with the offensive newspaper clippings.
Taken aback by the pope’s uncharacteristically aggressive tone, Attolico tried to turn the pontiff’s attention to happier matters. Mussolini, he told him, hoped to have Italy replace Britain as the protector of the Holy Land and so was working to provoke an Arab revolt there.
The pope was in no mood to be distracted. As Attolico tried to engage him in a conversation about how the Italian government could cooperate with the Vatican in managing Palestine’s Holy Places, the pope interrupted. “Yes, this too would be possible, but only in an atmosphere of harmony and reciprocal understanding, which is now lacking.”
The pontiff returned to his lament about how he had deceived himself by dreaming of complete harmony with Mussolini’s regime. “The Pope said all this,” Attolico later recalled, “in a tone of bitterness, no longer that of resignation as before but as that of a person who is now ready for the worst.” It was crucial, Attolico advised his government, for Italy’s press to avoid any more criticism of the Vatican and find an occasion in the near future to heap praise on Pius XII.[8]
Told of the pope’s unhappiness, Mussolini instructed his ambassador to return immediately to calm the Holy Father. He was to let the pope know that he was committed to respecting both the letter and the spirit of the concordat, including its provision making insults to the pontiff a criminal offense. He would also give new instructions to have the press attacks stopped. But along with these carrots came the stick: the pope was to be told of a disturbing report Mussolini had received. Several local Catholic Action groups were involved in unacceptable political activity. It went without saying that government action might be needed.
Meeting with the ambassador only five days after their previous encounter, the pope reacted to the Duce’s complaint with what, for the highly controlled pontiff, was practically an explosion of anger. If there were any such incidents of inappropriate behavior by Catholic Action groups, said the pope, he was unaware of them. Again, he cited his recent allocution to the leaders of Catholic Action, calling on their members to be ready to sacrifice their lives for their country. “And here,” reported the ambassador, the pope’s “eyes were almost sparkling, thanks to the intimate pleasure produced by recalling the ‘burst of enthusiasm’ that these words evinced in the crowd.”
All that might be true, countered Attolico, who was in fact sympathetic with the pontiff’s views, but he insisted there might still be isolated Catholic Action groups harboring “nostalgic adversaries of the totalitarian regimes.” If so, replied the pope, “give me the specific cases. Give me the concrete facts, and I won’t hesitate for a single moment to remedy them.”
