The Pope at War, page 20
“I would like the relations between us, beyond simply being those of reciprocal understanding, to be based on trust,” said the pope, now in a more conciliatory mood. “One should not always believe the information that one receives. If there is something that, in the opinion of the Italian government, needs to be corrected, tell me clearly, openly. I will always be very pleased, and our relations can only gain from it.”
Expressing his pleasure at the Duce’s restatement of his commitment to the concordat, a key component of the 1929 Lateran Accords, the pope recalled that it was his older brother, Francesco, who had negotiated them. As he spoke of his brother, who had died several years earlier, the pope’s voice softened. Francesco, said the pope, had praised the Duce’s “precious contribution” in crafting the historic accords and had said what a great and intelligent man he was. His brother had regarded Mussolini not only “with the greatest esteem, but also the deepest admiration.” Warming to his subject, the pope added that no one should forget all the Duce had done for the church, giving civil effect to religious marriages, introducing religious instruction in the public schools, and so many other things. The pope, Attolico was relieved to report, had clearly calmed down.[9]
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Italy’s Catholic press continued to offer strong support for the war. In early October a Civiltà Cattolica article declared that the rebirth of an Italian empire would strengthen the Roman Catholic Church’s influence in the world. “The article,” the Italian ambassador reported to Ciano, “took its inspiration directly from the Duce’s words.” Indeed, it quoted Mussolini by name, expressing support for the rationale he had given for the war, achieving a “Europe of justice for all,” and followed the Duce in blaming the war on the evil wrought by the Versailles Treaty. “I would be grateful,” Attolico told Mussolini’s son-in-law in conclusion, “if these articles…were made known to the Duce.”[10]
Italy’s Catholic daily newspapers meanwhile continued to do their part in promoting the idea that the Axis cause was the church’s own. The country’s most prominent Catholic daily, L’Avvenire d’Italia, owned by Catholic Action and jointly supported by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of four regions of the northeast of the country, published a stream of praise of the regime and its war aims. Raimondo Manzini, the paper’s director—whom years later Pope John XXIII would appoint director of L’Osservatore Romano—penned a front-page editorial praising the latest group of volunteers going off to fight and chronicled all the important changes brought about in Italy by two decades of Fascism, replacing a liberal society with one respectful of authority.[11]
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In mid-September 1940 Mussolini’s troops based in Italy’s Libyan colony crossed into Egypt and quickly captured the small Mediterranean town of Sidi Barrani, about a hundred kilometers east of the Libyan border, the first step in the effort to wrest the Suez Canal from the British. The approaching confrontation seemed a mismatch, with a quarter-million Italian troops based in Libya arrayed against perhaps 36,000 British troops stationed in Egypt. Emboldened, the Duce decided to open a second front, turning his sights to Greece.[12]
While Hitler had supported Mussolini’s decision to march on Egypt, he was not pleased by this new development. The Führer’s own long-term plan was to defeat the Soviet Union after he dispatched Britain. Stirring up war in the Balkan Peninsula now would, he feared, be an invitation to have the Soviet Union move troops in that direction. Making the invasion even less palatable to Hitler, the head of Greece’s government, Ioannis Metaxas, was a pro-Nazi dictator who had studied in Germany. The Führer decided to travel to Italy to try to dissuade his Italian comrade.[13]
Hitler’s nine-car train arrived at Florence’s train station at midmorning on October 28. Mussolini waited at the platform, a military band behind him. When the train stopped, the Duce, in an ebullient mood, waved his arms as if conducting the band as it played its musical tribute. The Führer leaned out of his window and forced himself to smile as he watched Mussolini walk along the red carpet that had been laid out for the welcome. “Führer,” said the Duce, “we are on the march. My troops victoriously entered Greece at six this morning.”
Mussolini and Hitler in Florence, October 28, 1940
Hitler, who realized he had come too late, remained silent.
“Don’t worry,” said Mussolini, “in two weeks, it will all be over.”[14]
Italy’s invasion of Greece rapidly turned into a fiasco. At Greece’s mountainous border with Albania, torrential rains transformed the dirt roads into mud traps, and bad weather prevented both air support and the landing of supply ships. For four days Italian soldiers slogged onward, crossing swollen streams and rivers as fallen trees and drowned sheep swept by. Much to the soldiers’ surprise, Greek artillery soon began shelling their positions. After briefly capturing a handful of Greek villages near the border, the Italians were surrounded by Greek troops assisted by hostile locals. The weather became even worse, as rain turned to snow, and temperatures plunged. Weapons and feet froze, and at night the shivering soldiers huddled together beneath piles of blankets in the holes they had dug. On November 14 a full-scale Greek counteroffensive began. Within days the Italians’ modest gains were wiped out, as they hurried in embarrassing retreat back into Albanian territory. To make matters worse, British bombers flying from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious succeeded in sinking a not insignificant part of the Italian naval fleet, anchored across the Adriatic at the Italian port of Taranto.[1]
Hitler was not pleased. “The situation which has now arisen,” the Führer wrote the Duce, “has very grave psychological and military repercussions.” The Italian attack had given the British an excuse to establish air bases in Greece, which now threatened the Romanian oil fields on which the Germans depended. It also threatened to draw the Russians into the Balkans. In his reply, the Duce assured Hitler that he was readying new divisions “to annihilate Greece,” adding, in a note that would have brought little comfort to his countrymen south of Rome, that he was unconcerned about British bombings of southern Italian cities, as they contained no industrial plants of any importance.[2]
For Hitler’s war effort, Italy’s unfolding catastrophe in Greece would soon appear as only a temporary setback, but for Mussolini it marked a major turning point. Until then, it seemed to many Italians that he had gone from victory to victory, bringing the country ever greater respect in the world. He had conquered Ethiopia and declared the birth of a new empire. He had sent Italians to Spain and helped win Franco’s victory. He had invaded Albania and, in a matter of days, and with little bloodshed, added King of Albania to Victor Emmanuel’s titles. Few Italians had questioned their military’s ability to prevail over Greece, regarded as a small, third-rate power. Now, for the first time, confidence in the Duce began to waver. When, over the next few weeks, the British began a successful counterattack on Italy’s troops in Egypt, the shock of defeat gave way to national embarrassment and disorientation, then to despair.[3]
The Greek disaster would be a turning point for another reason as well. It marked the beginning of the end of Mussolini’s conceit that he was fighting a “parallel war” alongside his German ally, with the Italians expanding their empire in the Mediterranean while the Germans took the lead farther north. The Italian military, never taken very seriously by the German military command, would have to be repeatedly rescued by the Germans, and both the Allies and the Germans would come to view Italy as the soft underbelly of the Axis.[4]
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Unsurprisingly, Marshal Pétain, leader of the French collaborationist government, wanted to have an emissary to the pope he could trust, and the outspokenly anti-Fascist d’Ormesson was certainly not such a man. In his final report, in late October 1940, the outgoing ambassador, a perceptive observer, recorded his impressions of the pope and of the mood prevailing in the Vatican five months after Mussolini’s declaration of war.
When Pius XII was elected, d’Ormesson recalled, many had thought he would simply continue his predecessor’s policies. After all, he had not only been Pius XI’s secretary of state, he had chosen the pope’s name as his own. But these predictions had proven false. “In reality,” wrote the ambassador, “Pius XI and Pius XII were very different men. In the place of a robust mountaineer from Milan came a more passive Roman bourgeois.” Pius XII “is good, fine, sensitive, it is even said oversensitive. But in my opinion, he lacks personality, or more exactly he lacks strong character.” Pacelli had spent his entire adult life as a Vatican diplomat and had never held a pastoral position. This had left him, thought the ambassador, with habits of reserve, of prudence, of finding “balance” that led him to avoid offering any harsh words of criticism. Coupled with his taste for what d’Ormesson dubbed a “beau style” of florid speech, this robbed his words of any clarity.
“The Pope seems to me above all to be a conservative of a monarchical stamp,” observed d’Ormesson, “enemy of all demagogueries, whether they be communist or National Socialist (but of the communists above all)…. He openly collaborates with fascism and, although sometimes treated roughly by Mr. Farinacci, and, above all, treated with great indifference by Mr. Mussolini, he seizes every opportunity to show his loyalty to the Fascist government. He had not a single word, nor gesture, even an indirect one, to criticize Italy for its entry into the war.” Pius XI, thought the Frenchman, would have publicly condemned the Axis aggression, but the horrific violence simply served to drive Pius XII back into his shell. All this played into Mussolini’s strength, for if ever there was a master of exploiting the weaknesses of others, it was the Duce, and Mussolini had become an expert in manipulating the pope to get what he wanted.
The pope’s refusal to take a public stand had continually frustrated the French diplomat. His speeches, since the war began, had been devoid of specific references to what was happening in the world. “Each time I approached the Pope and spoke to him of the future condition of Europe, I was always struck by the lack of clarity of his responses…. Obviously, he did not want to compromise himself, much less to commit himself.” It was crucial, the ambassador believed, to understand that the Vatican made a “total distinction between Germany and Italy, the latter power continuing to benefit from a very favorable prejudice.” He explained, “Despite fascism…despite Monsieur Mussolini’s own flippant attitude toward the Holy See (and this attitude is total), the Holy See remains and will always remain infinitely favorably disposed to Italy…. They are certainly conscious of its faults, and even of its villainy, but they are always ready to find excuses for it.” By contrast, the prelates offered no such excuses for the German regime. Not a trace of “Nazi-philia” was to be found in the Vatican.
Only one development could alter this picture, thought the ambassador. Should Germany renounce its pact with the Soviet Union and turn against it, all might change. Italian Catholics would rally enthusiastically to the anti-Bolshevik cause, and the war would become “a sort of crusade.” “Bolshevism being the principal enemy for the Church, Germany, in crushing it, would quickly regain sympathy and prestige at the Vatican…. In such a scenario, the Axis would appear as the ‘secular arm’ of the Church.” But for the moment, the prevailing attitude toward Germany in the Vatican, reported d’Ormesson, was fear: fear of German power and of the fate of the church in a Europe under the thumb of a triumphant Germany.[5]
The pope received d’Ormesson for a final audience on October 29, 1940. Mussolini had met with Hitler in Florence the previous day, the same day he had launched his invasion of Greece. For Hitler, it had been the last stop on a train trip that had stops for talks with Marshal Pétain in France and with Spain’s new dictator, Francisco Franco. Hitler had been disappointed by all three of the meetings. Pétain, he thought, was old and weak, and Franco evasive about joining the Axis. Mussolini had stubbornly gone ahead with his attempt to take Greece despite the Führer’s misgivings.[6]
The French envoy was eager to get the pope’s reaction to the Italian invasion of Greece, but he found that “as was the case every time that Italy’s behavior came into question,” the pope was reluctant to say anything. “One gets the strong sense,” reported the ambassador, “that the Pope has such a fear that a phrase, a word of his might be repeated and escape the walls of Vatican City, that he prefers to remain silent, and merely nod and look up, raising his eyes to the sky.”
The next day Pius XII hosted an audience attended by two hundred Italian soldiers, along with the priests who served as their chaplains. Blessing them and their “precious Fatherland,” he praised them for serving their country with “such faith, loyalty, and courage.” Attolico happily reported all this to Ciano, noting that the pope had made his remarks soon after learning the news of Italy’s invasion of Greece.[7]
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Remaining silent was not without its risks for the pope. In early November Cardinal Maglione received a long memo from Kazimierz Papée, the Polish ambassador to the Holy See, still hoping the pope would speak out against the horrors that the Nazis were visiting on his country. The Germans, Papée told him, were using the fact that Pius XII had received Hitler’s foreign minister, Ribbentrop, in March, months after the invasion of Poland, to claim the pope approved of Germany’s action. After all the outrages the Nazis had committed against the Catholic clergy and church institutions in Poland, people were asking why he had still said nothing. Many Poles wondered why Vatican Radio, while occasionally speaking of Soviet misdeeds in Poland, had remained silent about the German occupation of the country, and L’Osservatore Romano made no mention at all of the German assault on Poland.[8]
The ambassador’s plea had little effect. On November 10, in an event the Italian ambassador reported on at length to Ciano and Mussolini, the pope hosted five thousand youth members of Italian Catholic Action. At the special mass held in St. Peter’s Basilica following the pope’s remarks, Monsignor Colli, bishop of Parma and national leader of Catholic Action, addressed the crowd. Quoting liberally from the pope, the bishop urged them to support the war. “The youths of Italian Catholic Action,” Colli told them, “do not forget—something which the Holy Father continues to urge on them—that ‘we have here too a Fatherland that is dear to us, to which we owe a cult of faithful love.’ ” All good Italians, the bishop told them, quoting the pope, were obliged to “serve it as ‘perfect citizens…ready even to give our lives every time that the legitimate good of the country requires this supreme sacrifice.’ ”[9]
The church continued to signal its support for Italy’s Fascist regime in many ways. The unexpected death of Mussolini’s longtime police chief, Arturo Bocchini, a man who every morning brought him the latest informant reports to review, produced the latest signs of the close ties between church and state. Rome’s Catholic daily, L’Avvenire, offered the good news that Bocchini had still been conscious and filled “with a feeling of great piety” when his parish priest gave him the last rites. Monsignor Borgongini, the papal nuncio, had been present at his deathbed, bringing the main architect of Italy’s police state the comfort of the pope’s blessing. Archbishop Bartolomasi, head of the military chaplaincy and outspoken shill for the Fascist regime, presided over Bocchini’s funeral mass at one of Rome’s historic churches.[10]
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Criticized for his seeming invisibility amid the drama engulfing Europe, the pope decided he needed to do something to appear in the public eye. He planned a special mass honoring the victims of war to be broadcast from St. Peter’s. Virtually all of the twenty-four cardinals resident in Rome were present for the ceremony held on Sunday, November 24, 1940, and a large crowd filled the pews. Following a long disquisition on Christ’s teachings, sprinkled liberally with references to verses from the New Testament, the pope turned to the crux of his message. It was crucial, he said, that an order be restored among the world’s peoples “that is more equitable and universal, based on that justice which calms the passions.” It was an order, he explained, “that tends to attribute to all peoples, in tranquility, in freedom and in security, the part that is due each of them in this world.”[11]
While the pope had understandably lamented the suffering caused by war, observed the Italian ambassador in reporting the speech, he “knew how to find the right equilibrium.” Indeed, there were parts of the speech, Attolico suggested, that the Axis could use to show the pontiff’s support for their cause, including his statement that a more equal division of the earth’s riches was needed. Pius XII had also again praised the soldiers for heroically fulfilling their duties, even to the point of sacrificing their lives for their Fatherland. In its coverage of the event, Mussolini’s own newspaper highlighted much the same points. Farinacci’s paper likewise gave glowing coverage to the speech, quoting the same lines.[12]
Disappointed but not surprised, Britain’s envoy attributed the pope’s words to the fact that he was “anxious and cautious by temperament,” and “desirous of avoiding any charge of political partisanship so as to be in a position to exercise his influence when the moment comes for initiating peace negotiations.” Pius XII, he noted, remained “firmly convinced of German victory.”[13]
For Italy’s Jews, the humiliations were endless. One summer day—to cite a typical story—parents of a young family from Rome’s old ghetto decided to escape the sweltering city and give their children a treat. They went to a beach resort at nearby Ostia that they had often frequented in the past. When they arrived, the proprietor, who had in earlier years welcomed them warmly with a smile, now had an unmistakably severe look on his face. “What do you want?” he asked brusquely. The Jewish father had barely begun to respond with a “Buongiorno” when the proprietor cut him short. “Don’t you read the papers?” he shouted. “Beginning this past year, people of the Jewish race are not allowed in this establishment. You can’t come here again! Go away!” Rather than subject his family to further embarrassment as other beachgoers looked silently on, he took the hands of his crestfallen children and returned to the city.
