The Pope at War, page 21
With their children ejected from the country’s public schools in 1938, Jews in Rome and in other Italian cities having sizable Jewish populations created new private Jewish schools. There was no lack of potential instructors, as the country’s Jewish schoolteachers and university professors had all been fired. Now cast out of many of the jobs that had supported them—the ban on selling used clothing hit the Jews of more humble station in Rome particularly hard—many struggled daily to afford food. A typical account tells of a nine-year-old boy from Rome’s old Jewish ghetto selling individual cigarette-rolling papers outside bars to help support his family. To prevent Catholics with Jewish-sounding names from being unfairly targeted, the government allowed them to have them changed.[1]
For over two years, Italians had been subjected to a barrage of newspaper and magazine stories warning them that Jews were their enemies, that on the one side were the true Italians, Aryan avatars of Fascism and Catholicism, and on the other stood the evil Jews. Indeed, the distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan in Italy was based for the most part on whether a person was Christian or Jewish.
In introducing his “racial” campaign two years earlier, Mussolini had worried about the possibility of church opposition. In the first months of the campaign, which had coincided with the last months of Pius XI’s papacy, the pope’s rebukes had enraged him. Pius XI’s opposition to the anti-Jewish “racial” laws threatened not only to weaken public support for the antisemitic campaign but also to diminish public enthusiasm for the dictator himself. Now, as the end of 1940 neared, the last thing Mussolini needed was for his increasingly harsh campaign against Italy’s Jews to do anything to undermine Italians’ support for his regime. Fortunately for the Duce, since Pius XII’s election, he had little grounds for complaint.
The Vatican newspaper reported the ever more oppressive racial laws without comment. “Yesterday,” noted a March 1940 article, “the deadline passed for canceling from the rolls those professionals considered to belong to the Jewish race who practice the professions of doctor, surgeon, pharmacist, obstetrician, lawyer, public prosecutor, public defender, shopkeeper, accountant, engineer, architect, chemist, agronomist, surveyor, agricultural consultant and industrial consultant. No delays have been granted.”[2]
In the late 1930s many Jews escaping persecution farther north in Europe—from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia—had fled to Italy. Five days after Italy’s entry into the war, the government ordered all foreign Jews arrested and moved to “appropriate concentration camps currently being constructed.” Soon thousands of Jews who had sought refuge in Italy would be confined in such camps. In all approximately two hundred camps were established, scattered throughout the country, some housing not only Jews but others deemed “enemy aliens” or ethnic undesirables.[3]
Since the beginning of the racial campaign in 1938, many of Italy’s Jews had tried to escape persecution by getting baptized, but while church doctrine made no distinction between Jews who had converted before the racial laws went into effect and those who had been baptized after, Fascist measures did so, provoking a litany of church complaint. Typical was a letter that the cardinal responsible for the Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary[*] sent Monsignor Montini in August. It told of a young Jewish woman who had been baptized and who now sought to marry a Catholic. The cardinal called on Montini to help win state recognition of the marriage. The reply sent to the cardinal was simple: “there is, unfortunately, nothing to be done…. Ever since the racial law began to be promulgated, the Holy See tried, but in vain, to have the civil effects of mixed marriages recognized whenever both newlyweds were of Catholic religion. The Government responded with a flat refusal.”[4]
Despite official church dogma that there was nothing “racial” separating Jews from Catholics, attitudes that smacked of racism had long been found in the Vatican, so that Jews who were baptized remained racially marked. The prelates of the Vatican readily picked up the distinction that identified Christians as Aryans and Jews as non-Aryans. We can see some of these attitudes reflected at the time in the pope’s handling of a gift of $125,000 given him by the American United Jewish Appeal to use in relief work to aid war refugees fleeing religious persecution. The pope used a good part of the American Jewish fund to support Catholics who had been Jewish before being baptized, but he also used it to aid an “Aryan” Austrian Catholic couple as well. When the concern was raised in the Secretariat of State that the funds might have been intended to be used only for “non-Aryans,” Monsignor Tardini looked further into the matter.
In his subsequent report, Tardini quoted from the auxiliary bishop of Chicago’s transmittal letter of the gift. The bishop, wrote Tardini, had specified that the funds were to be used to aid the victims of persecution “without regard to race or religion.” And so, advised the monsignor, “these funds can certainly be used to aid some Aryans.” He added, “if up to now those who were Jews by race but Catholic by religion have been preferred, there is no need to continue on this path.” Tellingly, while the above note is found in the Holy See’s authoritative volumes of Vatican documents dealing with aid to war victims, the published version omits an uncomfortable phrase by one of the prelates closest to the pope, and a man who would become Pope John XXIII’s secretary of state. Next to “Jews by race but Catholic by religion,” Tardini had commented parenthetically that such “Catholics” had, “by the nature of their action more honored…their race than their Catholicism.” In the place of the phrase in the Vatican publication is a square bracket containing three dots and a footnote: “Personal notes omitted.”[5]
In November Italy’s minister of popular culture, in charge of the government’s antisemitic propaganda campaign, asked Attolico to update him on the Vatican’s position on the racial laws. The ambassador offered a comforting reply: “As for racism, it is true that certain of the theories that have been advanced are condemned (at least implicitly) by the Church, but they are only those theories that contrast with [church] dogma. A racism that is limited to the biological sphere is not condemned.” As for the racial laws themselves, observed the ambassador, “The Church cannot approve of any ‘persecution’ against the Jews, but it is not opposed to prudent measures, aimed at rendering the Jews harmless in relation to the society in which they live. Indeed, that is what the Church itself did by instituting the ‘ghettoes’ and with other measures.”[6]
All this was welcome news for the propaganda minister, for one of the government’s favorite arguments in promoting public support for the racial laws was identifying them with the restrictions the popes had long thought necessary to impose on Jews when they had the power to do so as rulers of the Papal States. The popes had confined the Jews to ghettoes, forbidden them from practicing professions or owning property, and sought to isolate them from the Christians around them. Farinacci repeatedly published articles recounting this history, liberally quoting from past popes and past church councils, as did the rest of the Italian press.
Meanwhile in France, the Pétain regime was beginning to enact anti-Jewish measures of its own. An October 1940 law duplicated many of the measures Mussolini had earlier put in place in Italy, excluding Jews from teaching in the public schools, ejecting them from the civil service, judiciary, military, and journalism. In response, the French Catholic press offered similar support. In a late November article titled “Are the Jews cursed by God?” the venerable La Croix took up the theme widely found in Italian Catholic publications: while the church opposed “an overly sectarian anti-Semitism,” it had long recognized the need to act to protect Christian Europe from Jews’ pernicious influence.[7]
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While the Vatican was causing Mussolini no problems, the news from the battlefront was. Winter having descended in the mountains of Greece, frostbite was proving as damaging as bullets to the poorly outfitted Italian soldiers. The news from North Africa was no better. The Italian troops whose capture of the coastal towns of Egypt had earlier so excited the Duce were now being pushed back over the Libyan border, and by early January 1941, 130,000 Italian troops would surrender to a smaller British force.[8]
The reverses were producing a wave of public unhappiness with the war, prompted by the contrast between the rhetoric of Fascist invincibility featured in the nation’s press and the stories being told by soldiers returning from the front. As would become his habit, Mussolini blamed the military command and dismissed Marshal Pietro Badoglio, head of the Italian military and hero of the Ethiopian war. The ever-tighter rationing of basic foodstuffs and coal did nothing to help the public mood, which America’s military attaché in Rome captured well in a mid-December 1940 report:
Faced with the prospect of a long war with the outcome in doubt the morale of the Italian people is exceedingly low. The successes of the Greek Army in Albania have profoundly shocked the whole country. The Greek Army was unheard of by the people at large, whereas the Italian Army over a period of 15 years had been played up as one of the world’s great military machines. Therefore, the events in Albania have left them bewildered and uncomprehending.[9]
In hopes that Italians might rise up against the Duce, British prime minister Churchill took to the radio to broadcast a Christmas Eve appeal. One man, he said, was responsible for taking the country to war against Britain and leading the country to ruin. “It is all one man—one man, who, against the crown and royal family of Italy, against the Pope and all the authority of the Vatican and of the Roman Catholic Church, against the wishes of the Italian people who had no lust for this war; one man has arrayed the trustees and inheritors of ancient Rome upon the side of the ferocious pagan barbarians.”[10]
Whether many Italians were brave enough, or motivated enough, to risk arrest for listening to an enemy radio broadcast, we do not know. It was another Christmas Eve speech that dominated the Italian press, as amid the drama of the war, all awaited Pius XII’s annual Christmas address to the Sacred College of Cardinals. If Italians were looking for some concrete guidance from the pope, however, they were disappointed. As had by now become his practice, he went on at length at a level of abstraction and abstruse ecclesiastical language that flew over the heads of all but the most erudite church intellectuals. In the words of a Fascist police informant, “The Pope could have said more by saying less…. The great prolixity of Pius XII’s speeches comes at the expense of their substance.”[11]
After speaking at length in this fashion, the pontiff finally did turn his attention to the war. Here he developed two themes. He first devoted considerable verbiage to self-congratulation, as would become a standard feature of his wartime oratory, recalling all he had done to try to prevent the war from breaking out and then all the humanitarian relief efforts the Vatican was making to relieve the suffering caused by the war. The title he gave to the next section of his speech—“The premises of a just and lasting peace”—borrowed the phrase Mussolini was fond of using, and the pope followed this with a section bearing a phrase likewise claimed by Mussolini as his own: “aspirations for a new order.” When the pope reached his conclusion, he at last used language that was uncharacteristically plain: “Among contrasting systems [of government]…the Church cannot be called upon to make itself a partisan of one course rather than another.”[12]
Attolico immediately sent Ciano news of the speech, praising the pope’s words, highlighting his “affirmation of the necessity of a new world order,” underlining these last words, and suggesting which of the pope’s phrases they might best be able to exploit in press coverage of his address.[13]
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Once the Christmas rites were concluded, the pope began to receive the ambassadors to the Holy See for their annual New Year’s audiences. It was the first time for France’s new ambassador, Léon Bérard, recently sent by Marshal Pétain to replace d’Ormesson. Sixty-four years old, a lawyer and an academic, a devout Catholic, a conservative, and a former French education minister, Bérard was as reserved and cautious a man as his predecessor was outgoing and outspoken. Representing a government that was collaborating with the Germans, he would never be comfortable being confined to the same Vatican City hostel that housed the ambassadors of the enemies of the Axis.[14]
Their first encounter, earlier in the month, consisted in good part of the pope offering his praise for Marshal Pétain, pleased by all the ways his government was bringing back privileges the church had lost decades earlier in France. Bérard had himself been pleased that the pope proved so understanding of the new government’s need to have “relations of collaboration” with the Germans, as the pope shared his oft-repeated observation that the Germans had many good qualities. That said, the pope made clear that he was very concerned by what he saw as the Nazis’ antireligious doctrine and their anti-church measures.[15]
At his own New Year’s audience with Pius XII on the same day, Italy’s ambassador took the opportunity to thank the pontiff for his recent Christmas address. It had, Attolico said, made an excellent impression, citing especially the pope’s condemnation of “ignorant and depressing pessimism.” The ambassador expressed the hope that the pope’s words would make Italians realize that at a time of war it was the church’s role to strengthen public morale. “I found the Pontiff,” Attolico observed, “agreeing perfectly with this concept.”[16]
Indeed, the war did seem to be going well for the Axis powers, despite Italy’s own military failures. On the last day of 1940, Monsignor Borgongini, the nuncio to the Italian government, offered the pope’s New Year’s greetings to the king. Victor Emmanuel told the nuncio he didn’t think the British could hold out much longer, for amid the relentless bombing, London was suffering “immense disasters.” While some were worried that America might enter the war, there was little reason to be concerned. The Americans seemed unlikely to want to do so, and even if they did, the king assured him, with German U-boats patrolling the Atlantic, they would never succeed in landing troops on the continent.[17]
Skip Notes
* The Apostolic Penitentiary is a tribunal of the Holy See, responsible for providing “absolution in the name of the pontiff on grave matters presented at court for the pope’s opinion.” Noonan 1986, p. 84.
By the time 1941 dawned, Italy’s military had become the laughingstock of Europe. “Even before the war,” read an early January German analysis, “it was the firm conviction of the German General Staff that not too much could be expected from the Italian Army.” Hitler’s generals had had higher hopes for Italy’s air force and navy, but they too would disappoint. The air force had hardly been heard from, and as for Mussolini’s much-vaunted navy, after only half a year of war, it “has relinquished naval supremacy completely to the English, both in the Mediterranean and in the Red Sea—actually without a fight.” Anthony Eden, the UK’s foreign secretary, referring to the recent surrender by Italian troops in North Africa, quipped, “Never had so much been surrendered by so many to so few.” Back in Italy, the last of the large colored plaster maps set up in town squares throughout the country, with movable pegs to show the forward position of Italian troops, were being discreetly removed.[1]
Following the string of Italian military reverses abroad, and the sporadic British bombardments of the country’s cities, public opinion was souring on the war. While there were still relatively few victims of the bombings, Italians found the lack of air defenses astonishing after years of regime boasts of invulnerability.[2] Mussolini’s ambassador to the Holy See brought Cardinal Maglione, the pope’s secretary of state, a list of parish bulletins seized by the police on the grounds they were undermining public morale. Maglione replied he had recently discussed the problem with Pius XII, and as the ambassador later reported, “the Pontiff himself had recognized the necessity of an intervention.”[3]
After a new appeal by the bishop heading Italian Catholic Action for support of Italy’s military efforts, the director of Italy’s most important Catholic daily, L’Avvenire d’Italia, devoted a huge front-page editorial to hailing the pontiff’s presumed approval for the Axis war: “People are asking today for a better division of land and wealth. Pius XII has said many times that this ideal is legitimate.” Archbishop Bartolomasi, head of the military chaplains, added his voice to assure Italians of the pope’s blessing for the Axis cause. He sent the chaplains a circular, featured in the Catholic press as well, praising the value of their work “in these days of a war that must, at any cost, be won. It must be won…for a better division of the wealth…for a better understanding and realization of the Gospels’ ethical-social principles.” All this, proclaimed the archbishop, reflected “the intention of the Holy Father’s august Christmas speech to the College of Cardinals.”[4]
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In the wake of Italy’s continuing reverses in Greece and North Africa, Galeazzo Ciano was in a bad mood, as Monsignor Borgongini, the papal nuncio, discovered when he went to see him. The nuncio had come to ask for the foreign minister’s help. Due to wartime rationing, the Vatican was encountering difficulties getting its own food supplies, as even basic items like bread, olive oil, and pasta were becoming scarce. He suggested that Ciano might have a word about the matter with his father-in-law.
