The Pope at War, page 24
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As Roosevelt was ramping up his efforts to send aid to Britain, while fending off his countrymen’s pleas to keep the United States out of another European war, he decided to send his envoy back to see the pope. “Duce!” read an anonymous note to Mussolini. “Myron Taylor is coming back to Rome. He is a Jew and hides himself behind the Vatican. Be on guard!”[17]
Roosevelt gave Taylor a dual mission. In the face of widespread American Catholic opposition to his support of Britain, and to his efforts to prepare the country for the possibility of war, he thought publicly renewing his bonds with the pope would be politically valuable. Taylor’s new trip to Rome also came shortly after Roosevelt had met the British prime minister in Newfoundland, where they drafted the eight points of what came to be known as the Atlantic Charter. It was a statement of their goals for a postwar world, including the disarmament of aggressor nations and the right of all people to self-determination. The president hoped to convince Pius XII to signal his support for the charter.
Taylor was well on his way to developing a strong bond with the pope. The imposing American business tycoon could display a softer side, as he listened respectfully to the pope and delighted in the Vatican’s ornate rituals. Although a Protestant, Taylor never failed to genuflect to the pope and ask for his blessing at the end of every audience. The pontiff appreciated Taylor’s can-do attitude, backed by America’s vast resources, and Taylor’s personal friendship with the president offered the pope a key resource. Osborne noted an additional trait the two men shared, a “militant Christian idealism.”[18]
On September 9, 1941, Taylor met with Pius XII. He brought a letter from Roosevelt expressing the hope that the pope might publicly support the aims he and Churchill had set forth. The pontiff, ever cautious, said he would give the matter some thought. Taylor then met with Cardinal Maglione, urging the importance of papal support for the Atlantic Charter’s eight points. Only two people on earth, said Taylor, were in a position to speak out credibly for “the triumph of justice”: the pope and the president of the United States.
What exactly Pius XII promised the American when they next met would be a matter of disagreement. In Taylor’s account, the pope said that, given his desire to maintain a “role of independence,” he could not “make such a statement immediately without a suitable occasion to inspire it. He agreed, however, to do so at a reasonably early date.”[19]
No sign of such an agreement can be found in the Vatican records. Indeed, aware of Mussolini’s nervousness about his meeting with the American envoy, the pope had his secretary of state brief the Italian ambassador on it immediately. The cardinal made no mention of Roosevelt’s proposal. The purpose of Taylor’s visit, Maglione told Mussolini’s ambassador, was simply to show America’s Catholics that he remained in contact with the pope and to convey the American president’s views on the war.[20]
As was often the case in such matters, the pope depended on Monsignor Tardini, Cardinal Maglione’s clear-eyed and plainspoken deputy, to prepare notes to help guide his response to the American president’s request. They offer precious insight into the views of the pope and his closest advisers.
“To defeat Nazism,” wrote Tardini, “the United States is supporting Russia,” in effect supporting Communism, that is, “militant atheism…battle against religion, ruthless war above all against all of Catholicism!” While Roosevelt was eager to get American Catholic support, “the leaders of the Catholic Church [in America] are instead persuaded that Nazism and communism are two extremely dangerous enemies of the Church. Both need to be destroyed. Whichever one of the two were to survive, it would be the ruin of humanity.” How, asked Tardini, could they say the American church leaders were wrong?[21] The following day he added additional notes: “Roosevelt’s letter made a painful impression on me. It is an attempted (although unsuccessful) apology for communism…. In an exhausted Europe and with Germany annihilated, it would become the absolute ruler over continental Europe.”
In the end, the pope decided it best to say as little as possible, offering the American president generic good wishes while avoiding any statements that could pin him down.[22]
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While Taylor was still in Rome, the Italian ambassador came to see the pope to find out what the American had come for, and to renew his attempts to persuade the pope to issue a public denunciation of Communism. It was a frustrating meeting for the ambassador, as the pope clearly had Germany, not Russia, on his mind.
“If I were to talk about bolshevism—and I would be very ready to do so,” the pope added—“should I then say nothing about Nazism?” The situation in Germany was dramatically worsening. Even if, as he had been told, the Führer had ordered the suspension of the persecutions aimed at the church, “that doesn’t mean that Christ has been readmitted to the schools…or that the numerous convents and religious institutions that had been closed will be reopened…or that they will suppress the prayer that German children are made to recite in which, parodying the Pater Noster, they thank Hitler for their daily bread.”
After going on in this vein for a half hour, the pope told Attolico he was glad he had come because there was a matter he wanted to ask about. He had long been hearing it said that some in Germany were aiming “to do without the Vatican” in the new European order that the victorious Axis armies would usher in. “Now,” said Pius XII, “they are telling me that, even in Hitler’s meeting with Mussolini, the Führer is reported to have said it was necessary to ‘do away with’ the Vatican. Is that true?”
Attolico assured the pontiff that such reports were totally false. Hearing this, the pope, Attolico reported, “was pleased, and I would say almost relieved, showing how much the belief, I would almost say the nightmare, of new and more serious persecutions weighed on his soul.” Thus reassured, the pope recalled the many pleasant years he had spent in Germany. “Oh, if Germany had only left me in peace,” he told Mussolini’s ambassador, “my attitude in this war, especially at this moment, would have been very different.”[23]
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In France, the Pétain government had begun introducing its own draconian antisemitic laws shortly after taking power the previous year. Initially worried that these might prompt a protest from the Vatican, the collaborationist officials were reassured by Léon Bérard, the French ambassador to the Holy See. “There was nothing,” he told them, “that can give rise to criticism from the Holy See’s point of view.” In a subsequent letter, he explained that although the church condemned racism, it had long recognized that a “Jewish problem” existed, and indeed from the time of the Middle Ages, the popes themselves had acted to keep Jews from a variety of occupations. He added that the church’s only objection to the anti-Jewish campaign was the treatment of baptized Jews as Jews rather than as Catholics. This the church could never accept.[24]
Although he would voice no objection to the antisemitic state campaigns under way in Italy, France, or elsewhere, Pius XII could never feel comfortable about the reports that were beginning to come in describing the Germans’ systematic murder of Europe’s Jews. His discomfort comes through clearly in notes that Monsignor Angelo Roncalli made in his journal following an audience with the pope in October 1941. “He asked me,” wrote the future Pope John XXIII, then visiting Rome from his post as papal envoy to Turkey, “if his silence regarding the Nazis’ actions is not a mistake.”[25]
Germany’s campaign of extermination of Europe’s Jews was indeed accelerating as its troops moved eastward. Since the invasion of the Soviet Union began in June, special German mobile killing units—Einsatzgruppen—had begun murdering Jews with the help of local antisemites. On June 27 an Einsatzgruppe unit together with local Ukrainians killed two thousand Jews in Lutsk. That same day a German motorized unit burned hundreds of Jews alive in a synagogue in Bialystok, Poland. Early the next month, at least six thousand Jews were shot to death and dumped into a trench in a Lithuanian forest, assisted by locals. All across the vast territory through which the German army was moving, Jews were being shot en masse, their bodies shoved into ditches they were forced to dig.[26]
In October 1941 the pope received one of the first unmistakably credible accounts of this massacre of Europe’s Jews. The nuncio in Bratislava passed on a report from the bishop in charge of Slovakia’s military chaplains. The previous November Slovakia, along with Hungary and Romania, had joined the Axis. While other war prisoners were being sent back to their homes, the bishop reported, “the Jews are simply being shot…systematically murdered, without distinction of sex or age.” The day the bishop sent his report, the pope was busy offering his blessings to an audience of eighty German soldiers, something he would continue to do over the next many months. That day, too, the pope had an appointment sitting for a sculptor commissioned to create his bust. The artist found his subject skittish and ill-tempered, as the pope directed agitated bursts of German to the nuns who ran his household. The nuns told the sculptor it was a miracle he had agreed to all the two-hour sittings. Normally, he was too high strung to stay in one place so long.[27]
In November 1941 Pius XII would learn in much greater detail about the unfolding mass murder of Europe’s Jews when Father Pirro Scavizzi, an Italian military chaplain, gave him a bloodcurdling account on his return from the eastern front. While aboard an Italian military hospital train as it passed through Ukraine in late October, the Roman priest had jotted down his observations: “the Jews here are very numerous and hated by everyone.” As soon as the German army arrived, “a massacre of the Jews took place in the most atrociously exemplary and terrifying way. Several hundred of them were enclosed, piled like animals, into old train cars, and beaten down in every way, and then, after several days of this martyrdom, they were murdered.” The Germans were dynamiting synagogues, and “a day does not pass without other murders of Jews taking place.” A few days later he wrote: “massacre of hundreds of Jews, forced first to dig a ditch, then machine-gunned and thrown inside.”
Pius XII poses for sculptor, 1941
Father Scavizzi met with the pope on his return from that trip in November, when he described at length what he had witnessed. The pope listened with great interest, growing increasingly distraught as the priest recounted the horrors the Germans were inflicting on Jews, Catholic Poles, and others on the eastern front. “I saw him cry like a child and pray like a saint,” the Roman priest later recalled. Along with his oral report to the pope, Scavizzi delivered an impassioned letter from a Polish priest. Describing the terrifying events unfolding in Poland, the priest said that the Poles could not understand what they termed the Vatican’s “crime of silence.” He begged the pope to make his voice heard.[28]
With Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the war entered a new phase. The following day Ambassador Phillips ordered all sensitive papers at the American embassy in Rome burned. Harold Tittmann, Myron Taylor’s assistant in Rome, came to Vatican City to ask if the apartment was ready that the Vatican Secretariat of State had reserved for him in case Italy declared war on the United States. On December 11 Ambassador Phillips received a summons from Mussolini’s son-in-law. When he arrived at the foreign minister’s office, Ciano rose from his desk and, with all the formality he could muster, stiffly told him: “I have sent for you to tell you in the name of my King and in that of the Italian Government that as of today Italy considers itself at war with the United States.” Hitler declared war on the United States that same day.
None of this was greeted with much enthusiasm by the Italian public. The obligatory crowd outside Mussolini’s window was quickly assembled, mixing enthusiastic Fascists with dragooned government employees and students. The Duce emerged onto his balcony, attempting his usual swagger but looking rather pale. His speech would be brief:
Men and women of Italy…hear this!
This is another day of solemn decisions in the history of Italy….
The powers of the Pact of Steel, Fascist Italy and National-Socialist Germany, ever more closely united, stand beside heroic Japan against the United States of America….
Neither the Axis nor Japan wanted the expansion of this conflict. One man, a single man, an authentic and democratic despot, through an infinite series of provocations, deceiving with supreme fraud the very populations of his own country, has wanted the war and has prepared it day by day with diabolical pertinacity….
Italian men and women, standing once again, show yourselves worthy of this great hour.
We shall be victorious![1]
Cheers from the crowd came as they always had at the appropriate times, following mentions of Nazi Germany and Japan, and following the Duce’s concluding and now ritualistic vow of inevitable victory, but they were markedly less enthusiastic than those that had greeted Mussolini’s similar performances in the past. As the dictator went back inside Palazzo Venezia, the crowd quickly melted away, returning home to their rationed suppers.[2]
For Mussolini, the pope’s support would now be even more important. Within days of America’s entry into the war, the king conferred the title of prince on all the descendants of the pontiff’s beloved older brother, Francesco, who had died several years earlier. It was Francesco Pacelli who had negotiated the Lateran Accords on Pius XI’s behalf with Mussolini. The benefits for the regime from conferral of the honor could be seen immediately: the Vatican newspaper reported that the government’s ennobling of the pope’s kin “constitutes new proof of the faithfulness to these historical events and to the happy consequences that have flowed from it in line with the great Christian traditions of the Italian nation.”[3]
Britain’s emissary to the Vatican, D’Arcy Osborne, observed that the ennoblement might have been understandable but for two facts: it was done so many years after the event that it claimed to be honoring, years too after the honoree had died, and in the meantime, Pacelli’s brother had become pope. The most plausible explanation for the granting of the honor, wrote Osborne, was “to affirm the ‘italianità’ of the Vatican, and thereby to indicate to the Italian people that, in the present world struggle, the Papacy must necessarily be on the side of the Axis Powers.” Unfortunately, thought the envoy, Italians were likely to draw exactly that conclusion. “The Pope, I was told, was somewhat embarrassed, as the transaction now savoured faintly of nepotism.”[4]
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Christmas 1941 would again see Pius XII broadcasting a holiday message to the world. Typical of his speeches, it was so long and of such rarefied language that it would fly over the heads of most Italians. Once again the pope fashioned it in a way that would allow both sides to read into it an offering of support.[5]
In its coverage of the speech, the national bulletin of Italian Catholic Action highlighted what it took to be the pope’s main message: “What is the cause of so many evils? Men have rebelled against true Christianity.” One should not oppress minorities; one should not try to monopolize the earth’s resources; there is no place for persecution of religion or of the church. The French ambassador explained to Vichy that the pope was calling for governments to do exactly what Pétain’s was doing, restoring “the values of Christian civilization and the rules of religious morality by maintaining good relations with the Church.” The ambassador pointed out that while the pope, in bemoaning persecution of religion and the church, had not named any guilty parties, he surely must have had both Stalin and National Socialism in mind.[6]
While Mussolini’s newspaper relegated its story to the second page, it offered a respectful account, offering its own paraphrases. Farinacci offered effusive praise for the speech in a lengthy front-page editorial, ably offering selective quotes from the pontiff’s words to turn it into a brief in favor of the Axis war. The German ambassador to Switzerland shared with the nuncio there his view that the pope’s speech was “very beautiful” because “every word is measured and it contains ample material for all the belligerents to reflect upon.”[7]
In sending an English translation of the radio address to London, Osborne tried to put as positive a spin on it as he could, calling attention to the pope’s generic denunciation of religious persecution. Members of the British Foreign Office were less deferential. As one noted, the pope’s praise of those governments having amicable relations with the church must be seen as “a compliment to Mussolini.” That, he added, seemed “scarcely necessary, even though the title of Prince had just been conferred upon the Pope’s nephews in strangely tardy recognition of his late brother’s assistance in negotiating the Lateran Treaty.” At the same time, the German Foreign Ministry newsletter hailed the pope’s speech as offering support for the theories at the heart of National Socialism and Fascism. It explained as well that the pope, in his reference to “oppressed minorities,” undoubtedly had in mind the prewar German minority in Poland.[8]
