The Pope at War, page 25
At his New Year’s audience, the British envoy found the pope unhappy about America’s recent entry into the war and the war’s resulting expansion. Contributing to the pope’s glum mood was Churchill’s speech, three days earlier, to a joint session of Congress in Washington. The prime minister had predicted that the war would last into 1943, when the tide would finally turn. The British Foreign Office sent Osborne’s report on the audience to King George VI with a scribbled note: “Mr. Osborne twice stresses the Pope’s depression. This is likely to increase owing to pricks of conscience caused by his timid policy.” In his end-of-year report for 1941, Osborne linked the pope’s insistence on remaining impartial in the war to his belief it would enable him to play a key role in brokering a peace. In the meantime, the pope immersed himself “in multifarious charitable activities and in indulgence of his weakness for oratory.” The path the pope had chosen, concluded the British envoy, came “at the expense of the moral prestige of the Papacy bequeathed to him by Pius XI.”[9]
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While Mussolini had jettisoned many of the beliefs he had once held as a young radical socialist, he never lost his visceral distaste for the Catholic clergy and Catholic doctrine. While these feelings erupted in periodic bursts of venom in the privacy of his encounters with Clara and his conversations with his son-in-law, he had long recognized the wisdom of exhibiting a different attitude in public, and his more caustic views on the church had rarely reached Pius XII’s ears.
This was now beginning to change. In speaking to the Fascist Party directorate in early January 1942, the Duce asked how it was that while America’s Catholic bishops had issued a declaration supporting their president, the Italian episcopate had made no similar joint declaration of support for him. “There are traitors in the Vatican,” someone shouted. “Down with the priests!”[10]
When, a few days later, the pope’s nuncio went to meet with Guido Buffarini, Mussolini’s undersecretary, he got to hear an echo of the Duce’s complaints. “It was easy for me,” Monsignor Borgongini recalled, “to rebuff the accusations and emphasize the words of praise that the Holy Father had pronounced for Italy, along with the patriotic work of the Bishops and the Italian clergy in these moments.” He told Buffarini that the pope could hardly fail to criticize the Germans’ treatment of the church, yet despite all the provocation, Pius XII had always done so “with extreme delicacy.”[11]
In fact, Mussolini would have little grounds for complaint in the months ahead. In mid-January his own newspaper featured an address by the bishop of Trieste to the priests of his diocese, warning that Communism was Christianity’s dangerous enemy and had to be defeated.[12] A week later, at a high-profile church ceremony, Cardinal Carlo Salotti, one of the Curia’s most prominent members, invoked the Madonna’s “protection of our soldiers who are fighting for a more just society and for certain victory.”[13]
As February began, the Vatican-supervised Jesuit journal added its own support for the Axis cause, publishing an article titled “Vital Space,” echoing the concept that both Nazis and Fascists were using to justify the war. The pope, it told its readers, had insisted that all people had a right to their fair share of the earth’s resources. That right, it quoted the pope as saying, “applies equally to the State…. Thus the State…has the right to possess the amount of goods necessary for the fulfilment of its essential functions, or, in modern terms, it has the right to such vital space as is indispensable for the preservation of its social life and for the material and moral welfare of its citizens.”[14]
In an effort to retain good relations with the moody dictator, Pius XII decided to send him a private message. The opportunity came in mid-January 1942 when the pope agreed to an audience with Pietro Fedele, Mussolini’s former minister of education and a longtime member of the Senate. The pope asked Fedele to tell the Duce how much he appreciated the recent conferral of nobility on his family, adding that he regarded Mussolini with “great admiration and profound devotion.” In reporting the pope’s remarks in a letter to Mussolini, Fedele underlined these last words, further emphasizing the phrase by noting “I repeat His words verbatim.” He added that the pope expressed his “joy that the Italian Bishops, at least in great part, are acting in full harmony with the political Authorities and with the Hierarchs of the [Fascist] Party.”[15]
While church relations with Italy’s Fascist regime remained for the most part friendly, the pope’s suspicions of Germany’s intentions were only increasing. In the latest incident, the number two in Germany’s embassy to Italy was reported to have remarked, “Oh, the Vatican! That’s a museum that within a few years we’ll have people visit with a ten lire admission ticket.”[16]
The pope sent a military chaplain to speak to the Duce about these latest rumors. Father Giacomo Salza met with the Italian dictator on February 4 and told him of the pope’s alarm.
“Dear Father,” replied the Duce, “there is no incompatibility between the Vatican and Fascism…. I am in Rome, and as long as I am here no one is going to touch the Vatican. The Vatican is almost two thousand years old. It will have at least another two thousand. Of this I am certain.”[17]
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On February 9, 1942, Mussolini’s ambassador to the Vatican, Bernardo Attolico, who had long suffered from heart and liver ills, passed away. Father Tacchi Venturi presided over his funeral Mass at the Jesuits’ central church in Rome, with Cardinal Maglione attending as well. Galeazzo Ciano led the large government delegation.[18]
Mussolini’s choice to replace Attolico, fifty-three-year-old Raffaele Guariglia, a career diplomat, was greeted warmly at the Vatican. Not only was Guariglia regarded as a good, observant Catholic, but he and Cardinal Maglione, both proud Neapolitans, were old friends.[19]
In the new ambassador’s first papal audience in late February, Pius XII gave voice to his fears, beginning with his continuing nervousness over rumors that people from “beyond the Alps,” as he delicately put it, were threatening to turn the Vatican into a museum. Such stories were ridiculous, said Guariglia, as ridiculous as a threat would be to turn all of Italy into a museum. Somewhat reassured, the pope returned once again to the theme he seemed never to tire of repeating whenever the subject of Germany came up: his great affection for the German people and his failure to understand why the German leaders—or at least some of them—had turned against the church. “He concluded,” wrote Guariglia in his report of this initial papal audience, by “expressing, by contrast, full faith in the political wisdom of the Duce.”[20]
A month later—following meetings the new ambassador had with the pope, with Cardinal Maglione, his deputies, and numerous cardinals and bishops—Guariglia reported to Ciano what he had learned. “The central preoccupation that dominates everyone around the Vatican,” he wrote, “concerns Germany’s anti-Catholic policies, and the ideas that are spreading in some German circles in favor of a new, one might say ‘theo-Nazi,’ religion.” The church’s leaders “say it is not true that the Vatican, as some have accused it, has particular theoretical or practical sympathies for the democratic organization of states, since, as far as Italy is concerned, it must recognize the fact that only Fascism has brought the Catholic Church the great benefits that had been denied it by the preceding regimes.” The problem, rather, came when, instead of drawing strength from the Catholic Church, as the Fascist regime did in Italy, the totalitarian state sought to put its own national religion in its place.
Raffaele Guariglia and wife, Francesca Maria Palli, with Cardinal Maglione, following presentation of his credentials as new ambassador to the Holy See, February 24, 1942
In all his conversations at the Vatican, Guariglia heard the same fear, that following its inevitable victory, Germany might try to get Italy to adopt a religious policy like its own. The best protection for the church, the prelates were convinced, was for the Holy See to keep its close ties to Mussolini and the Fascist government.
For this reason, the new Italian ambassador advised that “all segments of the Vatican—and not only the Pontiff and the directors of the Holy See’s policies—place their full, sincere trust in the proper policies of Fascism and in the wisdom of the Duce, that is, the Author of Conciliation.” The occasional brush-up over L’Osservatore Romano, and the periodic outbursts in the columns of Il Regime Fascista, “are not in reality facts of such a nature as to in any way erode the realistic understanding of a broad commonality of interests which, without any doubt, especially at the current political moment, exists between the Italian Fascist state and the Church of Rome.”[21]
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The pope continued to receive detailed reports of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews. They came not only from Jewish and press sources, but from churchmen in whom he would have complete faith. On January 9, 1942, the Roman military chaplain, Father Scavizzi, returned from another trip to the eastern front and met with the pope, giving him a hair-raising account of what he had seen.[22] “It is clear,” the priest reported,
that it is the government of occupation’s intention to eliminate as many Jews as possible, killing them using the various systems of which the most frequently employed and the best known is that of machine-gunning them in mass. They transport groups of hundreds and even thousands of Jews from their communities. There they make them dig a big ditch, then they machine-gun them and throw the cadavers in the ditch. The number of killings of Jews is now approaching about a million.[23]
“A young German officer,” the Roman priest recounted, “boasted of having learned how to kill both a mother and her child with a single shot.” Moments later the soldier proudly took out a photo of his own wife and children to show the priest. Tears clouded the soldier’s eyes as he spoke of his deep love for them.
Pius XII told the priest he occasionally thought of excommunicating those who would commit such atrocities, but had decided against it, believing it would not stop the slaughter and might even spur greater anger against Jews. Following their conversation, Scavizzi sent the pope a written report on what he had witnessed. For Hitler’s soldiers in Germany, Poland, and Ukraine, he wrote, “The watchword is: ‘exterminate [the Jews] without pity.’ The mass murders are multiplying everywhere.”
More gruesome details followed. At the end of March, the priest sent additional documentation to the Vatican Secretariat of State, asking that L’Osservatore Romano publish it. The pope judged that inopportune. It was best not to alienate either Mussolini or the Führer.[24]
In March, too, the pontiff heard again from his nuncio in Bratislava, who told of “the imminent mass deportation of all of the Slovakian Jews in Galicia and the Lublin region regardless of age, sex, religion.” The “atrocious plan,” the nuncio reported, was the work of Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest who since 1939 had been president of the Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany. He had ordered the deportation of the nation’s Jews to the death camps on his own initiative, needing no prompting from the Nazis. When the nuncio had gone to protest, Tiso “dared to say (he who makes such a show of his Catholicism) that he does not see in it anything inhumane or anti-Christian.” The nuncio himself had no doubt as to the Jews’ fate. “Deportation of 80,000 people to Poland at the mercy of the Germans,” he wrote, “is equivalent to condemn the large part to certain death.”[25]
In Italy the pope’s interest in the “Jewish question” continued to focus not on the ongoing persecution of the country’s Jews but on the application of the racial laws to those he considered Catholics, that is baptized Jews and the baptized children of “mixed” marriages.[*] Cardinal Maglione repeatedly sent Father Tacchi Venturi to complain to Mussolini’s undersecretary about the unfairness of applying laws aimed at Jews to those the church considered Catholics.
In meeting with the pope’s Jesuit emissary in late March, Buffarini, the undersecretary of internal affairs, had initially seemed to agree to an amendment to the racial laws declaring “Aryan the whole family in which one of the two spouses is of Aryan race.” However, in the end he had backed away from any commitment. “Because of this rigid application [of the racial laws],” lamented the Jesuit emissary, “many Catholics and their offspring were and continue to be treated as if they were pure Jews!”[26]
Skip Notes
* Most often in Vatican documentation, “mixed” marriages refers to marriages of two Catholics, one of whom is a convert from Judaism.
The first dark-suited men, lugging their bulky filming equipment, appeared one spring day in Vatican City. Soon, it seemed, they were everywhere, setting up their tripods and lights in the frescoed halls of the Apostolic Palace, in St. Peter’s Basilica, in San Damaso Courtyard, and along the walkways of the Vatican Gardens. The sight of the camera-toting laymen hurrying through these sacred spaces seemed odd, but it was the ascetic pope himself who had agreed to this unprecedented incursion of the outside world of cinema into the timeless precincts of the Holy See.
As the resulting film would explain in its opening capital-lettered panels, a twelfth-century Irish bishop had predicted that Peter’s two hundred and sixty-second successor to the pontifical throne would come be known as Pastor Angelicus. In late 1941, to promote this image of a pontifical champion of peace amid war, Pius XII had authorized the making of this ambitious, hagiographic feature-length film. Titled Pastor Angelicus, it would be shot in the Vatican and star the pope.[1]
The Vatican newspaper had announced the film project in December: “The spectator preparing to watch the vast documentary on Pius XII must approach it with that attention and reverence, that Faith and veneration, which must animate the soul of every Catholic on beholding the representative of God on earth. And, in fact, from his face, from the austere and sublime acts of the Vicar of Christ, torrents of light and goodness flow.” The Vatican paper predicted that for those having the good fortune to be admitted to the Holy Father’s presence by viewing the film, “the emotional impact will be immediate.”[2]
Now, in the spring of 1942, the camera crews were busy following the pope in his daily schedule, as he sat on his throne for audiences, walked through the Vatican Gardens, conferred with his clerical attendants, lifted his white-robed arms to bless a crowd, and offered his hand to be kissed by a grateful black-veiled woman on her knees. The filming coincided with an ambitious Vatican effort to burnish the saintly image of the pope, using the twenty-fifth anniversary of his elevation to the episcopate—that is, his rise to the status of a bishop—to create a series of major public events. In March, on the anniversary of his papal coronation, the Vatican had issued a special medallion to mark the day. It showed the distinctive profile of the pope on one side and a haloed image of Jesus on the other. The following month, plans for his episcopal anniversary featured construction of a church in his honor dedicated to his namesake, the obscure seventh-century pope Saint Eugenio I. The Italian dictator was among the many who contributed to the fund.[3]
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While the cameramen were busy setting up the scenes for their film, their subject was receiving ever more alarming accounts of the Germans’ campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews. In May the pope got yet another bloodcurdling report from Italian army chaplain Father Scavizzi on his return from his latest trip to the eastern front. “The massacre of the Jews in Ukraine,” he reported, “is now complete. They want to likewise finish off with their system of mass killings in Poland and Germany.”[4]
Monsignor Orsenigo, the longtime papal nuncio in Berlin, well aware of the Jews’ fate, did not seem overly concerned. He told the secretary of Italy’s embassy in Berlin he had tried to intervene various times “to soften the action against the Jews, at least the Christian Jews,” but had not had any success. The embassy secretary reported this conversation to Ciano, observing that “the nuncio did not fail to point out to the Jews how the excessive racial sense that characterizes them has come to be used against them.” The nuncio’s warm regard for Hitler had earlier been noted by Italy’s ambassador to Berlin. “Orsenigo,” he observed, “is viewed favorably and respected by the Führer himself.”[5]
The nuncio was also doing his best to minimize fears that the Nazis were trying to create a new religion of their own, insisting the rumors were overblown. He told an Italian diplomat in Berlin that while unfortunately some Nazis would be happy to see this happen, there were many “reasonable people in the bosom of National Socialism with whom one could talk.” With 40 or 45 million Catholics in the newly expanded Reich, he added, it would be suicidal for Hitler to turn against the church.[6]
In Italy, Mussolini had recently ordered Jews to form domestic labor brigades, saying it was scandalous that Jewish men were left undisturbed at home while good Catholic Italians were risking their lives on the battlefield. (The racial laws had banned Jews from serving in the country’s military.) Photographs of bare-chested Roman Jews doing hard physical labor along the banks of the Tiber soon appeared in the country’s newspapers. Upset by the images, Cardinal Maglione sent Father Tacchi Venturi to speak with the authorities about the new policy. Antonio Le Pera, head of the Department of Race and Demography, assured him that contrary to newspaper reports, members of the “noble professions, like doctors, lawyers, accountants,” would not be made to do the humiliating physical labor. Rather it would be limited to Jews of a humbler station. The Jesuit then went to speak with Le Pera’s boss, undersecretary of internal affairs Guido Buffarini. After expressing his unhappiness at seeing Rome’s Jews humiliated in this way, Tacchi Venturi told the undersecretary that “should they decide at any cost to put the requirement into practice, it would at least be important to order a perfect separation in the forced labor between the Jews who had become Christians and those who remained as Jews.”[7]
