The Pope at War, page 28
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Italian media meanwhile continued to feature the clergy’s patriotic appeals in support of the war. In December, Italy’s state radio broadcast a special Mass praying for Axis victory. A few days later similar masses were held in churches throughout the country. Celebrating a “Day of Faith,” they brought Fascist officials and military officers together with the faithful. Mussolini’s paper offered enthusiastic coverage of the event, giving special attention to the ceremony held at Bologna’s central church, San Petronio. The head of the Fascist Party for the province was present, along with the podestà, the prefect, and local military commanders. “After the Mass,” the paper reported, “Cardinal Nasalli Rocca, archbishop of Bologna, pronounced a most noble speech, exalting the heroism of our soldiers, who are fighting and dying for Italy, cradle of Christianity, beacon of civilization to the whole world.” In December, too, the pope, as he had in previous years, personally authorized the holding of a special Mass of mourning on the anniversary of the death of Arnaldo Mussolini, who had succeeded his brother as director of Il Popolo d’Italia.[16]
The main source of church complaint about Italy’s government at the time, according to the monthly reports of the nation’s prefects, stemmed not from any unhappiness with the war but from the regime’s failure to sufficiently police the nation’s entertainment. What particularly attracted the outrage of the church’s moral arbiters was the country’s popular variety shows, to which large numbers were streaming as a diversion from the rigors of wartime life. A lengthy late 1942 report of the national Catholic Action secretariat for morality recounted that its members had recently monitored 229 such shows. It called on the government to suppress them all. The secretariat complained that the actors were getting laughs by portraying husbands cuckolded by their wives, while female dancers wore costumes so minimal that they sometimes revealed their navels. Homosexuals, rather than being denounced for their depravity, were being portrayed in a comic light, “and dances, without exception, have one purpose only: that of provoking sexual orgasm in the spectators.”[17]
Luigi Lavitrano, one of the three cardinals charged by the pope with overseeing Italian Catholic Action, found the matter sufficiently serious that he wrote a long letter directly to Mussolini. Speaking on behalf of the entire Italian episcopate, he called on the Duce to address “a serious problem of a moral nature that deeply worries pastors of souls and educators of youth,” namely variety shows, which had been spreading into movie theaters throughout the country and threatened to become the nation’s most popular form of entertainment. “The moral consequences,” wrote the cardinal, “are extremely pernicious.”[18]
With the Allies firmly ensconced in North Africa, fears they might now be planning a cross-Mediterranean attack on Italy led to a flow of thousands of German troops down the peninsula to bolster Italian defenses.[1] One effect of the increasing German military presence was the ever-larger number of German soldiers eager to attend a papal audience and receive a papal blessing. The frequent audiences granted to the German soldiers were pleasing to the pope, who remained not only fond of Germans from the many years he had spent in that country but also proud of his ability to speak with them in their own language. Neither Hitler nor his colleagues were amused. A December 8 complaint from the Nazi Party Chancellery to the German Foreign Ministry called for better enforcement of the requirement that any such visits by members of the army be approved in advance by the German embassy in Rome.[2]
At the same time, the increased German military presence in the country was prompting new nervousness in the Vatican. “One hears talk,” Cardinal Maglione observed, “of invasion or bombardment of the Vatican by the Germans, of seizure of the archives, of expulsion of the diplomats from the countries that are the enemies of the Axis, etc.” Maglione was also concerned by the old rumor that had so unnerved the pope about German plans to turn the Vatican into a museum.[3]
The pope was feeling pressure from the British as well. On December 18, 1942, Osborne, the British envoy, briefed Monsignor Tardini, head of the Vatican Secretariat of State office dealing with foreign relations, on the systematic murder of Jews in German-occupied lands. Before leaving, he handed him a written report to give the pope. A few extracts offer some flavor of what the pope was to read:
December 8th: Polish Government in London informs Mr. Eden and Mr. Maisky that the Nazis have up to date massacred more than a million Jews in Poland. Meanwhile 180,000 Jews have been deported from Roumania and deportation is similarly proceeding from France, Holland, Norway (where heartrending scenes are today reported on the rounding-up of the Jewish victims), Croatia and Slovakia. The deportees are sent to Poland, which appears to have been selected as the extermination centre for European Jewry. [British Archbishop] Cardinal Hinsley denounces the policy of extermination.
…Dec 10th: Polish Government address a Circular Note to all other Governments regarding the German massacres of the Jews. One out of three million Jews in Poland have already been murdered. Speaking in London the Archbishop of York declares that “we are witnessing the deliberate massacre of a nation.”
…Dec 13th: New evidence is coming in of the unspeakable cruelty involved in Hitler’s war of annihilation against the Jews of Europe, to which he referred in his last speech…. Entire communities in Poland were massacred to a man and there were several thousand deaths a day. After Hitler had sent Himmler to Poland to make the arrangements for wholesale extermination, a number of special execution camps were organized.
…Dec 16th…Up to date about 500,000 Jews have been transported from Occupied Europe or countries under German influence to Poland for liquidation.[4] They include 50,000 from France, 70,000 from Alsace and Lorraine, 250,000 from Roumania, 57,000 from Slovakia and 50,000 from Luxembourg. These are distinct from the million Polish Jews already slaughtered.
“I had a rather distressing conversation with Mgr Tardini this evening about the attitude of the Holy See to the Jewish persecution,” Osborne began in reporting the reception he got when he presented the memo for the pope. “He was, I think, uncomfortable and on the defensive.” Would the pope not finally denounce the Nazi campaign? asked Osborne. Tardini offered the reply he had given many times before. The pope could not speak out against the outrages being committed against Jews, or those against Catholic Poles, without seeming to take sides in the war. Moreover, argued Tardini, giving another oft-repeated, albeit disingenuous, defense for the pope’s silence, they had not been able to verify the atrocity stories.[5]
The pressure wasn’t coming only from the British. Poland remained a particularly sensitive subject for the pope, as its overwhelmingly Roman Catholic population looked to him to condemn their oppressors. Three days after Tardini met with Osborne, the Polish ambassador, representing a government that since the German occupation of his country had operated from exile in London, came with much the same request. He brought a memo informing the pope that the Germans were in the process of murdering the entire Jewish population of Poland, with those killed to date exceeding one million. The ambassador asked the pope to “strongly and clearly condemn these as well as other German crimes, whose scale exceeds anything known in history.”[6]
Raffaele Guariglia, Italy’s ambassador to the Vatican, happened to be in Cardinal Maglione’s office at the time, delivering a very different message. The Duce wanted the pope in his upcoming Christmas broadcast to avoid any “incitements to peace that could have a debilitating effect on the Italian people.” The pope’s response the next day was vague. He would take the Duce’s suggestion into consideration and deal with it as best he could, given what his papal mission required of him.[7]
Three days later Osborne made a brief note in his diary: “Having been reliably assured that the Pope was going to speak out this Christmas, I am now equally reliably assured that he is not. The Vatican will be the only State which has not condemned the persecution of the Jews.”[8]
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Amid all the pope’s worries that Christmas season, there was one bright spot. Pastor Angelicus, the film on which he had lavished so much time over the past year, was finally having its premiere. It was a historic event, the first time a pope was protagonist in a film designed to present himself to the world. The product of the Catholic Film Center, it benefited from the work of twenty-five cameramen who had followed the pope around the Vatican for several months. The goal was to show the film in every Italian city and in many other countries as well. More than two hundred showings would take place in German-occupied Paris alone.
Osborne noted that the Vatican was now employing modern techniques to craft the pope’s public image. “His Holiness,” he observed, “is not altogether free from the human vanity of the artist. Flattery on this score of his eloquence does not come amiss and is not neglected by his entourage, while any suggestion that the baroque architecture of his discourse might prejudice the force or the clarity of his teaching is ill-received.” If the British diplomat found the film project in the midst of the war in poor taste, the Duce was even less pleased. Although the Fascist government had supported the making of the film, he resented it, jealous of any display of papal charisma that risked eclipsing his own.[9]
Mussolini’s unhappiness with the new cinematic paean to the pope was no doubt magnified by his own miseries. He had long been plagued by periodic attacks of crippling stomach pains, caused, it seemed, by stress-triggered ulcers. For years he had kept to a spartan diet, avoiding meat, alcohol, and coffee. The previous July, when his pains had flared up following a lengthy visit to Italian troops in Libya, doctors initially thought he had picked up a stomach amoeba. By November the pains had become much worse, and as Christmas approached, he was spending many days in bed. He had fought a lifelong campaign against a family tendency toward fat, but now he had lost a quarter of his body weight and looked gaunt and older. Clara’s father, a Vatican physician, visited Mussolini regularly to give him injections of vitamin supplements, while the Duce took antispasm pills and administered his own sodium bromide injections.
In speaking with Clara several times each day by phone, Mussolini sought her commiseration as he lamented that his life was a failure. “It is not the ulcers, Clara, that’s killing me,” he told her. “It’s seeing twenty years of work and sweat destroyed and useless.” He gave vent as well to his jealousy of the pope’s popularity in Rome, complaining, as usual without any trace of self-consciousness of his hypocrisy, about the ongoing Allied bombing of Italy’s cities. “All the cities should be respected in Christ’s name…this is what the Pope should have been asking for…not defending only Rome because he is there.”[10]
The morning following Rome’s gala premiere of Pastor Angelicus, Mussolini awoke with a sharp pain in his stomach and reached again for his pills and his syringe. Clara soon arrived and gave him a soothing massage. Depressed, he told her he did not think he could go on; it was time to quit. Clara had only a limited formal education and little direct knowledge of the larger world. In their first years together, she was more likely to simply add her support to whatever opinion her “Ben,” as she called him, expressed. Now she felt bolder in offering her own views, albeit those of a staunch, Mussolini-worshipping Fascist. Hoping to buck up Ben’s spirits, she urged him not to “yield to the English and the priests.” Then, as they often did when they wanted to relax, they put a record of classical music on the phonograph, beginning with their favorite, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. While they listened, Mussolini, lying on the floor beside her, began to cry. The symphony often had that effect on him. What particularly irked him, he said, was having to depend on the pope to get the British to spare Rome from bombardment. Again, the thirty-year-old Clara tried to shake him out of his self-pity. He should not let himself be defeated by the “Anglo-priestly” forces, she said. Doing so would leave Rome in the hands of the Vatican and its “priestly power.”[11]
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The pope would have been surprised to learn that among those tuning in to his Christmas radio broadcast on December 24 was the Duce himself. Unsurprisingly, Mussolini was unimpressed. Turning to Ciano, who was listening with him, he said, “God’s Vicar, that is, the representative on earth of the governor of the Universe, should never speak. He should stay up in the clouds. This is a speech filled with commonplaces that might as easily have been given by the parish priest of Predappio.”[*] [12]
As was his custom, the pope had words that both sides of the war could interpret as supporting their cause. Mussolini’s newspaper offered a respectful summary of the speech, highlighting the pope’s condemnation of “Marxist socialism” and his defense of private property. A paragraph in bold then followed: “the Pope said that this war represents the unravelling of a social order that, behind the false face or mask of conventional formulas, hides its fatal weakness and its unbridled instinct for profits and for power.”[13]
On the twenty-fourth page of the pope’s text were words that defenders of Pius XII would later cite in trying to cast the speech as a ringing papal denunciation of the ongoing massacre of Europe’s Jews.[14] Although the pope nowhere mentioned either Nazis or Jews, he lamented in that well-buried passage the “hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or their race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.” In his end-of-year report, Osborne recalled that the pope seemed “pained and surprised” that these words had not satisfied those who had been calling on him to speak out. “While the address strikes me as being the most effective of the Pope’s recent pronouncements,” Osborne told London, “it suffers from the usual defect of exorbitant length and from the fact that…his teachings are weakened by the oratorical flux in which they are invariably enveloped.”
Father Vincent McCormick, American Jesuit and former rector of Rome’s Gregorian University, living a stone’s throw from the Vatican, expressed his own disappointment in the pope’s speech. As usual, he wrote, it was “much too heavy,” its message “obscurely expressed.” Tittmann, meeting with the pope shortly after his speech, likewise found him miffed that his words were thought insufficient. As Tittmann reported to Washington, Pius XII “stated that he ‘feared’ that there was foundation for the atrocity reports of the Allies but led me to believe that he felt that there had been some exaggeration for purpose of propaganda.”[15]
Two days after Christmas the Polish ambassador, Kazimierz Papée, came for his New Year’s audience with the pope. Once again the ambassador began with accounts of the Germans’ horrendous persecution of both Jews and Catholics in Poland. In response, the pope reiterated his argument that any papal protest risked bringing new misfortune and added that he had already spoken out quite clearly in his Christmas broadcast. Expecting to get some positive acknowledgment of this from the Polish diplomat, he was unhappy that the ambassador met his claim with silence. “I am deeply convinced,” Papée reported following the audience, “that he spoke sincerely. The pope is now convinced that he clearly and strongly, albeit generically, condemned German crimes in occupied countries.” The ambassador added, “There lies the source of difficulties…. Pius XII…due to his sensitive and delicate nature, the character of his studies and a certain one-sidedness of his career—exclusively diplomatic and far from [real] life—cannot speak a different language and passes by the realities of our time, not realizing how little an average Catholic can understand and remember from his enunciations, isolated from facts, complex and carefully polished.”[16]
Diego von Bergen, the German ambassador, had his end-of-year audience with the pope the same day. It would turn out to be his last. Ever since Hitler came to power, Bergen had sought to smooth relations between the pope and the German Reich, and to convince Ribbentrop and Hitler it was in their interest to have better relations with the pontiff. In his report of the papal audience to Berlin, Bergen wrote that Pius XII had made clear his recognition of “the historic significance of the heroic German struggle in the East; the danger of Bolshevism to which the British and the Americans wanted to expose Europe.” If the pope offered any harsh words in private to the German ambassador about the atrocities the Germans were committing, the ambassador would not want to upset the already precarious relations between the Vatican and his government by passing them on to Berlin.[17]
The year ended, then, with Mussolini ailing, the pope feeling unfairly attacked for his silence, Vatican public relations efforts busily crafting a heroic image of the pontiff, and Italians’ misery growing. Food shortages, a staccato of reports of military reverses, and air raids on cities throughout the country that threatened only to get worse all fed the increasingly depressed public mood. The ranks of avid Fascists were rapidly dwindling, and while public anger had long focused on the men around the Duce, something new was becoming ever more apparent. The myth of the omniscient leader that had powered popular enthusiasm for the regime for so many years was finally beginning to crumble.[18]
Skip Notes
* Mussolini’s small hometown in Romagna.
The war could scarcely be going worse for Mussolini as 1943 began. “A very heavy day,” wrote Ciano in his diary in mid-January. “The retreat continues in Russia and it seems that in some areas it is becoming a rout. In Libya, the infantry divisions are abandoning Tripoli, headed west, while the rearguard is trying to slow Montgomery’s prudent but inexorable advance. I speak on the phone with Mussolini, who seems depressed.” Three days later Ciano added, “The Duce judges today’s German military bulletin the worst since the beginning of the war. And in fact, it is. In retreat at Stalingrad, in retreat on the front almost everywhere, the fall of Tripoli near.”[1]
