The Pope at War, page 3
Pacelli himself had no love for Hitler or for the Nazis. Shortly after the Führer came to power in 1933, Pacelli had negotiated a concordat with him, seeking to protect the church’s interests in Germany. The agreement was a great triumph for Hitler, whose ascent to power had been greeted with skepticism and alarm by other world leaders, and they were doing their best to isolate him. Now his new regime could boast of recognition by the pope himself. For the Vatican, though, the concordat proved a fleeting achievement at best. Hitler’s failure to abide by its terms soon became clear as he methodically chipped away at the church’s influence. Although embarrassed and unhappy with this outcome, Pacelli thought antagonizing the Führer would only make matters worse. He also viewed Germany as Europe’s strongest bulwark against what he regarded as the church’s greatest enemy, Communism. Rather than alienate Mussolini by condemning his alliance with Hitler, thought the cardinal, it would be more effective to keep him happy and take advantage of his close bond with Hitler to convince the Führer to make peace with the church.[3]
As the prelates around Pius XI worried where the pope’s eagerness to speak his mind on the evils of Nazism might lead, Mussolini was growing ever more alarmed by reports coming from his ambassador to the Holy See and from his many spies inside the Vatican. The dictator learned late in 1938 that the pope was secretly working on an encyclical, a declaration aimed at Catholics worldwide, denouncing racism and antisemitism. Even more troubling were reports that Pius XI was planning to use his upcoming speech to all of Italy’s bishops to denounce the Duce’s embrace of Nazi Germany.
For the Duce, Pius XI could not die soon enough.
Eugenio Pacelli sat in a chair beside the simple brass bed, watching as the once-robust pope, his face shrunken, labored to breathe beneath his oxygen mask. It was late at night, and although Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state, was accustomed to sleeping little, he decided to return to his rooms, two floors below in the vast Apostolic Palace, to get some rest. Awakened at four a.m. with news that the pope’s condition had worsened, he rushed back to the pope’s austere bedroom. Sweat poured down the pope’s pallid face as he gasped for air. The cardinal got down on his knees and asked the dying pope for his blessing.[1]
It was early morning, February 10, 1939. For Pacelli, whom the pope had elevated to the cardinalate and appointed to the church’s most influential position after that of the pontiff himself, it was a scene of great sadness. But there was much to be done, for the pope had also appointed Pacelli to be chamberlain, and it was now his job to ensure that all proceeded as it should until the cardinals could elect a successor.[2]
Pacelli’s relations with the pope had been close but not particularly warm. Their personalities could scarcely have been more different and perhaps this was one reason Pius XI had valued him so highly. The tempestuous pope, prone to say what he thought and often seemingly impervious to the opinions of others, depended on the highly disciplined, diplomatic Pacelli to calm the waters he roiled.
The Vatican secretary of state had found himself caught in the middle. Not only did Mussolini’s and Hitler’s ambassadors complain to him about Pius XI and seek his help, but so did many high-ranking churchmen, worried that the pontiff was becoming reckless in his old age. True to his position and his vows, the cardinal would not fail to carry out the instructions the pope gave him. But he found ways to take the sting out of the pope’s more acerbic remarks about the Italian and German regimes.[3]
Pacelli was a skilled diplomat and, despite a certain natural shyness, took great satisfaction in traveling the globe in a way no secretary of state before him had ever done. During his travels, he enjoyed meeting not only with the church’s ecclesiastical elite but with the politically powerful in secular governments. In the fall of 1936, he became the first Vatican secretary of state to visit the United States, spending two months touring the country, picking up honorary degrees at several Catholic universities, and after thousands of miles crisscrossing the country by air, meeting with the American president.
The following year the cardinal was the guest of honor at the dedication of a new basilica in France, taking a side trip to meet with France’s president and prime minister. A couple of weeks after Hitler visited Rome in May 1938, Pacelli left Italy again, this time going to Budapest, where he was the featured speaker at a Eucharistic Congress. His message everywhere was the same: The world was in crisis. It had turned its back on the cross of Christ. Only by returning to the bosom of the church would it be saved.[4]
While Pius XI was apt to bang his fist on his table and raise his voice in dressing down those foreign envoys whose countries’ actions had displeased him, Pacelli sought to win foreign diplomats over by stressing what they had in common. Insofar as he felt the need to register complaints, he did so in a way that suggested he was speaking more in sorrow than in anger.
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Relations between Pius XI and the Führer had begun promisingly enough when Hitler came to power in 1933. Indeed, the pope initially harbored some hopes for him, impressed by the strength of his anti-Communist views. Pacelli, who had spent twelve years as papal nuncio, or ambassador, in Germany and knew the country well, remarked at the time that while Hitler was clearly a remarkably talented agitator, it remained to be seen whether he was “a man of government.”
For his part, Germany’s new leader was eager for the church to end its support of Germany’s Catholic Center Party, the largest non-Marxist party standing in the way of his dictatorship. He made a series of conciliatory gestures, pledging to protect religious education and to guarantee a privileged place for the church in German society. It was amid these assurances that Germany’s bishops fell in line with the new government head, and the Center Party was allowed to die. Their understanding was codified with the signing, in Pacelli’s Vatican office only months after Hitler came to power, of a new concordat between Germany and the Holy See. The deal was a huge boost for Hitler’s credibility not only domestically but also internationally, as the papal nuncio in Berlin himself pointed out a few years later in talking with Germany’s secretary of state: “It does not seem possible to me that Signor Hitler has forgotten that, barely seven months after his arrival in power, when diffidence and hostility surrounded him both internally and externally, the Holy See extended its hand to him, contributing with its great spiritual authority to increasing faith in him and strengthening his prestige.” Characteristically, Mussolini took credit for the agreement, having, he said, given Hitler his successful “recipe” for how to ingratiate himself to the Vatican.[5]
Hitler had long viewed the Duce[*] as his role model. At a Munich rally held only days after Mussolini became Italy’s prime minister in 1922, Hitler, then still one of many extremist claimants for attention in the German political firmament, was introduced as “Germany’s Mussolini.” “It marked,” observed Hitler’s British biographer, Ian Kershaw, “the symbolic moment when Hitler’s followers invented the Führer cult.” Over the next years, as Hitler plotted his rise to power, he kept a bust of Mussolini in his office. “Men like Mussolini are only born once every thousand years,” he remarked after meeting the Duce for the first time in 1934. At the pope’s urging, Mussolini took advantage of that meeting in Venice to offer Hitler his advice: it was best to keep the church happy.[6]
Following his meeting with Hitler, Mussolini wrote to Pius XI, reporting what he had told the Führer. He decided it best not to mention, he confided to his ambassador to the Holy See, “all the idiotic things that Hitler said about Jesus Christ being of the Jewish race, etc.” What was important was that by the end of their conversation, Hitler made clear he did not want a religious war. It would be the first of many times the pope and Cardinal Pacelli would call on the Duce to speak with Hitler on their behalf.[7]
Pius XI’s hopes for the German dictator did not last long. The Nazis soon began replacing Catholic parochial schools with state schools, abolishing Catholic youth groups, and limiting church activities to the purely sacramental. “The pope,” a Vatican police informant in late 1934 reported, “has a strong personal antipathy toward Hitler. If it were not for Pacelli who is trying to bring more balance to the situation, the Secretariat of State would be even less tolerant of him.”[8]
Pacelli too would lose patience with Hitler when, in 1935, he launched show trials of large numbers of Roman Catholic clergy, charged with a variety of sexual and financial crimes. The German bishops urged the pope to act, suggesting he issue an encyclical to protest Hitler’s failure to abide by the terms of the concordat. Although Cardinal Pacelli, worried about antagonizing the Führer, advised against such a public protest, Pius XI went ahead. On March 21, 1937, Palm Sunday, bishops and priests throughout the Reich read the encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (“With deep anxiety”), to their congregations, a shocking development in a country where any criticism of the Nazi regime risked violent reprisal. Predictably, Hitler was furious not only because of the pope’s attack but by his ability to have the text secretly distributed and then read in churches throughout the Reich.
Hitler’s occupation of Austria in March 1938 and its subsequent annexation into the Third Reich had been an embarrassment for Mussolini, for he had considered Austria as something of an Italian protectorate, a buffer between Italy and the powerful German state. Making matters worse, the Führer had informed him of the invasion only a few hours in advance. The next day Hitler triumphally entered Vienna to the ringing of the city’s church bells, a celebratory touch ordered by the city’s archbishop.
With millions more Catholics now under Hitler’s rule, the pope and his secretary of state looked all the more urgently to Mussolini for help. Five days after Hitler’s entry into Vienna, Cardinal Pacelli wrote Mussolini, thanking him “for Your moderating action with Signor Hitler, Chancellor of the German Reich, and for Your intervention against the continuation of the policy of religious persecution in Germany.”[9]
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Hitler’s regard for Mussolini, already considerable, had grown further when, shortly after the Führer’s spring 1938 visit to Italy, the Duce announced his new “racial” policy. Mussolini soon rolled out the first of Italy’s anti-Jewish racial laws, closely resembling those Hitler had put into effect in Germany three years earlier. “After Italy’s new policy regarding the Jewish problem,” Hitler remarked, “the spirit of the Axis is complete.”[10]
On January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his ascension to power, the Führer gave a major address to the German Reichstag. He spoke for eighty minutes to the packed auditorium in his loud, strident voice, sprinkling in a series of ironic side comments. His themes were familiar ones, hailing the triumphs of the previous year in expanding the Reich by seizing Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland and all of Austria, and boasting of the German people’s fervent support for the Nazi regime. He denounced foreign attempts to interfere with the Reich’s treatment of Jews. Kristallnacht, the Nazis’ horrifying pogrom, had savaged the country’s Jews only two months earlier. Hitler then turned his attention to the question of the churches.
Italy’s ambassador to Berlin, present for the occasion, reported that at this point Hitler adopted something of a defensive tone. “While clearly condemning the ‘political’ clergy,” the ambassador wrote, “he reaffirmed the National Socialist government’s wish to leave the Churches in peace” and highlighted the large financial subsidy the Reich gave them each year. But Hitler could not resist taking a jab at the Catholic Church, expressing “words regarding the pederasty and the sexual aberrations of some members of the Clergy.”
In turning to foreign policy in the final portion of his speech, Hitler stressed the friendship that bound Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, hailing all the Duce had accomplished. He followed this, wrote the ambassador, with a “clear, precise, unequivocal affirmation, that, in case of a war waged against Italy, the aggressor would find itself facing Germany as well.” This, he reported, “triggered a great, enthusiastic demonstration by the Deputies and the public.” Italy’s ambassador, although not himself fond of Hitler, offered a comforting view back to Rome:
The speech, of great range, seemed well constructed and well framed. It was, in substance, quite moderate, especially in relation to the man and to his previous speeches. Other than for the Jewish question, which he showed the clear intention of liquidating once and for all, Hitler was not excessive in anything. As regards the Church, one can say he was anticlerical but not antireligious…. Other than in connection with a defense of Italy, the Führer never spoke of war. On the contrary, he spoke a number of times of peace.[11]
Six weeks later Hitler’s troops invaded Czechoslovakia and seized Prague, sending shock waves through much of the world. In the few weeks separating the Führer’s speech from that invasion, a new pope would be crowned.
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Mussolini had become prime minister in 1922, the same year Pius XI had become pope. At the time, the pontiff had good reason to be skeptical about Italy’s brash new thirty-nine-year-old government head. Mussolini had previously been a prominent radical Socialist and anticleric, and it was only shortly before becoming prime minister that he had proclaimed his support for the church. Relations would improve dramatically, and over the next years, Pius XI would make a fateful agreement with the dictator, codified in the 1929 Lateran Accords. In exchange for Catholic support for his regime, Mussolini agreed to end separation of church and state in Italy, establish Vatican City as a sovereign state ruled by the pope, and grant the church political powers it had not enjoyed for many decades.[12]
Not that the pope had any illusions about Mussolini’s own religious beliefs. The founder of Italian Fascism had never been known to attend a regular Sunday Mass, much less to take communion or observe other church rites. Although this seemed not to have unduly bothered the pope, he had, in recent years, become disturbed by Mussolini’s ever-growing hubris. Increasingly, it seemed, the Duce regarded himself as a kind of deity, the church there to serve his interests. Most worrisome of all for the pope was Mussolini’s embrace of Hitler, a man Pius XI viewed as the high prophet of blood-and-soil paganism.
The pope and the Duce were on a collision course. Although, as the German ambassador reported to Berlin in July 1937, Cardinal Pacelli had done all he could to rein Pius XI in, he “has not succeeded in persuading the aging, headstrong, and irascible Pope to exercise greater caution and restraint in his speeches.” A year later, when Mussolini unveiled his new “racial” policy, the pope went off text in an audience to ask why Mussolini thought he needed to ape the Nazis, a remark that infuriated Italy’s thin-skinned dictator.[13]
In December 1938 the Duce’s ambassador to the Vatican reported that the recent friction with the Fascist regime had left the pope depressed and angry. In speaking of Mussolini with the prelates closest to him, he would frequently let this anger show. “The pope,” recalled the ambassador, “threatened to do something before dying that Italy would remember for a long time.” Perhaps, he speculated, the pope might issue “an encyclical against Fascism or even a condemnation of Fascism.”[14]
Early in January 1939 the ambassador received confirmation that the pope was indeed about to issue an encyclical denouncing racism. The ambassador had confronted both Cardinal Pacelli and his deputy to ask if there was any truth to the report. They denied it, but the ambassador remained unconvinced. “Without further inquiries,” he reported, “I definitely could not exclude the fact that a document denouncing the totalitarian States is being prepared.”[15]
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While Pius XI was sick and depressed, Mussolini was feeling quite well. Returning on January 5 from a two-week vacation, Italy’s dictator was still wearing his skiing outfit when he met the American ambassador, William Phillips, that afternoon in his cavernous office at the fifteenth-century Palazzo Venezia. The room, named the World Map Hall for the huge mosaic map that had once covered a wall, was sixty feet long and fifty feet wide, its frescoed ceiling forty feet high, its marble floor an intricately inlaid series of geometrical shapes and images.
Throughout their meeting, Mussolini’s thirty-five-year-old son-in-law and foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, stood mutely at his side, giving Phillips the impression “of a thoroughly well-disciplined footman.”[16] The son of an early Fascist government minister, he had married Mussolini’s favorite child, his headstrong daughter Edda, in 1930.
At first, it was hard to take Ciano seriously. He was widely viewed as the spoiled son of Fascist aristocracy, the protected husband of the Duce’s daughter. When Phillips first met Ciano, shortly after he became foreign minister, he had been unimpressed. Ciano’s English was fluent and he was certainly affable, the ambassador reported to President Roosevelt at the time, but he was plump, fuzzy faced, and looked “astonishingly boyish,” with well-oiled hair “slicked back in typical Italian fashion.” Worse, he seemed more interested in chasing women at his golf club than in conducting serious business.[17]
Meeting Mussolini in the first days of the new year, the American ambassador found the dictator in a good mood but saw trouble ahead. Phillips had brought a letter from President Roosevelt to the Duce proposing that, in light of the persecution of Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, a state be established for them in East Africa. Roosevelt suggested setting aside the Plateau region straddling the southern border of Italy’s Ethiopian colony and the north of the British colony of Kenya. The Duce surprised Phillips by interrupting him to express his strong distaste for Jews, saying they lacked any loyalty to the countries in which they lived and were the purveyors of financial fraud. Moreover, they were utterly incapable of assimilating with any other “race.” There was no room for Jews in Europe, Mussolini told the American, and eventually they would all have to go, but he dismissed the idea of allowing Jews to settle in Ethiopia. He suggested that either Russia or North America, both having large sparsely settled areas, might better accommodate them.[18]
