The Pope at War, page 36
The U.S. War Department had prepared a list of twenty-five conditions that would have to be met to declare Rome an open city. From his fishing retreat, Roosevelt cabled Churchill, “I think we would be in a difficult position if we were to turn down the plea to make Rome an open city. I have just received from Washington the proposed conditions and given my approval in principle but I think we must be very sure of the inspection if the terms are accepted by Italy.”
The British prime minister remained unsympathetic. “The time for negotiating about Rome being an open city has passed,” replied Churchill. It would only “encourage Italy to attempt further negotiations for the neutralization of Italy itself.”
Roosevelt replied immediately. Given the imminence of Eisenhower’s planned air raid over Rome, it would be unwise to try to halt it now. “However,” he added, “pending the outcome of Vatican efforts, I am of the opinion that further raids should not be continued.”[23]
The frenetic transatlantic exchange of messages was followed by something of an anticlimax. Due to bad weather, Eisenhower called off the bombing mission at the last minute. Given the need to give priority to air support for the Sicilian operation, he reported, no new attack on Rome’s railyards could be contemplated immediately.[24]
Within hours of learning that the day’s bombing mission was canceled, Churchill sent Roosevelt word of the latest discussion of his War Cabinet. The effect on British public opinion of sparing Rome from attack “would be most unfortunate…. It would be taken as a proof that we were going to make a patched-up peace with the King and Badoglio and had abandoned the principle of unconditional surrender.” The world would see the decision as a ringing success for the new Italian government. “No doubt their greatest hope is to have Italy recognized as a neutral area, and Rome would seem to be a first instalment.” There was another reason as well for Churchill’s insistence that the Allies reject the Italian request, for they hoped to have Rome in their hands soon, and it would then be of great help to be able to use the city as a staging area for their own military efforts farther north. Should they proclaim Rome an “open city,” that would be impossible.[25]
Roosevelt was getting much the same message from his own joint chiefs. “It is inadvisable,” they warned him on August 5, “from a purely military viewpoint, to decide the question of the recognizing of Rome as an open city at the present time. By such recognition we would deny ourselves the use of communications through Rome which would be vital to operations to the north.” But they recognized why the president was reluctant to reject the pope’s plea. “For political reasons,” they acknowledged, “it would appear that the necessity of a direct denial of this request should be avoided.” Their advice: delay responding to the pope as long as possible. “It is our view that the communication facilities, plants, and airfields in Rome and its immediate vicinity are important military targets and should be attacked.”[26]
Fearing, for good reason, that Hitler would try to liberate his fallen Italian comrade, Badoglio initially sent Mussolini to the tiny island of Ponza, in the Tyrrhenian Sea between Rome and Naples. He did not remain there long, for Badoglio, worried that the Germans might be close to locating him, had him board a navy ship that sailed northward to Maddalena, a small island off the northern coast of Sardinia.
Shortly after Mussolini arrived at the semiabandoned villa that would be his home on the grounds of the small naval base there, he was handed a small package. Within a day of learning of Mussolini’s arrest, the Führer had ordered the SS to find the deposed dictator and free him, but he had not yet succeeded in locating him. He did succeed, though, in having the Italian government deliver this gift. Mussolini had turned sixty on July 29. Unwrapping the package, he found a book inside, sent by the man who, as a young rabble-rouser, had looked up to the Italian leader as a role model. It was the first volume of a luxury edition of the complete works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The Führer had scrawled his own dedication: “Adolf Hitler, to his dear Benito Mussolini.”[1]
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In Rome, Duke Pietro d’Acquarone, minister of the royal household, sent an urgent summons to industrialist Alberto Pirelli. On the tire magnate’s arrival on August 3, 1943, the duke accompanied him to the office of Italy’s new foreign minister, Raffaele Guariglia. The situation, Guariglia told the two men, was bleak. If Italy were to ask the Allies for an armistice, Hitler would order the thousands of German soldiers already in the area to move on Rome, seize control of the government, and most likely arrest the king. The Germans might conceivably force the pope out as well, as Napoleon had done a century and a half earlier to Pius VII. Guariglia predicted that additional German troops would then pour into the country and take over much of the rest of the peninsula, aiming to keep the Allied armies far from German soil. In light of these dangers, the new government’s most pressing task was to calm the Germans’ fears. The industrialist agreed: they must do nothing to appear to be betraying their German allies.[2]
Relations between an Italian foreign minister and a Vatican secretary of state had never been closer. On leaving his office late at night, Guariglia would often go to the Apostolic Palace to brief Cardinal Maglione on the latest developments. Given the potentially momentous events about to unfold, Maglione decided to convene a meeting of fourteen cardinals resident in Rome to brief them on what he had learned. Thirteen of the fourteen were Italian.
The Holy See, Maglione told them, had played no role in the king’s recent dismissal of Mussolini, yet it now faced the consequences of that action. German troops were progressively occupying Italian cities near the Austrian border, and motorized German divisions were nearing Rome. The new Italian government feared an imminent German seizure of the nation’s capital, and there was no guarantee the Germans would not invade the Vatican as well. Among the rumors he had heard was one claiming that the Germans planned to relocate the pope to Munich.
The cardinal told his colleagues it was crucial that the Holy See do nothing that the Germans could view as helping Italy reach a separate peace with the Allies. Italy had no choice but to continue the war on Germany’s side. But this would lead the Allies to resume their deadly bombardments. The result, he feared, would be not only more devastation and suffering but chaos that would offer fertile field for the spread of Communism.[3]
Amid all the tension, Ernst von Weizsäcker, the German ambassador, remained committed to promoting smooth relations between the Vatican and the Third Reich. To this end, he reported to Berlin that the Vatican was not entirely happy with Italy’s new government. He cited Vatican displeasure with the government’s loosening of the previous regime’s strict censorship of speech and the press. Rome was now flooded with leaflets denouncing the Vatican for its past support of Fascist rule. “Currents hostile to the Church are spreading in Rome to such an extent,” observed Weizsäcker, “that the Vatican is secretly assuming a defensive position…. What is certain is that the Church is anxious, and its arch enemy continues to be Communism.”[4]
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With all the uncertainties in the aftermath of Mussolini’s fall, Pius XII had thought it best to remain publicly silent, but on August 7 he decided to take a public initiative. He called on Italians to take advantage of the approaching Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin to pray for peace. Referring to the sorrow that the Mother of God felt at “the sight of the slaughter of so many of her sons,” the pope, in a text published in the Vatican newspaper, expressed the hope that “Christian peace” might soon be brought about, “by means of which alone the conquering and conquered peoples, reunited not through force but through justice and equity, may be enabled to enjoy a long tranquility and prosperity.”
In his diary entry that day, Father Vincent McCormick, the former head of the Gregorian University, expressed his disappointment in the pope’s first words since the ending of the Fascist regime:
I take it to be a document published to defend Vatican before Italy against the charge of doing nothing for peace. For Vat[ican] seems to be victim of terror now lest Rome or Italy be taken over by Germans or anti-clerical Italians. But what an unfortunate document! At a time when Sicilians are jubilant over their liberation, and hundreds of millions of people from Norway to the Medit[erranean] are breathing a sigh of hopeful relief, seeing at last after four years of subjection to tyranny and slavery the light of freedom begin to spread along the horizon, the H[oly] F[ather] speaks to tell us that the heavens, far from clearing, are becoming blacker than ever, Christianity is threatened. Is that His true feeling about a German defeat, or is it that His horizon is bounded by the Alps and the Sicilian straits. The robbed and starving in Greece, in France, in Belgium, Holland, Austria, in concentration camps—religious, priests, seminarians, the enslaved workers—does their liberation mean nothing to Vat[ican]? Sad, sad.[5]
As the pope was lamenting the suffering on both sides of the war, Italy’s new head of government, Pietro Badoglio, found himself engaged in a dangerous double game of his own. On August 6, while continuing to reassure Hitler that Italy remained a loyal partner, he dispatched two emissaries, one to the Allied headquarters in Tangiers and the other to meet with Allied diplomats in Lisbon, to explore the possibility of negotiations. In Tangiers, his emissary explained to the British consul general that initiating negotiations through the Vatican had become “impracticable,” and so this more direct, if informal and secret, approach was being made. Fearful of the Germans, Badoglio could not appear to be authorizing any such talks. Indeed, he was soon scheduled to meet with Hitler, where he would renew his public call for Italy to continue to fight at Germany’s side. But, his emissary explained, these were not his true sentiments nor those of his government. They were, unfortunately, necessary to gain time.[6]
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In his four years as pope, Pius XII had never spoken out against Italy’s anti-Jewish racial laws. He had, though, frequently complained to the Fascist government that the laws were being unfairly applied to families who were, in the church’s eyes, Catholic. Jews who had been baptized should be exempt from the racial laws, the pope believed, as should baptized children of “mixed marriages.” The fall of Fascism now offered the prospect of bringing about the changes to the racial laws the pope had long sought. The newly opened Vatican archives reveal that Badoglio himself was sympathetic to a change in the racial laws. Within a few days of being appointed prime minister, Badoglio had sent word to the pope that he would like to abrogate them, “especially those regarding marriage,” but could not do so immediately due to his fear of what the Germans would think.[7]
In the five years since those laws had gone into effect, Father Tacchi Venturi, the pope’s unofficial Jesuit emissary to Mussolini, had repeatedly complained to the government on his behalf about the ways they were being applied. Now the Jesuit was eager to act. Seeking papal approval, he wrote Cardinal Maglione urging that they take advantage of the changed government to remedy “the painful condition in which, due to their ancestry, not a few Catholics of so-called mixed families find themselves.” He reported that he had already sounded out members of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and found them sympathetic to such a papal request.
He then outlined the changes needed. The revised laws should grant “full Aryan status to all mixed families.” This would ensure that those children of mixed marriages who had been baptized after the inception of the laws “are no longer, as they are at present, declared members of the Jewish race, and, while being Christian, are treated as Jews.” He ended his letter, “I await your instructions.”[8]
Four days later Pius XII told Monsignor Tardini how to respond: “One can write to P.T.V. [Padre Tacchi Venturi] in the sense he has desired.” Cardinal Maglione added his own note to the Jesuit’s proposal: “Affirmative. Do it on behalf of the Holy See.” On the eighteenth, Maglione sent the papal envoy a letter authorizing his approach to the new government, reiterating that the changes were to be made to ensure that the racial laws were applied only to those whom the church regarded as Jews.[9]
Later in the month, the Jesuit reported back to Maglione on his efforts. “In dealing with the matter with His Excellency the Minister of Internal Affairs, I necessarily limited myself to the three points [regarding mixed marriages and converted Jews] specified in Your Eminence’s letter of August 8…taking good care not to call for the total abrogation of a law which, according to the principles and traditions of the Catholic Church, while having some provisions that should be abrogated, certainly contain others that merit being confirmed.”[10]
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After a brief pause following Mussolini’s overthrow, Allied air attacks on Italy resumed in the second week of August, heavily damaging Turin and Genoa and engulfing Milan’s famed La Scala opera house in flames. Rome fell victim as well. Late on the morning of August 13, Allied planes appeared over its skies, again targeting the city’s railyards and raining destruction and death on nearby residential neighborhoods. Knowing that the planes would steer clear of Vatican City, many Romans crowded into St. Peter’s Square as soon as they saw them approach. A Swiss journalist described the scene:
People huddled like chickens under the colonnade. Long files of cars parked all over the place; cabs with steaming horses obviously driven here at a great speed; and people still pouring in from every direction, in cars, on bicycles and on foot…. In the basilica a crowd. But even here people shiver and tremble, hearing the dull thud of the bombs. They also run from one corner to another, always thinking that not theirs but the opposite one is the safer.
But best of all was the sight of an Italian soldier, obviously on duty…timidly hiding himself in a corner of the porch. I grinned at him and he grinned back, as if saying, “Yes, I know I ought not be here, but you see, here I am safe!”
In early afternoon, the pope once again got into his car and headed for the scene of destruction. Stopping briefly in front of the Basilica of St. John in Lateran, he raised his arms in blessing as the distraught Romans gathered around him.[11]
The next day Badoglio’s government announced it was unilaterally declaring Rome an “open city.” On hearing the news, which linked the city’s self-declared immunity from further bombing to its status as the world center of Catholicism, several thousand Romans rushed to the Vatican. Gathered below the pope’s window, they shouted “Long live the pope! Peace! Peace!” The pontiff stepped onto his balcony three times to bless them. A witness from Italy’s Foreign Ministry offered his own ironic observation in his diary that day: “The Roman crowd, jubilant once more, goes to the Vatican and shouts ‘vivas’ to the pope with the same fervor with which yesterday they shouted to Badoglio and the day before that to Mussolini.”[12]
Pius XII at scene of Allied bombardment of Rome, August 13,1943
Uncertain how Roosevelt would react to Italy’s “open city” announcement, and with a further air assault on Rome planned for the next day, the combined chiefs sent Eisenhower a curt message: “Pending clarification and further instructions it is desired that you make no further attacks on Rome.” Eisenhower was not pleased but, having no choice, canceled the strikes planned for the fifteenth. “All our information indicates,” he wrote, that “attacks on Rome have had most profound effect on Italian morale. We believe here that we shall miss another golden opportunity if these operations are restricted before a bilateral declaration is made. It will certainly be some time before Government Agencies, War Factories and German Troops will be clear of the city.”
Eisenhower would not have to wait long, receiving new instructions within hours: “Standstill order issued by Combined Chiefs of Staff in their message of 14 August regarding bombing of Rome is revoked…. You are free to carry on these operations to the extent that you consider necessary or advisable subject to previous limitations regarding safety of Vatican.”[13]
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One morning in late August, the much-dreaded sound of the air raid siren again pierced the air. People streamed into the baroque Church of the Holy Name of Jesus in the center of Rome, the same church where Father Tacchi Venturi had lived for many years. False alarms had been common, and all hoped this would prove to be another, but in the absence of bomb shelters, the massive church seemed to offer the best hope for safety. Seeing a group of women huddled together, some weeping, a priest went to offer words of comfort.
“There are fourteen million Catholics in the U.S.A.,” said the Jesuit, “and they will immediately kick Roosevelt out if he dares to bomb Rome again especially now when it is an open city.”
