The Pope at War, page 4
Down the hall in the Zodiac Room—its name deriving from the astronomical design painted on its sky-blue ceiling—the dictator’s curly-haired, twenty-six-year-old lover, Clara Petacci, waited almost every afternoon for his visits and their lovemaking. Although he had had many lovers, and quite a few children by them, Clara was different. Not only was she much younger, but he had become obsessed with her, an obsession more than matched by hers for him.
Although she had not finished high school and had little experience of the world outside her corner of Italy, Clara, the daughter of a Vatican physician, had impressive drive. Through remarkable persistence, she had brought herself to the Duce’s attention and then won him over. Undaunted by the fact she had been married two years earlier in a ceremony performed by one of the church’s most illustrious cardinals, followed by a blessing given personally by the pope, Clara began her affair with Mussolini in 1936. By the following year, she would see or talk to him by phone virtually every day, and the diary she kept over the next several years would record practically every word he spoke to her, noting as well with her underlined code word sì (yes) each time they had sex. Her youthful pursuits—drawing, designing clothes, playing the violin, composing poetry—all came to take second place to her devotion to her lover, who was four months older than her father.
At home in the Villa Torlonia, Mussolini lived under the watchful eye of his wife, Rachele, the strong-willed ruler of his household, who kept chickens and pigs in their backyard. The daughter of a poor peasant family in Mussolini’s hometown, she had met her future husband when she was only seven years old. The next year, following the death of her father, Rachele’s mother took her out of school and sent her to work as a maid. Giving birth to Edda, the first of their five children, in 1910 when she was twenty years old, Rachele held fast to the anticlerical convictions of her youth and only reluctantly agreed to have her union with Benito consecrated by a church wedding fifteen years later. Spurning beauty salons and makeup, possessing only two modest coats, insisting on washing the dishes after their meals, and refusing to attend state functions, she nonetheless, in her elder daughter’s words, was “the true dictator in the family.” Although Mussolini diligently returned home every night, outside it he led a completely different love life.[19]
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In the wake of his 1936 conquest of Ethiopia and his declaration that after two millennia Rome once again had an empire, Mussolini was increasingly apt to see himself as infallible. He now dreamed of greater conquests. “March on to the ocean,” he told the Fascist Grand Council at their early February 1939 meeting. Italy had to “escape from its Mediterranean prison.” Too vain to be seen wearing reading glasses, Mussolini, like Hitler and for the same reason, had his text prepared on a special typewriter that printed letters three times their normal size. Perhaps sensing the feeling of alarm his remarks provoked among several of his fellow Fascist bigwigs, he added that he was not then planning any immediate military action.[20]
Mussolini had never felt comfortable around priests, and while he had earlier recognized the advantage of acquiring Vatican support in overwhelmingly Catholic Italy, he bitterly complained of the pope’s recent barbs. It was not going to be easy to convince Italians to embrace Nazi Germany. The history of Italian diffidence toward Germans was a long one, not helped by the recent Great War the two nations had fought. Nor could most Italians feel comfortable with the Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy. He could ill afford to have the church oppose his plans.
The barrage of criticism of Germany that appeared in the pages of the Vatican’s daily newspaper in the first weeks of 1939 infuriated Mussolini. A typical Osservatore Romano article told of the recent closing of 180 Catholic schools in one region of the country. It went on to list other parts of the Reich that were now bereft of any Catholic schools, including all of Austria. An even more hard-hitting article appeared on the paper’s front page in early February, giving a litany of Nazi measures aimed at undermining the church’s influence. “They want to prevent and bleed away Catholic life,” the Vatican paper charged, “and even more they want to destroy the Catholic Church…and even eradicate Christianity itself in order to introduce a faith that has absolutely nothing to do with the…Christian faith.” Although the Vatican tried to keep up the fiction that L’Osservatore Romano was not the official newspaper of the Vatican, few took this seriously. In fact, it was closely overseen by the Vatican Secretariat of State and by the pope himself.[21]
On January 22 Bonifacio Pignatti, Mussolini’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to the Apostolic Palace to complain. In his subsequent report, Pignatti expressed concern that the Vatican’s attacks on Germany might weaken Italians’ enthusiasm for their own Fascist regime. The problem lay with the pope alone, he said, for “no prelate, no matter how high up he is, dares oppose the Pontiff.” “As I have repeatedly written,” Pignatti advised, “only a new pontificate will be able to adopt a different, more conciliatory direction on the racial question.” The prelates around the pope were themselves increasingly worried where his outbursts might lead. “The Holy Father is always very irritable,” Monsignor Tardini, Pacelli’s deputy in the Vatican Secretariat of State, wrote in a note at the time. “He once again repeated to me that Mussolini is a farceur [buffoon]. ‘With me he has been rude and duplicitous.’ And he adds, ‘I say this to many people so that he too knows it.’ ” Tardini was at wit’s end: “And unfortunately it’s true. The pope does say it to many people. Ciano tells the nuncio that the pope…talks too much.”[22]
Unlike many of the rumors that swirled around the Vatican, the whisperings that Pius XI was secretly preparing an encyclical denouncing Nazi racism and antisemitism were grounded in fact. In the wake of Hitler’s visit to Rome the previous spring, the pope had decided that just such an official papal pronouncement was needed. But he worried that Cardinal Pacelli and the other high-ranking prelates of the Vatican would try to talk him out of it. As a result, he turned to an outsider, an American Jesuit, John LaFarge, to draft the encyclical. LaFarge, known for his work opposing racism in the United States, had sent the resulting text to the head of his order in September 1938, expecting him to deliver it to the pope within a few days. Instead, the Jesuit superior general, Wlodimir Ledóchowski, a strident antisemite, did all he could to sabotage it. The draft encyclical landed on Pius XI’s desk only in mid-January, with a cover note from the Jesuit leader urging him to abandon the project.[23]
The pope was planning another blow against Italy’s embrace of Nazi Germany as well. He had invited Italy’s more than three hundred bishops to Rome to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Accords on February 11, 1939. There, at St. Peter’s Basilica, he planned to give them what he thought might well be his final message. When Pius XI threatened to say something that would long be remembered, this is what he had in mind, and it was this that had made Mussolini so nervous.
The pope prayed for God to allow him to live long enough to give his message to the bishops, and to the world, but he had grown so weak that by February 6 he was confined to bed. Other than his doctors, only Cardinal Pacelli was allowed to visit him. Under the strain of the pope’s worsening health and increasing irritability, Pacelli himself appeared beaten down. The cardinal urged the ailing pope to delay the upcoming anniversary ceremonies, but Pius XI refused. Concerned that his voice might be too weak to be heard in St. Peter’s immense basilica, he ordered the Vatican printing office to make copies of his remarks for all the bishops.[24]
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“The Pope is dead,” Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and foreign minister, recorded in his diary on February 10. “The news leaves the Duce completely indifferent.” Indeed, on hearing of the pope’s death, Mussolini made no effort to repress a big grin. “At long last he’s gone!” he told his son Bruno. “That stubborn old man is dead.” The death could not have come at a more opportune moment for the Duce, for it was the day before the pope was scheduled to give the address that Mussolini had feared. Indeed, some would later suspect the Duce of having found a way to hasten the pope to his tomb.[25]
While the Duce privately gloated, the official Fascist government reaction could not have been more respectful, for the image of the deeply Catholic Fascist state had to be maintained. The Grand Fascist Council’s meeting scheduled for that day adjourned in a sign of respect and issued a statement that the Vatican’s own newspaper highlighted in its front-page coverage of the papal death:
The Grand Council of Fascism sends a reverent tribute to the memory of the Pontiff Pius XI who desired the Conciliation between the Church and the Italian state, a great event that, following sixty years of fruitless attempts, resolved the Roman Question with the Lateran Accords and, through the Concordat, established collaboration between the State and the Church to safeguard the Fascist and Catholic unity of the Italian people.[26]
The Fascist press devoted countless reverential articles to the deceased pope. Il Regime Fascista, the most anticlerical of all the major Fascist papers, was in this respect typical, filling page after page with praise for him. Its front-page story concluded: “While outside Italy the joint forces of Bolshevism, Judaism and the masonry, enemies of religion, of Jesus, and of Italian strength and world Peace, were working to provoke a war, Italy’s Catholic and Fascist people testify to their sorrow for the death of the great Pope of Conciliation and of Peace.”[27]
Ciano, as foreign minister, instructed Italy’s ambassadors abroad to lower their flags to half-mast. Ciano himself went that evening to the Sistine Chapel, where Cardinal Pacelli awaited him. As they stood together at the foot of the towering catafalque on which the pope’s body lay, Pacelli took advantage of the occasion to speak with Mussolini’s son-in-law about church-state relations, a conversation that led Ciano to believe that with Pius XI dead, the Fascist-church alliance would soon be improving. The two men then got on their knees, side by side, their shoulders practically touching, facing the pope’s body, as a crowd of prelates and aristocrats looked on. A photographer for the Vatican newspaper captured the image, as Mussolini’s pudgy son-in-law, in his embroidered ministerial tunic, his short dark hair slicked back, pressed his hands together in front of his face in prayerful homage. Beside him, the gaunt, bespectacled, balding sixty-two-year-old Pacelli, in his clerical gown and long flowing red cape, did the same.[28]
Galeazzo Ciano and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli in prayer at the body of Pope Pius XI in the Sistine Chapel, February 10, 1939
That weekend, instead of gathering to hear the pope denounce racism and Italy’s embrace of Nazi Germany, Italy’s cardinals and bishops came to Rome to mourn him. Mussolini initially balked at taking part in the funeral rites, but his son-in-law argued that his absence might prejudice their cause at the upcoming conclave. The Vatican would expect him to offer some gesture of respect. “The Duce,” Ciano observed, “is always bitter about the Church.” In the end, Mussolini agreed to attend one of the funeral ceremonies scheduled for the following week.[29]
Two days after the pope’s death, Mussolini, still worried about the speech the pope had been planning to give to the bishops, directed his Vatican ambassador to find out whether any copies of it remained. The next morning the ambassador went to see Cardinal Pacelli, who confirmed that hundreds of copies of the speech had been printed. Distributing the dead pope’s final message, remarked the ambassador, would not be a good idea. Pacelli agreed and ordered the Vatican printing office to destroy all copies. The vice director of that office assured the cardinal that he would personally see to their destruction, so that, as he put it, “not a comma” of the speech Pius XI had labored on in his dying days would remain.[30]
Skip Notes
* Pronounced DOO-chay.
A week after the pope’s death, Mussolini’s and Hitler’s ambassadors to the Holy See met to plan a common strategy. Bonifacio Pignatti, Italy’s sixty-one-year-old ambassador, was an experienced diplomat and a man the Vatican viewed as a good, practicing Catholic. He would do all he could to ensure the new pope was someone congenial to the Fascist regime.[1] His German counterpart, Diego von Bergen, had been committed to improving relations between the Vatican and the Third Reich ever since Hitler came to power. Bergen had already spoken with Cardinal Pacelli, who wanted to let Hitler know that he hoped harmonious relations might now be restored between Germany and the Holy See. Should the conclave choose Pacelli, said Bergen, he would undoubtedly do everything he could to reach an agreement with Germany and would very likely succeed.[2]
As the day for the conclave neared, the two embassies continued to lobby the cardinals for Pacelli’s election. The Italian ambassador sent his number two to meet with Fritz Menshausen, the number two at the German embassy. Menshausen “repeatedly insisted on the candidacy of Pacelli as Pope,” reported the Italian ambassador. “That would represent the best solution for Germany and would perhaps allow reaching a detente in the relations between the Holy See and the Reich.” Italy’s ambassador thought the German cardinals were likely to support Pacelli’s election. If the French, too, decided to vote for him, the other foreign cardinals were likely to add their support as well. What remained less clear was what the Italian cardinals—who formed a majority of the Sacred College of Cardinals—would do: “They fault the Cardinal Chamberlain [Pacelli] for his weakness of character, for being too prone to bend to pressure.” Italy’s ambassador added that in his opinion “these are quite well-founded concerns.”[3]
Cardinal Pacelli presides over the Camera Apostolica, February 1939
The following day, forty-eight hours before the start of the conclave, the two ambassadors met again to compare notes. Bergen described his meetings with the German cardinals, who had assured him they would adopt a “conciliatory” attitude. One of them had met three times with Pacelli, who had expressed both his desire to bring about peace between the Vatican and the German Reich and his own interest in becoming pope. “It now seems clear to me,” Pignatti reported, that “the obstacle to his election will come from the Italian cardinals, among whom he does not enjoy much sympathy.”[4]
In the days before the conclave, Cardinal Pacelli had also met with the French cardinal Alfred Baudrillart. After a moment of hesitation, Pacelli spoke openly of his chances. “At the end of the day,” wrote Baudrillart in his diary, “he will be a conciliator.” The only holdout among France’s papal electors was the youngest, fifty-four-year-old Eugène Tisserant, the Curia’s lone outspokenly anti-Fascist cardinal, and the only non-Italian cardinal in the church’s central administration. Pacelli certainly had his merits, the burly, bushy-bearded cardinal told the French ambassador, for he was a man of considerable culture and diplomatic ability, but he was too weak, too easily intimidated. Tisserant, whom France’s ambassador characterized as “a bit like the enfant terrible of the group of our cardinals, wearying them with his quips and abrupt expression of his strong opinions,” seemed to have “a personal antipathy toward the former secretary of state.”[5]
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In the past, conclaves were held within days of a pope’s death, and as a result the non-Italian cardinals often arrived too late to cast their votes. This time, to accommodate them, over two and a half weeks transpired between Pius XI’s death and the convening of the conclave on March 1. Not all were pleased with the delay, unhappy with the spectacle of endless politicking, not least in a series of semisecret meetings between foreign diplomats and their compatriot cardinals. “They ought to close in the cardinals just as soon as they arrive and make them recite the rosary from morning to night,” quipped the papal nuncio in Lisbon.[6]
The opening ceremonies began with a morning Mass in the Apostolic Palace’s Pauline Chapel. There, surrounded by its massive frescoed walls, graced by two of Michelangelo’s masterpieces, the secretary of Latin letters, a man normally in charge of preparing the pope’s Latin language correspondence, read a seemingly endless sermon in a glacial monotone. In the afternoon, the cardinals marched, each accompanied by a Roman aristocratic escort, to the Sistine Chapel. There, along either side of the famed frescoed sanctuary, small canopied tables had been set up for the sixty-two electors, with Boston’s Cardinal William O’Connell rushing in at the last minute. Atop each table sat an inkwell, pen, blank ballots, a stick of red wax, matches, and a candlestick.[7]
The voting began the next morning. A two-thirds majority was required to elect a pope, and on the first ballot Cardinal Pacelli received thirty-two votes, followed by the archbishop of Florence, Elia Dalla Costa, with nine, and Luigi Maglione, former nuncio to France, with seven. Pacelli had won the support of a large majority of the non-Italians but only a minority of his compatriots. The French ambassador had speculated that if Pacelli did not get the needed two-thirds vote on one of the first two ballots, his candidacy would recede, and another cardinal would be elected. As the votes on the second ballot were opened and read aloud, Pacelli’s name was pronounced forty times. He was still two votes short. Despite the ambassador’s prediction, Pacelli was now too close to be denied. That same afternoon, on the third vote, at five p.m., forty-eight cardinals dipped their pens into their inkwells and scrawled Pacelli’s name.
