The Pope at War, page 47
The pope agreed to speak to the prime minister about all this, but he had a message of his own that he wanted Babuscio to deliver. Let the Italian government know, he said, that he firmly hoped that whatever measures were to be taken against “those responsible for the Italian tragedy”—that is, Mussolini and the Fascist leadership of the country—“not depart from that spirit of clemency that is so innate among our people.”[12]
As it happened, the British prime minister’s visit came at a particularly bad time for the pope. On August 22, 1944, the day Churchill arrived in Rome, Cardinal Maglione, who had long suffered from heart disease, died. He was sixty-seven years old. A few weeks earlier he had been admitted to the American section of a Neapolitan hospital, but the doctors could not save him. His funeral would be held in Rome a week later, several days after the British prime minister was scheduled to leave the city. Although Maglione had never enjoyed warm relations with Pius XII, and it seemed in recent times that the pope often preferred to deal with his two deputies, Monsignors Montini and Tardini, the Neapolitan cardinal had been a favorite of the foreign diplomatic corps and an astute observer of the international scene. His death left a void that would not soon be filled.[13]
Accompanied by Osborne, Churchill met with Pius XII the day after Maglione’s death. Monsignor Tardini, after discussing the upcoming visit with the pope, had drafted points the pope wanted to raise with the British prime minister, which were then translated into English. The bulk of these concerned Italy’s political situation, first among them the question of the monarchy. After Victor Emmanuel’s two decades of support for Mussolini and the Fascist regime, the monarchy that had founded the Kingdom of Italy now risked being jettisoned. The pope planned to tell the prime minister that it should be retained, arguing that “the change from the monarchical system to that of a republic could likely add to the present distress, embitter discords, and prepare new upheavals for the future.” The pope was also eager to discuss his greatest worry: “Communism is a very grave and imminent danger for the Italian people, impoverished, starving and exasperated as it is.” Only if the Allies provided Italy with major economic relief, the pope would warn, could the Communist threat be blunted.
The pope also wanted to bring up disturbing reports he was receiving from southern Italy that the Allies were allowing Catholic religious instruction to be dropped from the public schools. The great majority of the members of the Allied Commission for Education, complained the pope, were non-Catholics. Using the excuse that they needed to select anti-Fascists to advise them, the commission had sought advice “from Italian intellectuals, known for their anti-Catholic spirit, who really constitute a negligible minority in comparison with the great body of educated Catholic Italians.” What the pope thought the Allies needed instead was the advice of ecclesiastical authorities, especially in the selection of appropriate textbooks for the public schools.
Next on the pope’s list of topics to be raised with Churchill were concerns about the future of the Lateran Accords that the Vatican had signed with Mussolini fifteen years earlier: “Some say that the Lateran Agreements were concluded by Fascism and therefore should fall with it.” On the contrary, in a revision of history that would quickly become the standard line in the Vatican, the pope was to argue that the Fascist government had never been favorably disposed toward the church. The agreement had been not between the church and Mussolini, who negotiated it and signed it, the pope would insist, but between the church and the Italian king.
Finally, the pope was eager for the Allied authorities to do something about an alarming new development. At the Vatican’s insistence, the Fascist regime had repressed all attempts by Protestants to proselytize in Italy, but now, as the war front moved northward, Protestant missionaries were making their way into the country. The effects of allowing “Protestant propaganda” in Italy would be “a) a sad division and a serious disquietude among the people; b) a strong reaction on the part of the bishops, the clergy and Catholic Action; c) an unavoidable attitude of condemnation and opposition on the part of the Holy See.”[14]
How many of the points from this memo Pius XII discussed with Churchill in their forty-five-minute meeting is not clear, although he was not shy in speaking his mind with the British prime minister. After the meeting, Churchill told Myron Taylor the pope was “a very forthright and powerful personality.” As Churchill might be thought to be rather knowledgeable on the subject of powerful personalities, the comment is revealing. The war had changed the pope, whom many cardinals had earlier feared would be insufficiently tough for the demands of the position. Pius XII still cultivated an ascetic image, and still in private delighted in having his canaries feed from his hands, but he was now far from bashful in making his views known. No longer sharing Rome with Italy’s longtime dictator, who had known how to intimidate him, and with Hitler increasingly in retreat, he could now begin to assert himself.[15]
Nowhere were the pope’s more imperious instincts clearer than in the question of appointing a new secretary of state. As always at such a time, rumors of who Maglione’s successor might be spread quickly. But Pius XII seemed in no hurry to find a replacement. In fact, the pope felt more comfortable without a secretary of state, and he had never been fully at ease with the one he had, for in the pope’s eyes Cardinal Maglione had seemed to view himself too much as an equal. In Monsignors Tardini and Montini, the pope had able men whose subservience to him was never in doubt.[16]
On September 1, 1944, the fifth anniversary of the start of the war, and with fierce fighting continuing farther north in Italy, the pope broadcast his first worldwide radio address since Rome’s liberation. A new front in the war was forming at the time in northern Italy. Over the summer, Allied troops had advanced rapidly northward from Rome through Florence, but by the end of August they had stalled at the Germans’ new line of defense, the Gothic Line. It stretched from just south of La Spezia on the northwestern coast across the Apennines to Pesaro on the Adriatic. Not helping the Allied cause was the decision of the military command to transfer large numbers of troops from the Italian front to the new front in France. Over the next months as winter descended, the fighting in the northern Apennines would be fierce, with the Germans and their Fascist allies still in control of the northern third of the peninsula.
While Allied officials were relieved that the pope’s September 1 radio speech made no direct call for a compromise peace, it did trigger some angry reaction. Particularly unhappy were the Poles, dismayed that on the anniversary of the German invasion of their country, the pope made no mention of it, focusing instead on how much Rome and Italy had suffered from the war. The pope’s speech was also poorly received in Britain, where his remarks were interpreted as asking the people of London to forgive the Germans for attacking them. A letter to The Times on September 4 offered a common English view, expressed in a typically ironic way:
I am sorry, indeed, if I have missed the Papal denunciations of Germany’s crimes; but I find that my friends are in the same state of woeful ignorance. In fairness to his Holiness, and for the instruction of your readers, perhaps you would permit your correspondent to give us the texts of the pronouncements condemning the German invasions of Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Greece, Russia, &c., the systematic slaughter and torture of Poles and Jews, the mass deportations and vast robberies, the bombardments of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, London, &c. I have been searching hopefully for such an utterance in your long report…of the Pope’s broadcast address on the fifth anniversary of the war. I do not find it. There is nothing here to show the historians that the war was not begun by America or Greece.
What particularly upset the pope was that some of the unfavorable comments about his speech were broadcast on Allied military radio, leading to a letter of protest that Montini handed Osborne. “We cannot but be surprised,” wrote Montini, “that Allied Press services collect these malevolent and unjust reports, thereby co-operating in their diffusion among the public.”[17]
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While the battle over the Eternal City had ended, the battle to rewrite its history had barely begun. Rome was filled with men who had played major roles in the Fascist regime and now desperately sought to keep their privileged positions and to avoid admitting to any responsibility for the disaster that had befallen their country. Francesco Babuscio, the Italian emissary to the Holy See, offers a case in point. Along with others like him, he now faced the threat posed by the High Commission for the Purging of the Public Administration. Established by the Italian government several months earlier as part of an Allied-encouraged effort to remove Fascists from public administration, the commission got new life following Rome’s liberation. In late August, Babuscio learned that he was being suspended from his position while under investigation by the commission. The suspension never took effect, thanks to the efforts of the government’s aristocratic undersecretary for foreign affairs, Giovanni Visconti Venosta. The undersecretary argued that at such a delicate moment, it was best not to do anything that might upset the government’s relations with the Holy See.[18]
While Babuscio was left in his place at the Vatican, the proceedings against him went on. The charges were many, from his having risen above others in the foreign service early in his career thanks to his strong Fascist ties, to his service in administering conquered Albania, which led to another promotion, and his appointment in February 1943 as Mussolini’s chief of staff at the Foreign Ministry.[19]
If the men who until months earlier had been loyal servants of the Fascist government now found themselves in a compromising position, the same was, at least in theory, true of the many high prelates who had taken such a public role in supporting the Fascist regime and the Axis war. For the pope, allowing action to be taken against any of them would mean admitting the role the church had played in supporting Fascism and the war, both facts of recent history that Vatican officials and leaders of church organizations throughout Italy would now strenuously deny.
One churchman proved to be too compromised even for Pius XII to protect, much as he tried. For almost two decades, Archbishop Angelo Bartolomasi had headed Italy’s military chaplaincy, an appointment requiring papal approval. An enthusiastic supporter of Fascism, he had long played a highly visible role in rallying Catholics to support Mussolini and, until the Duce was overthrown, urging Catholic support for the Axis war. But when the Fascist regime fell, the pope made no move to replace him, and indeed months after Rome’s liberation, Bartolomasi remained at his post.
In mid-August 1944, at the urging of Italy’s minister of war, Babuscio advised the pope that he should remove the source of much embarrassment. When, a month later, the pope still had taken no action, Visconti Venosta, undersecretary of foreign affairs, sent word to the pope that he could delay no longer.[20]
Early in the fall, as the pope still refused to act, Visconti Venosta went to see Monsignor Montini to give vent to his frustration. In an attempt to placate the undersecretary, Montini assured him that while Bartolomasi remained head of the Italian military chaplaincy, he would no longer play any public role in that capacity. Yet despite those assurances, in early October the archbishop took part in his official capacity at the belated funeral honoring Colonel Giuseppe Cordero di Montezemolo, a martyr of the underground resistance. Captured by the Germans, Montezemolo had been the highest-profile victim of the mass execution carried out only a few months earlier at the Fosse Ardeatine. The outrage of Montezomolo’s family and friends at the prelate’s presence at the funeral of the anti-Fascist hero could hardly have been greater.
An angry Visconti Venosta directed Babuscio to deliver an ultimatum. Up until then, he had done everything he could to prevent the press from attacking the Vatican for leaving the Fascist archbishop in his place, but no longer. Nor would he advise other members of the government to remain quiet. “If one wants to avoid a painful polemic,” the undersecretary told Babuscio, “there is only one thing to do. Put the government in a position to declare that Monsignor Bartolomasi is no longer the Military’s Bishop.”[21]
Babuscio went to see Monsignor Montini. True, Montini admitted, he had assured them that Bartolomasi would never again take part in any public ceremonies as head of the chaplaincy. His appearance at the resistance hero’s funeral was, said the monsignor, “not planned.” The matter would soon be put to rest, he promised, and Bartolomasi replaced. Finally bowing to the pressure, Pius XII reluctantly agreed to relieve the archbishop of his post.[22]
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Allied troops had entered Paris in late August and were now marching eastward. Over the next month, as the Allies approached the German border, the Germans would evacuate their troops from Greece and Albania. But in Italy the Allied army found itself bogged down in the rugged Apennines south of Bologna. A German engineering unit, employing Italian forced labor, had begun to build the two-hundred-mile series of fortifications stretching across the peninsula the previous spring. With more than two thousand machine-gun nests, innumerable concrete bunkers, air defenses, artillery positions, antitank ditches, and observation posts, it proved a formidable barrier to the Allied advance. The fighting over the next months would be fierce. The cemetery interring German war dead at Futa Pass would ultimately be the final resting place for over thirty thousand, while the Allies suffered forty thousand casualties of their own. Among the latter was a twenty-one-year-old American platoon leader, hit in his shoulder and his back by German fire, and given little chance of surviving. Lapsing into and out of consciousness over the next three years, losing a kidney and the use of his right arm, he somehow survived. The GI, Bob Dole, would go on to serve over a quarter-century in the U.S. Senate and, in 1996, be the Republican candidate for president.[23]
Rome’s Jews could now come out of hiding, but Jews in the north were still being herded onto trains bound for the Nazi death camps. A month after Rome’s liberation, Palestine’s two chief rabbis—Ashkenazi and Sephardic—had sent Maglione a telegram, urging the pope to grant them an audience:
We understand Apostolic Delegate [responsible for Jerusalem] Father Hughes will these days convey our request audience with His Holiness reference position European Jewry. Since we contacted news arrived position rapidly worsening. The voice of God and our tormented brethren will give us no rest till we confer with His Holiness who has ever proffered helping hand oppressed Israel. View extreme urgency pray petition His Holiness expedite grant audience. Anticipatory thanks.
Well aware of the kind of help the rabbis would be asking of him, the pope judged it best to turn down their request, albeit taking care not to put anything in writing: A note on the newly available Vatican file reads: “As for the audience requested by Chief Rabbi Herzog of Jerusalem, the decision of the Holy Father is this: ‘He believes it well not to respond.’ ”[24]
As 1945 began, the north of Italy was still a war zone. German troops in the Apennines south of Bologna were holding off the stalled Allied advance, while both the Germans and the forces of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic were battling the expanding Italian partisan movement. Partisans captured by the Fascist republic’s “Black Brigades” were regularly tortured before being shot. Italy’s rapidly growing Communist Party was not only providing the largest contingent of partisan fighters but also organizing work stoppages in the factories. Farther north in Europe, the Germans, following a brief initial success in the Battle of the Bulge, were in retreat. January 1945 would also see the Soviets liberate Warsaw. The Red Army would enter Budapest the following month.
In northern Italy conditions were grim. Allied bombs were still falling on the cities as British nighttime bombers and American daytime “precision” bombers took aim at the Germans’ positions and their supply lines. Bologna, lying just across the Germans’ winter line, suffered the most. Large portions of the porticoed city were leveled as bombs fell around Bologna almost daily in December and January.[1]
Italians in the north of the peninsula lived in fear of the Germans and their Italian Fascist comrades, on the hunt for those suspected of aiding the partisans. In early October, Cardinal Schuster, Milan’s archbishop, described the situation in a report to the pope: “Here the regime of terror is progressively increasing as the end comes ever more clearly in sight.” Many parish priests were in hiding, sought after by the Germans and their Fascist cronies for aiding the partisans. Other priests were already imprisoned. Mussolini no longer seemed in control of his own forces. “Last week Mussolini, following my own complaint, ordered the arrest of [Pietro] Koch, head of the autonomous militia that has tortured its victims with the most refined methods. The police chief of Milan, on the personal order of the Duce, had the head of the band arrested along with his principal associates, and subsequently invited a group of medical doctors to examine the instruments of torture they used on their prisoners.” But within days, Guido Buffarini, Mussolini’s minister of internal affairs, ordered Koch and his henchmen freed and indeed threatened to have the police chief and the prefect arrested. “And so it goes,” concluded the archbishop. Two weeks later Schuster sent the pope an update. An Allied bombing raid on Milan had caused six hundred deaths, including a priest and nearly two hundred children whose school was hit.[2]
