The Pope at War, page 5
Following tradition, the cardinal deacon then approached Pacelli and asked if he would agree to serve. His acceptance, observed Cardinal Baudrillart, “was serious, dignified, and pious, but by a man who could not pretend to decline that which, though trembling, he has wanted for such a long time.” Outside in the piazza, the growing crowd watched as white smoke emerged from the chimney of the Apostolic Palace, triggering excited shouts of Il Papa è fatto! (The Pope has been made!) A half hour later the cardinal deacon, surrounded by black-robed attendants, strode onto the loggia perched above the great front door of the basilica looking out on the vast piazza. In a strong voice, amplified by a loudspeaker system, he pronounced the traditional words Habemus Papam! The cardinals, he told the crowd in Latin, had elected Eugenio Pacelli, who had chosen the name Pius XII. Out then stepped the tall, thin, now white-robed figure, preceded by a prelate bearing a large cross, as other cardinals and Swiss Guards crowded around him. Tens of thousands of the faithful, packed into St. Peter’s Square, dropped to a knee, as the new pontiff raised his arm to offer his blessing.[8]
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At the time of the new pope’s election, the subordinate role he had played to Pius XI and his conciliatory style had led many to view him as weak. A couple of years earlier the Spanish ambassador to the Vatican remarked that “Pacelli presents no real counterweight to Pius XI, because he is completely devoid of will and character. He hasn’t even got a particularly good mind.” The chargé d’affaires at the British embassy, while characterizing the cardinal as “a good man, a pious man, not devoid of intelligence,” added that he was “essentially there to obey.” Similar thoughts were expressed by the elderly French cardinal Baudrillart, who confided in a 1938 diary entry that “despite all of his eminent qualities, Pacelli does not seem to have either a very strong intelligence or a very strong will.”[9]
Having served as secretary of state for the past nine years, Pacelli had indeed become closely identified with his papal predecessor. But the two men were very different in both background and personality. Pius XI came from a modest northern Italian family, his father a textile factory manager. Pacelli came from the so-called black aristocracy, the Roman elites closely identified with the popes since the times they ruled the Papal States as pope-kings. His paternal grandfather had fled with Pius IX in 1848 when a revolution in Rome drove the pope into exile, and then, on their return, helped found the Vatican daily newspaper,
Born in Rome in 1876, Eugenio was a frail, bespectacled child who enjoyed playing his violin more than playing with other children. Following his seminary education in Rome, helped not only by his own considerable talents but by his family connections, he gained a position at the Vatican Secretariat of State. There he rose quickly through the ranks, becoming undersecretary of state in 1911. In 1917 Pope Benedict XV presided over Pacelli’s consecration as bishop in the Sistine Chapel. A few days later, moving from his parental home for the first time, the newly minted forty-one-year-old bishop boarded a train bound for Munich to take up his new appointment as nuncio to Bavaria.
It was in Munich that a woman would enter his life, albeit not in a romantic way, as the twenty-three-year-old German nun, Pascalina Lehnert, the seventh of twelve children of a Bavarian mail carrier, came to manage his household. From that time to the later years when Pacelli brought her back to Rome to manage his Vatican household, her presence would generate constant rumors. As she established her rule over the household, seemingly ever present in her black nun’s habit, some would find her a “troublesome” woman, but for Pacelli she would prove indispensable. Initially charged with seeing that the cleaning, cooking, and laundry all got done, she would become the one regular female presence in Pacelli’s life, ensuring that all was just as he liked it, privately offering her advice and eager to shield him from any unpleasantness. This fiercely protective attitude—mixed with deep adoration for the man she would later campaign to declare a saint—was appreciated by her benefactor, but came to be resented by many, not least because of their chagrin at finding a woman exercising such influence at the heart of the Vatican.[10]
While in Munich, Pacelli had witnessed the early National Socialist movement and its charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, who had his headquarters there. Pacelli was nearby when, in 1923, Hitler, inspired by the success the previous year of Mussolini’s March on Rome, launched his Beer Hall revolt. It was an attempt to overthrow the Bavarian regional government as a first step in a half-baked plan to topple the national government. While the revolt was a fiasco, the episode only increased Hitler’s visibility and popularity, not least in giving him time in prison to draft Mein Kampf. In 1925, the same year that manifesto was published, Pacelli left Munich for Berlin to take up the position of nuncio to the German government.
Throughout the dozen years he spent in Germany, Pacelli felt most at ease with the conservative Catholic upper classes. He regularly attracted attention, a distinctive tall, thin figure in his black clerical robe and red bishop’s cape. “His face is ascetic,” wrote a German journalist who observed him in 1927, “the features of his face hollowed out like an ancient gem, the shadow of a smile appearing only rarely.” Striking too were his dark eyes, magnified by his glasses. He projected a calm dignity, and gifted in languages and having spent so many years in the country, he spoke German flawlessly.[11]
In his comfortable residence in Berlin, Pacelli often hosted receptions attended by members of the German elite. Among his guests were Germany’s president Paul von Hindenburg, along with members of the German cabinet. As a popular dinner guest himself, Pacelli was appreciated for his ability to talk knowledgeably on a dizzying array of topics, from history and world affairs to theology, and for his ability to switch smoothly from one language to another with his delightful repartee. Although he was far from athletic and not one to readily take time off from work, Pacelli did enjoy the few days he was able to go horseback riding in the nearby Eberswalde woods, returning to a childhood pastime. Seeing how much pleasure this brought him, yet how infrequently he was willing to leave the nunciature for his equestrian expeditions, a thoughtful benefactor gave him an electric horse that imitated a galloping stallion. Although he mounted it regularly in Berlin and later had it brought to Rome, it got little use there. As Sister Pascalina noted in her memoir, “He used it about ten times at most as Secretary of State and Pope, not because he did not like it but simply because he did not have the time.”[12]
Pacelli returned to Rome in late 1929, when Pius XI awarded him a red cardinal’s hat and then appointed him Vatican secretary of state. Sister Pascalina followed him, and Pacelli asked her to furnish his new apartment in the Apostolic Palace just the way he had liked things in Berlin. She had his bookcases and favorite books sent, along with the desk that the German bishops had given him as a present, complete with a silver plaque on which they had their names inscribed.[13]
For the next nine years, Pope Pius XI and Pacelli would make an odd pair, the blunt-spoken, barrel-chested, temperamental pontiff, and the almost unhealthily slender, calm, quiet, highly controlled Pacelli, the consummate diplomat. Pacelli differed from the pope as well in carefully writing out the full text of his speeches, not trusting himself, as the pope did, to speak extemporaneously from notes. But he had a prodigious memory and often gave these speeches without having the text before him, the words, as he put it, scrolling down the page in his mind’s eye as he spoke.[14]
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In reporting the news of Pope Pius XII’s election, Pignatti, Mussolini’s ambassador to the Vatican, explained that it “was facilitated by the fact that before entering into conclave Cardinal Pacelli had made clear that, while he had been the faithful executor of the orders given him personally by Pius XI, he had his own views that did not entirely correspond with the direction taken by the former pontiff, especially in recent years.”[15] Ciano, Italy’s foreign minister, recorded his own pleasure at the news of Pacelli’s election in his diary. He recalled his conversation with the cardinal as they prepared to kneel in prayer before the pope’s body: “He was very conciliatory, and it seems also that in the meantime he has improved relations with Germany. In fact, Pignatti said only yesterday that he is the Cardinal preferred by the Germans.” The next day Mussolini expressed his own satisfaction with the news and remarked, with his customary hubris, that he planned to offer the new pope advice on “how he can usefully govern the Church.”[16]
The Fascist press was effusive. Corriere della Sera, the country’s top newspaper, dedicated its first three pages to the election, the front page featuring an article declaring that “Fascist Italy looks on the new pope with confidence and sympathy.” The following day Roberto Farinacci, one of the most prominent members of the Fascist Grand Council and its biggest booster of Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany, offered an effusive editorial in his newspaper, Il Regime Fascista.[17]
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Following his first appearance as pope on the loggia overlooking St. Peter’s Square, the newly named Pius XII returned, exhilarated but exhausted, to his Vatican apartment. There Sister Pascalina, along with the other two German nuns who helped her run his household, awaited him. On seeing them now at the end of that historic day, the man famous for his ability to control his emotions finally let his guard down, if only a bit. Seeing the excited sisters sob with joy as they dropped to their knees to kiss the newly placed Fisherman’s ring on the finger of his right hand, he could not hide the tears that clouded his bespectacled eyes. Self-conscious, he glanced down at his new white robe. “Look how they’ve dressed me up,” he quipped to the woman who had stood by him for so many years. But disciplined as he was, the pope let his guard down only for a moment. He had urgent matters to address and an important message to deliver.[18]
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Il Regime Fascista, March 3, 1939
On March 4, 1939, two days after his election, Pius XII asked the German ambassador to see him the next morning. Hitler had sent the new pope a congratulatory telegram, and it was all the encouragement he needed to turn to the most pressing item on his agenda. Italy’s Catholic press seized on the Führer’s message as well, hailing it as a clear sign that Hitler wanted to work with the new pope to improve relations.[1]
Pius XII began his conversation with the sixty-six-year-old Diego von Bergen, his first with a foreign diplomat as pope, by asking him to thank the Führer for his good wishes. Eager to dispel any impression he might be prejudiced against Germany’s form of government, the pope quoted from the speech he had given the previous year at the Eucharistic Congress in Budapest: “It is not the business of the Church to take sides in purely temporal affairs and in the accommodations between the different systems and methods which may arise for overcoming the urgent problems of the present.”[2]
The next day Pius XII wrote Hitler directly, expressing his hope that as pope he could restore harmonious relations between church and state in the German Reich. At the same time, he instructed the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, to end all criticism of the German government. A new era, it seemed, was about to dawn in the relations between the Vatican and the Third Reich.[3]
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To win the support of the French cardinals for his candidacy, Pacelli had promised to appoint Cardinal Luigi Maglione, the former papal nuncio to Paris, to be his secretary of state. Sixty-two years old, balding, but with an impressive fringe of white hair, Maglione was short and stocky, his face kindly, its most distinctive feature the deep dimple in the middle of his chin. He would be popular with the foreign diplomats at the Vatican, a warm man known for his sense of humor and his distinctive chuckle. Born to a modest family in a small town outside Naples, he had been left fatherless when he was a child. Despite this background, he was admitted to the Academy of Ecclesiastical Nobles, the Roman training ground for the Vatican diplomatic corps. He spent the early 1920s as nuncio to Switzerland before being named nuncio to France in 1926, remaining there for a decade before returning to Rome.
Cardinal Luigi Maglione
“Cardinal Maglione,” read a confidential profile prepared by the Italian embassy to the Holy See, “is a man of spotless ecclesiastical life and vast culture. He has a mind open to understanding the necessities of the times and is a man of great tact in his relations with others and especially in diplomatic functions. A calm and reflexive character, he brings together with his other qualities an uncommon level of prudence in government and in practical affairs.” Ciano described the new Vatican secretary of state as “a southerner full of talent and spirit,” who “has a hard time notwithstanding his clerical education restraining the impulses of his exuberant personality.” Both Ciano and Bergen, the German ambassador, saw in him a man with whom they could work.[4]
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Before dawn on Sunday, March 12, 1939, fifty thousand people began streaming into St. Peter’s Basilica. Italian troops and police flooded the piazza and neighboring streets, where an even larger crowd of the faithful and the curious gathered. Later that morning a procession of royalty, government heads, foreign ministers representing thirty-six countries, cardinals, bishops, heads of religious congregations, and other church dignitaries began its slow march into the sanctuary. Among them was Galeazzo Ciano, representing the Italian government. President Roosevelt had sent Joseph Kennedy, one of America’s most prominent Catholics and father of a future American president, to represent the United States.
At last, the pope appeared, carried into St. Peter’s atop the papal sedia gestatoria, his traveling throne, to the sound of silver trumpets. He was swathed in layers of finely embroidered white vestments, wearing a tall white miter atop his head. In the atrium the procession stopped briefly so that the basilica’s deacon could pay homage, kissing the pope’s foot. As the lumbering procession, with its huge retinue of medievally garbed papal attendants, entered the main nave, the immense crowd inside erupted in applause. The pope, his face thin and pallid, slowly waved a white-gloved hand in repeated blessing.
Following the ceremonies, the guests began to emerge from the basilica. The broad steps of St. Peter’s soon filled with dignitaries, whose places had been reserved to give them the best view of the main coronation ceremony, still to come. A long line of robed, white-mitered bishops exited the church, along with various Vatican armed corps, holding their papal banners aloft. In the piazza the papal forces exchanged salutes with the Italian military units that had been waiting outside. After the Vatican’s Palatine Guard band finished playing the papal hymn, the band of the carabinieri, the national police under Italian military command, struck up the Royal March, followed by “Giovinezza,” the stirring Fascist anthem.
By then all eyes were focused on the ornately adorned loggia, atop the central entrance of the basilica, where a golden papal throne, covered in red velvet, sat empty beneath a canopy made of the same material. The pope’s Noble Guards were the first to appear, planting the church banner. The new pope then emerged to the sound of trumpets and the roar of the crowd below. Standing at the balustrade, he raised his hand in blessing, then turned to ascend his throne for the culmination of the ceremony. Removing the miter from the pope’s head, the cardinal deacon replaced it with the heavy, three-tiered, bejeweled papal tiara. Pius XII then rose and lifted his right arm as he recited the “Urbi et Orbi” invocation, blessing Rome and all the world.[5]
It was after two p.m. when the pope was finally able to return to his apartment. As would become his practice, he ate alone in his private dining room. According to Sister Pascalina, the little canaries he kept in a cage by his side when he ate sang a particularly beautiful song on that propitious day. Ever attuned to the birds’ moods, the pope interrupted his meal to open the little door and let them out. They flew onto the table and the empty chairs, keeping him company until he finished his meal. Then, one by one, he induced them to perch on his finger as he returned them to their cage and closed the little door.[6]
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Pius XII coronation, March 12, 1939
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Pius XII appreciated precision and lived by routine. He rose each morning at six-fifteen a.m., often after having gone to bed only at one a.m. or later, and even then, an insomniac, he did not sleep well. While dressing, he liked to turn on the radio to a foreign station, eager to keep up his English and French. His bedroom, on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace, had two windows overlooking St. Peter’s Square. It was furnished plainly, with a simple brass bed, rug, small mirror, a mahogany desk, and a painting of the Virgin Mary. Enamored of devices of modern technology, he was fond of the electric shaver given him during his travels in the United States, sometimes using it while a canary perched on his free hand. At seven he went to his private chapel and knelt before the altar to pray. After putting on his vestments, he said Mass, surrounded by the nuns and priests of his household, and then went to his private dining room for coffee and a sweet roll. Although he ate alone at his table, his secretaries sat near him and handed him the latest dispatches. Following breakfast, he stepped into the elevator to descend the two floors to his office. There he read the most pressing correspondence, before the monsignor who served as his majordomo came in to hand him the list of the day’s audiences. Typically, his appointments began with the secretary of state or one of his two deputies, who came in carrying a briefcase bursting with diplomatic papers. The cardinals who headed the various congregations at the heart of the Curia, the central government of the Holy See, then followed.
