The Pope at War, page 50
Italy’s Jews, too, played a part in recasting their country’s history, for the alternative was much too painful. The fact that so many of them had responded to the pressure of persecution by abandoning their religion in the hope of an escape through baptism was not something they were eager to acknowledge. Nor were they eager to draw attention to how little protest the racial laws had prompted among their Catholic fellow citizens, indeed how eager so many of those citizens had been to take their Jewish colleagues’ positions and their Jewish neighbors’ property. Least palatable of all was recognizing how many of their Catholic neighbors during the German occupation had reported on their hiding places to the police, sending their loved ones to their deaths. Better to blame it all on the Germans.[2]
The history of Italy’s anti-Jewish racial laws—in brutal force for five years before Mussolini was deposed—began to be rewritten even before the rubble had been removed from the nation’s streets. In June 1945 Italy’s ambassador to Belgium reported on a local Jewish newspaper’s request for information on the measures taken against Italy’s Jews. “Naturally,” the ambassador reported to Rome, “I emphasized that our racial law not only found scarce application in individual concrete cases, but all the people and virtually all the administrative bodies that were supposed to apply it, competed instead in efforts to completely sabotage it.” Only with the arrival of the Germans in September 1943, the ambassador told the journalist, had Jews begun to be persecuted, and that was “exclusively the work of the Germans,” while “the Italian people in all strata and the Italian clergy did all they could to hide and save the Jews, almost always at great risk for their own persons and for their families.”[3]
Of greatest concern to Pius XII and his immediate advisers, following the liberation of Rome, was the fate of the concordat that Mussolini had negotiated with the pope’s brother. It had ended liberal Italy’s separation of church and state and offered the church many privileges. A July 30, 1944, memo in the Secretariat of State office already reflected the recasting of history that would characterize the postwar period: “In 1929 the claims by the Church and by Catholics were recognized not by the Fascist Party, which always harbored an unfavorable attitude toward the Catholic Church but by the Italian government.”[4]
Not until ten years after the war’s end did the church first face a strong challenge to its new narrative, when the scholar Arturo Jemolo published his history of church-state relations in Italy. He wrote: “Whoever looks with a dispassionate eye at the relations between the Church (not only the Holy See, but the episcopate, and the secular and regular clergy) and the Fascist government for a period that includes the eleven years between the conclusion of the Concordat and the beginning of the 1940s cannot fail to recognize that they were cordial, marked by a spirit of collaboration and reciprocal concessions.”[5] When, three years later, a book aimed at a broad audience appeared in Italy with much the same thesis, the Vatican quickly responded, denying that the church in Italy had ever supported the Fascist regime. Indeed, L’Osservatore Romano ran an attack on the book even before it appeared in bookstores. “The Church,” it proclaimed, “has maintained an attitude that has been correct, clear, and consistent in its centuries-long life…vigilant, solicitous, careful to protect the many who depend on it from the anger of despots or from the sinister maneuvers of other malefactors; and always immoveable, steadfast in the eternal principles on which its high mission rests.”[6]
In 1963 the appearance of the play The Deputy posed a new threat to this narrative. Written by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, the play portrayed a Pius XII who willingly turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. It was staged despite church protests in both Europe and North America and was scheduled to come to Italy in February 1964. The Vatican applied pressure on the government to prevent it from being performed in Italy, and as a result, state officials banned it.[7]
A positive review of The Deputy in a British publication had resulted in a denunciation that could hardly have come from a higher church source. Giovanni Montini offered a vigorous defense of his former mentor, in the form of a letter to The Tablet. Coincidentally, the British Catholic journal received it on June 21, 1963, the day Montini was elected to the papacy. Rejecting the playwright’s depiction of Pius XII, Montini wrote that the wartime pope had in fact spared “no effort” and left nothing “untried to prevent the horrors of mass deportation and exile.” “History,” wrote Montini, “will vindicate the conduct of Pius XII when confronted by the criminal excesses of the Nazi regime: history will show how vigilant, persistent, disinterested and courageous that conduct must be judged to have been.” Indeed, he argued, Pius XII was “a noble and virile character capable of taking very firm decisions and of adopting, fearlessly, positions that entailed considerable risk.” What those courageous actions during the war were he did not say.[8]
An embarrassing example of this repackaging of history is offered by the Vatican’s official 1998 statement on the church and the Holocaust, “We Remember.” Released by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, headed by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, it set out its subject clearly enough: “The fact that the Shoah took place in Europe, that is, in countries of long-standing Christian civilization, raises the question of the relation between the Nazi persecution and the attitudes down the centuries of Christians towards the Jews.” While acknowledging a long history of “anti-Judaism, of which, unfortunately, Christians also have been guilty,” the Vatican statement argues that this demonization of Jews had nothing to do with what made the Holocaust possible. Rather, it attributed the latter to “anti-Semitism, based on theories contrary to the constant teaching of the Church.” The Vatican statement completely ignores the heavy use the Fascists and Nazis made of the popes’ long history of warnings about the evil influence of Jews and the repressive measures they took against Jews. It ignores as well the church’s vigorous defense of the anti-Jewish laws introduced in much of Europe in the decade preceding the Final Solution, a defense found in Vatican-supervised publications as well. “We Remember” based its thesis on a distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism that had no basis in the actual history of the wave of antisemitism that swept much of Europe in the years leading up to and during the war. A more accurate title for the document, to which Pope John Paul II added his own letter of presentation, would have been “We Choose Not to Remember.”[9]
At the center of this new, well-scrubbed historical narrative stands Pius XII, presented as the heroic champion of the oppressed. Ambiguous phrases buried amid thousands of words of baroque oratory have come to be heralded as clear denunciations of the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews.[10] All the efforts the pope made to avoid antagonizing Hitler and Mussolini are wiped from view. His role as primate of the Italian church, presiding over a clergy that was actively supporting the Axis war, is likewise forgotten. Only examples of those brave priests who stood up to the Fascists can be discussed. Erased from memory are the pope’s regular assurances to the Duce that he need only inform him of anti-Fascist priests, and he would have them silenced.
The speed with which the Fascist regime’s influential lay enablers were able to remake their identities after the war was matched by the speed with which influential churchmen were able to remake theirs. Few were the unfortunates like Archbishop Bartolomasi who had to pay a price for having used their church pulpits to drum up support for the Axis cause. Even in such an extreme case as Bartolomasi’s and his years of enthusiastic Fascist boosterism, however, it would take months of mounting pressure and papal foot-dragging before Pius XII finally forced the archbishop out as director of Italy’s military chaplaincy. Cesare Orsenigo, the Hitler-friendly nuncio in Germany, remained in his position following the end of the war, indeed died while still nuncio there in 1946. Nor did the pope choose a new ambassador to Italy, leaving Francesco Borgongini in his place until elevating him, in 1953, to the cardinalate.
The church has showered honors on some of Mussolini’s most influential boosters. Father Agostino Gemelli, after being subject to brief unpleasantness by the postwar Italian commission aimed at rooting out the main figures of the Fascist regime, returned to his post as rector of the Catholic University of Milan. Today Rome’s major Catholic hospital is named in his honor. The campaign to make a saint of the archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Schuster, long viewed by the Fascists as one of their most important church supporters, began only three years after his death in 1954. In 1996 he was beatified.
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In the summer of 1945, with the war in Europe over, foreign diplomats at the Vatican assumed the pope would finally go off to enjoy the traditional papal retreat in the fresh mountain air of Castel Gandolfo. After his initial stay there in 1939, he had not returned, insisting that while Romans were suffering, his place as their pastor was to remain at their side. But the pope didn’t seem particularly eager to leave the Vatican. In mid-July, D’Arcy Osborne sent Churchill a report explaining the pope’s decision:
The real fact is that his “villeggiatura” in the country profoundly bores him and he has therefore been opposing passive resistance to all the endeavours of his court and well-wishers to persuade him to move and get a much needed change of air. He appears to be one of those unfortunates who are unable to relax and who cannot enjoy leisure or natural surroundings. On his daily walk in the Vatican Gardens he is generally studying one of his speeches and rarely lifts his eyes from the document held close before them to look at the flowers and trees of his gardens or the view over Rome.[11]
The pope’s annual Christmas address that year contained something none of his speeches during the war did, a clear denunciation of totalitarian states: “The force of the totalitarian State! Cruel, heart-rending irony! The whole surface of the globe, reddened with the bloodshed in these terrible years, cries aloud the tyranny of such a State.” As Osborne observed, the pope had waited to denounce totalitarian states until the only one left was the Soviet Union.[12]
Not only did the pope help recraft the Italian church’s history of collaboration with Mussolini’s regime and support for the war; he helped remake Italy’s history and Germany’s as well. Far from sharing any blame for the war, Italians were now cast as its victims. Receiving Pasquale Diana, Italy’s new ambassador to the Holy See, in February 1946, the pope described the Italian people as the “victim of a war in which they were involved against the feelings and wishes of the great majority.” He went on to offer effusive praise, as Diana reported, “for the behavior of the German clergy for its opposition to the Nazi regime.” Only in 2020 would the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany finally acknowledge how misleading the pope’s representation of that history was. In marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the war, they issued a statement acknowledging that Germany’s bishops failed to oppose the Nazi war or Hitler’s attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews. Neither Italy’s church nor the Vatican itself has yet acknowledged any similar responsibility.[13]
The immediate postwar period was a dramatic one for Italy and for the pope. On June 2, 1946, with women having the right to vote for the first time, Italians went to the polls to decide whether to retain the Savoyard monarchy or to launch a new, republican form of government. A few weeks earlier King Victor Emmanuel, compromised by his longtime support for Mussolini and Fascism, had ceded the throne to his son in hopes this might encourage more enthusiasm for the monarchy. But his belated move proved insufficient. A majority voted for the republic. Umberto, king for a month, boarded a plane for Portugal and a life in exile. Italy no longer had a royal family.
The results of the referendum on the monarchy made the pope nervous, as he worried the change would benefit Italy’s fast-growing Communist Party. He worried too that a new, democratic government would renounce the Lateran Accords, which from the Vatican perspective had been Mussolini’s crowning achievement. In the end, these fears proved groundless. The Italian Communist Party, aiming to win Catholic votes in the heavily Catholic country, was eager to show that Communism and Catholicism were not incompatible. Party leader Palmiro Togliatti surprised many when he announced that the Communists would vote in favor of incorporating the Lateran Accords into the new Italian constitution. They remain there today. In the first election for parliament under the new republican constitution, held in 1948, the newly formed Christian Democratic Party, benefiting from the strong support of Catholic clergy and Catholic activists throughout the country, defeated a joint Communist-Socialist ticket to win a majority.[14]
The pope finally returned to Castel Gandolfo in August 1946, seven years after his last visit. Seventy years old, never in robust health, and having recently suffered through the cold wartime winters, the pope looked weakened. “The doctors,” the French chargé d’affaires to the Vatican reported, “long preoccupied by his condition, have declared that they would no longer take any responsibility if the Sovereign Pontiff remained in Rome all summer.” But even when he finally moved into the papal villa in the Alban Hills, the pope insisted on staying up late every night, refusing to go to bed before listening to the BBC radio’s midnight news.[15]
The end of the war had no effect on the pope’s commitment to his annual New Year’s reception for the Roman aristocracy. Indeed, he used the occasion to express one of his worries about Italy’s new democratic regime. The Fascist censoring of books, theater, and film that both Pius XII and his predecessor had taken ample advantage of was a thing of the past. The Christian concept of liberty, the pope told the assembled nobles, did not permit the press and motion pictures to remain unsupervised, for this would leave public morality unprotected. The pope would do what he could to see that offending materials were kept from the impressionable Italian public. He picked up on this theme the next month in his meeting with the Italian ambassador to the Holy See. “As was to be expected,” the ambassador reported, “the Pontiff in the course of the audience also spoke of the antireligious and anticlerical press, expressing his regret that the means had not been found to stop those publications.”[16]
The war’s end also brought renewed gossip about the pope’s failure to appoint a replacement for Cardinal Maglione as secretary of state. Shortly after the war’s end, the American envoy Harold Tittmann sent a long report on the matter to Washington: “There is no doubt that being his own Secretary of State is not distasteful to him and that he welcomes the opportunity personally to supervise even the minutest details of administration.” Tittmann passed on the rumor that was then spreading on both sides of the Atlantic: the pope wanted to select his friend Archbishop Francis Spellman for the post but thought it best to wait until the international situation died down before appointing an American. While Pius XII did take advantage of his first batch of appointments of new cardinals the next year to elevate Spellman to that rank, he would leave the position of secretary of state unfilled.[17]
By 1948, four years after Maglione’s death, the fact the pope had still not filled the secretary of state position was prompting not a little unhappiness in the Vatican. Revealing were the remarks that Monsignor Carbone, on the Secretariat of State staff, confided to an Italian military intelligence informant:
The Pope is a blessed man, who wants to do everything by himself and has an excessive estimation of his own personal abilities. He ought to remember how precious his own work was as Secretary of State to limit the personalism of Pius XI and he ought to resolve to place a cardinal at his side who has views of his own…with whom he can discuss and examine questions from two different points of view. Instead, he does everything himself, he decides everything himself, because Monsignor Montini, out of fear of losing his confidence, tells him he is right about everything.[18]
This was not an opinion the monsignor would have dared to have the pope hear. Pius XII was not one to take criticism well. Jacques Maritain, the distinguished Catholic philosopher who at war’s end had become France’s ambassador to the Holy See, expressed his concerns about what he referred to as “the sensitivity of the Pope’s temperament”: “When the Pope saw his words maligned, or worse, when he saw them ignored…it hurt him more than it should. Although those around him continually encouraged him, really he was most alone and needed the encouragement of outside observers.” Whenever Maritain found a press clipping that cast the pope in a good light, he sent it along to the pope to cheer him up.[19]
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After saying mass at the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo on September 3, 1948, Pius XII collapsed. Laid out on a nearby couch, he regained consciousness only a half hour later. Characteristically, the pope refused his doctors’ advice that he not work so hard. Reporting the incident, the American envoy to the Vatican observed, “Sustained efforts by his intimate advisers to lighten his task by prevailing upon him to fill position of Secretary of State which has been vacant since 1944…still unavailing.”[20]
At the conclusion of his three years as ambassador to the Vatican in 1948, Jacques Maritain offered the French foreign minister his impressions. The Holy See, he explained, is a monarchy ruled by old men. Pius XII, eager to do good and to be seen to be doing good, believed it was his duty as pope to act as the defender of Western civilization. As a result, he had increasingly turned his attention to the political domain, a tendency reinforced by his recent successful involvement in keeping the Communists out of the Italian government. Indeed, thought Maritain, the pope’s mystical belief in the bond that united the pontiff with the city of Rome had reinforced the Vatican’s penchant for viewing the world through an Italian lens, notwithstanding the Holy See’s universal mission.
