The Pope at War, page 62
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3
As was his custom, the archbishop ended his appeal by identifying the Fascist cause with God’s own: “On this road…our magnificent Armed Forces march and with the soldiers the Italian people, strong in their resolve, faithful to God, trusting in God. It is the path to Victory!” R.m. [Raimondo Manzini], “L’alta visione,” AI, January 15, 1941, p. 1; “Un alto messaggio dell’Ordinario militare ai Cappellani delle Forze Armate,” AR, January 15, 1941, p. 1. On January 11, 1941, the Polish ambassador to the Holy See complained about Bishop Colli’s statement in the press claiming that the recent Italian church initiatives praying for Axis victory had the pope’s blessings. The result was a series of memos back and forth in the Vatican Secretariat of State office leading to the advice to Colli (and Archbishop Bartolomasi) not to cite the pope in these efforts. AAV, Segr. Stato, 1941, Associazioni Cattoliche, posiz. 5, ff. 1r–8v.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4
Borgongini to Maglione, January 17, 1941, ADSS, vol. 4, n. 237.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5
Informativa, Città del Vaticano, January 5, 1941, ACS, SPD, CR, b. 324; U.S. military attaché report, Rome, January 18, 1941, NARA, RG 165, 2062-716, color 125, 8–9; Bismarck to German Foreign Ministry, January 29, 1941, DGFP, series D, vol. 11, n. 731.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6
Agostino Gemelli, “Per una grande manifestazione di Fede,” AI, January 22, 1941, p. 2; R. Manzini, “Fede di un Popolo,” AI, February 2, 1941, p. 1; “Solenni funzioni nelle Chiese d’Italia per la vittoria e per la consacrazione del popolo al S. Cuore,” AR, February 4, 1941, p. 2. A week later, the paper returned to herald the great success of the event, quoting from various letters from parish priests stating that the number of parishioners who attended rivaled those who came for Easter mass. One ecstatic priest reported that of his fifteen hundred parishioners, thirteen hundred had taken communion at the ceremony. “I trionfi della Fede nella giornata propiziatoria,” AR, February 11, 1941, p. 3.
That the pope would expose himself by offering his formal blessings to a mass glorifying the Axis war in the name of the Sacred Heart of Jesus seems surprising, and in fact, notwithstanding the two different sources for this claim, and the fact that it was widely presented as fact by the Catholic press at the time, the notes published by the Vatican suggest that the pope declined the request. According to Monsignor Montini’s late January notes, the pope, asked by Gemelli to give his apostolic blessing for the event, did not. Montini notes, January 28, 1941, ADSS, vol. 4, n. 247.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7
Tranfaglia 2005, pp. 155, 344; Informativa dalla Città del Vaticano, February 14, 1941, ACS, SPD, CR, b. 325.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8
Phillips to FDR, February 24, 1941, FDR Library, psfa 401, pp. 98–99; U.S. military attaché report, Rome, February 25, 1941, NARA, RG 165, 2062-718, color 125, 15; Informativa dalla Città del Vaticano, February 14, 1941, ACS, SPD, CR, b. 325. De Felice (1996b, pp. 732–43) similarly concludes that Italian public opinion began to improve in late February and that most believed the war would end in Axis victory by September.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9
Bérard to French Foreign Ministry, March 4, 1941, MAEC, Guerre Vichy, 551; Attolico to Ciano, February 27, 1941, n. 640/298, ASDMAE, AISS, b. 193.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10
Present was the national president of the organization, Aldo Moro, future Italian prime minister and Christian Democratic martyr, who offered what the police informant described as “a warm and patriotic speech.” Informativa da Roma, February 25, 1941, ACS, SPD, CR, b. 325.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11
Attolico had been unhappy to learn in March that government authorities in Cremona had embargoed the diocesan bulletin containing the bishop’s Easter message, deemed guilty of having referred to war as a punishment from God. If there had been something regarded as offensive in the bishop’s message, argued the ambassador, he should have been advised and he could have lodged a complaint at the Vatican, “but, for Heaven’s sake, one doesn’t engage in confiscations that can be seen as true violations of the Concordat.” Worse, he thought, such actions could lead people to conclude that the church was not being supportive of the war. Attolico to Ciano, March 7, 1941, n. 715/328, ASDMAE, APSS, b. 55; Attolico to Ciano, March 30, 1941, tel. 945/438, ASDMAE, APSS, b. 55.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12
Buffarini to Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Gabinetto, March 16, 1941, ASDMAE, APSS, b. 55; Attolico to Ciano, March 22, 1941, tel. 863, ASDMAE, APSS, b. 55.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13
Attolico sent his praise of the cardinal not only to Ciano but also to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Popular Culture. March 17, 1941, tel. 811/370, ASDMAE, APSS, b. 55. Even Farinacci, no doubt for his own purposes, was hailing the strong support shown by the high Italian clergy for the war effort. In a front-page piece on the March 23 national celebrations marking the anniversary of the founding of the Fascist movement, he devoted a section to the festivities in Milan. Held at a church bordering the same piazza where that now legendary gathering of Fascist founders had taken place twenty-two years earlier, the ceremony featured the consecration by Cardinal Schuster of the new pennant of the local Fascist party chapter, named in honor of Mussolini’s dead brother Arnaldo. “Tutto il popolo italiano stretto intorno al Duce,” RF, March 25, 1941, p. 1.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14
“Patriottica pastorale del vescovo di Recanati e Loreto,” CS, March 20, 1941, p. 2. On the Corriere della Sera and its involvement in the racial campaign, see Allotti and Liucci 2021, chapter 13.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15
Attolico to Ciano, February 4, 1941, n. 387/160, ASDMAE, APSS, b. 54.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16
The documents on the plans for the seizure of the church bells and Attolico’s negotiations with Cardinal Maglione are found at ASDMAE, APSS, b. 54. On March 28, 1941, a police informant from Milan reported that on receiving the circular from the government regarding the census of church bells for their eventual requisition for war purposes, the bishops had written for instructions to the Vatican. They received in return instructions from the Secretariat of State, reported the informant, telling the clergy to express their displeasure but not to issue any public protest. ACS, SPD, CR, b. 325.
Even before the war ended, calls for the return of the bells from the dioceses in liberated Italy began to come in. In December 1944 the royal government signed a legislative decree calling for the bells’ return, although the actual return of the surviving bells and the construction of the replacements for those melted down began only in the summer of 1947. De Marchis 2013, pp. 42–44.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17
Del Boca 1996. “Will it prove true,” a police informant in Rome asked at midmonth, “that the blacks will not come back to power and there will not be danger of reprisals? Will it prove true that, according to the assurances that the Pontiff made to the Duchess of Aosta, that the Apostolic Nuncio has assumed responsibility for the protection of the whites?” Informativa da Roma, April 11, 1941, ACS, SPD, CR, b. 326.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18
Boiardi et al. 1990, p. 9; Goeschel 2018, pp. 200–10; Rauscher 2004, p. 393.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19
Phillips to FDR, April 14, 1941, FDR Library, psfa 401, pp. 126–27; U.S. military attaché, Rome, April 15, 1941, NARA, RG 165, 2062-716, color 125, 18–20.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20
Prelates in the Vatican were nervous at the time about spies in their midst, spies not only for Mussolini but also for foreign powers. See Alvarez 2002. For an example of extensive discussion about a frequenter of the Vatican Secret Archive suspected of being a German spy during the first months of 1941, see AAV, Segr. Stato, 1941, Varie, posiz. 231, ff. 1r–20r.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21
Colonello Cesare Amé, Capo servizio, SIM-Sezione “Bonsignore,” Roma, April 16, 1941, ACS, PCM 19940–43, b. 3168, cat. G9-1, Sez. “Bonsignore”; Informativa dalla Città del Vaticano, April 9, 1941, ACS, SPD, CR, b. 326; Osborne annual report for 1941, Osborne to Eden, October 28, 1942, NAK, R 7915/7915/57, p. 5. At the same time, Osborne again pleaded with Cardinal Maglione to have the pope speak out against Nazi aggression, this time their unprovoked attack on Yugoslavia and Greece. “This attack and the maneuvers that preceded it,” argued the British envoy, “have earned the virtually universal condemnation of the civilized world and there will certainly be an inclination to reproach the Vatican for its silence.” Osborne to Maglione, April 7, 1941, ADSS, vol. 4, n. 313. On Vatican radio, see Perin 2017.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22
At the top of Cardinal Lauri’s April 2 request for rescheduling the meeting for that same day or the next (when, in fact, it was held), Tardini later penciled in his own note of explanation: “The Most Eminent Cardinal Lauri was the protector of Signor Travaglini, whom he arranged to have named a viscount.” Cardinal Lauri to Pius XII, March 29, March 31, and April 2, 1941, ASRS, AA.EE.SS., Pio XII, parte 1, Germania, posiz. 774, ff. 253r, 254r, 255r.
Curiously, in his memoirs Harold Tittmann (2004, p. 27) recalls that in early 1941 he had been “invited several times to lunch or dine with Prince Philip of Hesse and his wife, the frail Princess Mafalda.”
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23
Tittmann 2004, p. 37.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24
Attolico to Mackensen, May 5, 1941, ASDMAE, AISS, b. 131.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25
Tardini notes, May 6 and May 8, 1941, ADSS, vol. 4, nn. 338, 340.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26
“Alto discorso di Pio XII,” AI, May 24, 1941, p. 1; “La Crociata della purezza nella sublime allocuzione del Santo Padre alla Gioventù femminile di Azione Cattolica,” AR, May 24, 1941, p. 4; Commissario di Borgo report, May 25, 1941, ACS, DAGRA 1941, b. 35.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27
“Relativa alla persona del Papa,” August 1, 1941, ACS, SPD, CR, b. 328. Several years later Pascalina had only strengthened her influence in the Vatican, as J. Graham Parsons, the American envoy at the Vatican, reported to the American secretary of state in 1947. He quoted from a recent Italian news story: “The woman in closest association with the Pope is the famous Sister P, Pius XII’s ‘housekeeper,’ superioress of an order of nuns formed exclusively of Germans or Swiss from Germanic cantons…a good woman, no longer young…very fond of the Pope, whom she has been caring for in a truly laudable way for many years…. But Sister P is like a too-loving and impressionable mother. The other Vatican dignitaries and prelates willingly pardon her for her indiscreet and exaggerated chatter, in view of the fact that her work with the Pope would be irreplaceable…. She is the only person who sees the Pope more than once a day, and it seems that her advice is always taken.” August 13, 1947, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1945–49, 8661.00, box 6971, p. 9.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28
Phillips to Roosevelt, January 21, 1941, FDR Library, psfa 394, p. 14.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29
Ciano 1980, p. 513, diary entry for May 16, 1941.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30
De Felice 1996b, pp. 1070–74. The finance minister’s comment was quoted by Ciano (1980, p. 559) in his diary entry of November 20, 1941. “Speaking of the recent measures that forbid the use of gasoline in private cars,” one such police informant reported at the time, “Monsignor Monticone, archivist of [the Vatican congregation of] Propaganda Fide said: ‘now we’ll see the Petacci Family’s three automobiles alone in driving through Rome, provoking great scandal among all Romans.’ ” Informatore n. 390 (Pozzi), July 26, 1941, ACS, MIFP, b. 10. The Petaccis would later claim that their Roman home, notwithstanding “calumnious and tendentious claims of enemy propaganda,” had been purchased entirely by a combination of funds that Clara’s mother had inherited and money that her father had earned as a doctor. Undated document found in ACS, Archivi di famiglie e di persone, Clara Petacci, b. 5, fasc. 85.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31
Ciano 1980, pp. 513, 516, 517, diary entries for May 16, 26, and 28.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32
Phillips to FDR, May 17, 1941, FDR Library, psfa 401, pp. 143–47; FDR to Phillips, May 24, 1941, FDR Library, psfa 401, p. 130.
As the summer of 1941 approached, Vatican relations with the Italian government remained good. Following his late May meeting with Pius XII, the Italian ambassador told Ciano that the pope “spoke a number of times with great deference of the Duce and of Your Excellency.” The pope had stressed how much he was counting on Italy’s leaders to protect the Vatican should, as seemed likely, the Axis win the war. “One can now say,” concluded the Italian ambassador, “that in the face of Germany’s hostile attitude toward the church those in positions of authority in the Vatican are almost unanimous in seeing in Italy their base of support for the future.” Attolico to Ciano, May 30, 1941, tel. 5029, ASDMAE, APSS, b. 54.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33
Chapter 21: The Crusade
Hitler to Mussolini, June 21, 1941, DGFP, series D, vol. 12, n. 660; Bismarck to Ribbentrop, June 22, 1941, DGFP, series D, vol. 12, n. 666; Rauscher 2004, p. 403; Robert Citino, “Operation Barbarossa: The Biggest of All Time,” National World War II Museum, June 18, 2021, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-barbarossa. That the operation had long been planned is evident from Hitler’s December 18, 1940, directive that gave the operation its name. DGFP, series D, vol. 11, n. 532. See also Herbert 2019, p. 343.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1
Roberts 2018, p. 659; Attolico to Foreign Ministry, June 23, 1941, tel. 000373, ASDMAE, AISS, b. 193; Herbert 2019, p. 344.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2
Ciano 1980, p. 527, diary entry for June 23, 1941; Mussolini to Hitler, June 23, 1941, DGFP, series D, vol. 13, n. 7. For an examination of the Italian role in the Soviet campaign, see Scianna 2019.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3
Attolico to Ciano, June 26, 1941, n. 1842/818, ASDMAE, AISS, b. 193; Raimondo Manzini, “Le potenze dell’Asse contro l’Unione delle Repubbliche Sovietiche,” AI, June 24, 1941, p. 1; N., “La situazione,” AR, June 27, 1941, p. 1.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4
“The Secretariat of State, in keeping with the promises made to us some time ago,” observed Ambassador Attolico, “is not failing to continue that action in the periphery aimed at a full and sincere collaboration of the Italian clergy in the national cause.” Attolico to Ciano, July 1, 1941, tel. 1900/836, ASDMAE, APSS, b. 55.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5
Attività del Clero, prefetto di Salerno, July 3, 1941, ASDMAE, AISS, b. 130; Attolico to Ciano, July 1, 1941, tel. 1900/836, ASDMAE, APSS, b. 55.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6
The archbishop continued, “So today we salute and bless the Italian legions, which go to join the allied armies in the common effort to open the immense prison that holds Russia, depriving it of the right to see the light, to freely believe and profess the faith.” The Roman legions, concluded the archbishop, “will thus have accomplished the dual tasks of saving civilization and defending the faith!” “Patriottica pastorale del Principe arcivescovo di Gorizia,” PI, July 20, 1941, p. 6.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7
Foreign Ministry to Attolico, June 29, 1941, tel. 24901, ASDMAE, AISS, 1947–1954, b. 227. Among the various police informant reports from the Vatican that detail a secret agreement of this type, see Informativa (Galantini), July 24, 1941, ACS, SPD, CR, b. 327.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8
Babuscio Rizzo, Appunto per gli Atti, August 1, 1941, ASDMAE, AISS, b. 193; Attolico to Ciano, August 2, 1941, DDI, series 9, vol. 7, n. 450. In the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, high-ranking members of the Italian clergy offered their outspoken support for the war. In a speech highlighted in the Fascist press, Monsignor Celso Costantini, secretary of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, offered his own prayers for Axis victory. “We fervently wish with all our heart,” he said, “that this battle brings us a conclusive victory and the end of bolshevism.” He invoked “the blessing of the Almighty on the Italian and German combatants in the struggle for the defence of our freedom against the red barbarities.” Attolico thought the speech especially notable, because, he reported, underlining his words for emphasis: “he would not have spoken without the agreement of the Holy See.”
