The Pope at War, page 7
“The Italian people are ready to put on their backpacks,” the Duce declared in a late March 1939 speech, “because like all young peoples, they do not fear combat and are certain of victory.” Despite the war clouds gathering in Europe, few took him seriously. The American ambassador, for one, thought it all hot air. “No one here believes that he is prepared to strike in a military sense in order to achieve his goal,” he reported to Roosevelt, “for it is a well-known fact that Italy is not prepared for war.” Moreover, he added, “the Italian people are strongly against being drawn into any war.”[1]
The ambassador’s illusions would be short-lived. Eager to show that his Fascist regime belonged in the same league as his Nazi partner and to lay his own claims to the Balkans before Hitler could plant his flag there, Mussolini ordered Italian troops to cross the Adriatic and seize poverty-stricken Albania. On Good Friday, April 7, 387 Italian warplanes and 170 ships converged on the defenseless country. Twenty-two thousand Italian soldiers landed at its four ports.
Within days an Italian puppet government was in place. On April 16, in a tragicomic ceremony at Rome’s royal palace, Victor Emmanuel III added King of Albania to his titles. Deeply self-conscious about his height—he was barely over five feet tall—the king found himself facing a group of hardy Albanians summoned to offer a veneer of legitimacy to the farce. Ciano described the scene as Victor Emmanuel rose to accept the crown: “The King responds with an uncertain, trembling voice. He is decidedly not an orator who impresses an audience, and these Albanians, a hard, mountain, warrior people, look on, while intimidated, with amazement at that little man seated on a huge golden chair.”[2]
King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena at the ceremony for the acceptance of the title of King of Albania, Quirinal Palace, Rome, April 16, 1939
The Catholic press joined the chorus heralding the invasion. “All the principal centers of Albania occupied by the magnificent Italian troops” and “Albania liberated from a shameful slavery” read the headlines of Milan’s Catholic daily. Rome’s Catholic newspaper published the text of a telegram that an Italian bishop had sent praising the Duce for the invasion. But signs of public enthusiasm in Italy were few. While the American ambassador condemned the unprovoked aggression, he clung to the line he had been feeding Roosevelt. He remained convinced, he told the president, that Italy was not planning any major war. But he sounded a note of caution: “We all admit that Mussolini is playing an exceedingly dangerous game.”[3]
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While the pope had shown no particular interest in Italy’s invasion of Albania, he was worried about the growing tensions between Italy and France. Mussolini had been demanding that the French cede some of their North African colonies to Italy. In April, Secretary of State Maglione repeatedly summoned the Italian ambassador to share the pope’s concerns and urge the two sides to resolve their differences amicably.[4]
From the time he ascended to the papacy, Pius XII had dreamed of playing the role of peacemaker. It was an ambition his World War I predecessor, Benedict XV, had nourished as well, and his failure weighed heavily on the memory of his papacy. With Europe’s peace threatened by two sources of tension, between Germany and Poland and between Italy and France, Pius XII decided to propose an international peace conference. First, though, he thought it best to consult Mussolini and so sent Father Tacchi Venturi to float the idea.
Would it not be good, the Jesuit asked the Duce at their May 1 meeting, for the pontiff to send a message to the five powers—France, Germany, England, Italy, and Poland—calling on them to resolve their differences peacefully at such a conference? The pope, he added, would not want to do anything that would displease him and would only go ahead if the Duce would support the initiative. Mussolini said he would give the matter some thought and asked him to return the next day.
The following evening the Duce told Tacchi Venturi he was willing to take part in such a peace conference but advised the pope to sound out the other governments before making his initiative public. Pleased by Mussolini’s response, the pope quickly cabled messages to his nuncios in Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw and his delegate in London.[5]
Responding to the resulting request for a meeting from Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo, the papal nuncio in Germany, Hitler summoned him to his sumptuous mountain estate outside Salzburg. The nuncio had barely explained the reason for his visit when Hitler, who, Orsenigo reported, “had listened very deferentially, immediately expressed, as the first thing that came to his mind, his feeling of thanks toward His Holiness for his attention and his interest, asking me to let the Holy Father know of these sentiments.”
When the nuncio finished explaining the pope’s proposal, the German dictator replied that before responding, he would need to discuss it with his Italian partner. Then Hitler, “almost in a tone of a simple friendly conversation, added, ‘However I don’t see any danger of a war. I don’t see it in the case of Italy and France, because Mussolini’s requests…Tunisia, the Suez Canal, and Djibouti, which I find to be reasonable and fully support, are not such as to lead to a war, but only to negotiations.’ ” Nor, the Führer added, did he see any reason why Germany’s dispute with Poland should lead to war.
Following their hour-long conversation, Hitler invited the nuncio to join him in a nearby room for tea. With their official business behind them, Hitler rhapsodized about his visit to Italy the previous year. Italy’s art, said the Führer, was of incomparable beauty. The country was fortunate as well, he added, in having the Duce and Fascism. Without Mussolini, Communists would have reduced all of Italy’s artistic treasures to rubble, as, Hitler said, they had recently done in Spain. Indeed, Mussolini deserved praise from all of Europe, for had he not led the way, the continent would by now be one big Bolshevik empire. Finally, the German dictator returned his attention to the Vatican, expressing his pleasure that the pope spoke German so well. He only regretted, he told the nuncio as the tea was coming to an end, that in his recent visit, he had been unable to visit St. Peter’s Basilica.
“There was once a wise man,” replied the nuncio, “who said it was a very good thing not to see everything one wanted to see, so that even in old age there would still be things to which one could look forward.”[6]
Word of the pope’s proposed peace conference had in the meantime triggered frenetic exchanges between London and Paris. The British, inclined to take up the pope’s initiative, suggested holding two separate sets of negotiations, one involving Germany and Poland, and the other France and Italy, but the French were wary. All the evidence, argued the French government ministers, suggested that the pope had coordinated his initiative with Italy’s Fascist government to push Mussolini’s territorial demands. The Italians, they feared, would take advantage of their privileged relations with the Vatican in any such negotiations.[7]
While these conversations were under way, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the forty-six-year-old German foreign minister, boarded a train to Milan to meet with his Italian counterpart. There Ciano informed him that, notwithstanding what Mussolini had told the nuncio a few days earlier, the Duce had no intention of having his dispute with France brought to any papally sponsored conference. The two foreign ministers agreed they would thank the pope for his efforts but ask him to abandon the effort.[8]
Germany’s official reply to the pope came a few days later, when State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker delivered Hitler’s decision to the nuncio. The prospects for success, the German diplomat told him, did not seem sufficient to justify the sort of conference the pope had in mind. Orsenigo’s reaction to this news offers an inkling of the kind of emissary the pope kept in Berlin throughout the war. “The Nuncio,” Weizsäcker recalled, “scarcely spoke of the matter itself again, and merely said, with reference to a remark of mine, that he, too, was not quite clear as to what urgent and menacing reports the Vatican could have received to cause a démarche to be made.”[9]
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Pius XII’s eagerness to play a visible role in world affairs was making Mussolini uneasy. Insofar as the Vatican played any political role, from the Duce’s perspective, it should be confined to efforts aimed at supporting his regime. Nor was the Duce eager to see the pope’s stature grow, believing Italy had room for only one heroic figure. Better for the pope to remain in his chapel and pray.
The Duce’s unhappiness with the pope’s protagonismo grew further in mid-May, when Pius XII made known his plans to go in formal procession to the Basilica of St. John in Lateran, on the opposite side of the city from the Vatican. It was an ancient ritual whereby a new pope, as bishop of Rome, took possession of his diocese. The massive ancient basilica traced its origins to the fourth century and had been home to many of the early pontiffs. The origins of the papacy itself and its claim to authority over the church worldwide were rooted in the pope’s role as bishop of Rome, and the bishop’s seat was at the Lateran.
Pius XII in his sedia gestatoria, May 1, 1939
For the Duce, the less the pope traveled outside the walls of Vatican City, the better. Especially infuriating for the temperamental dictator were any public spectacles in Rome where the pope could equal—or worse, surpass—the crowds of devotees and popular enthusiasm he himself attracted. When the pope’s predecessor had made the same trip to the Lateran basilica, he had done so in a closed car, traveling at considerable speed, and once there, he had remained inside the church. Pius XII had something very different in mind, and nothing Mussolini’s ambassador said to dissuade him would have any effect.
When the day of the procession came, a long line of cars left the Vatican, accompanied by armed Swiss Guards. The pope sat in the back seat of a slow-moving open car, as the crowds lining the streets cheered. Once at the basilica, the pope, seated in his sedia gestatoria, was carried around the vast piazza, circumnavigating the massive Egyptian obelisk at its center. An impressive procession of papal prelates marched with him, accompanied by colorfully uniformed Noble Guards, their ceremonial sabers unsheathed, and a gaggle of Palatine Guards, armed with rifles and bayonets.
“I can predict,” Italy’s ambassador observed in reporting the spectacle, “that Pius XII will seize any favorable occasion to go out from Vatican City. As much as he is an ascetic, he does not shy away from the pomp that, in his mind, befits the Roman Pontiff. Moreover, being profoundly Roman, the Pope is, without any doubt, seeking popularity, especially among his fellow Italian citizens. If we allow it, we will all too often see Pius XII in the streets of Rome, and probably in other cities of the Kingdom.”[10]
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The Italian ambassador’s German counterpart, Diego von Bergen, eager to ease tensions between the Vatican and Berlin, continued to send Berlin reports on the pope’s pro-German views. The first months of the new papacy had indeed seen a dramatic easing of those tensions. On April 20, the pope had instructed his Hitler-friendly nuncio in Berlin to personally bring the Führer the pope’s birthday wishes. On that day, too, the bells of Germany’s Catholic churches pealed in celebration as priests and their parishioners prayed for God to bless the Führer.[11]
“Pope Pius XII,” Bergen wrote in mid-May, “has the desire to go down in history as a ‘Great Pope’…as a messenger and accomplisher of peace on the basis of justice, as a bringer of peace to the world.” No goal was more important to him, asserted the ambassador, than overcoming the church’s differences with Italy and Germany. While the Vatican’s relations with Italy’s Fascist government had deteriorated in the last months of Pius XI’s papacy, that crisis had mercifully passed, reported Bergen, “thanks to the greatest accommodation shown by both sides.” While the pope’s views of Germany were more complicated than those toward Italy, he explained, Pius XII had “stated quite openly…that he ‘loved Germany’ and hoped for nothing more fervently than for an early peace with us.” To reach that goal, the new pope “would be prepared for far-reaching concessions, provided that the vital interests of the Church and principles of dogma were not endangered.”[12]
Relations between the Vatican and Italy’s Fascist regime had indeed dramatically improved under the new pontiff. In late May Giuseppe Bottai, Italy’s minister of education and one of the key members of the Fascist Grand Council, met with the pope. In his recent Easter Sunday radio address, Bottai had stressed the religious value of the government’s newly unveiled national school policy. Highlighting all the measures the Fascist regime had taken to provide Catholic instruction in the public schools, Bottai announced that they were being enshrined in the nation’s new school charter. Italy, he declared, viewed “Christian teaching in the manner of Catholic tradition as the foundation and high point of public education.” He promised, too, that, in cooperation with the Vatican, he would expand Catholic religious instruction in the nation’s secondary schools.[13]
In meeting Pius XII, the Fascist leader marveled at the contrast with his predecessor, whom he had also visited. Although the new pope received him in the same room, it looked very different. In Pius XI’s time there had been, Bottai noted in his diary, a “picturesque disorder of furniture, decorations, trinkets, papers, newspapers, books.” Now everything was in meticulous order. The new pope had also moved his desk. Pius XI had positioned his between the room’s two windows, so that sunlight washed across the pope’s shoulders. The new pope had moved the desk to be along the wall to the right as his visitors entered. In the place of the old clutter, it was now cleared of all but a few essential items. “One has the immediate impression,” observed the Fascist minister, “that the man who sits there knows his ‘job’ well…. Pius XII immediately gives the visitor the sensation of a mystic, but a mystic who works, who weighs his words carefully, who knows what he wants and how and where and when he wants it.”[14]
Observers of the new pope saw an unusual combination of an ascetic man intensely interested in the news of the world, someone who labored well past midnight each night, but who, in the privacy of his bedroom, delighted in having a canary perched on his shoulder, a man who, although nervous of crowds, seemed never to tire of offering them painstakingly prepared speeches on almost every conceivable subject, a man who would never miss his hour-long walk through the Vatican Gardens but rarely looked up from his papers to take in the nature around him, a man whose natural aloofness struck many as coldness, yet who could also be charming. By temperament mild and shy, Pius XII at the same time basked in the majesty of his office, eager to cast himself as God’s messenger of peace on earth.[15]
Rome now had two men who towered over all the rest, and to whom Italians looked in worshipful adoration. Despite all the fears of war, doubts about the German alliance, and questions about what seemed to some the inexplicable campaign against the nation’s Jews, Mussolini’s popularity appeared undiminished. Ambassador Phillips reported to Roosevelt in late May that the Duce continued to rouse the crowds, his staccato speech laced as always with pithy phrases, military metaphors, and references to faith and sacrifice. There was no hope, Phillips advised Roosevelt, that Italians would turn against him.[16]
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Notwithstanding Hitler’s assurances, Pius XII was becoming increasingly worried that the German demand that Poland return Danzig might trigger a war. A city of 400,000 inhabitants, it was composed overwhelmingly of ethnic Germans. As part of the punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of the First World War, the German region of West Prussia, on the eastern border of Germany, had been given to the newly reconstructed state of Poland. It cut the German region of East Prussia off from the rest of the country. The port city of Danzig, on the Baltic coast in West Prussia, was given special status, under the protection of the League of Nations, but with special ties to Poland. The loss of Danzig and West Prussia had led to a wave of nationalist resentment in Germany, and now following the Reich’s absorption of Austria and the Sudetenland, it looked like Germany was preparing to take the region back.
On May 22, 1939, Ciano and Ribbentrop met in Berlin, where in a well-photographed ceremony they signed the Pact of Steel, Italy’s formal alliance with Germany. This prompted the pope to write directly to the Duce. It was his fervent wish, Pius XII told him, that he “use his great influence on Chancellor Hitler and the German government to ensure that the Danzig question be dealt with in a calm way.”[17]
Following the signing of the Pact of Steel, Berlin, May 22, 1939: Bernardo Attolico, Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler, Galeazzo Ciano, Joachim von Ribbentrop
At the same time, the Duce sent Hitler a considerably less pacifistic message: “War between the plutocratic and therefore self-seeking conservative nations and the densely populated and poor nations is inevitable.”[18]
The pope would learn of Mussolini’s gloomy prediction soon enough, having dispatched his Jesuit envoy once again to urge the Duce to do all he could to prevent the outbreak of war. Tacchi Venturi met Italy’s dictator at Palazzo Venezia two weeks after the signing of the Pact of Steel and sent his report back the following day: Mussolini had listened to the pope’s plea “with glacial coldness without saying a word.” Discomfited by the dictator’s demeanor, the Jesuit asked him, “But then Your Excellency believes war to be inevitable?”
