by Eamon Duffy
From the Vatican’s point of view, incomparably the most important of these Concordats was that with Fascist Italy, the result of almost three years of hard bargaining with Mussolini, and finally signed in February 1929. The Concordat gave the pope independence in the form of his own tiny sovereign state, the Vatican City, (at 108.7 acres, just one-eighth of the size of New York’s Central Park) with a few extra-territorial dependencies like the Lateran and Castel Gondolfo. He had his own post office and radio station (a guarantee of freedom of communication with the world at large), the recognition of Canon Law alongside the law of the state, Church control of Catholic marriages, the teaching of Catholic doctrine in state schools (and the consequent placing of crucifixes in classrooms, a weighty symbolic gesture) and finally a massive financial compensation for the loss of the Papal States – 1,750,000,000 lire, a billion of it in Italian government stocks, but still a sum which in the hungry 1930s enabled Pius XI to spend like a Renaissance prince.
This Concordat did not deliver all that the pope had hoped, and it horrified those committed to Catholic Action and the anti-Fascist struggle. Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, was disgusted, and asked ‘was it worth sixty years of struggle to arrive at such a meagre result?’12 Pius viewed it as a triumph, nonetheless, for it represented a decisive repudiation of the ‘Free Church in a Free State’ ideal of Liberalism. Moreover, Mussolini had not merely resolved the Roman question; he had also suppressed the Church’s enemies, the Italian Communists and the Freemasons. In the first flush of enthusiasm, and against Gasparri’s advice, Pius spoke publicly of Mussolini as ‘a man sent by Providence’. In the elections of March 1929, most Italian clergy encouraged their congregations to vote Fascist. There is no such thing as a free Concordat however, and the major casualty of the agreement was the increasingly powerful Catholic Partito Popolare. In the run-up to the Concordat Mussolini made it clear that the dissolution of this rival political party was part of any deal, and the Vatican duly withdrew support for the Popolare, and secured the resignation of its priest-leader, Don Luigi Sturzo, and his self-exile in London. Pius XI thereby assisted at the deathbed of Italian democracy. It is unlikely that he shed many tears, for he was no democrat. He disapproved of radicalism, above all radicalism in priests, and though he was passionately committed to Catholic Action, and devoted his first encyclical to the subject, like Pius X he envisaged it as being confined to what he rather chillingly described as ‘the organized participation of the laity in the hierarchical apostolate of the Church, transcending party politics’.13
Nevertheless, the defence of Catholic Action in this broader sense was to bring him rapidly into conflict with Mussolini. One of the lesser casualties of the Concordat was the Catholic scout movement, which Mussolini insisted must be merged with the state youth organizations. This went against the grain with Pius XI, who valued Catholic youth movements as a prime instrument of Christian formation. Mussolini was bullish on the issue, bragging that ‘in the sphere of education we remain intractable. Youth shall be ours’.14 Fascist harrassment of Catholic organizations mounted, and in June 1931 the pope denounced the actions of the Fascist regime in the Italian encyclical, Non abbiamo bisogno.15 This letter was primarily concerned to denounce the harrassment of Catholic organizations, and to vindicate Catholic Action from the Fascist claim that it was a front for the old Partito Popolare, Catholic political opposition under another name. But the pope broadened his condemnation to a general attack on Fascist idolatry, the ‘Pagan worship of the State’. He singled out the Fascist oath as intrinsically against the law of God.
Pius was not calling Italy to abandon Fascism. The encyclical was careful to insist that the Church respected the legitimate authority of the government, and was essentially a warning shot across Mussolini’s bows to lay off Church groups. In this, it was largely successful. It was an indication nonetheless that the pope was aware of the need for a long spoon when dealing with totalitarian regimes, and that certainly applied to the Concordat with Hitler in 1933. That Concordat was negotiated by Eugenio Pacelli, Secretary of State from 1930. Pacelli had spent most of the 1920s in Munich as Nuncio, and was devoted to Germany and its culture. He had no illusions about Nazism, however, which he recognized as anti-Christian, and indeed from 1929 a number of the German bishops were vocal in denouncing its racial and religious teachings, insisting that no Catholic could be a Nazi. From Rome, however, Nazism looked like the strongest available bulwark against Communism, and the Vatican’s overriding priority was to secure a legal basis for the Church’s work, whatever form of government happened to prevail.
Pacelli in fact later claimed that he and the pope were primarily concerned to establish a basis for legal protest against Nazi abuses, and that they entertained no high hopes of establishing peaceful coexistence with what they both had rapidly come to feel was a gangster regime. Between 1933 and 1936 Pius XI directed three dozen such notes of protest about infringements of the Concordat to Berlin. They were mostly drafted by Pacelli, and their tone is anything but cordial.
Once again, the price of this Concordat was the death of a Catholic political party. The Centre Party had been the major instrument of Catholic political advance in Germany since 1870, and it too was led by a priest, Mgr. Ludwig Kaas. The Centre Party helped vote Hitler in, but Hitler had no intention of tolerating a democratic rival, Cardinal Pacelli made it clear that the Vatican had no interest in the Centre’s survival, and it did not survive. Kaas was summoned to Rome, where he became keeper of the building works at St Peter’s: it was to be Kaas’ activities in reordering the crypt of St Peter’s to make space for Pius XI’s coffin which would lead to the discovery of the ancient shrine of St Peter. There was widespread dismay in Europe at the political castration of Catholicism in Hitler’s Germany, and the removal of yet another buffer between the German citizen and the Nazi state, but article 31 of the Concordat protected Catholic Action, ‘the apple of the Pope’s eye’, and Pius XI was content.
In his dealings both with Fascism and with Nazism, Pius XI staked the well-being of Catholicism in Italy and Germany on the development of a vigorous religious life, fostered not merely by the Church’s liturgy and sacramental life, but through Catholic social organizations from boy-scouts to trade unions and newspapers: hence his enthusiasm for Catholic Action. He was aware also that in the age of the totalitarian state such organizations needed political protection if they were to survive. Unlike Benedict XV, however, he imagined that the papacy alone could provide that political protection. He failed to grasp that freedom could not be guaranteed merely by international treaties – which is what Concordats were. By sacrificing the Catholic political parties Pius assisted in the destruction of mediating institutions capable of acting as restraints and protections against totalitarianism.
This is all the more striking because in 1931 he published a major encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. In it he extended Leo’s critique of unrestrained capitalism, while emphasizing the incompatibility of Catholicism and socialism. In the most remarkable section of the letter, however, he argued the need for a reconstruction of society, which was in danger of becoming stripped down to an all-powerful state on the one hand, and the mere aggregate of individuals on the other. What was needed were intermediate structures, ‘corporations’ like guilds or unions, without which social life lost its natural ‘organic form’. He sketched out the principles of ‘subsidiarity’, by which such groups would handle many social tasks which were currently left to the state. These suggestions seemed to many to have strong similarities with the Fascist ‘corporations’ established for trades by Mussolini. The pope, however, emphasized the need for free and voluntary social organization, in contrast to the Fascist corporations, in which ‘the State is substituting itself in the place of private initiative’, and so imposing ‘an excessively bureaucratic and political character’ on what ought to be free social cooperation.16
As these mild crit
icisms and the much stronger attack on socialism in Quadragesimo Anno indicate, however, all Pius’ social thinking was overshadowed by hatred and fear of Communism. He denounced the Bolsheviks as ‘missionaries of antichrist’, and spoke often of Communism’s ‘satanic preparations for a conquest of the whole world’17.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s his fears seemed amply justified. To the murder of clergy and persecution of the Church in Russia, against which he openly protested in 1930, was added the savagely anti-Catholic regime in Mexico, which from 1924 seriously set about eradicating Christianity. From 1931 the new Republican regime in Spain was increasingly hostile to the Church. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 hostility turned to active persecution, and refugees flooded into Rome with accounts of Communist atrocities, the massacres of priests and seminarians (7,000 murdered within months), the rape of nuns. The Nationalist opposition, by contrast, though also guilty of atrocity, and not originally noted for their piety, increasingly saw the Church as integral to their vision of Spain. They received the endorsement of all but one of the Spanish bishops in a joint pastoral in 1937, and despite General Franco’s murderous acts of repression, the papacy backed him.
There was no disguising, then, Pius XI’s softness towards the right. An authoritarian himself, he saw no particular evil in strong leadership, and he valued Fascism’s emphasis on the family and social discipline. When Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935 the pope did not condemn, and delivered speeches couched in such bewildering and lofty generalities that it was impossible to say what he thought – it seems likely they were written by Cardinal Pacelli.
Yet there were limits to this papal tendency to the right. Pius XI viewed with horror the claims of the dictatorships to the absolute submission of their subjects, and he detested the racial doctrine which underlay Nazism. With the Concordat safely achieved, Hitler discarded the mask of cordiality towards the Church, and the Nazi press began a smear campaign. The Archbishop of Baden, it was claimed, had a Jewish mistress, the Vatican was financed by Jews, the Catholic Church was profiteering on inflation. Press attacks gave way to physical intimidation. By 1936 the Vatican had accumulated a vast dossier of Nazi attacks on the Church’s freedom in Germany, which, it was rumoured, it intended to publish. Cardinal Pacelli, on a visit to America, declared that ‘everything is lost’ in Germany. The pope was now a sick man, his energy ebbing fast, prone to doze off in audiences, uncharacteristically leaving more and more to his subordinates. But he was increasingly agitated by what was happening, and had come to feel that Nazism was little better than the Bolshevism he had hoped it would counteract. Always irritable, he horrified Cardinal Pacelli by shouting at the German ambassador that if it came to another Kulturkampf, this time for the survival of Christianity itself, the Church would win again. Mussolini comforted the German – he had had this trouble himself, there was no point arguing with the ‘old man’.
In January 1937 key figures from the German hierarchy came to Rome on their ad limina visit. They told the pope that the time for caution had passed, and Pius XI decided to act. Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, was commissioned to produce a draft encyclical, which was tidied up by Pacelli, and signed by the pope. In a triumphant security operation, the encyclical was smuggled into Germany, locally printed, and read from Catholic pulpits on Palm Sunday 1937. Mit Brennender Sorge (‘With Burning Anxiety’) denounced both specific government actions against the Church in breach of the concordat and Nazi racial theory more generally. There was a striking and deliberate emphasis on the permanent validity of the Jewish scriptures, and the pope denounced the ‘idolatrous cult’ which replaced belief in the true God with a ‘national religion’ and the ‘myth of race and blood’. He contrasted this perverted ideology with the teaching of the Church in which there was a home ‘for all peoples and all nations’.18
The impact of the encyclical was immense, and it dispelled at once all suspicion of a Fascist pope. While the world was still reacting, however, Pius issued five days later another encyclical, Divini Redemptoris, denouncing Communism, declaring its principles ‘intrinsically hostile to religion in any form whatever’, detailing the attacks on the Church which had followed the establishment of Communist regimes in Russia, Mexico and Spain, and calling for the implementation of Catholic social teaching to offset both Communism and ‘amoral liberalism’.19
The language of Divini Redemptoris was stronger than that of Mit Brennender Sorge, its condemnation of Communism even more absolute than the attack on Nazism. The difference in tone undoubtedly reflected the pope’s own loathing of Communism as the ultimate enemy. The last year of his life, however, left no one in any doubt of his total repudiation of the right-wing tyrannies in Germany and, despite his instinctive sympathy with some aspects of Fascism, increasingly in Italy also. His speeches and conversations were blunt, filled with phrases like ‘stupid racialism’, ‘barbaric Hitlerism’. In May 1938 Hitler visited Rome. The pope left for Castel Gondolfo, and explained to pilgrims there that he could not bear ‘to see raised in Rome another cross which is not the cross of Christ’. In September he told another group that the Canon of the Mass spoke of Abraham as ‘our father in faith’. No Christian, therefore, could be anti-Semitic, for ‘spiritually, we are all Semites’.
In the summer of 1938 an American Jesuit, John Le Farge, the author of a recent study of American racial discrimination against black Americans entitled Interracial Justice, was summoned to a secret audience with the pope. Papa Ratti asked him to draft an encyclical against Nazi racial theories and their Italian imitations. The resulting draft, ‘Humani Generis Unitas’, was a product of its time, whose primary focus was the well-being and work of the Church rather than any abstract philanthropy, and whose text, recently recovered from oblivion, grates again and again on a modern sensibility, for it reiterates centuries of Christian suspicion of the Jews, ‘this unhappy people … doomed to wander perpetually over the face of the earth’ because of their rejection of Christ. The encyclical stresses the dangers to the Christian faith of excessive contact between Jews and Christians. Yet it also unequivocally asserted the unity of the whole human race, and denounced all racialism, and anti-Semitism in particular. ‘Humani Generis Unitas’ was never to see the light of day, however, its progress through the Roman machinery slowed by shocked conservative resistance, and by the pope’s failing health.
This ‘lost encyclical’ epitomizes the contradictions of Papa Ratti’s pontificate, showing everywhere a mindset which was the outcome of centuries of papal suspicion of the direction of modern religious, political and social developments, yet reaching out towards a larger and more inclusive understanding of humanity, and, for all its limitations, offering an absolute opposition to the root ideology of Nazism. That opposition became the all-absorbing preoccupation of the dying pope. In the last weeks of his life he drafted a blistering denunciation of Fascism and its collaboration with Nazi lies, which he had hoped to deliver to the assembled bishops of Italy: he begged his doctors to keep him alive long enough to make the speech, but died, on 10 February, with just days to go. ‘At last,’ declared Mussolini, ‘that stubborn old man is dead.’
He had not a liberal bone in his body. He distrusted democratic politics as too weak to defend the religious truth which underlay all true human community. He thought the British Prime Minister Chamberlain feeble and smug, and no match for the tyrannies he confronted. He loathed the greed of capitalist society, ‘the unquenchable thirst for temporal possessions’, and thought that liberal capitalism shared with Communism a ‘satanic optimism’ about human progress.
He had even less time for other forms of Christianity. He hoped for reunion with the East, but envisaged it as the return of the prodigal to the Roman father. In 1928, in what is perhaps his least attractive encyclical, Mortalium Annos, he rubbished the infant Ecumenical Movement, sneering at ‘pan-Christians consumed by zeal to unite churches’ and asking, in a characteristically tough-minded phrase, ‘can we endure
… that the truth revealed by God be made the object of negotiations?’ The encyclical made it clear that the ecumenical message of the Vatican for the other churches was simple and uncompromising: ‘Come in slowly with your hands above your head.’
Yet that is not all there is to be said. Always a strong man and an energetic pope, in the last years of his pontificate he rose to greatness. The pope of eighteen concordats ceased to be a diplomat, and achieved the stature of a prophet. British diplomats and French Communist newspapers commented that the pope, of all people, had become a champion of freedom. When he died, the British Government’s man in Rome, Francis d’Arcy Osborne, not always an admirer, reported to the Foreign Office that Pius’ courage at the end of his life had raised him to be ‘one of the outstanding figures of the world’ and that ‘he may be said to have died at his post’.20
This was the inheritance of Eugenio Pacelli, when he was elected pope as Pius XII on the first day of the Conclave on 2 March 1939. He was the inevitable choice. Immensely able, an exquisitely skilled political tactician, he had been groomed for the succession by Pius XI, who had sent him all over the world as Nuncio. The pope told one of Pacelli’s assistants in the Secretariat of State that he made him travel ‘so that he may get to know the world and the world may get to know him.’ The remark meant more than at first appeared. Pius Xl’s authoritarian regime had marginalized the cardinals as a body, and he had not held consistories. As a result, none of the non-Italian cardinals knew more than a handful of their colleagues. Most of them knew Pacelli, however, and that fact had a major bearing on the outcome of the Conclave.
But he seemed born to be pope. Austere, intensely devout, looking like a character from an El Greco painting, Pacelli was everyone’s idea of a Catholic saint. As Nuncio in Germany he had struck Kaiser Wilhelm II as the ‘perfect model’ of a high-ranking Roman prelate. As a young man he stammered slightly. The deliberate and emphatic speech he adopted to cope with this gave his words a special solemnity, which he himself came to believe in. He was fond of dramatic devotions and expansive gestures, raising his eyes to heaven, throwing his arms wide, his great and beautiful eyes shining through round spectacles. Despite the austere persona and the hieratic poise, he responded to people’s emotion, smiled and wept in sympathy with his interlocutor. As pope, he had a mystical, overwhelming sense of the weight and responsibility of his own office, going down into the crypt of the Vatican by night to pray among the graves of his predecessors. In every photograph he seems poised in prayer, preoccupied with another world. Vatican staff were expected to answer the phone from his apartments on their knees.