Not all the Popes have been quite so dry or cautious in their encyclicals – Leo XIII in his Rerum Novarum wrote with a kind of holy savagery on the abuse of property (didn’t the Bishop of San Luis Potosi in Mexico preserve the copies in his cellar till the revolution for fear of offending the rich?) and Pius XI, attacking the Hitlerian State in Mit Brennender Sorge, allowed the personal tone of voice to be heard.
But a Pope – or a saint or a parish priest – is not necessarily a writer, and in any case many – if not most – of Pacelli’s encyclicals are not personally written by himself, only very carefully revised and approved. (The comparison with a newspaper article is reasonably apt. One can always tell for example which leader in the London Times is written by the Editor: there is a masterfulness, a lack of caution – not the same as lack of prudence – which appears also in the encyclicals of Pius XI who was usually his own author.) I express, of course, a private opinion based on translations. One distinguished writer has compared the Pope’s style to the Roman fountains, formal even in their ornateness, the Latin words, colourless as water but pure and exact, falling with certainty into the ageless basins – Roman? Renaissance? Is his formality closer perhaps to music than literature? Bossuet, Dante, St Augustine these are among the very few literary references that occur in his writing, but he speaks with real understanding of music. Again one is reminded of many parish priests whose worldly interests seem narrowed by the love of God to a few books and the enjoyment of classical music.
This is the essential paradox in a Pope who many believe will rank among the greatest. By the gossipers of Rome he is often described as a priest first and a diplomat afterwards. But how was it with his background that he did not become a diplomat first and foremost? He belongs to an aristocratic Roman family. Although his own inclinations seem to have been to ordinary parish work and to the confessional, he was steered by those who may have known his talents better, from a very early period in his life as a priest, towards an official career, first the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, which is the papal Secretariat of State, under Monsignor Gaspari who was to assist Pius XI in framing the Vatican Treaty. The paradox persisted: Pacelli combined his official work with pastoral work, just as during his public audiences he has been known to go into a corner of the audience hall at a peasant’s request and hear his confession.
The steady ecclesiastical career drove on: Papal Nuncio in Munich in 1917 so that he could act as intermediary for the Pope in his efforts to attain peace (here he: saw violent revolution for the first time when the Communists broke into his palace); in 1920 with the formation of the German Republic he became Nuncio in Berlin and later when Hitler began his campaign for power he maintained close ties with the Centre Party. The leader of the Centre Party, now Monsignor Kaass, has remained the Pope’s friend, is administrator of St Peter’s and is responsible for the excavations under the Vatican which have disclosed the old Roman cemetery where St Peter was buried. He has built the Pope a private staircase, so that he can make his way alone into these caverns and talk to the workmen. Walking with me among his tombs the Monsignor referred with affection to his friend, pointing a finger upwards, ‘him up there’.
In 1929 when Pacelli left Germany the inevitable Cardinalate followed: the parish priest was doomed, you would have said, and yet he obstinately stayed alive. We can hear him speaking in the words of Pacelli’s farewell so different from the formal encyclicals that were to follow. “I go the way in which God, by the mouth of the Pontiff, commands me to go. I go this way fully conscious of my weakness, believing in Him who uses the weak to put the strong to shame. What I was, is nothing; what I am is little; but what I shall become is eternal.” ‘What I shall become.’ As the Pope placed the Red Hat on his head he spoke the traditional words that in our day have taken a real significance: ‘Accept the red hat, a special sign of the Cardinal’s dignity. This means that you should be ready to shed your blood and to die, if need be, in the fearless defence of our Holy Faith, for the preservation of quiet and peace among the Christian people. . . .’
Only a month later he was appointed Secretary of State to Pius XI. perhaps the most politically active Pope since the Middle Ages, the man who revived the Vatican State, who fought Mussolini so firmly that Mussolini rejoiced in public at his death, who began the struggle against Hitler not only by his encyclicals but by personal affront – he left Rome when Hitler came there and closed the Vatican Museum which Hitler had intended to visit. On his death bed in February 1939 he finished his last encyclical – the final words written on the night he died, his last blow, it was to have been, so they say, at the Totalitarian State. His successor never issued it.
Yet the new Pope as Secretary of State had been closely associated with his predecessor’s policy, and his attitude to affairs in Germany was well known. At a party which he gave in Rome after his return from Germany, an old Conservative friend of his, the Marchese Patrizi, was overheard by him to remark that it was a good thing Germany had a strong man now who would deal with the Communists. Cardinal Pacelli turned on him. ‘For goodness’ sake, Joseph,’ he said, ‘don’t talk such nonsense. The Nazis are infinitely worse.’ We can assume therefore that neither Hitler nor Mussolini were gratified when the Conclave, breaking a tradition of nearly 300 years, elected the Secretary of State Pope in March 1939 at the age of sixty-three. Perhaps the foreign Cardinals turned the balance in Pacelli’s favour. He was almost the only Cardinal they could have met personally.
For this is another paradox of the Pope – that this priest, whom I have heard described as a Franciscan by one who knows him well, is regarded as a very travelled, very modern man. There are the new gadgets of the Vatican, from the white typewriter and the white telephone and the electric razor to the short-wave wireless station and the latest television equipment provided by an American company. But the television transmitter is apparently not working very well and the service is starved for money, while the programmes of the Vatican radio are astonishingly uninspired – relays of leaders from the Osservatore Romano, local pieces of Catholic news.
As for travel it is true that Pacelli moved about a good deal of the earth’s surface before he became Pope, but it is a reasonable guess that the only two countries that made any deep impression on him were Germany and America. For both countries he has retained great affection. The administrator of St Peter’s is German and only recently Cardinal Faulhaber was invited to consecrate the new altar of the restored basilica of Constantine under St Peter’s. As for America his personal feeling of friendship for Cardinal Spellman seems certain, though somewhat surprising considering the marked divergency of their characters (the cynical sometimes point out that the United States is the only country of importance left that is able to transmit Peter’s Pence to Rome: the Catholics of other nations are bound by their currency laws).
As for his other travels they have been widespread but brief and filled with the official duties of the Pope’s representative: to the Eucharistic Congress at Buenos Aires in 1934; to Lourdes in 1935 on the nineteenth centenary of the Redemption; to Lisieux during the Eucharistic Congress in 1937; and to the Congress in 1938 at Budapest. How much during such journeys does the Pope’s representative see? There is a passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace that describes the travels of an army.
A soldier on the march is hemmed in and borne along by his regiment as much as a sailor is by his ship. However far he has walked, whatever strange, unknown and dangerous places he reaches, just as a sailor is always surrounded by the same decks, masts and rigging of his ship, so the soldier always has around him the same comrades, the same sergeant-major, the same Company dog, and the same commanders.
The Papal Secretary of State moving from country to country, Eucharistic Congress to Eucharistic Congress, is hemmed in by the pack wagons of the Church, the dignitaries in skull caps, the distant crowds that hide by their pious bulk even the shape of the buildings.
One cannot believe that the journ
eys of Pacelli have influenced him much except in so far as they have driven him to learn many languages. One must not exaggerate his knowledge, however. We hear the gentle precise voice: speaking to us in English, and we forget the strict limits of his vocabulary. He sends his blessings to our families ‘with deep affection’ – that is a favourite phrase often repeated and emphasized – but inevitably he has to address the pilgrim in certain set formulas.
For the priest this is a smaller handicap than for the diplomat. A priest in the confessional toe is apt to speak in formulas, but into the straitjacket of a limited vocabulary some priests are able to introduce an extraordinary intimacy, gentleness, a sense of love. That is Pius XII’s achievement, if we can call the grace of great charity an achievement. We become aware that he loves the world as another man may love his only son. The enemies whom Pius XI pursued with such vigour, he fights with the weapon of charity. In his presence one feels that here is a priest who is waiting patiently for the moment of martyrdom, and his patience includes even the long drawn conversations of the nuns who visit him. From another room one hears the stream of aged feminine talk while the Monsignors move restlessly in their purple robes, looking at their watches or making that movement of the hand to the chin forming an imaginary beard, that is the Latin way of exclaiming at a bore. Out comes the last nun, strutting away with the happy contented smile of a woman who has said her say and out from his inner room comes the Pope with his precise vigorous step ready to greet the next unimportant stranger ‘with deep affection’.
How endless these audiences must seem to him – private audiences to diplomats, authors, civil servants, the people ‘with a pull’, public audiences to Italian cyclists, to actors, Boy Scouts, aircraft engineers, directors of American companies. Fiat workers, bankers, tram conductors. We seem to hear a village priest speaking, rather than the ex-Nuncio to Berlin, the ex-Secretary of State, when he speaks to the tram conductors and describes their own troubles to them. ‘He has to warn some passengers, to give advice to others, and in selling the tickets he usually has to give the change – a duty which complicates things still more. He must see to it that people enter by the rear door and leave by the front door and that they observe the smoking regulations.’ How long is it since the Pope travelled in a tram? The description is so simple that we smile. ‘A duty which complicates things still more.’ We had not thought of the complication of change-giving, but the conductors had and so had the Pope.
One is reminded sometimes in these addresses of the controversy between Henry James and the popular Victorian novelist, Walter Besant. Besant had made fun at the notion of a woman writing a novel about men’s affairs, and James replied that any girl with sufficient talent could write a novel about the Brigade of Guards after once looking through the window of a Mess. It was a question of talent, not of knowledge. What is true of the writer is true of the priest, who from a hint in the confessional has to build his knowledge of a whole world outside his experience, and one finds in these private addresses of the Pope – what one seldom finds in the encyclicals – an intuitive genius. For example here is this celibate, this hermit buried in the Vatican cave, addressing a special audience of newly married couples on the heroic energy required in everyday life, the boredoms and frustrations and torn nerves of two people living under one roof. ‘When one should remember during a chilly dispute that it is better to keep quiet, to keep in check a complaint, or to use a milder word instead of a stronger, because one knows that the stronger word, once it is out, will relieve, it is true, the tension of the irritated nerves, but will also leave its darkening shadow behind.’
Many soldiers, Allied and German, Protestants, atheists, Jews, had their audiences with the Pope during the war. The Neutrality of the Vatican was rigidly guarded: Rome was protected from the Allies as from the Germans to the best of the Pope’s ability, but soldiers of all sides were welcome as pilgrims. Many stories have been told of these wartime audiences. Here is one more.
While a London priest was making his rounds in his parish a year or two ago, a working man shouted to him from across the road that ‘his bloody Pope’ was the greatest man alive. The priest, who supposed the man was drunk, stopped and spoke to him since the view he had expressed was hardly common in that area. The man told him that he had lost his only son in the war and that they had been very attached to one another. The thought that he would never see his son again was driving him crazy, for he had no religious faith to help him. He was in the army and went to the Vatican with a military party to see the Pope. As the Pope moved amongst them, chatting to this man and that, the father shouted after him. The Pope asked him what he wanted and he said that he wanted to know if there was any hope of his seeing his son again. The Pope replied that that was one of those short questions which required a long answer. He told one of the attendants to bring the man after the audience to his private room. There he sat down and for an hour explained the reasons for believing in the immortality of the soul. The man left the Pope convinced that he would see his son again and happy in the knowledge.
This is the Pope whom most of us before the war regarded as a diplomat. Even his photographs, where the eyes have lost expression behind deep glasses, where the lips keep their thinness and lose their sensitivity, add to the impression of an ex-Secretary of State. It is true he keeps that office still in his own hands, assisted by Monsignor Montini,*11 but one who has had close dealings with the Pope, denied to me that diplomacy was important in his eyes. This is not a world where diplomatic action counts for much. In the last thirty years the Pope has seen the consistent failure of diplomacy, but it is a world he once knew well – the world of ambassadors and visiting Ministers – and he retains these contacts in his own hands much as a man keeps the trophies on his wall of a sport long abandoned. The world cannot be saved by diplomacy.
What can save it?
So much time for audiences public and private, so much time for work (the light in his study over St Peter’s burns till one in the morning), so much time like any other priest for his breviary, and in the background one is aware of the huge threatening world, the conferences in Moscow, the speeches at Lake Success, the troops pouring down in Korea, big business bulling and bearing in the skyscrapers of Wall Street. He presses into one more visitor’s hand a little green envelope with the Papal arms containing a small nickel holy medal. Can this Thing – so defenceless it seems – survive?
Every morning at breakfast the Pope lets loose his two canaries and his favourite bird – a small bird with a green breast, I don’t know its name. They walk over the table pecking at his butter, and his favourite takes crumbs from between his fingers and perches on the white shoulder. ‘He talks to children’, my informant said, ‘as though they were his birds and to his birds, as though they were children . . .’ That was why he called the Pope Franciscan, and the Franciscans next to the Jesuits are his favourite Order. Even in this short period of relaxation he seems to be making a hieratic gesture symbolizing charity. If a man loves enough, every act will represent his love.
I have said he gives the impression of a man patiently waiting for martyrdom. He has already barely escaped it. At his coronation, the German ambassador was heard to remark, ‘Very moving and beautiful, but it will be the last’, and a moment came during the war, under the German Occupation, when the end was expected. Hitler was said to have uttered the threat that he would raze the Vatican to the ground, and it is certainly true that the administrator received orders one day from ‘him up there’ to produce a plan for summoning the ambassadors of the powers at a moment’s notice to St Peter’s so that the Pope if necessary might make an announcement of grave importance. But the threat of exile or death passed: the order was revoked. Now again the danger threatens. The Church’s borders are widespread, in Poland and Korea, but war travels fast these days. Hitler was handicapped by the presence of the Church in Germany: in Russia the Church is represented only by a few priests in hiding.
Sometimes a P
ope can be known by the saints he canonizes. Pius XI, the pugnacious priest, canonized Thomas More and John Fisher, over-ruling the requirements of miracles: they were men who fought the totalitarian state of their day. Pacelli has canonized the child Maria Goretti, who died forgiving her murderer.
It is a long time since a Pope has awoken, even in those of other faiths, such a sense of closeness. One remembers Henry James’s description of Pius IX among his guards coming up the Via Condotti in his great rumbling black-horsed coach ‘so capacious that the august personage within – a hand of automatic benediction, a large, handsome, pale old face, a pair of celebrated eyes which one took, on trust, for sinister – could show from it as enshrined in the dim depths of a chapel’.
Pius XII gives no automatic benediction, though there are still dim depths, one feels, in the Vatican, in spite of the Roman sunshine glinting on the orders and the swords, as one is sieved from one audience chamber to another by scarlet flunkeys, who will later grab the guileless visitor and extort the money for drinks. The huge civil service has to go on functioning, and sometimes in our irritation at its slowness, its caution, or its pedantry, we may feel that it is obscuring the white-clothed figure at the centre. But a feeling like this comes and goes: it is not the impression that remains.
Collected Essays Page 31