The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  When Hitler triumphantly followed his troops into Austria in an open armored car, he had declared that Germany’s victory was the first step toward the thousand-year Reich. And when he reached Vienna, church bells rang, and the Catholic Church heralded his arrival. The archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, immediately signaled his support for the führer. “Catholics in the Vienna diocese are asked on Sunday to offer thanks to the Lord God for the bloodless course of the great political change,” he declared. “Heil Hitler.”

  Hitler was pleased at the unexpected endorsement from the Catholic Church, but at the Vatican, Pope Pius XI was appalled. The pope thought Innitzer was a weak man and a coward. After Innitzer’s declaration, members of the Austrian Catholic Church who disagreed with the cardinal and opposed the Nazis were arrested and beaten.

  The pope angrily summoned Innitzer to Rome and berated him for two hours during a private meeting. The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who always argued for moderation, had counseled Pius not to demand Innitzer’s resignation. The pope relented, but was adamant on making a public display. He forced Innitzer to publish a retraction of his praise for Hitler.

  None of this mattered to Hitler, though he did note that Pope Pius XI was still the troublesome enemy that he and the Catholic Church had always been. Hitler’s minions clamped down on Austrian freedoms and sent tens of thousands of opponents, Jews and Catholics, democrats and Communists to concentration camps. With freedom of the press one of the first casualties, Innitzer’s retraction was never published or broadcast in Germany or Austria.

  Hitler’s trip on May 2 was his first venture beyond Germany and Austria and was meant to cement the Axis alliance. The Times of London reported that “Herr Hitler’s visit . . . seems destined to become legendary, for the preparations which have been made for it are stupendous. The cost is estimated at between three million and four million pounds [$200 to $300 million in 2012 U.S. dollars]. A new railway station and a new road [the Viale Adolf Hitler] have been built for the Führer’s arrival in Rome. . . . Grandiose effects of decoration and illumination have been devised, not only in Rome but in Florence and Naples as well.”

  World attention focused on Hitler’s journey to Rome, especially in the United States, where officials monitored the cultish reception. A few hours before Hitler’s arrival, Ambassador William Phillips, accompanied by his wife, Caroline Drayton Phillips, had traveled on a regularly scheduled passenger train on the main line from northern Italy down to Rome after a weekend stay in the north. “Every station up till half an hour of Rome was bedecked with German and Italian flags and for long distances every house, villa and hut close to the railway were [sic] displaying the two flags,” Phillips remembered. The ambassador noted that the flags and the decorations served to cover over the poverty and slums of the countryside. “I only hope the poor wretches who live in these hovels will be allowed to keep these flags which have been furnished them. They could be turned into much needed clothing,” he also wrote.

  The newspaper LaFarge read on the train to Bristol carried detailed coverage of Hitler’s tour. Mussolini had converted Rome into a glowing extravaganza, determined to outdo the grand reception he had received from Hitler the previous year. The führer was greeted by a city radiant with torches and monuments bathed in light. The Times of London described the event as “one of the most elaborate and magnificent receptions of which there is record even in the annals of the Eternal City.”

  There were two news items of special note concerning Hitler’s trip to Rome. First, thousands of police would guard Hitler and Mussolini, and ominously, newspapers reported, German Jews in Rome, Naples, and Florence were being detained throughout Hitler’s eight-day visit.

  LaFarge’s newspaper also reported that Pope Pius XI had decided to leave Rome three days before Hitler’s arrival. The Times of London linked the pope’s departure to Hitler’s arrival and reported, “the tendency has been shown in some quarters to attribute a political significance to the Pope’s decision.”

  AS LAFARGE GLANCED up from the newspaper, he could see little of the English countryside because it was already shrouded in early-evening darkness. From the train, he could not see even the contours of the villages along the way. This was not unusual, because these areas of England rarely had any kind of lighting at night, but as he thought back years later, the scene mixed in memory with the blackouts that would occur across Britain and all Europe when the Germans began their bombing campaigns. As the train moved toward its destination, LaFarge increasingly sensed that he was experiencing an England that was calm but waiting for terror to strike.

  LaFarge put aside the newspaper and prepared to visit with his cousins in Bath. He alighted at the Bristol Temple Meads Station, the oldest major train station in the world. For a hundred years, the Temple Meads cathedral-like central clock tower dominated the center of the city with its Tudor spires, spectacular stained glass, and detailed stone and woodwork. He switched quickly to the local train to Bath, where his cousin, Hope Warren and her husband, Robert Wilberforce, received him. “What a curious sensation,” LaFarge recalled, “riding near midnight in that autorail in a totally unknown country, only a few hours off the steamer.”

  LaFarge awoke refreshed on the morning of May 3. Quickly reaccommodating to land, he went with his cousins on a tour of the countryside he had known as a young man. He made a point of revisiting the timeless magnificence of England: a visit to the eighth-century Saxon Church at Bradford on Avon and to the Glastonbury Tor, the hill occupied by settlers since the Neolithic period. There he said a prayer to Joseph of Arimathea, who appears in legends about the Holy Grail. All in the rain, no surprise for England.

  He then visited the Bath Abbey, first founded in the eighth century and rebuilt in the 1500s. He walked on the slab that entombed Lieutenant General Henry Shrapnel, who gave his name to exploding cannon shells. Contrary to LaFarge’s assumption—“I suppose he exploded!”—Shrapnel died of natural causes in 1842 at the age of eighty, supported all the while by a comfortable government stipend for his invention.

  LaFarge’s first impressions produced the desired result, a marked contrast with America’s preoccupation about politics and war. “Just as I had anticipated,” he wrote to his sister Margaret a day after arrival, “people over here seem much less excited over the political situation than at home. I am more and more impressed by the complete isolation, outside of a few superficial contacts, that exists between here and there. It is a different world.”

  After a few more days in Europe, however, LaFarge found it impossible to sustain this notion any longer. One could not ignore the sense of impending war. He was haunted by memories of the Europe of his youth in 1905 that represented a lost world “quite as if I had never before set foot beyond the ocean . . . as if one had visited Paris or London or Rome in a previous existence.”

  ON MAY 4, after two days with his relatives, LaFarge traveled to London to conduct meetings and interviews. He would be visiting Czechoslovakia during the trip so he scheduled a luncheon conversation with Jan Masaryk, the Czech ambassador to Britain, a man consumed by and despairing over his country’s future. Masaryk was the son of Czechoslovakia’s founding father, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. The younger Masaryk was U.S. educated, and his mother was American.

  Masaryk had just returned from 10 Downing Street, where he met with British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax. They had discussed the ongoing negotiations with Britain over Hitler’s charge that the Czechs were oppressing Germans living in Sudetenland, a scythe-shaped strip of territory wrapped around Czechoslovakia on its German border. Most of the country’s three million ethnic Germans lived in Sudetenland, which had been ceded to the newly formed Czechoslovakian state in 1918 through the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the Great War. Hitler warned that while Germany was a peaceful nation, it would fight to redress the indignities it had suffered ever since the end of the war.

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bsp; Chamberlain wanted Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler and give in to his demands. The New York Times declared: “Britain has written off Czechoslovakia as an independent state.”

  Masaryk told LaFarge that Chamberlain and his foreign secretary would not give him a clear answer on whether there was room for further negotiations: “If Great Britain is not going to support us,” he told LaFarge, “then I shall simply pack my valise, take a trip to Berlin and lay all the cards on the table before Hitler. The game will be up, and I shall simply accept what Hitler chooses to leave us.” But the scraps would be nothing. Secretly, Hitler already had drawn up his plan for the conquest of Czechoslovakia.

  Masaryk also predicted that Hitler and Stalin would eventually join forces. As bad as Hitler and Nazism might be, Communism was seen as considerably worse by LaFarge, his fellow churchmen, and the Vatican. This was at the heart of the Catholic Church’s slow, cautious response to the dangers of Hitler and Mussolini.

  Roman Catholics had reasons for thinking that Communism was the great enemy of Christianity. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Catholics were attacked and churches had been shuttered; in Spain, priests and nuns had been massacred. If Nazism and Communism joined forces, many Catholics reasoned, the threat to Catholicism and to the world was multiplied.

  LaFarge did not forget Masaryk’s despondency, his anger at the British, or his predictions. The meeting with the Czech ambassador brought LaFarge his first experience close to the center of politics and intrigue. He sensed spying eyes all around and worried that Nazi agents might be intercepting his communications. Before he left America, he had devised a rudimentary code system of prayerful phrases just in case security concerns arose. He told his editor, Francis X. Talbot: “If I send a card from Germany or Austria, following will be meaning of greetings at end:

  “Oremus pro invicem [Let us pray for one another]—things are very bad, worse than you imagine.

  “Pray for me—About as we heard in the U.S.

  “Say a prayer for me on my travels—Not so bad, fair show of resistance, etc.

  “Greetings and prayers—Situation complex and difficult to analyze.”

  LaFarge expected to be followed, spied upon, spat upon, even shunned by those “anti-religionists” and Communists, but he still needed to see the impact of Hitler and the Nazis for himself. Events and his travels were about to take him much closer to the heart of the story than he imagined, where a Jesuit might indeed have some impact.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A “Crooked Cross”

  Castel Gandolfo, May 4, 1938

  POPE PIUS XI had retreated a week earlier than expected to his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo, about twenty miles southeast of the Vatican. He knew his move would be taken for what it was—a pointed snub. The pope wanted no part of the triumphal celebration in Rome of the growing friendship between Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist state.

  On May 4, he commented on the presence of the Nazis in Rome for the first time in public. “Sad things appear, very sad things, both from far and near,” he told a general audience. “And among the sad things is this: that it is not found to be out of place or untimely to fly an insignia of another cross that is not the Cross of Christ.”

  His words echoed throughout Rome, Italy, and the world. But this wasn’t the first time the pope issued condemnations of Nazism and Hitler. The pope had a considerable arsenal of rhetorical weapons to use against Hitler and Mussolini. Even from Castel Gandolfo, he could reach beyond the Vatican as few others might, by radio and the international press. Impulsive by nature, the pope could not be contained.

  He convened a meeting of church leaders a few hours before leaving the Vatican. The Great War, as World War I was known, “was to be the last war,” he said in that April 30 meeting. “Men said it was to be the beginning of a reign of peace. Instead of which, behold, it has been the herald and forerunner of an inferno of confusion and contradiction.” If the Vatican language was not direct, the message was clear; Nazi policies were leading to a new world war.

  Just after 5 P.M. on April 30, servants had shuttered the windows of the papal residence at the Vatican and the pope took the elevator to the ground floor. He was dressed in the simple black vestments of a priest so he wouldn’t attract attention. The piazza was relatively empty, but a few people gathered and cheered when they saw him emerge at one end of St. Peter’s Square. Among his entourage were his private secretary, Monsignor Carlo Confalonieri, several members of the Swiss Guard, and one of his official physicians. He left behind orders that the Vatican museums were to remain closed to visitors from May 3 to May 10, the duration of Hitler’s tour of Italy. The Vatican explained publicly that the facilities needed to be “reorganized.” He had also sent a letter to churchmen that reiterated his rejection of Hitler and Mussolini, referring to their totalitarian goals as anathema to religion and declaring that they promoted racism through fake science. He warned members of the curia to avoid all official functions, dinners, or celebrations or receptions honoring Hitler. In addition, the official newspaper, Osservatore Romano, the only publication left in Italy that was free of Fascist censorship, was not to report Hitler’s visit.

  The newspaper reported facetiously that “the Holy Father was not going to Castel Gandolfo ‘for petty diplomatic reasons, but simply because the air at Castel Gandolfo made him feel good, while this air made him ill.’”

  Word spread quickly that the pope was on his way to Castel Gandolfo. People began to line the Appian Way as soon as the pope’s four-car motorcade left the outskirts of Rome. By the time the procession reached the village of Albano, hundreds had gathered in the main piazza, waving and cheering as the pope rode past. Thousands had gathered in the central piazza of Castel Gandolfo, where an orchestra serenaded him as the motorcade arrived at the front gates of the palace.

  The wooden doors opened and Pius XI was shepherded into the inner courtyard. He rode the small elevator to his rooms on the third floor and soon stepped onto the balcony of the palace and gave his blessing. The small crowd cheered and waved flags: the Italian tri-colore, green, white, and red, intermingled with the yellow-and-white banner of the Vatican fluttering in the wind. The band played the Italian royal march, the papal hymn, and then, much less pleasing to the pontiff’s ears, the Fascist marching song. Such were the times.

  The pope waved once more, then turned and retired to his private chapel and quarters on the opposite side of the building from the piazza. From here, the pope could look out toward the Mediterranean in the distance or turn outside to the balcony adjacent to the Vatican Observatory. He also had a commanding view of Lake Albano, a perfectly serene perch from which to contemplate the world beyond. Castel Gandolfo was always a relief from the closed quarters of St. Peter’s. From this cloistered place, he could strategize and regroup.

  The pope had a remarkable ability to gather the world’s attention. He was the leader of about 350 million Catholics, about 16 percent of the world population, and no other religious or moral figure was comparable. His words were translated into dozens of languages, read and displayed on the front pages of newspapers everywhere. He had issued thirty-two encyclicals in his sixteen years on the throne of St. Peter, and each of them carried weight beyond the Catholic faithful. With the dawn of the telegraph and the radio, he had a worldwide audience for his pronouncements on morality and the human condition. This was his weapon against tyranny.

  He spoke daily through Osservatore Romano and Vatican Radio, both of which issued regular political commentaries about European affairs. He would need to make use of this power judiciously in the coming months. The world was facing the abyss, drawn there by Adolf Hitler. The pope was not alone in thinking that the German führer was insane.

  THE WEEKS PRIOR to the pope’s retreat to Castel Gandolfo had been intense. Two weeks earlier, on April 17, Easter Sunday, the pope had delivered his annual Urbi et Orbi benediction “to the City of Rome and to the World” before an overflow crowd of one hundred th
ousand people in St. Peter’s Square.

  Since Pius was recovering from a variety of illnesses, including angina and perhaps a heart attack, he was confined to waving and issuing his blessing to the crowd from a chair. He also used a wooden contraption that supported him from the back when he felt too weak to stand, similar to Franklin Roosevelt being propped up and made to seem as if he was standing. Those looking up to the pope, the setting framed by Bernini’s seventeenth-century sculptures of the Apostles, saw him appearing cheerful and surprisingly well. A New York Times reporter said the pope “was rather pale and he had lost considerable weight, but his eyes sparkled behind the thick lenses of his spectacles with the old vivacity, and his gestures as he raised his right hand in blessing had regained their energy.”

  That was the image the pope sought and maintained. Pius XI indeed had regained considerable strength since a heart attack late in 1936. Many around him had thought he might not live through that Christmas. But the holiday came and the illness receded. Inevitably, the press speculated about his health and physical appearance. News agencies maintained a constant pope watch, vying to be the first to report the news of his death. It was a macabre business.

  A second Christmas had come, and he was still well enough. “Despite his eighty years and his recent grave illness,” the New York Times had reported, “the Pope stood the strain of the five-hour ceremony in his heavy pontifical robes very well although at the end he was visibly tired and he went to bed immediately afterward for a long rest.”

  Pius XI ruled the Holy See with an imperial style and a withering gaze. He had also been obstinate in resisting the best arguments of those around him. They regularly bothered him with comments about his health. He was irritated and snapped at them when they mentioned his infirmities.