by Peter Eisner
Cardinal Carlo Salotti told him one day, “You have been an example for all men to follow. No man works harder than Your Holiness for God and His Church. But hard labor has need to rest in its time. . . . Why not take a long rest?”
The pope had no time for this. He was annoyed with Salotti for even raising the issue. “The Lord has endowed you with many good qualities, Salotti. But he denied you a clinical eye,” Pius XI said.
Finally, the cardinals convinced the pope to see someone who did have a clinical eye, the chief of the Vatican health service, Doctor Aminta Milani. The pope confessed to Milani that he had been feeling ill. His legs were painful, he had trouble breathing at times, and sleep was difficult. After an examination, Milani said the pope was suffering from circulatory problems and dangerously high blood pressure. Doctors at the time could generally identify cardiac disease and recognized that heart failure was a major cause of death among people over fifty years old. They could also measure high blood pressure and understood the consequences, but they had few remedies. Milani, a respected physician trained in medical pathology at the Royal University of Rome at the turn of the century, prescribed bed rest, occasional injections of stimulants, and bloodletting.
The pope said, however, he had no intention of going to bed and with good reason rejected bloodletting, a process that had progressed little since the Middle Ages. Bloodletting had been questioned in the last hundred years and had been determined as useless by doctors in the United States and much of Europe.
The cardinals warned the pope, however, to follow Milani’s treatment or face grave consequences. Pius relented, but he said he would submit to the treatment only under certain conditions. The procedure would be done while he worked in the papal offices, not in bed, and he would not take time from his schedule.
The pope’s American personal biographer, Thomas B. Morgan of the United Press, described the operation. On the appointed day, the doctor came to the pope’s office and made a small “puncture behind the ear.” It “was performed in his library chair and he withstood it with the fortitude of a martyr,” Morgan wrote later. “When it was over and a pad of gauze placed upon the wound, the Holy Father told the physician that that was enough.” The blood draining basin was removed and the pope ordered the physician to withdraw as well. He then followed through with his schedule of meetings and audiences for the rest of the day. All those who approached the pontiff noticed that he was holding his handkerchief to his ear in obvious discomfort. “He asked no sympathy,” Morgan said, and “resented it when given.” The pope survived the treatment.
Sometime later, the pope asked Milani and the other doctors attending him to tell him plainly and accurately how much longer he would live. They told him that he would survive, but no one could say for how long.
Pope Pius XI realized he had a serious heart ailment that might lead to his death, but he wanted to survive, and as he said, “we cannot look upon youth without a very sincere love, without a certain envy.” He seized whatever time he had to launch the most important campaign of his papacy.
While his criticism of Hitler was long standing, Pius stepped up his opposition because he recognized the dangers of Nazism and the crazed violence that threatened not only Jews, but all humanity. He distanced himself from others at the Vatican who remained more alarmed by the Bolshevist Revolution in Russia and Karl Marx’s famous banner: religion is the opiate of the people. This Vatican faction agreed with Hitler’s pledge to obliterate Communism and believed on those grounds he could not be all bad.
The pope had clashed with the führer even before Hitler had maneuvered himself to the chancellorship of Germany in 1933. Hitler had sent his deputy Hermann Göring to Rome in 1931, two years earlier, but the pope refused to meet with him. The Vatican had signed a diplomatic accord known as a “concordat” with Germany soon after Hitler took office in 1933. But the pope began challenging Nazi violence immediately. Vatican commentaries, including a report that said that National Socialism might be better named “national terrorism,” censured Nazi regulations and methods.
In the spring of 1937, the pope began a new series of attacks. Less than four months after having been given the Last Rites of the church and having been considered near death, he issued a startling encyclical that amounted to an indictment of Hitler and the Nazis. The encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), had been written in secret. The pope ordered the text to be smuggled clandestinely into Germany, where it was then read from the pulpit on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937. The encyclical criticized the Nazi government for having submitted Catholics to “oppression and prohibition” of their faith. No longer, the pope said, would he remain silent before such abuse. He prayed “for those who because of their faith have been persecuted and made to suffer, even to the extent of being put in prisons and concentration camps.” Those faithful, though not specified, easily might have referred to Jews as well as Catholics who faced the wrath of the Nazis. He also passed judgment directly on Hitler’s idea of the master race: “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the Universe.”
Hitler took the speech as a declaration of war. He vowed retaliation, saying he would “open such a campaign against them in press, radio and cinema so that they won’t know what hit them.” But he did it carefully in his own way—Hitler understood the importance of maintaining good relations with the Catholic Church, because the pope had considerable moral sway. “Let us have no martyrs among the Catholic priests,” he said, “it is more practical to show they are criminals.” The following day, the Gestapo fanned out across the country and seized all available copies of the pope’s message.
In June 1937, two months after the encyclical, the pope convened a meeting of bishops to criticize the growing harassment of Catholics in Germany with the implicit warning that the Vatican could break diplomatic ties with Berlin. He demanded an end to arrests and mistreatment of priests, bishops, and students. “Our brothers were carrying out their duties as churchmen. They have not interfered in the political sphere and they have not committed a breach of the law . . . As long as such measures are not nullified there can be no assurances of freedom in the church or of free election.”
The pope planned to broaden his complaints against the Nazi regime and knew he could be a bulwark against the madness if he could survive a while longer. Perhaps he could rally world leaders to action before it was too late. He wanted to live.
BEFORE HE WAS a bishop of the church, Pius had been Monsignor Achille Ratti, possibly best known as a pioneering mountaineer, a daring, world-class Alpine climber. These days his life as pope was reminiscent of tackling a seemingly unassailable peak, yet now he was attempting to awaken the world to Hitler’s march to war.
Mountain climbing involved physical challenge and courage; dealing with church politics and world affairs also involved guile and specialized skills: “While with the hard fatigue of climbing, where the air is rarefied and purer, our physical strength gains vigor, it comes about, too, that by facing difficulties of every kind, we grow stronger for meeting the arduous duties of our lives,” Pius wrote in 1922.
He was using that strength of spirit now to battle a foe on moral terms. In a rare moment of self-reflection, the pope urged Thomas Morgan, the American reporter who befriended him, to delve into his background and draw his own conclusions.
“Divine Providence has called us to work and the Alpine climbing is over,” he told Morgan. “You too will have plenty to do. But you can see the mountains. Go to them . . . where the air is pure and where one is really re-created and refreshed both in body and soul.”
Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti was born in the northern region of Lombardy on May 31, 1857. His home village, Desio, was ten miles from Milan in the foothills of the Alps, a region controlled by the Austrian Empire on and off for 150 years. It was a ti
me of shifting political boundaries—the Italian army attacked Lombardy in 1859, swept north, then drove out the Austrians in a series of battles and annexed Lombardy to the new Italian state.
Poor farmers and workers had been drawn to Desio in the mid-1800s with the promise of work in the silk manufacturing mills in the area. Among them, Ratti’s father, Francesco, was industrious and became successful enough to be promoted from worker to machine operator and then to be named manager of a silk mill. It was unusual at the time to find a case of such upward mobility from near serfdom to an emerging working class; Francesco later became the owner of his own textile mill. With increasing fortunes, the family had moved up economically and lived fairly well.
Morgan visited the silk mills of Desio and imagined what life had been like in the mid-1800s. Exploring the countryside, he met an old gentleman, Battista Cittario, who remembered the young Achille Ratti running and jumping and fighting, “the most sure-footed of all the boys. He was good in everything,” Cittario said. “He often went to church with his mother for she was a very devout woman.” Morgan also visited the public elementary school a few miles from the pope’s home village, where he had been sent to study when he was ten years old. A report card on file from 1867 showed the boy received perfect tens in all subjects. With the intercession of a favorite uncle, Don Damien Ratti, the parish priest of nearby Asso, Achille Ratti was sent to study at a seminary school. The young man was bound, preordained it seemed to Morgan, to become a priest and to be an unusual one.
His uncle introduced him to the religious life, but this uncle also took the young Ratti on excursions, Morgan wrote, “to the precipitous heights of the Alpine ranges . . . He was thrilled with the extent of the plain, the beauty in the ruggedness and steepness of the hillside reaching down into what seemed the unfathomable depth of the blue waters [of Lake Como]. And when he faced the north, the Alps, standing like giant sentinels challenging the courage of man, frowned upon the earth and dominated it.”
After his ordination in 1879, Ratti served for years as a teacher, a scholar with three doctorates, as a librarian first at the Ambrosian Library in Milan, founded in the seventeenth century and famed for its Greek and Middle Eastern manuscripts, and finally as head of the Vatican Library in Rome. Along the way, he studied Hebrew with a rabbinical scholar who became his lifelong friend. All the while he could have been mistaken for a bookish man alone were it not for his mountain-climbing conquests.
Over the years he took on increasingly new and dangerous challenges. “It is no exaggeration to say that in his own chosen sport, the name of Achille Ratti goes down in the records of the Italian Alpine Club as does the name of . . . Babe Ruth in baseball . . .” Morgan wrote.
Ratti continued climbing until 1913 when he was fifty-six years old. By then, he had mastered many peaks rarely attempted, including Monte Rosa, a climb designated by the British Alpine Association as “dangerous and foolhardy.”
Morgan wrote detailed accounts of some of the more daring climbs with color and such descriptiveness that it appeared that the pope had worked with him, even dictated portions himself. His assault on Monte Rosa at 15,203 feet—about 580 feet lower than Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps—came in 1889, the first ascent of its kind in history. “The hours were interminable,” wrote Morgan. Ratti shared the ordeal with his fellow priest, Monsignor Luigi Grasselli.
“Night was falling,” Morgan continued. “They held their breath as they watched the threat of inexorable gloom enveloping them and none had a place where he could stand without clinging to the face of the rock. They were like prisoners spread-eagled in some medieval torture. They could not endure such torment in the increasing cold of the night. The release of a hold meant disaster.”
The next year they climbed successfully Mont Blanc and eventually the easier-to-tackle but more dangerous Mount Vesuvius. The pope told Morgan that the volcano “received us with a deep roar, followed by an explosion which, illuminating the bottom, or rather the entire basin of the crater, amazed us with the terrifying grandeur of the spectacle taking place before our eyes. . . . Flames leapt up from the base to the mouth of the monster, because from the lava-jetting cone deep down, as from a well of living fire, there gushed forth an elegant—I must call it that—spray of incandescent material. This gigantic fountain issued forth . . . like a fairy rain on the steep slopes of the cone.”
ACHILLE RATTI had heard from his family about authoritarian rule when he was a child in the final years of the Austrian Empire’s long occupation of northern Italy. Italians had little love for their German-speaking occupiers, perhaps a lesson Ratti applied years later to the regime of the Nazis under Adolf Hitler, who was an Austrian. Papa Ratti, as Italians called him, did have international experience. In 1918, Pope Benedict XV had named him the Vatican’s ambassador to Poland, which had been restored to independence after the end of the Great War. His career as a librarian ended with the Polish appointment.
Ratti was at his post in Warsaw in 1920 when the Polish army repulsed the invading Soviet army. The experience contributed significantly to then Bishop Ratti’s view of the world—as had lessons of Austrian rule in his home region of Lombardy. The church was also under attack after the fall of Czar Nicholas II in the Russian Revolution. Lenin’s Bolsheviks destroyed churches and imprisoned priests throughout Russia. Nevertheless, as pope in the 1920s, Ratti sought a gesture that might make life easier for Catholics still in Russia. He sent food aid to the new Marxist-Leninist state, but the gesture did not result in improved relations with Moscow. The birth of the Soviet Union brought into vogue with Catholic churchmen the phrase “Godless Communism.” The church confronted the question of whether Hitler was a worthy ally against Communism, whether “the enemy of my enemy” was a friend, or one more enemy?
This was a central issue at the Vatican when Pope Benedict XV died of pneumonia in 1922, and when Achille Ratti, who was then sixty-four years old, became the compromise choice to replace him. He was elected pope by the College of Cardinals on the fourteenth ballot after one other prelate had turned down the job. Ratti’s opponents said he was not worldly enough to govern and that he had lived his entire life in a world of books. Though he had been a librarian for a long while, the criticism was unwarranted. In terms of daring and adventurousness, there has been no other priest—or any other pope before or since—who traversed mountain passes that now bear his name and none other who had the stamina to climb unattainable peaks. Somewhere at the heart of his increasingly passionate drive against Hitler and Mussolini was the drive to break the mold and to do what others would not or could not do. These were not the aspirations of a bookish, retiring man.
AS HE RECOVERED after 1936 from his ailments, the pope would carry on with a normal schedule—he had much left to be accomplished. Central was his intention to continue, even accelerate, the pace of his attacks on Hitler and Mussolini, to reject anti-Semitism, and to seek new ways to warn the world about the growing threat of war in Europe. Hitler and Mussolini were mightily concerned by the pope’s recent actions and declarations. Such was a measure of the moral power of the papacy. Pius XI knew well that his speeches and the resulting worldwide headlines enraged Hitler. He criticized the Nazis and their anti-Semitic tirades with increasing vigor in the hope this would spur international action before it was too late.
Along with his speech about Hitler’s presence in Rome on May 4, the pope authorized a similar statement by his American aide and interpreter, Monsignor Joseph Hurley. This new statement again emphasized the images of two crosses, the Christian cross and the crooked cross of Nazism. The pope had banned coverage of Hitler’s trip, but there would be strong language, both on Vatican Radio and in the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano.
John LaFarge’s European trip, May–October 1938.
“There are two crosses now side by side in Rome . . . the cross of Christianity and the crooked cross of neo-paganism,” it said, without crediting Hurley as the author. Hurley’s anonymo
us words were translated and read on Vatican Radio in Italian, English, German, and French and published in Osservatore Romano. The “crooked cross” became the image of Vatican-Nazi relations. The statement sent Hitler into a fury, and Mussolini ordered the seizure and destruction of any copies of the Vatican newspaper circulating outside the Vatican walls.
Cardinals at the Vatican reacted with fear, worried about reprisals against Catholics in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Britain and the United States were also surprised by the strength of Pius’s words. Once he been considered a conservative pope who embraced authoritarians and enthusiastically sought and endorsed landmark diplomatic agreements with Mussolini and Hitler. He had authorized the accords with both countries so that the church could perform its basic missions of education and preaching to the faithful; in return, the church agreed not to interfere in German or Italian politics.
Mussolini and Hitler, both Roman Catholics, claimed some moral legitimacy as a result of the agreements with the Vatican, which they cast as tacit endorsements from the pope. That impression was proven wrong, and the pope found ways to leverage the agreements in his dealings with both totalitarian regimes. Pius XI criticized both governments for imposing harsh limits on civil society and for building up dictatorships that tried to replace religion with a brand of idol worship—the führer and Il Duce. To counter this, the pope increasingly challenged the Nazi’s outrages; and Hitler, who was waging his own public opinion campaign, got the point.
After the pope’s outburst against Nazis and their swastika, the Vatican ignored the rest of Hitler’s visit to Italy. Other news media, of course, did report on the visit.
Officially, Hitler’s trip was a resounding success, except for the glaring absence of Pope Pius XI. His view of Hitler was commented on everywhere. The pope, after all, was vicar of Rome, and his decision to avoid such a celebration was more than a slight. The world would know, said the pope’s secretary, Monsignor Carlo Confalonieri, that “at least one person who would not bend: it was an old octogenarian of a Pontiff.” The pope’s silence was a statement itself, nevertheless, to the Italian people and to the world.