The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  John’s brothers taught him about sailing, and his youth was dedicated to plying the cliffs and coves of Narragansett Bay, close to their home in Newport. “The background of my boyhood was the sea,” he recalled. “I would stroll down to the western end of the beach to watch the vast heaving waves under the moonlight.”

  When LaFarge was quite young, his mother told him that his father “does not look properly after us. He means well but nevertheless I am at times forgotten, and there are times when I must turn to Almighty God for help.” LaFarge became his mother’s friend and partner, he recalled, and shared “her problems, her anxieties and heartaches. I felt manly and protective.”

  The elder LaFarge was an eccentric bohemian and a prominent man in the arts. He was an influential muralist, designer of church mosaics and stained glass, and was one of the seven charter members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. LaFarge the artist was a difficult person to know, all the more because he suffered in middle age from lead poisoning that left him chronically ill and often bedridden.

  One of young John’s earliest memories of his father involved going with his mother down to the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1891 when he was eleven years old. The elder LaFarge was returning with Henry Adams from an extensive voyage to the South Pacific. “I was glad to know that I really had a father in fact, since my picture of him before that time had been quite indefinite.”

  By 1938, LaFarge still ached to learn about the man he really didn’t know. One of his father’s signature works was the mural The Ascension of Our Lord above the altar of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Greenwich Village, not far from the studio on West Tenth Street where young John had visited him. Visitors to the church were spellbound and came just to gaze at LaFarge’s creation. A critical appraisal in the New York Times said that LaFarge “has shown that we possess at least one artist [in America who is] the peer, if not the superior of the best workmen . . . Composition, drawing and proportions are masterly.”

  Henry Adams, in his autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams, described John LaFarge as one of his closest confidants and an important and delightful influence in his life and said he was “quite the most interesting person we knew.” The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, the year after Adams died and nine years after the elder LaFarge had died. “To LaFarge,” Adams wrote, “eccentricity meant convention; a mind really eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone—a shade—a nuance—and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity. Of course all artists hold more or less the same point of view in their art, but few carry it into daily life, and often the contrast is excessive between their art and their talk.”

  As LaFarge read these words, he recalled that the closest he and his father had ever been was during the several months John had spent with him in New York City. Young John retained a much closer relationship with his mother until her death in 1926. But he did carry something of those days with his father. The elder LaFarge’s life work focused on arts that touched on the spirit and influenced the spirit of his son. The young LaFarge developed an impressive knowledge of the arts in his own right and had an expert’s eye for stained glass, sacred art, and architecture. He was not eccentric by nature, as Henry Adams had described his father, unless he qualified as being the only member of his immediate family to enter the priesthood. And by becoming a Jesuit, he was dedicated to service and, unlike his father, he was following an uncommon, quiet path. As St. Ignatius would have it, the manner of a Jesuit “was ordinary,” not eccentric.

  Bancel, who was fifteen years older than John, had followed their father’s track of producing sacred art. And now, with all the reminiscing about his early life, LaFarge received troubling news from home. Bancel, who had recently completed a stained-glass panel at St. Aidan’s Church in New Haven, was ill. The memories washed over LaFarge, and more than once he wished he had never been selected to do the pope’s work. He was homesick.

  BY JULY 19, LaFarge had established a routine for working on the encyclical, though melancholy and self-doubt pervaded his time in Paris. His loneliness and thoughts about his family influenced his decisions. He referred frequently to moving quickly and getting home before the end of the summer, but that did not seem likely.

  He set up a desk and living quarters on the Left Bank with the Jesuit community he had visited two months earlier, at the magazine Études, the French Jesuit equivalent of LaFarge’s own magazine, America. He had told Father D’Ouince, the head of the Études community, what he was doing in general terms, and he was allowed to come and go and work freely.

  They worked long days, and often into the night. LaFarge complained of aches and pains and began to look increasingly gaunt and appeared to be losing weight. He needed distractions to alleviate the tension and pressure. Cultural life in Paris was perfect for that—it was more vibrant than ever, a last bastion as countries closed down to the east and Spain remained embroiled in its bloody civil war. French art and especially French magazines were rising in popularity.

  LaFarge and his fellow Jesuit writers set up a working arrangement for a hundred-page document, which LaFarge wanted to finish by the end of August. He planned to take it down to the Vatican himself, perhaps make a side trip to Spain, and then to return home.

  He and his colleagues got down to work and established ground rules for meeting the pope’s expectations. Pius XI had told LaFarge to meld “racism as myth” into an attack on the Nazi racial policies. The pope told LaFarge that his own book, Interracial Justice, should be the blueprint for the encyclical. The book proclaimed that the call for justice and human rights is universal, whether for blacks or for Jews. The preface had even quoted the pope: “all the institutions of public and social life must be imbued with the spirit of justice, and this justice must be truly operative. It must build up a juridical and social order able to pervade all economic activity.”

  LaFarge added that “the Negro-white problem is only one of a multitude of similar interracial problems in this country, and, indeed, throughout the world.” There was no question that the pope’s argument against anti-Semitism was based on these same principles.

  The German Jesuit Gustav Gundlach became LaFarge’s chief collaborator. He knew the ins and outs of the Vatican and had worked on earlier encyclicals, including Quadragesimo Anno, which was written in 1931 and warned against the dangers of unbridled capitalism and the dangers of Communism. The other man, Gustave Desbuquois, was assigned by Ledóchowski and took a far less active role. Desbuquois served primarily as the translator of the encyclical into French.

  LaFarge and Gundlach divided their labors. LaFarge naturally would deal with the heart of the matter—racism and anti-Semitism—while Gundlach would handle the boilerplate, context, and theological setting for the piece. LaFarge would do what the pope intended and be his alter ego in producing the document. But LaFarge concluded that “a certain degree of historical and doctrinal context was necessary” and put Gundlach in charge of bringing that to the document. The clear focus, LaFarge said, was a declaration about “nationalism, racism and the Jewish question” and a practical consideration of the church’s role at this moment in history.

  Just as LaFarge and Gundlach were settling into Paris, the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, referred to an “unpublished document” that would outline the pope’s view on Nazi and Fascist racist policies. This was the pope’s way of telegraphing that he was awaiting LaFarge’s draft of the encyclical.

  LaFarge and Gundlach hammered out the details—exactly how much history was required, how much Catholic dogma. LaFarge was confident about what he had to say on the central matter of racism, but he saw himself a novice compared to his helpers, who were not new to working on major church declarations. He kept his focus on racism and conceded the context to Gundlach, whose most important contribution was to serve as LaFarge’s guide in understanding the labyrinths of Vatican power. He had dealt with Ledóchowski and knew the Jesuit leader would try
to interpose himself as a gatekeeper to the pope.

  Gundlach, who had been a progressive sociology professor and political analyst in Germany during the Weimar Republic, believed the draft should describe the underpinnings of church teachings and how they declared that racism, and therefore anti-Semitism, is based on fakery and myth. LaFarge’s American point of view led him to simple language that would echo the Declaration of Independence’s pronouncement that “all men are created equal.”

  Gundlach also understood church doctrine concerning Judaism and anti-Semitism. Though international Jewish leaders celebrated significant progress under Pius XI, the church’s history on anti-Semitism was sordid, and Gundlach was not immune to the prejudice. In 1930, Gundlach had identified two types of anti-Semitism, one based on racism, the other on economics and politics. That second form of anti-Semitism boiled down to the idea that Jews were overbearing and overextended their abilities in government, commerce, and culture, thereby damaging Christian society.

  Though Gundlach maintained that racist attacks on Judaism were unacceptable and “unchristian,” he wrote that “the second type of anti-Semitism is permissible when it combats, by moral and legal means, a truly harmful influence of the Jewish segment of the population in the areas of economy, politics, theater, cinema, the press, science, and art.” This was a repulsive concept, but it reflected the times and spoke to the false caricature, held by many Catholics and other Christians in Europe and the United States, that Jews were too “crafty” in business, were morally questionable, and, in the extreme, were to blame for Communism and for killing Jesus Christ.

  Nevertheless, three years before Hitler took power, Gundlach had written that “the Church has always protected Jews against anti-Semitic practices proceeding from false jealousy, false Christian zeal or from economic necessity.”

  The church had promoted anti-Semitism for centuries, but now the pope was taking a major step and expected LaFarge to take the lead. A few weeks into the project, LaFarge thought things were going well. Writing an encyclical meant creating a document with historic dimensions, one that spoke about a specific concern of the church and thereby the pope’s concern, but also to create a theological stance for the church that would flow from previous teachings.

  LaFarge was sure that he could focus on the substance, but there were always moments of self-doubt. “Every now and then,” he wrote, “a chill goes up my spine. But I believe it will work out.”

  In such a moment of doubt, LaFarge wrote to Talbot and asked how he could presume to speak in the voice of Pope Pius XI. His editor replied in a number of letters over the summer and told LaFarge that he must not consider himself inferior in any way to the scholarly Gundlach. The pope had singled out LaFarge, not Gundlach, to write the encyclical. The pope knew what he was doing and had made the proper choice.

  “You are the one best equipped to do this work,” Talbot wrote. “You have been preparing for this topic throughout years; you have probably read more on it, thought more on it, analyzed it more, solved it best. You have the supra-national mind. You have worked out already the broad principles, either explicitly or implicitly, in your writing and in your thoughts. You are most familiar with the upheavals of the modern nations, with their ideologies, with their acts, with their aims, and you know the history of the fallen nations.”

  In the end, LaFarge’s growing friendship with Gundlach made the work easier. Gundlach took a liking to the American Jesuit and tried to explain to LaFarge the swirling politics surrounding the Vatican. He told LaFarge that a number of people were against the pope issuing a new, controversial declaration at this time. Gundlach believed that the best way to protect the document from these naysayers was to base it on the most rigorous church teachings and dogma.

  Finally LaFarge and Gundlach agreed that the encyclical would have two sections, divided roughly in half. The first would be historic and theoretical and largely written by Gundlach. The second half would be written by LaFarge. Even though the writing group got along amiably, there were still two camps. On one side, Gundlach was verbose and the declared intellectual. Heinrich Bacht, another German Jesuit, was brought in to translate the work into Latin. Bacht appreciated Gundlach’s work and believed Gundlach was the most important contributor to the project.

  “As I remember it,” Bacht recalled in a letter years afterward, “all the work of elaboration fell on Father Gundlach, if only because the good Father LaFarge was absolutely not an ‘intellectual’ capable of that kind of work.”

  Bacht’s opinion of LaFarge was based in part on a clash of cultures. The European style was ponderous and woven with complex theological syntax. LaFarge tended toward more simple American prose. Interracial Justice and his writings in American magazine were learned, well-written pieces of work. If being a European “intellectual” meant being obtuse and indecipherable, Gundlach certainly qualified. His writing was based on verbosity; why should a word or two suffice when many more could be used?

  “If we go back to the beginnings of the period in which we now live,” he wrote in the draft encyclical, “and follow its gradual development up to the present day, when it reaches its culmination, we find that originally there was a spiritual attitude entirely opposite to the one that now prevails. Then, reason felt sure of itself, to the point of believing itself exempt from error; it claimed to have discovered the true principles of every kind of knowledge.”

  Any good editor could have boiled that down to: “Modern life, especially the advent of the industrial revolution, has brought changes in social organization and in the way people relate to their spiritual lives.”

  Gundlach also spent pages on such things as, “Die Mechanistisch-atomistischen Auffassung der menschlichen Gesellschaft,” which was just as ponderous in the English translation, or any language: “The Mechanistic-Atomistic Conception of Human Society.” He followed that with the “Mechanistic-Totalitarian Conception of Human Society.”

  LaFarge did not edit Gundlach’s prose. He was more focused on keeping everyone working happily and speedily, knowing that his own contribution was the closest to what the pope had asked, especially since none of the others had ever met privately with Pius XI. But this spirit of camaraderie did not stop Gundlach from criticizing LaFarge’s writing for being “too pragmatic, not sufficiently principled.”

  If nothing else, LaFarge’s writing was as direct as his journalism usually was; it was neither theoretical nor difficult. Introducing the theme of racism, he said simply this: “Men of good will should do everything they can to put an end to all unmistakably defamatory and discriminatory distinctions in public life, so that relations among social groups may be regulated solely by interracial justice and charity.” He was obviously borrowing from his writings about racism in the United States. Although some of the Europeans took LaFarge’s style as being far from intellectual, whatever that might have been, LaFarge disregarded the criticism.

  At times the disagreements became a bit heated, and Desbuquois, who was spending more time on his own writings and his social-welfare organization in Paris, called in another French Jesuit, Father Barde (no one remembered his full name), to sit in on some of the editorial sessions with LaFarge and Gundlach. But Barde could not take more than two meetings and never returned. One Jesuit recounted afterward that Barde “found Gundlach’s philosophical considerations too abstract and unsuited to the theme.” Somehow LaFarge managed to keep the relations friendly and balanced, often inviting the others out for social events or breaks to interrupt the monotony.

  LEDÓCHOWSKI CAUSED a stir and a delay when he sent LaFarge an urgent letter on July 17 about the need for secrecy. He had gotten word that LaFarge had been speaking about his papal mission with priests other than those he was working with. “You have probably seen that the Holy Father already alluded to the matter [in public],” Ledóchowski wrote, “but that does not prevent us from continuing to be very reserved about it. Follow this rule now and also after the work, with God’s help,
is finished, otherwise we might have serious problems.”

  LaFarge had written to two or three priests in New York about the project and several others in Rome. He assumed he could trust all of them, but he was frightened by Ledóchowski’s warning. He may not have cautioned the people in New York about spreading the news. LaFarge also suspected that Talbot had confided in the Jesuit provincial superior in New York, Joseph A. Murphy, who might have mentioned it to Ledóchowski. Embarrassed and mortified, LaFarge dipped into his meager funds and sent a cable at six dollars a word to New York on July 21:

  TALBOT SEVERE WARNING RECEIVED ON PADLOCK CANNOT INFORM EVEN MURPHY IF YOU INFORMED HIM URGE HIM NOT TO INTIMATE SAME . . .

  He signed the cable “Pilgrim,” the pseudonym he sometimes used for unsigned columns in America. But the message had an air of intrigue and sounded exactly the way he didn’t want to sound—like a person using a code name, sending a cryptic message. He feared that it was the kind of message that would likely be read by others.

  Ledóchowski, the general, also told LaFarge to stop talking about his work on the telephone; in the future, any communications were to be handled face-to-face. Ledóchowski’s American assistant, Zacheus Maher, was on his way to Paris to get a firsthand report on progress.

  LaFarge was excited by the cloak-and-dagger aspect to the project. It meant the encyclical was significant, and he was an important player. Gundlach and Desbuquois had dealt with the secrecy surrounding previous encyclicals, especially the case of the pope’s With Deep Anxiety anti-Nazi message in 1937. That encyclical had caught the Nazi machine by surprise, and the pope had smuggled his message into Germany for dissemination. But even with all the precautions, the Gestapo had known something was up and had been able to interdict some copies before the document was read from the pulpit in several parishes.

  The German Foreign Office included the Vatican on its list of diplomatic espionage targets. At least as early as 1936, an organization at the Foreign Ministry known as Pers Z (Z Section of the Personnel and Administrative Branch) was monitoring Vatican transmission and message traffic. It had succeeded in deciphering some codes at the Vatican and other states, including Italy, Britain, and the United States.