The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  Spying was nothing new at the Vatican, and it was sometimes conducted by priests themselves. Any phone line to or from the Vatican could be intercepted. Italy had been tracking church communications all along, an easy task since the Vatican switchboard, post office, trains, and all other means of conveyance passed through Italian hands. The Mussolini government was adept at tapping phones. Regular mail was useless for sending sensitive information to the Vatican. The Vatican regularly sent coded messages, but there was no guarantee they would arrive at their destination. Coded messages sent by wireless were a possibility, but such communications were also vulnerable to being deciphered.

  Pius XI had already had other experience with secret operations. He had been using secret communications since the 1920s, when he began clandestine efforts to support church activities in the Soviet Union. He had ordered a French priest to infiltrate Moscow in the 1920s. The priest traveled undercover and established contact with Catholic clergy who were threatened and repressed by the new Soviet government.

  The Vatican also had its own encryption apparatus, but its ciphers were eventually penetrated by Germany and Italy. Officials discovered the break and issued new ciphers to church offices around the world in an effort to restore secure communication. The problem was that, over time, both Italy and Germany were able to develop agents among Catholic priests and inserted them in key positions. Italy was successful in using priests inside the Vatican as conduits for information. They apparently were midranking prelates, rather than cardinals and bishops, and their names remained hidden behind code names and anonymous reports.

  Hitler’s best human intelligence on the Vatican may have come from its agents within the German Catholic Church. The German security branch, SD (Sicherheitsdienst) had been embarrassed by the pope’s ability to sneak the 1937 encyclical into the country. By the end of 1938, Nazi security forces had penetrated the German Catholic Church, using agents and electronic surveillance.

  Gundlach gave LaFarge the background on all this. But he also explained to LaFarge that Ledóchowski’s warning about secrecy was more a way of exerting control. The pope’s call for secrecy certainly was about keeping the news about the encyclical away from the Germans and the Italians, but he also wanted to prevent the details from spreading in the Vatican. In this case, the pope had not gone through the usual channels and had summoned LaFarge privately. Even Cardinal Pacelli had been kept uninformed.

  LaFarge’s decision to work in Paris made it more difficult for outsiders to track the progress, content, even the existence of his new declaration against anti-Semitism. But the pope’s own leak also made things difficult. News and anticipation of an upcoming encyclical, on the other hand, would impede any effort by Ledóchowski to delay and suppress it.

  Now suddenly, after recommending that LaFarge work swiftly, the Jesuit superior general seemed to be changing tack. Ledóchowski told LaFarge that speed was not always the primary concern. “All these things cannot be achieved within a month,” he wrote in a letter. “And anyway, it is not appropriate for you to leave before the work is finished.”

  LaFarge had told his superior that he might be finished by mid-August and that he hoped to leave for home in early September. Ledóchowski said that was impossible. LaFarge had no intention of leaving before the work was finished, though he was aching to go home. However, in retrospect, he regretted that he had not analyzed Ledóchowski’s motivations more carefully.

  Did Ledóchowski want to keep the encyclical secret from foreign meddlers, Fascist and Nazi agents, or did he want to prevent it from ever being released? Perhaps Ledóchowski was trying to stall, knowing the pope had a worsening heart ailment.

  Gundlach occasionally raised the suspicion that Ledóchowski and Pacelli wanted to temper the church’s vehemence toward Nazism and Fascism—they were acting as gatekeepers between the pope and the rest of the world. This had nothing to do with foreign spies—it had to do with Vatican politics.

  Gundlach had also received a tip that the Gestapo and other Nazi intelligence agencies had been tracking him since at least April 1, when Gundlach had denounced Hitler in a broadcast on Vatican Radio. The broadcast, authorized by the Vatican, criticized the invasion of Austria and the behavior of the Viennese Church led by Cardinal Innitzer. Gundlach was now persona non grata in Nazi territory and had been warned that he faced arrest if he returned to Germany.

  “The whole time we worked on this ‘secret project,’” recalled Father Heinrich Bacht, “we were gripped by the fear that the Gestapo would try something, because it had been keeping an eye on Gundlach ever since his famous radio broadcast; in any case people said at the time that there was a quasi-official Gestapo office in Paris.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the Heat of the Summer

  Rome, July 29, 1938

  IN MID-JULY, BENITO Mussolini published a study by a group of Fascist Italian scientists that purportedly said that Italians, like Germans, are “Aryans” and must be protected from contamination by other ethnic groups—Jews. Fascist commentators concluded that this meant intermarriage between Jews and non-Jewish Italians would pollute the race and should be banned.

  Pope Pius fired back immediately and attacked these Fascist policies, labeling them replications of the institutional anti-Semitism in Germany. The pope denounced Mussolini’s so-called scientific study as apostasy—abandonment of religion—and called on all Catholics to reject racism.

  “We should ask ourselves why Italy has an unfortunate need to imitate Germany in promulgating laws against Jews,” the pope said in a speech in Castel Gandolfo. “We should say that human beings are first of all one grand and sole race, one large and sole generated and generating, living family. In this sense, humanity is one sole, universal Catholic race.”

  The words could have come out of John LaFarge’s book on racism. The pope not only trashed Mussolini’s grand plan, but he also implied that the Axis of equals, Italy and Germany marching together, was a fraud. Italy was merely imitating Germany.

  The pope’s criticism hit home and had pushed Mussolini over the edge, causing him to issue an impromptu rebuttal in every newspaper in Italy and making sure it was printed with blaring headlines. He declared that Fascism was the way of the future, for all of Italy, for all time, and added, “To say that Fascism has imitated anyone or anything is simply absurd.”

  Mussolini’s anger was understandable. He knew these criticisms would be taken seriously because the pope’s standing as a moral force elevated him as a significant, natural rival among the Italian people.

  Mussolini claimed he had invented his own form of anti-Semitism that had nothing to do with Nazi Germany. After that, Jews were banned from the Fascist Party, and Mussolini became dyspeptic over the “Jewish vermin” around him.

  “Enemies . . . reptiles,” Mussolini complained to his mistress, Clara Petacci. She recorded in her diary that he said: “I have been a racist since 1921. I don’t know why they think I’m imitating Hitler. We must give Italians a sense of race.”

  Few Italians understood why Mussolini was suddenly lashing out like this. The pope’s original criticism appeared only in Osservatore Romano and on Vatican Radio. Throughout the summer, the pope continued to berate the Fascists promptly with each outrage he saw. But his words were confined to the Vatican newspaper, which Mussolini had banned outside the walls of St. Peter’s. So the pope’s complaints reached an increasingly irate audience of one. And Mussolini fumed every time the pope issued a new proclamation.

  Cardinal Pacelli, the secretary of state, worried that the rising tension between Mussolini and Pope Pius would lead to a rupture and a scuttling of the 1929 living arrangement between the Vatican and the government. Members of Pacelli’s appeasement camp did not want to pick a fight with Mussolini over his anti-Jewish legislation. They had enough power to publish a report in Osservatore Romano on August 12 that said the pope had not intended to mock Italian racial laws or to say that Italy was imitating Nazi Germany. The p
ope, the newspaper implied, would never involve himself in politics.

  Pius, however, could not be restrained. Several days later, he launched another salvo and ordered his subordinates to inform Mussolini that “if he wants to kill off the Holy Father, he is using efficient methods. But the Holy Father will first make it known to the world how the Catholic Religion and the Holy Father have been treated in Italy.”

  U.S. ambassador William Phillips reported back to Washington that the pope had stepped up his attacks on Mussolini and Hitler to a level that did potentially threaten church-state relations. These reports benefited from insights by Monsignor Joseph Hurley, the embassy’s insider at the Vatican. Hurley told the ambassador that “the pope would not retract from his position.”

  Ambassador Phillips sent a report to Washington, saying the pope had declared “in the strongest language which I have known him to use, his denunciation of this racial purification move.”

  Phillips’s ability to report on nuances of Vatican policy always depended on the analysis assistance of Hurley, who was not only the top-ranking American in the Secretariat of State of the Holy See; he was also the highest-ranking American at the Vatican in history. Hurley was the token American at the Vatican Secretariat of State, having replaced Francis Spellman, but at a much higher level of importance. While Spellman had covered ecclesiastical relations, Hurley dealt with policy and diplomacy.

  His role at the Vatican extended beyond his official title and was unprecedented and largely hidden from view. The pope, as with several other Americans, had taken a liking to the forty-four-year-old monsignor and had chosen him as his personal interpreter. While the pope had a reading knowledge of English, he could not speak fluently enough in official settings. That gave Hurley a seat alongside Pius at key diplomatic sessions involving Britain, the United States, and other English-speaking emissaries. That also gave Hurley the ability to bypass intermediaries with his direct conduit to the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Hurley came to use this relationship to the fullest. As a result, Phillips’s off-the-record and somewhat clandestine contacts with Hurley allowed the pope and the president to be informed closely by what each other had to say.

  Monsignor Hurley was proud to work with the pope so directly. He had already served in the Vatican diplomatic corps in India and Japan, where he sometimes dealt with delicate and inflammatory issues. He had an unusual background for a priest and a diplomat. He grew up in a gritty working-class neighborhood of Cleveland, the son of Irish immigrant parents. On the eve of World War I, Hurley attempted to attend West Point but was rejected because of a local residency requirement. Instead he attended St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit institution where he excelled in his studies, especially debate, but also became known as a fine football player—earning the nickname Breezer Hurley for his speed at dodging defenders on the gridiron—and he also enjoyed boxing.

  He remained a forthright, sometimes pugnacious man as a priest, characteristics that conflicted with his superior, Cardinal Pacelli, the secretary of state. But Hurley’s temperament was well suited to Pope Pius XI, who also had a humble background and a love for athletics. Hurley’s special role allowed him to range beyond the purview of his cautious and disapproving superior, Pacelli, who might otherwise have reined him in. Pacelli sought ways to tone down the bite of papal criticism against Germany, arguing in part that Hitler might act out reprisals against German and Austrian Catholics. Hurley was not interested in such compromise and was able to follow the higher authority of the pope.

  Phillips was pleased with his close relationship with Hurley, and the State Department realized the patriotic American monsignor was a worthy intermediary. Contacts with the Vatican were a touchy political subject in the United States. Diplomatic relations were severed three years before the demise of the Papal States in 1870, and resumption of relations was not welcome at the State Department or in Congress. But President Roosevelt was enthusiastic about all possible contacts in Rome toward discouraging and weakening Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler. The pope could be an ally in that quest.

  Paris, August 13, 1938

  Though John LaFarge felt pressure to complete the encyclical and worried about not being home with his ailing elder brother, Bancel, he continued to pursue his other topics, partly because he wanted his secret assignment for the pope to leave time for reporting and writing about current events. His greatest diversion was the Spanish Civil War, which he saw with the narrow perspective of a zealot. Throughout the summer of 1938, LaFarge cheered on the increasingly likely victory of Francisco Franco, whose forces were encircling and suffocating the Republican government.

  He was not alone in focusing on Spain. The civil war had divided Roman Catholic opinion. Some like LaFarge thought Franco was waging a necessary war against the forces of Communism. Others saw him as a ruthless tactician ready to seize dictatorial power from a democratic government. These were the seeds of the view of the “red menace” in Western Europe. LaFarge believed fervently that Franco’s victory would stop the advance of Communism elsewhere. “If the Reds would carry on as they were doing in the country of Spain,” LaFarge wrote, “it was evident that if they had the chance, despite their soothing words, they might be undertaking similar projects in France itself.”

  Many people, including influential Catholics, disagreed with him. A Communist takeover of Europe was neither evident nor likely, and Communists were not the largest component of the forces fighting Franco. The Spanish Civil War, raging since July 1936, had a major effect on the Catholic Church’s response to Nazism in Europe. Many in the church reviled Stalin, who had repressed Catholics in Russia for twenty years. Who was more dangerous? Stalin, who supported the Spanish Republic, or Hitler, who supported Franco and his insurgents? What was the greatest threat facing the world? Spain’s Civil War was a bloody debating ground.

  LaFarge’s notes for an article in America describe Franco as a moderate trying to rein in “those in his immediate associates whose record would be favorable to the spread of Nazi ideas.” He thought Franco had been forced to deal with unsavory characters because he needed financial support. LaFarge argued that Franco, once victorious, would emerge as a democrat.

  The pope had criticized Franco’s continued attacks on Spanish civilians; two weeks before his meeting with LaFarge, on June 10, 1938, the pope demanded that Franco stop such carnage. Osservatore Romano said: “Useless massacre of the civil population once more has revived the serious and difficult problem of ‘humanization’ of war, which is itself destructive and inhuman.” The Vatican focused on Franco’s policies of bombing areas especially in the Basque country, which it said “have no military interest nor are they near military centers or public buildings which affect the war.”

  LaFarge and his colleagues labored on despite such political distractions and were relieved when the heat wave across Europe subsided in August with cooling rains and milder weather. But on August 13, LaFarge received a telegram that his brother, Bancel, his substitute father and mentor, had died at age seventy-three, at his home near New Haven.

  LaFarge grieved that he could not have been at his brother’s bedside. Bancel was the central authority figure in his life. “At his death I reproached myself,” he wrote, “as I have done before and since, that I never had really expressed, as I should all my indebtedness to Bancel, for if it had not been for him I should never have obtained my education, possibly not at college and certainly not abroad.”

  A flood of memories came to him: Bancel as a young man teaching this youngest brother to take out their little skiff onto Narragansett Bay and the ocean; Bancel always kind and attentive when the rest of the family was not there. LaFarge recalled that when he attended Harvard, he was often penniless, but Bancel always rescued him with spending money.

  Bancel had had a good life, a happy marriage and family with his wife, Mabel, and four children. He was a respected artist and produced beautiful paintings and stained-glass designs, although he n
either won the recognition his father had nor had the same satisfaction in his craft. Although they had been apart for years at a time, the brothers felt lasting affection and LaFarge’s grief was overwhelming. “I had so hoped to be with Bancel during his last hours,” LaFarge said, “it was a bitter disappointment to find myself on the other side of the ocean.”

  LaFarge’s Jesuit brethren did all they could to comfort him. Talbot went to New Haven for Bancel’s funeral. “I said Mass for your brother Bancel on the day after I heard the news,” Talbot wrote in a letter to LaFarge. “The other members of the Community likewise remembered him in their Masses and Prayers. May God give him eternal rest!”

  Talbot also sent word from the parish priest who ministered to Bancel on his deathbed. “Some days before his death, Father Downey was called. He was asked to give the final blessing, for there was imminent danger of death,” Talbot wrote. “Father Downey grasped his hand and said a few words. Bancel meanwhile was mumbling, attempting to express himself. Suddenly, as if with a tremendous effort, in a voice that could be heard outside the room, he almost shouted: ‘Father, I am very happy that you have come to see me.’ The members of the family marveled that Bancel had the strength to speak in such a tone. As far as I know, he did not speak aloud after that.”

  LaFarge was comforted that Bancel’s “last hours were of great peace and really all that was most fitting for such a life. He was laid out in his artist’s smock, as befitted one who had given the best of his talents to his chosen profession.”