The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  The pope heard about the accident quickly, along with a preliminary report that Pacelli was not seriously hurt. The pope sent two members of the household to help in any way they could. They arrived within moments and saw that the cardinal appeared to be well, only suffering some bruises. They sent him back to St. Peter’s in a separate car and arranged for the boy to be taken to the hospital in nearby Albano, where doctors treated him for some scrapes and a dislocated shoulder. A Vatican doctor examined the cardinal when he arrived and confirmed that Pacelli had not been seriously hurt. The doctor then drove down to Castel Gandolfo to assure the pontiff that Pacelli was well. It was a disaster averted.

  Pacelli felt well enough the next day to leave for Switzerland. The pope was always reluctant to see him go. Despite differences in opinion, the pope had relied heavily on Pacelli in the eight years he had been secretary of state. There was much work to be done.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Pope’s Discontent

  U.S. Embassy, Rome, September 1938

  WILLIAM PHILLIPS WAS back in Rome in September after escaping the city’s August heat. His wife stayed behind in the Italian Alps for a while longer, preferring the daily rains to the sweltering heat that continued. Phillips was scheduled to return to Washington for meetings with President Roosevelt and the secretary of state. But first he needed to focus on his main brief from the president, which involved applying pressure on the Italian government and maintaining communications with the Vatican. He asked for a meeting with Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, before he left for America that night. At the foreign ministry, Phillips pushed Ciano to encourage the Germans to be moderate in their handling of Czechoslovakia.

  “I reminded Ciano that our relations with Germany were anything but satisfactory,” Phillips wrote in his diary. “The Italian Government, on the contrary, was in such intimate relations that it seemed to me of the utmost importance that they should exercise a restraining influence in the event of the occurrence of a real crisis.”

  Ciano recalled that his response was somewhat distracted and by rote: “I play [sic] the same pro-German and anti-Czech music: all the responsibilities belong to Prague.”

  Phillips was not having any of that. “So far as I was concerned,” he recalled, “I would look to him personally to do everything in his power to restrain the German Government at such a moment.”

  They went back and forth about relations with Germany and about Hitler and his designs on Czechoslovakia. Ciano did not offer any clear answers and finally changed the pace with a question of his own.

  He wanted to know what Phillips thought the United States would do if war broke out in Europe. The ambassador replied by comparing 1938 to the period prior to the U.S. entry in the European war in 1917. There were parallels, and while there certainly was strong antiwar sentiment right now in the United States, things could change.

  “A long war might again see the same situation,” Phillips said. “When American lives and ships were lost, and if this happened, the emotions of the American people might sweep the country in a briefer space of time.”

  In such a case, the United States would go to war against Germany. Phillips was resolute and wanted to make sure Ciano heard him clearly. It would be a world war.

  Phillips was so troubled by the direction and tenor of this conversation, he decided this was no time to leave his post. He cabled Roosevelt as soon as he returned to the embassy. The president agreed and confirmed Phillips’s answer about going to war.

  Roosevelt cabled back: “If we get the idea that the future of our form of government is threatened by a coalition of European dictators, we might wade in with everything we have to give. . . . Today I think ninety per cent of our people are definitely anti-German and anti-Italian in sentiment—and incidentally, I would not propose to ask them to be neutral in thought.”

  As Phillips monitored events from Rome, he stayed in closer touch with Joseph Hurley, his conduit to the pope. He called the American monsignor to the embassy and placed two items on the agenda. First, he asked Hurley to secure permission to begin publishing President Roosevelt’s speeches and other significant statements in Osservatore Romano. Italians had no independent information about the United States or about Roosevelt’s perspective on tensions in Europe. The newspaper would be doing a great service by providing uncensored news directly from Washington.

  Second, Phillips wanted the pope to keep the pressure on Hitler and Mussolini during the crisis over Czechoslovakia. This meant repeated criticism, using the exact same words repeatedly. “I reminded Hurley that in America both the President and the Secretary of State had to keep on saying the same thing over and over again until it was nauseating for them to do so, in order to make an impression on the public.”

  Throughout the fall, coordination between the United States and the Vatican strengthened, not because Hurley worked for Pacelli, but because Hurley had a direct line to the pope.

  Phillips and Hurley won praise from the State Department for breaking through Italian censorship. The Vatican newspaper and radio were regularly publishing and broadcasting key speeches by President Roosevelt and other U.S. officials. The United States was gratified to see “the increasing friendliness to the United States of the Vatican organ,” the State Department reported. “Official pronouncements made by the President and the Secretary of State [Cordell Hull] have been given prominent place and sympathetic presentation by this newspaper, which has also from time to time protested against the attacks in certain Italian newspapers on American films.”

  Hurley ran a considerable risk in making this happen. Quite often he carried U.S. transcripts under his cassock when he returned to the Vatican from visits to the U.S. embassy. Mussolini’s agents were watching both the Americans and Vatican officials. Had he been stopped, he could have been expelled, charged with espionage, or worse. President Roosevelt sent him a personal note thanking him for his service to his country.

  Berlin, September 26, 1938

  Berlin was bathed in glory and cheers. Nazi supporters packed the roads as Hitler waved to them in the semidarkness along Potsdamer Strasse, en route to the Sportpalast, the city’s largest indoor arena. The dais was festooned with the German eagle embracing a swastika, and the stage itself was designed in the form of an eagle spreading its wings. Many more swastikas ringed the stage; another banner hung from a second tier in the hall with the familiar refrain, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer—“One People, One Reich, One Führer.” At the given signal the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, introduced the führer, who was flanked by other luminaries of the Reich. Goebbels addressed Hitler.

  “You can rely on your people, as they rely on you,” Goebbels declared. “The people stand behind you as one man. We are aware that no threat and no pressure, from whatever source, can keep you from pursuing your and our inalienable rights.”

  LaFarge and the other Jesuits had heard that Hitler’s speech would be significant, perhaps a matter of war and peace. Ledóchowski invited his Jesuit subordinates to join him for the broadcast after dinner. They gathered around the radio console in the recreation room of the Jesuit headquarters off St. Peter’s. LaFarge was seated beside Ledóchowski and felt strange sitting there so close, able to observe the Jesuit leader’s demeanor and every gesture. It was a highly dramatic setting that LaFarge would always remember.

  “Father Ledóchowski seated himself in his usual alert fashion close to the instrument, while the others grouped around,” LaFarge wrote. “The transmission was perfect, as if we were seated in the vast hall itself.”

  William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for the Columbia Broadcasting Company, stood on a balcony above the stage, closely guarding his microphone. He looked down upon the assemblage and prepared to interpret the gist of what he was hearing. The world was waiting for Hitler to decide if he was going to declare war over Czechoslovakia. As Shirer prepared for the main portion, Goebbels came to the end of his brief introduction: “We g
reet you, my Führer, with our old battle cry: Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil!” Shirer’s shortwave hookup picked up the delirious cheers of the German people and broadcast them worldwide.

  People across Europe and in San Francisco, New York, Washington, and beyond crowded around their radios to hear this. The matter at hand was Hitler’s impatience and anger over the delay in ratifying what came to be known as the Munich Agreement on Czechoslovakia.

  As Hitler stepped to the podium, the price of gold rose and fell on world markets. He saluted the crowd with his open palm to more furious cheers and shouts, and then he stepped to the microphone.

  In Rome, Ambassador Phillips pondered the source of Hitler’s oratory skills and emotional power. He found the führer to be a master “at the way in which he worked up his audience to a high degree of emotion.” Even without understanding the German, Phillips said, “the mere excitement of the man himself and the effect on his audience caused me acute alarm. . . . He is certainly a remarkable orator—probably there is no one in the world like him. . . .”

  LaFarge felt the marvels of radio technology as it brought him directly into the Sportpalast. Hitler had begun in a gentle, dulcet tone, what LaFarge described as “a quiet reasoning voice as if he were taking the great audience into his confidence.”

  Hitler patiently recounted the recent weeks of negotiations on Czechoslovakia—and trading on the New York Stock Exchange continued to react to every nuance and rumor surrounding his speech. Stocks gained some ground in those first seconds, then fluctuated with Hitler’s every vaguely threatening word; the market closed lower. Hitler reminded his global audience that the German Wehrmacht was on the ready, “rearmed to an extent the likes of which the world has never seen.”

  Hitler’s disembodied voice was clear on the wireless, and the echoing cheers and the sieg heils were a crashing ocean of sound behind him.

  He rose slowly to a crescendo, threatening the consequences if Czechoslovakia did not bow to his will. The language was fiery, uninterrupted, fiercely enunciated. Shirer repeated the words in a hushed tone to his live English-speaking audience.

  “May the world know this,” Hitler said in German with Shirer trying to keep up with the English interpretation, “there now marches a people and a different one than that of 1918. . . . In this hour the whole German people will be united to me, my will they shall feel as their will, just as I regard their future and fate as director of my actions.”

  In his rising fury, Hitler impelled Britain, France, and Czechoslovakia to conclude negotiations and submit. It was an ultimatum for the surrender of Sudetenland to Germany: The Czech president, “Edvard Beneš will have to hand the territory to us on October 1,” Hitler said. The alternative was obvious. Beneš, not Hitler, the führer said, “now holds in his hand peace or war.”

  LaFarge could feel the same hysterical wave of screaming emotion Shirer experienced directly in the Sportpalast nine hundred miles away. Shirer said he had never seen such a performance in all the times he had witnessed Hitler speak to a crowd. “That evening Hitler burned his bridges, or so it seemed to those of us who listened in amazement to his mad outburst.”

  By midspeech, Shirer said Hitler was frothing and screaming, “shouting and shrieking in the worst paroxysm I had ever seen him in, he venomously hurled personal insults at ‘Herr Beneš,’ declared that the issue of war or peace was now up to the Czech President and that, in any case, he [Hitler] would have the Sudetenland by October 1 . . .”

  Jan Masaryk, the Czech ambassador to Britain, was in London, also listening to the speech. He said it was “so uncultured and shocking that I am proud of my government’s decision to take a firm stand against the authors of a mentality which is trying to destroy European culture.”

  Hitler continued to spout fire. “Beneš the aggressor!” he shouted. “Beneš the tyrant! Beneš the betrayer of civilization. Beneš the enemy of the German people!”

  LaFarge listened with distress and fear, yet he also observed Ledóchowski’s placid demeanor. “The full import of what I had witnessed in Germany and Czechoslovakia burst upon me,” LaFarge said. “Hitler rose rapidly to frantic screams of fanaticism, followed by the terrific rumbling roar from the audience: ‘Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!’ My own bones quaked at each of these recurrent episodes. Over and over the voice died down and rose again, but Father General’s attentive face and eager form remained impassive.”

  Somehow each time Hitler seemed poised to send in the tanks, he pulled back, making clear this was an ultimatum rather than war itself. He even had kind words for Chamberlain, who acted as an honest broker for the only solution Hitler saw—surrender!

  LaFarge looked beyond the radio, beyond the voice to the sound of madness. He heard “the voice of impending war,” LaFarge said, “the voice of a blind, dark passion which might erupt anywhere in the world. Echoes of it even appeared in the United States, the voice of the mob, of hate, of hysteria.”

  Hitler continued: “We will take one common holy resolve. I shall be stronger than any pressure, any peril. And when this will is stronger than peril and pressure, it will break the pressure and peril. We are resolved!”

  Shirer said: “For the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonight to have completely lost control of himself.” But when Hitler sat down, Shirer recounted the indelible memory of watching Goebbels, who sprang up and shouted into the microphone: “One thing is sure: 1918 will never be repeated!”

  Shirer continued: “Hitler leaped to his feet and with a fanatical fire in his eyes that I shall never forget brought his right hand, after a grand sweep, pounding down on the table, and yelling with all the power in his mighty lungs: ‘Ja!’ Then, he slumped into his chair exhausted.”

  LaFarge was frightened beyond words, and none of the Jesuits he was with could bring themselves to break the silence; they didn’t move even when the bell rang for evening prayer. Ledóchowski had been transfixed by Hitler’s voice from the radio. No Jesuit would break table as long as the Jesuit Superior General remained.

  LaFarge watched Ledóchowski throughout the broadcast; no one moved as long as Ledóchowski remained. LaFarge said: “And the bell rang fifteen minutes later for the examination of conscience, customary at the close of a Jesuit’s day, but he still remained.”

  Hitler had seized even the order of prayer among a group of Jesuits listening to him in Rome, LaFarge said, “making us all stay up and listen to the radio when we would have been quietly saying our prayers. Finally with a last effort the Führer screeched to a finish.”

  Only then, Ledóchowski stood quickly and turned to the door. LaFarge realized then that Ledóchowski’s reaction was quite different from his own. He was calm and appeared to be satisfied with Hitler’s speech. Just before he disappeared from sight, the general of the Jesuits turned back to the priests, and said simply: “Don’t worry, there will be no war.”

  “And sure enough there wasn’t,” LaFarge recalled. “Not then.”

  Rome, September 30, 1938

  The pope thought the Munich accord was a waste of time. He was asked by some diplomats, including French ambassador François Charles-Roux, to provide a statement of support for Chamberlain’s initiative with Hitler, but the pontiff refused. His comments were broadcast on Vatican Radio on September 29, the night before Chamberlain, Hitler, French prime minister Édouard Daladier, and Mussolini signed the accord. In indirect terms, the pope let it be known that he doubted the Munich Agreement was worth any more than the paper it was printed on. The headlines the next day bypassed the substance of the pope’s remarks and focused on his emotional state. It was said that he broke into sobs repeatedly, and his voice was filled with emotion. He said he recognized that his life was drawing to an end—“Let the Lord of life and of death,” the pope said, “take from us the inestimable gift of an already long life” as he prayed he could give his life for peace. Emotional though he was, he was making a point, that he thought Hitler was immoral and could not be t
rusted. He implied that the Munich accords were meaningless unless there were “actions corresponding to the reiterated words of peace.”

  Soon after the formal announcement of the Munich Agreement the following morning, the Vatican newspaper reported that the pope had greeted it with “great joy.” But that was not true, and he had said no such thing. The statement was more evidence that the gatekeepers, including Cardinal Pacelli, were attempting to control the message from St. Peter’s whenever they could.

  Pius was even more specific and emphatic in private on October 14 when he met with Domenico Tardini, the Vatican undersecretary of state, in charge part of the summer and fall while Pacelli vacationed in Switzerland. The pope told Tardini that Hitler could not be stopped by mediation. He said he was disgusted that Mussolini was claiming to be a peacemaker at the last minute in time for the signing of the Munich document.

  “Don’t you understand?” the pope said in that meeting when Tardini suggested that the Vatican could help rally support to what Chamberlain was trying to do. The pope refused. “This is all warmed-over broth!!” He went on, “Chamberlain provided Hitler with a gold foot-stool! The opposition was right. . . . Chamberlain has given in.”

  The pope would not use his influence in the world as an intermediary or counsel if Nazi Germany was involved. And neither Hitler nor Mussolini would ever accept the pope as a neutral mediator in a dispute. At the same time, the pope also knew he was being accused of siding with the Communists. Therefore, whether or not he listened to Hitler’s ravings at the Berlin Sportpalast, he remained silent on Munich.

  Subordinates sought to tone down his confrontational approach on Munich. Piero Tacchi-Venturi, a controversial Jesuit in Rome who had befriended Mussolini early on and often acted as an intermediary with the pope, praised the Munich Agreement nevertheless as Mussolini’s “pacifist victory” and “an affirmation of the Catholic and moderate spirit of the regime.”