The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  “Father Talbot and I met him on the wharf at his arrival,” Frances recalled. “Granted the nature of his passage, we were uncertain where to find him, but find him we did, under L in first class, carrying large bundles and looking like the proverbial immigrant!”

  Frances saw that her uncle had suffered physically during the five months in Europe. He had lost more than thirty pounds and looked like a pale shadow. LaFarge said little about his trip home, other than complaining about the food, but he was relieved to be away from the constant threat of tyranny.

  The next order of business was going to his eldest brother’s bedside. Despite his rush to get home, LaFarge had again failed to be present for the death of a close family member, first his father, his brother Bancel, and now Grant. “Alas, just as I was about to leave I received the news of his death and had to content myself with the sad consolation of officiating at his funeral Mass in the Church of St. Joseph in Wickford, Rhode Island,” LaFarge wrote. “Generous to a fault, and deeply affectionate, Grant had suffered in silence the stings of disappointment. I could not help begrudging the days and weeks that I might, if not for that summer abroad, have spent near my oldest brother before it was too late.”

  Adolf Hitler continued to dominate the headlines as LaFarge settled in at America’s Jesuit headquarters just off West End Avenue in New York. The Wehrmacht was completing its occupation of Sudetenland and newspaper stories described a Europe that still was advancing toward war. For all practical purposes, events had developed as LaFarge perceived they would when he stood at Prague’s Wenceslas Square less than five months earlier and realized he had been witnessing the last days of Czech independence.

  When LaFarge came home, the United States was divided into camps—those who agreed with appeasement and those who saw war as inevitable. Some said “save the refugees and fight the Fascists on all fronts”; others praised Hitler for keeping the Communists at bay. LaFarge prayed that somehow peace would be preserved in Europe and that perhaps the Munich accord would achieve it. But he wavered. He had heard Hitler’s frightful speech and had seen Ledóchowski’s placid reaction. The memory of his meeting with Jan Masaryk resounded and made it more and more clear that one could not choose between Communism and Nazism; they were both authoritarian systems, but Nazism was about to swallow up Europe and beyond.

  Meanwhile, he awaited word from Rome, perhaps with questions from the pope or from Ledóchowski, prior to publication of the encyclical.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Shame and Despair

  Rome, October 7, 1938

  AS SOON AS Mussolini returned to Rome from presiding over the Munich Agreement in September, he issued a new set of regulations that banned marriage between Jews and Catholics. The pope charged that the measure violated the 1929 Concordat between the Vatican and the Fascist government and demanded urgent negotiations with the government.

  Despite his general reluctance to criticize Mussolini publicly, Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli agreed with the pope in this case, because he felt it was the Roman Catholic Church alone that should decide questions of union in matrimony. For Pacelli, this was a matter that went beyond politics; it cut to the core of Catholic theology. He discussed the resulting crisis openly at a dinner at the Irish embassy, seated next to Caroline Phillips, the U.S. ambassador’s wife. It was a rare opportunity for Mrs. Phillips. “The cardinal is one of those fine ascetic-looking priests who are rare and I always feel it a privilege to talk with,” she wrote in her diary. “There was much talk of the Fascist laws against the Jews which they believe will prove to be contrary to the Concordat between the Vatican and the Fascist government. We may expect a new controversy.”

  But while Pacelli made sure his remarks were diplomatic and modest, the pope was responding angrily and emotionally to the anti-Semitic marriage laws. “I am ashamed . . . ashamed to be Italian,” the pope told Domenico Tardini, Pacelli’s deputy. “And tell that, Father, to Mussolini himself! I am ashamed not as pope but as an Italian! The Italian people have become a herd of stupid sheep. I will speak out, without fear . . . I have no fear!”

  Whether or not that particular message was delivered, Foreign Minister Ciano reported in his diary that Il Duce “described the Vatican as a Catholic ghetto. And he said that all the Piuses had brought misfortune to the Church. He described the current Pope as ‘the Pontiff who will leave the greatest heap of debris behind him.’”

  Vatican prelates visited Mussolini and counseled him to remain patient. Many representatives of the church described the pope as an increasingly solitary voice and implied that he would soon be dead.

  A day after Mussolini’s marriage decree, on October 9, Hitler stepped up his confrontation with the church when Nazi thugs in Vienna forced their way into the residence of Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, terrorized the cardinal and his staff, burned furniture, and trashed church offices. Innitzer was slightly injured by flying glass. The Nazis said Innitzer had been interfering in politics and had to be stopped. This was a turnaround in the fortunes of Innitzer, the same cardinal who had been considered a darling of the Nazi regime and had met with Hitler and congratulated him after the March occupation of Austria.

  The Vatican quickly dispatched Joseph Hurley to Vienna to investigate; Hurley returned to Rome after a few days and filed a report with the Vatican secretary of state’s office. Several days after that, on Saturday, October 15, he came to the U.S. embassy to brief Ambassador Phillips. “A mob of 1500 Nazi youths surrounded the palace, some entered the second story, smashed windows, threw into the street holy relics, threw one priest into the street causing both legs to be broken,” Hurley told Phillips. “The only police interference during the riot was by one officer who arrested one rioter and the latter was promptly released by his fellow rioters.”

  The pope called Hitler a renegade and said the attack on Innitzer was sinister. The pope denied the charge against Innitzer. “It is a lie—we repeat, a lie, a lie, a lie” that the Vatican was involved in politics, Pius said, speaking in the third person. “The pope follows only one policy from which no force on earth can separate him: to give something to the common good.”

  Following these events, Hurley told Phillips he had approval to use the Vatican newspaper and radio to publish and broadcast speeches and statements made by President Roosevelt and the U.S. government. That made the Vatican the only free conduit of information available in Italy, and that information would be broadcast in many languages, including German. The authorization might have come directly from Pope Pius, since Pacelli, as always, would have counseled restraint.

  On the morning of October 28, the pope bundled up against the cold and rain for the trip back to Rome from Castel Gandolfo. He bade farewell to the villagers from the balcony during a break in the showers. The rain fell again when he arrived at St. Peter’s, but people still stood in the square and cheered. He gave them his blessing and then retired to his private rooms. His energy was flagging. More than four months had passed since he had summoned LaFarge, and still there was no sign of the encyclical that could change history.

  At another time, he might have taken strong steps to track down LaFarge and the encyclical, but he didn’t. More and more, he was deputizing others to carry some of his burdens. He had even summoned Pacelli from his long vacation in Switzerland to help with the affairs of state back at the Vatican.

  New York, October 28, 1938

  LaFarge reacted to Gundlach’s scolding letter by drafting one of his own to the pope. There had to be a way to tell the pope gently and clearly that the encyclical had been waylaid. Gundlach had cautioned, though, that spies were everywhere. “Nowadays mail often has a curious fate,” he wrote. Gundlach suggested that LaFarge go through the apostolic delegate in Washington, Bishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, who was a confidant of the pope and who should be able to see that LaFarge’s letter reached the pope’s desk. But even that was not a certain route.

  LaFarge wrote the letter in French in a flowery style and m
ade sure to praise Ledóchowski, the Jesuit superior, in case he read a copy:

  With the heavy responsibility that Your Holiness deigned to place on my poor shoulders, I am persuaded to recognize my obligation to inform Your Holiness of the . . . circumstances concerning my efforts. Obeying as well as I could the directions that Your Holiness on that occasion had graciously provided me, I worked intensively all summer, helped at the suggestion of our Most Reverend Father General by one of the professors of the Gregorian Pontifical University.

  LaFarge wrote that he had returned “to Rome at the end of September and delivered the document to the hands of [Ledóchowski] who most benevolently had given me every facility in producing it.”

  LaFarge apologized for not having seen the pope again. “Thank God,” he said, that “the physical exhaustion of my energy that affected me in August is now cured. For serious personal reasons, I was forced to leave [Rome] immediately for America. That saddens me deeply because I felt an ardent desire to deliver the document in person.”

  He added that Ledóchowski had promised to deliver the text quickly. “So I console myself that it surely must already be in the hands of Your Holiness, although I lost the opportunity to present it in person.”

  Of course, LaFarge knew by now that Ledóchowski had withheld the encyclical and that Gundlach saw Ledóchowski’s role as part of a maneuver to block the encyclical.

  While LaFarge could not be sure that the pope actually had received the letter after he wrote at the end of October, Gundlach told him that the pope, according to his sources in the Vatican, had made inquiries about the encyclical about two weeks after the letter should have arrived. At the same time, the sources said it might not make a difference. The inner circle told Gundlach the pontiff’s heart condition had worsened and he was not expected to survive long. He has “become very frail,” Gundlach wrote to LaFarge on November 18. “People around him don’t give him much time. It appears that the situation is such that only what other people permit reaching [him] does reach him. But he himself is supposed to be mentally alert but not to bring forth much initiative.”

  Gundlach’s letter was one of the few open acknowledgments of a rift at the Vatican. As the pope weakened and was less able to function, Pacelli gained more power, not only as secretary of state, but also as the camerlengo, the man designated to govern the church when the pope is incapacitated—or when he dies. The result was a race for time to locate and publish the encyclical before Pope Pius XI died.

  Rome, November 5, 1938

  In the fall, the pope and President Roosevelt coordinated a visit to Rome of the church’s most controversial leader in the United States, Cardinal George Mundelein. Mundelein, the archbishop of Chicago, would report on the results of a recent Catholic Eucharistic Congress in New Orleans, where Mundelein had been the pope’s official representative. There was also the matter of the beatification of Mother Cabrini, the little Italian nun who had worked among the poor of New York and Washington, that would take place on November 13. But those were more excuses than answers about the real reason for the visit.

  The mere mention of Mundelein’s name was a jab at Hitler and the Nazis. Mundelein, one of the more liberal members of the College of Cardinals, had been more outspoken against the Nazis than almost anyone. In 1936, he had said the Catholic Church in Germany was being “slowly strangled. Religious leaders are in jail. We are being fed propaganda that they are guilty of criminal violations.”

  And two months after the pope’s first anti-Nazi encyclical in 1937, and with the pope’s evident blessing, Mundelein had gone much further—he mocked Hitler and those around him. He asked in a speech in Chicago: “How is it that a nation of 60 million people will submit in fear and servitude to an alien, an Austrian paper-hanger, and a poor one at that, I am told, and a few associates like Goebbels and Göring, who dictate every move of the people’s lives.” Hitler was enraged by Mundelein’s speech, which provoked diplomatic protests in Washington and at the Vatican.

  Mundelein’s trip appeared to be a maneuver conducted by President Roosevelt with the pope’s knowledge—perhaps with the help of Mundelein himself. A few days before Mundelein’s scheduled arrival, U.S. ambassador William Phillips called Monsignor Joseph Hurley to the U.S. embassy to ask if he knew anything about the visit. Roosevelt wanted Phillips to receive Cardinal Mundelein as a major U.S. dignitary. “This is all most interesting and unusual and of course will cause a great deal of public comment since nothing of this nature has ever happened to an American Cardinal visiting Rome, but the President has good reasons, undoubtedly.”

  Hurley agreed that the ambassador’s official involvement “will be widely noted in the press because previously no visit to Rome by an American Cardinal has called for any notice by the Embassy.”

  Phillips welcomed Mundelein ostentatiously dockside in Naples on November 5 and took him to lunch on an American warship, the Omaha. After the luncheon, Phillips had arranged for a special train to take the American cardinal directly to Rome.

  The trip was a demonstration of U.S. solidarity with the pope in opposition to Hitler. The beauty of Mundelein’s visit was that while he made no public declaration at all in Rome, the trip managed to anger the Nazis as intended.

  Nazi newspapers reviled Mundelein and called him the American “Agitator Priest.” Joseph Goebbels’s newspaper, Angriff, said it was a play by Roosevelt for Catholic votes in midterm elections on November 8 and a diversion from “American reality,” which “consists of a hungry farmer family leaving its home, strikers playing cards instead of working, tramping youths who never had jobs, breadlines containing parents with baby carriages, and shanty ‘depression homes.’”

  The diplomatic offensive against Hitler during Mundelein’s visit was dampened by the pope’s health. He did preside on November 13 in Mundelein’s presence at the beatification ceremony of Mother Cabrini; however, he had to be propped up on his specially designed platform chair. Mundelein emerged from a private meeting with the pope saying that Pius appeared vibrant and healthy. Nevertheless, the pontiff’s energy was draining away.

  Ambassador Phillips left Rome for his long-delayed consultations in Washington on November 12 while Mundelein was still in town, but after the diplomatic portion of his visit. Caroline Phillips stayed on and recorded details of the rest of Mundelein’s visit. She described the following day in her diary the beatification ceremony at St. Peter’s for Mother Cabrini and saw the pope was not well.

  “It was truly a marvelous sight,” she wrote. She was seated behind

  rows of Cardinals and Bishops in scarlet and violet robes, handsome Chamberlains of the pope in black Spanish costumes of the 16th century, white ruffs around their necks, gold chains across their black velvet breasts, short sword and knickerbockers, knights of Malta resplendent with gold cross and order on their black velvet and plumed hats. . . . we waited and finally flares of beautiful silver trumpets followed by wild cheers and waving of handkerchiefs announced the arrival of the pope.

  He came seated in his red velvet . . . embroidered chair carried high by men in red cassocks and preceded by Cardinals and priests and acolytes. He was sitting there very wearily but with immense dignity and peace blessing the crowds on either side of him with his right hand. He had a fine, spiritual, intellectual face but looked very feeble.

  Mundelein’s visit ended with concern about the pope, and for a time he even delayed his departure for fear that the pontiff’s illness might have been terminal. There was another underlying sadness and anxiety beneath events in Rome. Germany had fallen to a new level of terror in the Nazi campaign against Jews.

  Berlin, November 9, 1938

  Early on the morning of October 28, 1938, Nazi storm troopers in Hanover, Germany, rousted an old Polish tailor, Zindel Grynszpan, and his wife, Rifka, from their bed and forced them onto a train out of the city bound for Poland. Along with an estimated twelve thousand other Jews, they were denied entry and huddled instead in a refugee camp on t
he German-Polish border. Grynszpan contacted his seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, saying they were trapped in the harsh, overcrowded camp with no prospects of escape; the family had been left penniless. The young man was outraged and distraught.

  A week later, on November 7, he walked into the German embassy in Paris and asked to speak with a diplomat. When an undersecretary named Ernst vom Rath stepped forward, Grynszpan shot him at close range. Vom Rath, a member of the SA Nazi storm troopers, died two days later.

  The incident gave the Nazis an excuse to carry out a coordinated attack on Jews that was more violent and widespread than anything before it. Joseph Goebbels reported that Hitler had decided “demonstrations should be allowed to continue. The police should be withdrawn. For once the Jews should get to feel the popular anger.”

  The night of November 9 would be known as Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass. The marauding Nazis killed at least ninety-one people, raped and tortured many more, and burned at least 270 synagogues throughout greater Germany, which now also included Austria and the Czech Sudetenland. They smashed seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses and sent thirty thousand Jews to concentration camps. The organized bands were joined by others who looted merchandise and wrecked stores, carrying away clothing and shoes amid cries of “Perish Jewry” and “Kill the Jews.”

  The terror was boundless. Liesel Kaufmann, a fifteen-year-old girl, could not escape the memory of that night, “the flames, the smoke, and the chants,” she recalled. “The next day, the synagogue was still burning and a crowd was still shouting. They said, ‘Burn them—kill the Jews.’ I still hear those voices.”