The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  Bystanders stood by silently and powerless, shocked as the plain-clothed marauders hunted down Jews and trashed and torched their synagogues and stores. The bands sometimes erroneously trashed non-Jewish establishments but tried to avoid that damage and to leave foreign businesses intact. There was looting; shoes were stolen from wrecked displays, and children wandered with their faces smeared with filched chocolate bars.

  “‘Move on,’” a policeman warned Otto D. Tolischus of the New York Times, “‘there are young comrades of [our Aryan race] inside who have some work to do.’”

  President Roosevelt condemned the attacks, expressed shock on behalf of all Americans, and said he could “scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization.” He then announced he was recalling the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

  The ailing pope did not issue a statement on Kristallnacht; it was not clear if news about the attack reached him immediately or whether any statement he might have made could have gotten past Pacelli and the others surrounding him. The Vatican newspaper was also silent.

  While Pius’s voice was not heard, churchmen closest to him beyond Rome spoke out. Cardinal Alfred Schuster, the archbishop of Milan, the pope’s home city, said the racism preached by Mussolini and Hitler was heresy. Despite the calls for “peace and avoiding international conflict at any cost,” Schuster said, the racist policies “constitute a forge upon which are formed the most murderous weapons for war to come.”

  “A kind of heresy has been abroad,” Shuster said, “and is spreading elsewhere that not only attacks the supernatural basis of the Catholic Church but is materializing the spiritual concepts of individuals, the nation and the fatherland in human blood, denies to humanity every other spiritual value and thus constitutes an international danger no less than that of Bolshevism itself. It is so-called racism.”

  There were echoes of Pius’s words elsewhere as well, especially among American bishops and cardinals, many of whom repeated the pope’s earlier attacks on the Nazis.

  New York, November 20, 1938

  LaFarge’s magazine, America, condemned Kristallnacht in a sharp editorial. “Germany, once counted among the civilized nations, has put herself beyond the pale. . . . We have no words to express our horror and detestation of the barbarous and un-Christian treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany. It forms one of history’s blackest pages.”

  American Catholic leaders repudiated the savagery of Kristallnacht. Catholic University organized a high-profile, prime-time coast-to-coast radio broadcast, featuring a live hookup with bishops from around the country, with the rector of the university and with Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. Rev. Maurice Sheehy, a professor at Catholic University, set the tone, saying that church leaders “raise their voice not in mad hysteria, but in firm indignation against the atrocities visited upon the Jews in Germany, because as Pope Pius XI has pointed out, we are all spiritual Semites.”

  Despite the condemnation from religious leaders, one widely known American priest presented a different message. Father Charles Coughlin, a onetime New Deal Democrat, had a one-hour weekly national radio broadcast that was steeped in demagoguery, virulent criticism of Roosevelt, and underlying support for Adolf Hitler. A forty-seven-year-old parish priest at the National Shrine of the Little Flower Church in Royal Oaks, Michigan, Coughlin had been broadcasting the weekly program since 1926. His power and influence had begun to falter under persistent criticism from the church hierarchy, but he still reached a loyal audience estimated at as many as fifteen million.

  Coughlin took to the microphone at 4 P.M. on November 20 for his weekly Sunday address. That evening, he said his goal was to submit Kristallnacht to the lens of “scientific analysis.” The result was rhetorical tripe and lies. Why did the Nazis lash out at Jews? His answer: Jews are aggressive and wily and the atheists among them are responsible for a worldwide conspiracy that led to the Russian Revolution and the onset of Communism.

  After the anti-Jewish rant, his flagship radio station, WMCA in New York, threw him off the air as did many other stations. The next week he continued in the same vein, saying he only asked “that an insane world will distinguish between the innocent Jews and the guilty Jews as much as I would ask the same insane world to distinguish between the innocent gentile and the guilty gentile.”

  Prior to these broadcasts, Catholic officials and priests in the United States often had difficulty confronting Coughlin head-on. LaFarge, among others, was uncomfortable speaking about him in public because they feared his power. “He has tremendous influence among Catholics and non-Catholics,” LaFarge said in an interview shortly after he had arrived in England in May 1938. “This influence reaches the most inaccessible places, in fact wherever there is a radio. I think on the whole his influence is good, though I don’t agree with a lot of what he says.”

  Coughlin also had important friends, including the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi head of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, who was thought to be bankrolling the radio priest’s political activities.

  Unsurprisingly, Coughlin had become a darling of the Nazis and the Fascists. One of Mussolini’s staunchest propagandists, Roberto Farinacci, called him an “apostle of Christianity.” Joseph Goebbels wondered sarcastically about what had happened to the touted U.S. media and their famed freedom of the press.

  More than a year later, an FBI investigation determined that Coughlin had been in touch for some time with German agents in the United States. He was finally forced off the air in May 1940, a year and a half after his Kristallnacht anti-Semitic broadcasts; by April 1942, when his newspaper, Social Justice, was banned from distribution, Coughlin was effectively silenced.

  Three weeks after Kristallnacht, LaFarge resumed speaking out against racism in the United States and more prominently compared it to what was happening to Jews in Europe. At a dinner on November 29 in LaFarge’s honor after he returned from Europe, he proclaimed that U.S. racism is the “pale but venomous elder cousin” of Nazi racism. “Racism, like the other destructive ideologies, cannot be understood and interpreted merely in terms of fear and dislike for its victims. In Europe racism is so closely associated with anti Jewish propaganda that one is included to ask whether the whole racist idea has any other aim or object than that of expressing spite against the Jews.”

  The speech reflected the tone and language he had assembled for the pope’s encyclical, yet no one at the dinner had a hint that this was part of the Vatican’s most important statement ever on anti-Semitism.

  The Vatican, November 25, 1938

  The pope woke up at his normal hour on the morning of Friday, November 25, feeling as well rested as he had in recent days. He ate breakfast and walked out of his private apartments toward the elevator to begin his workday. But then he suddenly faltered, and before his aides could react, he lost his balance and fainted to the floor. Two Vatican physicians, Aminta Milani, the chief of the Vatican health service, and Filippo Rocchi, the junior member of the medical staff, raced to the pope. Attendants carried him to his bed. Milani administered oxygen and an injection of camphor oil, which had been used for decades as a stimulant in such cases.

  For hours, the pope did not regain consciousness. The pope’s heart had been damaged in the attack he suffered in late 1936, and those surrounding him were gravely worried. The priests and cardinals had been told he could not survive a second attack. Word spread around Rome that the pope was near death. Lorenzo Lauri, the first of the cardinals to appear, administered the sacrament of Last Rights when Milani described the gravity of the situation.

  Pius’s heartbeat was irregular and Milani continued to administer oxygen. Cardinal Pacelli soon arrived and sent word to church officials around the world that the pope was ill and to expect the worst. He ordered all but the doctors and closest aides to stay away from the papal bedroom. People gathered at the Vatican as word spread. The mood was black and somber. Prayers were issued worldwide.

  The pope’s heart rate was alternat
ely weak and fibrillating; he did not move. After a while, just as Milani was giving up hope, the pope’s heartbeat grew stronger again and the fibrillation stopped. By late morning, the doctor reported that pope was improving. Around 3 P.M., Pius opened his eyes, smiled, and appeared well. He asked for something to drink, and Milani called for some hot broth. The pope’s sister, Donna Camilla Ratti, and his nephew, Count Franco Ratti, who had raced down from Milan on first word of the pope’s illness, were soon allowed to enter Pius’s bedroom to sit with him. By the end of the day, the pope was weary, but the scare was over.

  An official Vatican communiqué reported the pope had suffered an attack of cardiac asthma, a symptom of what would later be called congestive heart failure, but had improved significantly in the course of the day. “It is a question now of knowing whether a true improvement occurred,” the communiqué said, “or whether the improvement was merely the effect of the remedies administered to sustain the Pontiff’s heart.”

  The pope was fully alert by the next morning. Although he understood the severity of what had happened, he went back to work and tried to minimize the danger. “Do not think of me,” he said. “Too many others are suffering today. May God help them all and bring peace to them all.”

  Meanwhile, the pope summoned a trusted friend from Milan, Dr. Domenico Cesa-Bianchi, who was chairman of the medical institute at the University of Milan. Cesa-Bianchi had assembled a team of doctors at the Milan Institute, most of them anti-Fascists who were working quietly against Mussolini. Among them was the thirty-five-year-old Jewish heart specialist, Massimo Calabresi, who had been imprisoned by the Italian regime as a student. Calabresi had just finished a text on advances in cardiology and received a nationwide prize for the best medical book of the year. The pope wanted the best medical care available as he fought for time.

  Within days, papal audiences and speeches resumed. “The Pope must be a Pope, he must not stay in bed,” Pius said. On Sunday morning, November 27, the pope surprised everyone by speaking to four hundred Hungarian pilgrims. One said the pope appeared “very pale but he appeared the master of his strength and unhesitating in his motions.”

  “Since that date,” added a U.S. embassy official reported to Washington, “the Pope has not deviated from his normal schedule.”

  The pope had averted death once more, but his collapse added to the perception that these might be his final days. Through December it was understood that private audiences would be shortened. His secretaries insisted that the pope take longer breaks and rest frequently. Some of the time, at least, he complied.

  PHOTO SECTION

  Achille Ratti, the future Pope Pius XI, circa 1880. Ratti was from a mountain village in northern Italy near Milan. He was ordained a priest at age twenty-two in 1879. As he advanced in the Catholic Church, he also became known as a world-class mountain climber. His exploits included the ascent of 15,203-foot Monte Rosa, the second highest peak in the Alps, on a pass never attempted before. (Courtesy of Georgetown University Library.)

  John LaFarge, at about twenty years of age. He graduated in 1901 from Harvard University, where he studied music theory and played the piano, while focusing his studies on poetry, literature, and the classics.

  LaFarge in Holland, early 1900s. LaFarge entered a seminary in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1901, after Theodore Roosevelt, a family friend, helped convince LaFarge’s father to accept the idea that his son wanted to be a priest. (Courtesy of Georgetown University Library.)

  LaFarge, circa 1915, in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. After becoming a Jesuit, he was assigned to work in predominantly African-American parishes in rural Maryland, where he became an advocate of vocational training, education, and equal opportunity. (Courtesy of Georgetown University Library.)

  Achille Ratti, early 1900s. Ratti served as a teacher, as a scholar with three doctorates, as a librarian first at the four-centuries-old Ambrosian Library in Milan, and finally as head of the Vatican Library in Rome.

  LaFarge, circa 1920, St. Mary’s County. LaFarge lived in southern Maryland from 1911 to 1926. He worked on the creation of regional Catholic interracial councils and thought such councils should fight for an end to prejudice. He was transferred to New York in 1926 as associate editor of the Jesuit magazine America. (Courtesy of Georgetown University Library.)

  Pope Pius XI and his secretary, Monsignor Carlo Confalonieri, in the Vatican gardens, 1922. Achille Ratti was elected pope in February 1922. He had been elevated to the rank of cardinal and archbishop of Milan less than a year earlier. Previously he had been Pope Benedict XV’s diplomatic representative in Poland after the end of World War I.

  Monsignor Joseph P. Hurley, right, next to Bishop Edward Mooney in Japan, 1931, with an unidentified cleric. In 1934, Hurley was appointed to the Vatican Secretariat of State, replacing Francis Spellman as the ranking American at the Vatican. He became the pope’s English interpreter and unofficial go-between with the United States. (Courtesy of the Archives of the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida.)

  Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the pope’s diplomatic representative in Germany, leaving a meeting, circa 1929. Pacelli served the Vatican in Germany for twelve years. Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, became the Vatican Secretary of State in 1930. Many thought that the pope used Pacelli as a sober counterpoint to his own impetuous style of leadership.

  The pope and Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, left, inaugurated Vatican Radio on February 12, 1931. Pius used the immediacy of his broadcasts to speak to a world audience for the first time. Marconi said, “This is the first time in history that the living voice of the Pope will have been heard simultaneously in all parts of the globe.” (Courtesy of AP Images.)

  The pope at the microphone in 1932. His frequent broadcasts ranged increasingly into politics and pleas for peace. The pope embraced technology, expanded the Vatican observatory, substituted cars for horse-drawn carriages, and installed elevators, an automatic phone system, and a new printing plant at the Vatican.

  Ambassador William Phillips and his wife, Caroline Drayton Phillips, in Europe. Friends of President and Mrs. Roosevelt (Mrs. Phillips was a relative), they served in Rome from 1936 to 1941. FDR wanted Phillips to weaken chances of an alliance between Mussolini and Hitler. Caroline Phillips’s diary provided frank insights about fascism and anti-Semitism in Italy. (Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.)

  Wlodimir Ledóchowski, the superior general of the Jesuit order from 1915 to 1942. Jesuit leaders are also referred to as “the Black Pope,” and Ledóchowski was considered the third most powerful person at the Vatican after the pope and Cardinal Pacelli. Known as a strict force among the Jesuits, he espoused anti-Semitic positions, though he pledged to work with John LaFarge and the pope on the 1938 encyclical.

  The pope, 1932; he suffered a heart attack in late 1936 and was not expected to survive. He recovered in early 1937 and began issuing declarations, including an encyclical that harshly condemned Hitler and the Nazis. In 1938, Hitler and Mussolini considered him a major opponent and were concerned that his popular appeal would damage their ability to sway public opinion.

  Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, the pope’s longtime friend and ally, was the only French cardinal working directly at the Vatican. Tisserant had served in the French army in World War I in the field and as an intelligence officer. He was mentioned as a possible future pope and was considered a rival of Cardinal Pacelli.

  Mussolini and Hitler in Germany, 1937. Hitler traveled to Rome in May 1938 to cement ties with Italy to form the Axis. Privately, the German and Italian leaders despised one another. Pope Pius XI left for his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo to avoid being at the Vatican during Hitler’s visit. He did not want to see “the crooked cross of neo-paganism” flying over Rome.

  President Roosevelt and Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago, undated. Mundelein became one of the church’s strongest critics of Nazism. In a 1937 speech, he derided Hitler as an “Austrian pape
r-hanger, and a poor one at that.” Both Roosevelt and the pope supported Mundelein, who traveled to Rome as Roosevelt’s official emissary in November 1938.

  Jan Masaryk, undated. John LaFarge met with Masaryk, the Czech ambassador to Britain, in May 1938, as Britain sought to appease Hitler by ceding the majority-German region of Czech Sudetenland to German control. Meeting with LaFarge, Masaryk, son of the late Czech president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, predicted an alliance between Hitler and Stalin.

  Invitation to LaFarge’s speech before a group of intellectuals and politicians in Paris on May 17, 1938. LaFarge, who spoke about U.S. politics and issues of democracy, often found himself questioned about U.S. policy toward Europe and whether the United States would fight alongside France and Britain against the Nazis. (Courtesy of Georgetown University Library.)

  LaFarge in New York in 1938 after returning from Europe. LaFarge kept secret his work on the pope’s encyclical. He delivered the draft encyclical to Superior General Ledóchowski in Rome, who said he would deliver it to the pope. On his return from Europe, LaFarge spoke out about themes of war and anti-Semitism. (Courtesy of Georgetown University Library.)

  British prime minister Neville Chamberlain; Benito Mussolini; Lord Halifax, the British foreign minister; and his Italian counterpart, Count Galeazzo Ciano, left to right. Chamberlain and Halifax visited Rome in January 1939 but had no success in improving relations with Italy. They also met with the pope, who reiterated his strong rejection of Hitler and Mussolini.