The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  The pope reiterated his position that Nazi Germany had taken the place of Communism as the church’s most important enemy. The British officials were impressed by the pope’s forceful presentation. He had sharp words for Chamberlain. The effort to appease Hitler by giving him what he wanted had been an obvious failure; the pope had said so all along, and Chamberlain now had to admit that was true.

  Pius repeated once more: it is not Communism that poses a threat to humanity; Nazism and Fascism and their march toward domination and racist attacks are the greatest danger the world has ever seen. If Britain and the Vatican agreed with this perspective, they could work together.

  The pope stressed the need for united efforts to stop Hitler. The British ambassador, summarizing his own impressions, said the pope “has shown great courage. He finds himself now in open conflict with the totalitarian States . . . It is natural that he should look for support to the great Democracies . . . The Pope is an [sic] old and probably a dying man; for whatever reasons he is following a policy in international affairs which on the major issues of principle corresponds very closely indeed with our own.”

  Hurley reported back to the U.S. ambassador about the gist of the papal meeting—which ended up being more valuable than the failed diplomacy with Mussolini. Chamberlain, Halifax, and the pope saw eye to eye. The meeting had clarified the pope’s view on Hitler, who he described as “a sick man.” Halifax later said the three men had agreed they both had an “aversion” to the “brutal and totalitarian ideology of Hitlerism.” In addition, Halifax later wrote, the pope “in the end realized that the more immediate menace to the Christian order of Europe was from the Nazis themselves.”

  When Chamberlain left Rome on January 14, Mussolini grudgingly went to the train station to bid Chamberlain farewell, both sides knowing full well that nothing had been accomplished. Il Duce was mildly amused when some British subjects present at the departure broke into a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” It must have had deep meaning, because, according to Ciano, “Chamberlain’s eyes filled with tears when the train started moving.”

  Mussolini was baffled. “What is this little song?” he asked.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Will There Be Time?

  Vatican, January 21, 1939

  THE POPE TRACKED down the encyclical in mid-January despite Ledóchowski’s efforts to conceal and delay its delivery. Pius directed Pacelli’s subordinate, Domenico Tardini, to tell Ledóchowski that he knew he had the encyclical and that the Holy Father wanted it immediately. Without further recourse, Ledóchowski delivered a version of the encyclical on January 21, 1939, almost exactly four months after he had received it from LaFarge.

  Ledóchowski’s cover letter to the pope admitted that he had held back the original. The superior general said that the prominent Jesuit editor Enrico Rosa had begun rewriting the encyclical before he became ill. Ledóchowski gave no explanation of why the matter had languished four months, including the two months since Rosa had died. He now proposed redrafting the encyclical from scratch and discarding LaFarge’s version altogether.

  I take leave to send immediately to Your Holiness the draft by Father LaFarge concerning nationalism and the various notes made by him. It seemed to me and to Father Rosa that the draft, as it was, did not meet with what Your Holiness had in mind. Father Rosa began to compose another draft, but he did not have the energy to complete the job.

  Your Holiness knows that I am always at your disposition, most ready to be able to render whatever small task you might desire. If Your Holiness would want in fact that I perform a similar effort, it would be perhaps well to continue in the manner which has shown to work well in the past, that is: to first produce a short outline, second details from Your Holiness, present it afterwards to Your Holiness, and only after that the observations are received to process the first draft and submit it once more to Your Holiness, to be able to compose the final draft.

  Ledóchowski’s act and letter to the pope were disingenuous on several grounds. First, he neither referred to the proposed title of the encyclical, The Unity of the Human Race, nor could he even bear to use the words racism or anti-Semitism. He presented it as a treatise on nationalism, which it had not been, at least in its original form. There also was no indication the pope had deputized Ledóchowski to rework the document without submitting it first to the pope.

  He was asking the pope to accept a different document entirely, prepared the same way all other encyclicals had been prepared. The pope did not want to do that. He had directed its preparation personally and had told LaFarge to write it secretly and in the pope’s name, “as if you were the pope.”

  Now the question was whether the pope could summon the strength to edit the encyclical and publish it quickly. The cold calculation among dissenters at the Vatican made it clear that the issues of racism and anti-Semitism, Pius’s singular focus, might be abandoned by the next pope, whoever it might be. Ledóchowski was playing for time until Pius died.

  The general was a secretive man by nature who hid and often destroyed written communications of substance. In fact, one Jesuit researcher, Father Robert Graham, was told that Ledóchowski “burned all the preliminary drafts of the encyclical” and submitted an already-edited version. The Jesuit general had left one single letter to be read by the pope and then filed for anyone else who might see it in the future. He made it appear as though he was innocently trying to follow protocol. But that was not true.

  Knowing none of this, Gundlach wrote desperately to LaFarge on January 28 and said he felt he was being treated like an “immature child.” He didn’t even have an original copy of the encyclical and feared it would be lost forever. Even if the text was never used by the pope, he hoped it could be resurrected in some other form. “I have, as you know, no carbon of the German text and also not of the table of contents,” Gundlach wrote. “I have only the unabbreviated text in French of the first and second parts.” With the originals, he hoped their project could at least become a book.

  “This situation is easier for you to bear,” Gundlach told LaFarge. “For you have a public activity with many relationships at home. But one of us (me) sits here within four walls in a foreign atmosphere and has to rely on the big brass as to whether they want to say something to me or not, indeed, whether they want to even answer a question.”

  Zacheus Maher, Gundlach said, had promised him a month earlier that he would speak to Ledóchowski the following day—“tomorrow” about the encyclical. Nothing happened. “That was the end of December,” Gundlach said. “He would then let me know about it. I’m still waiting to hear.”

  Rome, January 23, 1939

  In late January, Italian foreign minister Ciano told Mussolini that the Vatican had invited him to an event on February 11 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Accords. Mussolini rejected the notion out of hand, agreeing with Ciano that it sounded like a trap staged by the pope to confront and embarrass him.

  Mussolini was becoming deeply concerned about the pope’s possible next moves. Rumors circulated around Rome concerning the February 11 celebration, especially because the pope had scheduled an extraordinary meeting at the same time, summoning all 280 Italian bishops to the Vatican.

  Vatican sources stirred the concern by telling reporters that the pope would take the opportunity to emphasize “Church-State differences that had developed since inauguration of Italy’s anti-Semitic program.”

  Mussolini and Ciano began to worry about what the pope had in mind. Would the pope formally declare that the Lateran agreements had been broken? Would he even go to the extent of excommunicating Mussolini, Hitler, or both? Ciano demanded answers from his informants within the Vatican, but no one knew. “I do not know, because the Holy Father does not tell anyone what he will do,” said Monsignor Francesco Borgongini-Duca, who as the papal nuncio to Italy was close to the center of power. But he added ominously: “it is clear that he will do something big.”

  Ci
ano wrote in his diary: “The atmosphere for the celebration of the tenth anniversary is becoming murky . . . we must be sure the Pope avoids some of those sharp statements he is known to make when he speaks to the bishops if we are to accept invitations to St. Peter’s.”

  Mussolini was fixated on the dangers of what the pope might do; the question was how far Mussolini would go to stop the pope from creating a serious rift between the Vatican and the Italian government. How could he stop the pope?

  While concealing the details, the pope spoke cryptically about his plans on one public occasion. He met at the end of January with representatives of the Italian Federation of Catholic University Students. The students, whose organization included two future prime ministers, Aldo Moro and Giulio Andreotti, had faced tough times. They were in the vanguard of young Italians who opposed Mussolini and Fascism. One of them was Bianca Penco, a leader based in Genoa. At the age of ninety-one in 2008, almost three-quarters of a century later, she could still recall the pope’s warmth and commitment that day.

  The pope told Penco and the other student leaders he was determined to make one last great statement. He acknowledged the troubles faced by the students and compared it to his own struggle against Fascism. He believed the church must “speak out for freedom,” she recalled in an interview with the Italian magazine Il Secolo XIX. “He spoke to us passionately about the persecution that our organization and other groups had suffered” for their opposition to Fascism, “as a betrayal of the Lateran Treaties.” He then told the students he was preparing “a very tough speech: he was determined, spoke with gravity as he was accustomed to do, and was fully prepared to challenge Mussolini and Hitler. He appeared to be in perfect health.”

  The pope was consumed by writing the speech to the bishops those last days of January and first days of February. His secretaries saw him writing, reviewing, and editing the document to the exclusion of most other work. He drafted it with pad and pencil and showed it to no one until he was finished. He then gave the handwritten copy to his loyal personal secretary, Monsignor Confalonieri, who typed it in its final form. Only then did the pope show it to Pacelli, who hardly made a mark on the copy, even though the subject was provocative and certain to raise controversy. It was as if he suspected the pope would never deliver the discourse.

  The pope was also worried that he might be incapacitated and not able to read the speech to the bishops. He told Confalonieri to have enough copies printed so that each bishop could get one. He wanted the event to be perfect and managed every detail, even discussing the menu for the lunch that was to be served. Pacelli, who otherwise was running routine affairs of the Holy See, repeatedly asked the pope to rest more and to delay the bishops’ meeting. Pius refused.

  At first, Ciano informed the Vatican that not only would Mussolini not attend or visit the Vatican, he would not even acknowledge the anniversary. Finally, however, Ciano said Mussolini decided that not attending at all would be too much of a diplomatic slight; Ciano would attend the event himself “in order to avoid giving offense to the Pope.”

  Everyone knew the pope had considerable leverage in his dealings with Mussolini. Despite the rancorous relationship, the criticism, and his own threats and saber rattling, Il Duce was concerned about public reaction and didn’t really want a break with the Vatican.

  New York, January 30, 1939

  LaFarge continued to maintain a high profile. On January 26, he told a New York radio audience that the use of military force was justifiable under some circumstances. “Most people are stirred up over the political threat,” he said. “They are scared not so much at racism itself as at the political and military force of the nation or nations which have made racism a national philosophy. If a racist power attacks us with boats and guns or any other weapon, let us by all means defend ourselves against them on sea and land.”

  Adolf Hitler delivered a major speech before the German Reichstag on January 30, 1939, casting himself as the determined leader of a peaceful nation. He claimed that warmongers abroad incited by the “Jewish press” were forcing the issue. And should the German Reich be drawn into a war, “if international financial Jewry within and without Europe should succeed in throwing the nations into another world war the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth and therewith a victory for Jewry, but the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.”

  He said that calumnies were being cast upon Germany by agitators, including the likes of Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, who had referred repeatedly to Nazism as tyranny. Ickes was also seeking a resolution to Jewish emigration from Germany by suggesting resettlement in the wide-open spaces of Alaska.

  A day after Hitler’s tirade, President Roosevelt proposed that the United States begin arming France and England for war. The Vatican said Hitler was practicing “the propaganda of hate.” It also stated that German newspapers were conducting “an anti-religious campaign that spares neither God nor the Redeemer nor the Gospel nor the Church . . . the Pope is dragged with the Bishops and clergy . . . through a sea of insults and immoral caricatures on pages that concede the right of asylum to every most incredible audacity.”

  The Vatican, February 5, 1939

  Still fine-tuning his speech to Italian bishops, the pope spent a quiet weekend. He knew that questions about the substance of the speech had created buzz around the Vatican, but he had kept his plans confidential. The pontiff met with old friends, Tomaso Gallarati Scotti on Friday, February 3, and Cardinal Eugene Tisserant on Saturday, February 4. Gallarati Scotti, a Catholic writer, was a generation younger than the pope and was his onetime student. Both men said the pope appeared to be in good health and discussed the world situation and the dangers around them.

  Pius continued to harp on Mussolini and Hitler. Later, he retired to his rooms, where he read and listened to the latest news on Vatican Radio. The broadcast was a litany of tensions in Europe, including distressing news about Italy and its relations with Germany.

  The pope turned from the news to word from his aides that the chief Vatican doctor, Aminta Milani, a constant visitor at the Vatican, was now sick at home with a bad case of the flu. Such illnesses were dangerous and contagious, especially in the winter chill. The pope’s confessor, Father Lazarini, was also in ill health and had been taken to the hospital for surgery. The pope said Mass in his private chapel and went to bed.

  He did not sleep well on Saturday night. His attendants heard him coughing during the night. On Sunday morning, February 5, Pius continued with as much of his schedule as he could. He had a brief talk with a group of children who had won a school catechism contest, but retired early. Monday morning, Cardinal Pacelli canceled the pope’s regular meetings and called in house doctors and specialists. With Milani in bed, Filippo Rocchi, the junior member of the five-doctor Vatican health corps, was on duty. The pope told Rocchi that he felt “inexorable and widespread pain.” His health deteriorated over the course of the day with fever, exhaustion, trouble breathing, and aches and pain. Rocchi issued an internal medical report.

  “The condition of the circulatory apparatus of the Holy Father returned to cause preoccupation in the sense of a return of the signs of left ventricular insufficiency with bradiarhitmia,” Rocchi wrote, saying the pope’s pulse was in the range of forty to forty-four beats per minute. “To this is added traccheobronchial catarrh with light thermic movement, probably secondary to the circulatory conditions, and disturbances of retention which have imposed permanent drainage. The psyche is perfectly lucid and prompt to attention as habitually normal.”

  In layperson’s terms, the pope was running a fever and he had a chest cold that was impacting his heart problems.

  The Vatican press office, under orders from the pope, made no public mention of his health on Monday, February 6, the seventeenth anniversary of his election to the papal throne. Diplomats and church leaders who came to St. Peter’s were invited to sign a register of greetings and con
gratulations to honor the pope, but Pius did not receive visitors. As congratulations came in by telegram from around the world, the press office reported that the pope had spent the day “by kneeling long in prayer in his private chapel” and the rest of the time “was conserving his strength.” It was likely that he stayed in bed most of the day.

  The pope was alert though weak on Wednesday morning, February 8. He feared that any announcement about his health would damage preparations for the bishops’ meeting on Saturday. Pacelli asked the pope one last time to cancel the bishops’ conference, saying it would be too tiring for him.

  The pope refused with a single “No.”

  He ordered his secretary, Confalonieri, to maintain silence about his condition. No medical bulletin was issued during the day. “The pope on his own account desired to avoid the diffusion of alarming news,” Confalonieri said, and he limited announcements to saying the pope was canceling audiences for the day.

  By Thursday, February 9, nevertheless, word of the pope’s condition had spread. The Vatican merely said the pope’s schedule had been canceled again so he could rest and prepare for his meeting with the bishops. The bishops kept to their itineraries and began arriving in Rome from around the country, though many started to doubt whether the Saturday event would take place. An official statement on Thursday repeated “that the Pope was feeling well but by the counsel of his doctors had canceled again the audiences to be in condition to receive the Italian Episcopate on Saturday,” Confalonieri recalled. “A similar notice was published in the evening edition of Osservatore Romano.” The pope rested and the doctors said he was a good patient. He had only one repeated request in the form of a demand: he wanted to be kept alive through Saturday.