The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  Analysts generally praised the choice of Pacelli. Ambassador Phillips expressed the opinion of many that “the fact that he has chosen the name of his predecessor is an intimation to the world that he intends to pursue the strong policy of Pius XI.” Dorothy Thompson of the New York Tribune said his election was “not only in harmony with the spirit and policies of his predecessor [but] it is in harmony with his diplomatic career.” That was also the impression in France. “The cardinals have marked the clear desire to pursue the politics energetically affirmed by Pius XI,” editorialized the Paris daily L’Epoque, “against all doctrines of violence and those that may come in the future.”

  Yet there was significant diplomatic dissent. The American consul-general in Cologne, Germany, Alfred Klieforth, told the State Department that Pacelli, though a veteran diplomat, was deluded in his view of the Nazis. Klieforth reported to Washington on March 3 that Pacelli had told him he thought “Hitler was not a true Nazi and ‘in spite of appearances would end up in the camp of the left-wing Nazi extremists where he began his career.’” Another critic, the former German chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, maneuvered out of office by Hitler in 1932, told the British Foreign Office that “he knows Cardinal Pacelli very well and considers that there is a great deal of naiveté” in his view of Hitler and Mussolini.

  Dissenters also remained within the walls of the Vatican. Among them were Cardinal Tisserant, who had not only refused to vote for Pacelli, but also told a friend afterward that he had voted for the Jesuit cardinal of Genoa, Pietro Boetto, a wasted vote because a Jesuit had never been and would not be elected pope. Among the other silent critics were Joseph Hurley, who had always maintained a cool relationship with Pacelli; and Gundlach, who doubted that Pacelli as the new pope would ever publish a treatise that condemned anti-Semitism. Gundlach described what hardly anyone outside the Vatican wall realized. He saw the new pope as a wisp of a man, swaying like a thin reed in the breeze, and he feared that his voice would be just as thin.

  Rome, March 15, 1939

  Three days after the papal coronation, Hitler invaded the remaining independent portion of Czechoslovakia, seized Prague, and annexed the country. As with Austria, exactly a year earlier, the Nazi army met virtually no resistance. Czechoslovakia no longer existed, and Chamberlain’s plan for peace in our time was dead, just as Pope Pius XI had predicted.

  Pope Pius XII, who had wanted the previous pope to endorse the Munich Agreement, now did nothing to criticize the German invasion. Even before Pacelli’s investiture, he made sure that the Vatican would avoid taking sides and stay impartial.

  William Phillips noted that the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, had toned down its rhetoric and replaced vitriolic attacks on Italy and Germany with moderate language. Britain quickly saw the same. “Vatican policy changed overnight,” wrote British historian Owen Chadwick. “Pius XI denounced the Nazi ill-treatment of the Churches, or countered Mussolini’s anti-Semitic provisions, and generally stood up for justice and liberty. All these good objectives were suddenly seen as secondary to one supreme quest, that of helping the European powers not to destroy each other.”

  British officials had wrongly assumed that Mussolini would be unhappy with Pacelli as the new pope; it turned out that his congratulations had been genuine. Ciano told the French ambassador Charles-Roux he was “delighted with the election. I am on the best terms with Cardinal Pacelli . . . His election is a great success for Italy.”

  The new pope met with Ciano within a week of assuming office and said he planned to “follow a more conciliatory policy than Pius XI,” Ciano wrote in his diary. Ciano’s assessment was succinct: “I believe that we can get along well with this Pope.”

  The Germans were also enthusiastic. Pacelli was in touch almost immediately with the German embassy and sent a friendly letter to Hitler within days of his election. Heinrich Himmler spoke to Ciano about the prospects for improved relations. “They like the new Pope and believe that a modus vivendi is possible,” Ciano said. “I encouraged him along these lines, saying that an agreement between the Reich and the Vatican would make the Axis more popular.”

  The new pope advocated peace negotiations with Hitler and Mussolini on one side and with the Western powers on the other. Critics said the peace negotiations initiated by the new pope did not point to peace. Everyone expected the pope, any pope, to support peace, “to use the authority of his great office to avert the threat of war in Europe,” the New York Times said in an editorial in May 1939. But as the new pope sought to be a fair broker and intermediary between the Axis and the Allies, he faced the problem, the Times continued, of “creating a will to peace on the part of nations which have been ready to resort to violence in order to achieve their ambitions.”

  New York, March 12, 1939

  John LaFarge wrote enthusiastically in America about the election of the new pope. He assumed that Pope Pacelli, as he was sometimes called, would follow the policies and the legacy of Pope Pius XI. LaFarge had never spoken with him and had seen him only twice, in Budapest and briefly in the courtyard at Castel Gandolfo, yet he had every reason to be hopeful that his project still could be issued as an encyclical.

  LaFarge had read the speculation about what exactly the new pope would focus on. “In a simple sense, of course, the new Pope is ‘political.’ He has for years occupied with brilliance a major political position . . . and he has dealt with the world’s leading politicians,” LaFarge wrote.

  Yet in another sense, LaFarge repeated what Pope Pius XI had often said. The church is intrinsically not political. It guides and views politics as part of its spiritual mission. And that must be based on humanity and morality.

  “For the totalitarian governments,” LaFarge continued, “whether Communist, National Socialist or Fascist, it is practically impossible to see anything else in the Papacy than a rival to their own state-centered autocracy.”

  LaFarge wrote that civilization and humanity were at stake. The church creates “an unswerving devotion to human rights and to the common good,” he said. “If we look back to the late Pope Pius XI, “we find this exemplified in his own life and utterances.” LaFarge assumed the new pope would follow the same path.

  At the Vatican, on Easter Sunday, April 9, or the following Monday, Pope Pius XII, the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church, met with the Jesuit superior Wlodimir Ledóchowski and considered the words of John LaFarge that condemned anti-Semitism as racism and a crime against humanity. Pope Pacelli indicated that he had never before seen LaFarge’s draft encyclical. His good friend Ledóchowski told him that he thought the document was lacking in focus and was too extreme. The pope accepted the word of his friend. That was all Ledóchowski needed to hear.

  Ledóchowski’s assistant, Zacheus Maher, wrote to LaFarge on Monday and told him the new pope had rejected the encyclical. The Vatican no longer wanted it and banned any reference to it being a papal document. “If you wish, you may now profit by your recent work and proceed to its publication,” Maher said. But “there shall not be the least allusion to the work as having in any way had any connection with anything requested of you by his late Holiness.

  “The Lord will surely bless you for all the effort and anguish this work caused you even though it will not have the outlet at first anticipated.”

  LaFarge and Gundlach exchanged letters after they each received this news from the Vatican. LaFarge suggested to his German friend that they make a pact not to publish the encyclical on their own, even as an independent document. Perhaps in that case, the new pope might change his mind and publish it one day.

  “Slim chance of that,” Gundlach wrote back to LaFarge. But he agreed to hold on to the text. In his view, the “diplomatic” bloc within the Vatican—those who did not support the previous pope’s confrontational style—had simply won out.

  Gundlach also had received a letter from Maher on behalf of Ledóchowski and described it to LaFarge. “You can imagine that I was very shaken,” Gundlach wrot
e, “less on account of the content of the note, which I after all had no longer expected in any other fashion, than on account of the peculiar way with which this affair and we ourselves have been handled.

  “We are hoping here for the continuation of the true line that once was,” Gundlach continued. But he could see that Pope Pacelli would not take sides in the battle against the rising tide of Nazism. Some defended the pope, Gundlach added, saying Pacelli would “in no way degrade himself and not go astray, even though his decisions and pronouncements be less spirited and more nicely balanced.” Gundlach did not agree.

  Gundlach summed up what he believed had happened with Pius XI’s encyclical: Ledóchowski’s strategy of delay had worked. He blocked the previous pope, and he advised his close friend, Pacelli, the new pope, to discard the encyclical on racism and to silence those who produced it. “Our affair in any case meanwhile went the way of all flesh”—it died with the old pope.

  Gundlach was bitter about how he and LaFarge had been treated, but he was mostly motivated by the conviction that the encyclical deserved to be published. He struggled in vain to find a positive side of the story—he thanked LaFarge for involving him in the drafting of the document and for his friendship. He also said how much he had enjoyed that summer working in Paris.

  The two Jesuits came away from this experience with an understanding of the modus operandi of the new pope. This would be the course of the church in the midst of inevitable war—standing far back while Europe collapsed before an advancing German army and as the Nazis carried out their persecution of the Jews.

  The Vatican, August 14, 1940

  Cardinal Tisserant never spoke out in public against Pope Pacelli; he suffered in silence at first, then began to complain privately and directly to the new pope about his policy of neutrality. Some said the policy was intended to protect the Vatican and protect Catholics in Europe. Others said it was not the pope’s role to make political statements. Tisserant vehemently disagreed. “I have insistently asked the Holy Father to issue an encyclical (condemning Nazism and Fascism),” he said in a letter to a fellow churchman. “I fear history will have to reproach the Holy See with having pursued a policy of convenience for itself, and not much more. This is extremely sad, especially for one who has lived under Pius XI.”

  Joseph Hurley, Pius XI’s personal interpreter and conduit to the U.S. embassy, also thought that Pope Pius XII should speak out. The European war had begun when Nazi Germany seized Poland in September 1939. Chamberlain resigned on May 10, 1940, the final acknowledgment that his policy of appeasement was a failure. He died of cancer six months later. On June 10, 1940, Italy entered the war alongside Germany. Four days later, Hitler’s Wehrmacht marched triumphantly into Paris after conquering Belgium and Holland.

  Hurley took his first open step toward a break with the Vatican when he issued a remarkable commentary on Vatican Radio in English on July 4, 1940, less than a month after Paris fell to the Nazis. The speech, monitored in Britain and the United States, declared that the time for pacifism was past. “We have sympathy for the pacifists but they are wrong,” Hurley said. “No word in the Gospel or in papal teaching suggests that justice should go undefended, that it is not worth dying for. . . . The Church is no conscientious objector.”

  Hurley, the ranking American at the Vatican Secretariat of State, had spoken far beyond his brief, knowing well that the new pope did not like threatening remarks. Hurley’s declaration was a throwback to the days of the previous pope—his beloved benefactor. The commentary came on the air without identifying Hurley, but Vatican reporters recognized his voice.

  The Times of London reported on the commentary, saying that while “Osservatore Romano prints no war commentary nowadays,” this particular report shows that “the Vatican still allows strongly worded broadcasts.” Hurley’s broadcast was most likely not authorized by the pope or other high-ranking officials at the Vatican. He was speaking as a loyal American and a man of moral force.

  Hurley had never been a favorite of Pacelli, and his outspoken role was visible. He continued to work closely with U.S. officials in Rome, especially with Myron Taylor, who had been appointed as President Roosevelt’s personal envoy to the Vatican. Hurley’s role as intermediary with U.S. ambassador Phillips was thereby curtailed, much to both men’s disappointment.

  Phillips stayed on in Italy for another eighteen months, cooperating with Taylor in unsuccessful efforts to dissuade Mussolini from fighting alongside Hitler. But Phillips quit his Italian post in October 1941 and became station chief of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in London. The OSS was the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Phillips continued to serve Roosevelt and President Truman in several diplomatic roles throughout the 1940s. He and his wife, Caroline, then retired to their home in Beverly, Massachusetts. Caroline maintained her diaries until her death at the age of eighty-four in 1965. Her husband, eighty-nine, died three years later.

  Pope Pius XII’s opportunity to oust Hurley came quickly. When word came on August 12 that Archbishop Patrick Barry of St. Augustine, Florida, had died, Hurley was unceremoniously assigned as his replacement four days later. The naming of a new bishop normally took months of deliberations. Hurley’s elevation to bishop of St. Augustine was cast as a promotion and was carried out with praise and sweet words.

  But the church hierarchy knew that Hurley was being banished. St. Augustine was considered a backwater assignment for such a high-ranking Vatican official. He was cast aside for daring to speak out against the Nazis in solitary tribute to his mentor, Pope Pius XI. One of the new pope’s first acts had been to promote Francis Spellman, Hurley’s predecessor, as the designated American at the Vatican; Spellman became archbishop of New York on April 15, 1939, en route to becoming a cardinal seven years later.

  Even in Florida, Hurley drew attention in the United States as one of the most vocal church figures during World War II. He proudly spoke, for example, about U.S. war preparations on the CBS Radio Network on July 6, 1941, with the preface that his word did not carry “any mandate from the Vatican . . . only my own authority.” He repeated Pius XI’s condemnation of the “the crooked cross of National Socialism,” a term Hurley had coined. The previous pope, he said, had warned that Nazi “intrigues had been laid bare which aim at nothing less than a war of extermination.”

  He did not criticize Pius XII, but rather praised his attempt to negotiate for peace. He did say it was time to prepare for the inevitable conflagration. “Pope Pius XII has not ceased to raise His voice against the evils of totalitarianism . . .” and for peace. “It is history, of course, that we failed,” Hurley said. “We failed because one nation, confidently arrogant in its armored might, wanted war. This war is Germany’s doing . . . We may not, we must not, wait for the start of hostilities . . . let us pray for peace but prepare for war.”

  After the war, Hurley was occasionally summoned back to temporary diplomatic duty at the Vatican, but he remained as bishop of St. Augustine until he died in 1967, embittered, disillusioned, increasingly conservative and as autocratic in his Florida domain as his beloved mentor Pope Pius XI had been at the Vatican.

  EPILOGUE

  New York, May 20, 1963

  THE RECREATION ROOM at America House had been silent except for John LaFarge’s voice as he told the story of his summer in Europe in the days before the war began.

  LaFarge was filling in the details of a story he had acknowledged in his 1954 memoir, The Manner Is Ordinary. At the time, he described his meeting with Pius XI as a discussion about racism and anti-Semitism. “He had read my book Interracial Justice and liked the title of it,” LaFarge said. “‘Interracial Justice, c’est bon!’ the pope said, pronouncing the title as if it were French. He said he thought my book was the best thing written on the topic, comparing it with some European literature. Naturally, this was a big lift to me.”

  LaFarge promoted human rights issues for the rest of his life through books and commentaries in America a
nd in speeches around the country. Awards showered upon him—the 1955 Catholic International Peace Award; media awards; a social justice award from the Religions and Labor Council in 1957 shared with Martin Luther King; recognition in 1962 by the American Jewish Committee. He wrote a number of books, including A Catholic Viewpoint on Racism (1956) and An American Amen (1958). “A priest’s life,” he wrote in that book, “is not unlike that of a bridge between God and man.” A final book, Reflections on Growing Old, was published in 1963.

  And yet, his meeting with Pope Pius XI pulled at his conscience. LaFarge wrote in The Manner Is Ordinary: “If I were in Rome again, he said in conclusion, I should be sure to drop in to see him. He might like to talk to me again on the question and might have some further ideas.” The pope had expected him to return that year in person with a finished encyclical.

  Now, in 1963, he was revealing what really happened during his conversation with the pope.

  LaFarge told his friends he had trusted Wlodimir Ledóchowski. His fellow Jesuits understood that his loyalty and deference to the Father Superior was tantamount. How could LaFarge have known that Ledóchowski was lying?

  Ledóchowski had died at the age of seventy-six on December 13, 1942, midwar, about four years after the death of Pius XI. One Jesuit who worked with Ledóchowski said that the Jesuit superior general always covered his tracks and left no compromising documents.

  Nevertheless, LaFarge knew he had failed. The pope had asked LaFarge to return personally and deliver the encyclical. But extenuating circumstances, sickness and death, and the pressure of Ledóchowski’s personality had kept LaFarge from ever seeing the pope again.

  Walter Abbott, one of LaFarge’s longtime fellow Jesuits at America House, asked Uncle John one basic question about Ledóchowski’s role.