The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  “I asked him if he thought that the Father General sabotaged the encyclical,” Abbott said.

  LaFarge said yes; he did think Ledóchowski had blocked the encyclical. “I could not fathom why” Ledóchowski would do such a thing, LaFarge said. In any case, he added, it probably didn’t matter by that time. LaFarge told Abbott he thought “Pius XI was weakened and too far gone” to follow through with the encyclical’s publication.

  LaFarge, tugged by obedience to Ledóchowski and by the personal need to be with his family, had made a difficult and, in some ways, defensible decision. He now regretted the decision to go home; he could have given the pope the encyclical in person. “I made a mistake by doing the right thing,” LaFarge told the other Jesuits.

  He then stood up and shuffled slowly off to his room for bed. After Uncle John had left, Abbott looked to the others. “He told us the whole story . . . JLF had us spellbound. I have lived with him for 20 years and this is the first time I’m hearing about this project.”

  A few weeks later, President John F. Kennedy invited LaFarge to the White House for a meeting of religious leaders to discuss “certain issues of this nation’s civil rights problem. This matter merits serious and immediate attention and I would be pleased to have you attend the meeting to be held in the East Room of the White House.”

  The meeting was one step in the Kennedy administration’s commitment to creating equal opportunity and job training for black Americans. In the ensuing months, never complaining about the pain in his legs or his weariness, LaFarge focused on the wave of civil rights legislation and preparations for Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. He was too frail to walk very far on the August day of the march, but he insisted on being present, so he was carried to the front of the line on the shoulders of other men. It was a fitting gesture; he knew that eventually King’s dream would be accomplished by a new generation, where “children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.”

  Interviewed by a New York Times reporter, LaFarge said civil rights were central to the future and promise of the United States: “It concerns the fundamental rights of all of us—not merely the Negroes but the entire population. We are all involved in this question of right and wrong.”

  He joked with a niece about being carried that day, making light of the problem. “After all, the mechanism runs down after a while,” he wrote. “Wonderful it has worked as long as it has.”

  THREE MONTHS LATER, on November 9, 1963, LaFarge stood with Martin Luther King one last time and introduced the civil rights leader at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City. King was awarded the St. Francis Medal, citing his work for peace through nonviolence. That was a rare appearance for LaFarge, who had begun turning down meetings and speaking engagements.

  On November 22, 1963, LaFarge chose to stay home at America headquarters rather than serve as tour guide to a visiting priest, something he usually loved to do. At around noon, he heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. LaFarge was devastated. The Jesuits at America House, along with everyone in the country, watched the television story as it developed: the death of the young president; the body borne back to Washington; grieving tributes to Kennedy who lay in state in the Capitol rotunda; and the first public statement by the new president, Lyndon Johnson.

  On Sunday morning, November 24, 1963, John LaFarge ate breakfast and then returned to watching the television coverage. He retired to his room for a nap at midday, probably before the shocking televised murder of the president’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. The other Jesuits watched the drama throughout the day.

  At around 4 P.M., one of younger Jesuits, C. J. McNaspy, went to look in on LaFarge. When he got no answer from his knocks on the door, McNaspy entered the room. LaFarge was fully dressed and lying motionless on his bed. He had taken off his glasses after having read the newspaper nearby. McNaspy realized what had happened and came running from the room.

  “Uncle John is dead! Uncle John is dead!” he shouted to the others.

  LaFarge had died quietly sometime during the afternoon.

  The editor in chief of America at the time, Thurston N. Davis, said the grief among the Jesuits was so great that it seemed as if “the whole earth ached.”

  “I can’t escape the feeling that the Dallas tragedy had something to do with it,” Davis said. “One of the Fathers anointed him and called the police to get a doctor. When the police examined his person for ‘valuables’—a routine procedure—they found two worn rosaries.”

  Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, who officiated at the funeral of President Kennedy two days earlier, said Mass on November 27, 1963, for John LaFarge of the Society of Jesus, who had chosen a path that would portray him to the world as an ordinary man. Cushing, a progressive force in Catholic-Jewish relations, had known LaFarge for at least forty years and focused on LaFarge’s exhortation that Catholics join the civil rights movement.

  “Let us cherish the memory of this great crusader for the truth. And we can do it best not only by our prayers but by perpetuating more and more the wonderful spirit of Catholic interracial work.”

  POPE PIUS XI’S last crusade against the Nazis was revealed after LaFarge’s death. Priests reviewing LaFarge’s papers found the draft encyclical against anti-Semitism and began speaking about it. The first major revelation was on December 15, 1972, with publication in the National Catholic Reporter of an extensive report about LaFarge and the encyclical by associate editor Jim Castelli.

  “The encyclical, had it been published, would have broken the much criticized Vatican silence on the persecution of Jews in Europe, before and during the Second World War,” Castelli wrote.

  Vatican officials rejected the notion that the document could even be called an encyclical, arguing it was not clear the pope would finally have issued it. An official, the Reverend Burkhart Schneider, described the text in 1973 as “speculative, theoretical, and [having a] laborious style that more resembled Gundlach’s manner of thinking than LaFarge’s.” Further, he said, the draft was submitted because Pius XI wanted “to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Concordat” with Italy. But the pope’s death “caused the text prepared, along with many others on different themes, to end up in the silence of the archives.”

  It is true that the pope would likely have edited and sharpened, even shortened the encyclical. He published thirty-two encyclicals during his pontificate, an average of two a year. Some of them were short, others as long as LaFarge’s. The pope had reviewed and edited them all.

  The National Catholic Reporter’s report quoted extensively from the encyclical text, which was being published for the first time. It cited letters between LaFarge and Gundlach and their secret mission and some other documentation.

  The NCR article was based on research by a young priest, Thomas Breslin, who discovered the encyclical and correspondence among LaFarge’s personal papers. Breslin contacted NCR after reading about Tisserant’s charge that Pius XI had been killed. In 1995, Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky wrote a book about the encyclical that was based in part on the material Breslin had found. The book, written in French, was translated into English in 1997, as The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI. The book includes an English text of the encyclical, retranslated from the French version.

  A number of elements of the story were unavailable then: the files of Pope Pius XI, which were opened by the Secret Vatican Archives in 2006, and the complete files of Edward Stanton at Burns Library, Boston College, which include previously unreported memos and documents from LaFarge’s papers. Stanton, a Canadian Jesuit, wrote about LaFarge and the encyclical for his doctoral thesis. He continued to work on the story when he began teaching at Boston College in the 1970s, gathering material and additional research for a book that would go beyond the doctoral thesis. Stanton’s file included original copies of LaFarge’s draft of the encyclical in English, and papers and notes not seen before. Those include LaFarge�
��s original draft letter to the pope on October 28, 1938, in French; and an undated note to Stanton from the Reverend Walter Abbott, LaFarge’s longtime friend who was present on the evening of May 19–20, 1963, when LaFarge told his story to his fellow Jesuits.

  The Vatican archives revealed for the first time a copy of Ledóchowski’s transmittal cover letter with the encyclical on January 21, 1939, which, along with the pope’s hints during his meeting with anti-Fascist students a week later, provides circumstantial evidence that Pius XI had the encyclical in hand.

  Stanton died of a heart attack while jogging on March 13, 1983, and the LaFarge material remained unseen among his own personal papers, which are housed at the Burns Library at Boston College. The original draft of the encyclical in this file, which includes handwritten corrections by LaFarge, is similar but not identical to previously published versions of the document.

  Sources also include the unpublished diaries of William Phillips, housed at Houghton Library, Harvard University, and from his privately published memoir, Ventures in Diplomacy. The Diary of Caroline Drayton Phillips was examined at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

  Pope Pius XI’s archives were opened to researchers in 2006. Material about the pope’s relationship with other members of the curia and primary documents comes from the masterful scholarship of Professor Emma Fattorini of the University of Rome La Sapienza, who then began examining Pius XI’s archives. Her efforts and the work of scholars, including David Kertzer, professor of history, Brown University; Robert Maryks, professor of history, City University of New York; Frank J. Coppa, professor of history, St. John’s University; and Hubert Wolf, professor of history at the University of Munster, are based on dedicated years of research. I am indebted to them. The archives of the diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, house the papers of Bishop Joseph Hurley and were consulted as well.

  It was evident in the course of assembling this book that some material has not yet been discovered. Hurley kept notebooks that amounted to diaries and random thoughts throughout his life. He made reference in a notation late in his life that he intended to gather up these notebooks with material to write a memoir. The notes are found in his papers at St. Augustine, but the Rome material appears to have been removed. Charles Gallagher, S. J., a former archivist at St. Augustine, and Professor Michael Gannon, a Florida-based historian and former priest who once was Hurley’s assistant, said that Vatican authorities had been in contact with the St. Augustine diocese. Unspecified files of Hurley’s papers were removed and apparently taken into Vatican custody some time after Hurley died. Gannon said that he had found the notebooks in Hurley’s desk after the bishop died, but it was not clear where the Rome notes Hurley listed had ended up.

  In the case of Cardinal Tisserant, there was no known follow-up to the 1972 New York Times story that reported a legal case involving his files. No trace of his papers has been found. The Vatican Secret Archives reported in 2010 that it is indexing files covering the papacy of Pope Pius XII, millions of documents that may provide more information. That material is expected to be available by 2015.

  POPE PIUS XI’S attempt to use his words as a weapon remained a source of controversy seventy-five years after the fact. He has been overshadowed in history by his onetime secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. Pacelli has been the object of both adulation and condemnation for his role during World War II. That role has not been the subject of this book but is amply debated in dozens of books, treatises, articles, and plays. One side of the argument said that Pope Pacelli could have done more. That argument was summed up by Albert Camus in 1948: “For a long time I waited during those terrible years, for a voice to be lifted up in Rome,” he told a meeting of Dominicans. “It appears that this voice was raised, but I swear to you that millions of men, myself included, never heard it.”

  Pius XII once hinted at his own perspective. Once the war began, a reporter for Osservatore Romano, Edoardo Senatro, asked him if he would consider criticizing Nazi atrocities. Pope Pacelli replied: “You must not forget, dear friend, that there are millions of Catholics in the German army. Would you like to place them in the middle of a conflict of conscience?”

  Pacelli’s pursuit of political impartiality did not stop him from sheltering Jews and other refugees at Castel Gandolfo and endorsing other individual acts to save possibly tens of thousands of Jews. I walked through the gardens of Castel Gandolfo one fall day in 2011 and stepped into the brick-arched rooms where Jews were safe from the Nazis, thanks to Pius XII.

  Criticism has focused, however, on what the Vatican might have done to stop the systematic killing of Jews by the Nazi regime. The Vatican had reliable information at least by February 1942 about mass executions taking place in Nazi concentration camps. The archbishop of Krakow, Poland, Adam Stefan Sapieha, sent a message through couriers to the Vatican that “We live in terror, continually in danger of losing everything if we attempt to escape, thrown into camps from which few emerge alive.”

  “To make the extent of the disaster clear,” he added, “there is no difference between Jews and Poles.”

  After Pius XII died at the age of eighty-two on October 9, 1958, some criticism emerged. Domenico Tardini, the monsignor who at the direction of Pacelli helped destroy copies of Pius XI’s final speech to bishops on February 11, 1939, said Pacelli “was, by natural temperament, meek and rather timid. He was not born with the temper of a fighter. In this he differed from his great predecessor, Pius XI, who rejoiced, at least visibly, in the contest. Pius XII visibly suffered.”

  Seven popes were elected in the twentieth century. The first of those to be canonized as a saint was Pope Pius X, who served from 1903 to 1914. Five others have been considered for sainthood, including John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul I. John Paul II, who died in 2005, was beatified by Benedict XVI in 2011, a step before canonization. Pius XII is en route to beatification, which requires evidence of miracles having been ascribed to him. The priest in charge of that process, Peter Gumpel, a German Jesuit, has said that such miracles can be attributed to Pius XII. The process has been surrounded by controversy and charges from critics that Pius XII did not do enough to fight Nazism.

  Only one pope of the twentieth century is not in the process of consideration for beatification: Achille Ratti—Pope Pius XI.

  Some scholars speculate that Pius XI’s speech, if delivered on February 11 and followed by LaFarge’s encyclical, would have led to a break with the German and Italian treaties with the Vatican. If he had died even a week later, such analysis says, Eugene Pacelli would not have been the front-runner to succeed him. An appeaser of the Nazis and the Italians would no longer have been able to restore relations.

  Other scholars say, as well, that once such a break took place, and once condemnation from the Vatican rose, the world might have been different. It was possible that continued pressure from a strong-speaking pope would have blocked or weakened what eventually became Hitler’s Final Solution for the Jews.

  After Kristallnacht, Hitler felt “he could go to any length with the Jews, without fear of attack from any church,” wrote Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Irish writer and politician, in 1989. “Had Pius XI been able to deliver the encyclical he planned, the green light would have changed to red. The Catholic Church in Germany would have been obliged to speak out against the persecution of the Jews. Many Protestants, inside and outside Germany, would have been likely to follow its example.”

  One strong piece of evidence emerged decades later within the Church to show that Catholic leaders had an influence on the behavior of the Nazis. In 1996, then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, recalled that his village in Germany “experienced a sense of liberation” when Cardinal Clement von Galen of Munich “‘broke the silence and publicly defended the mentally ill’ who were likewise earmarked for extermination by Hitler’s Reich.”

  Ratzinger, forced under law into the Nazi Hitler Youth o
rganization at fourteen years old in 1941 and into a military antiaircraft unit when he was sixteen, saw a fourteen-year-old cousin with Down syndrome dragged away by the Nazi eugenics program and later killed.

  “Only a boldly public outcry could have halted the atrocities,” Max Pribilla, a German Jesuit journalist, wrote in 1946. The implication was that a similar voice from the Vatican could have made a difference.

  After its report on the encyclical in 1972, the editors of the National Catholic Reporter said this: “Considering that Hitler had only begun to move into full-scale persecution of the Jews, and had not yet begun planned extermination; considering that Italy had only begun to copy Germany’s racial laws; considering the persecution of Jews throughout history; considering the difficulty, especially in Europe, of launching a similar wide-scale attack on Catholics; and considering the moral weight of the papacy, especially at that point in history—considering all this, we must conclude that the publication of the encyclical draft at the time it was written may have saved hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lives.”

  That can never be known. It was only clear that Pope Pius XI took a stance in favor of absolute morality and defended to his last breath his principles of decency and humanity, nothing more, nothing less.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SPECIAL THANKS TO Charles Gallagher, S.J., assistant professor of history at Boston College, for his help, thoughtful analysis, and friendship in considering the issues surrounding the Vatican in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and for reviewing the manuscript. Thanks also to Robert Burruss for his maps and for reading early versions of the manuscript; Steve Christensen provided, as always, well-focused advice as did Henry Heilbrunn, Lynne Heilbrunn, and Madeleine Lundberg.

  The Reverend Donald Conroy provided constant encouragement, insight, and historical and ecclesiastical context, and gave very helpful suggestions and impressions on an early version of the manuscript. My appreciation and gratitude to Ian Portnoy, who advised, encouraged, and followed me on this project all along.