The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  Roberto Cantalupo, Mussolini’s ambassador to Spain, meeting with him for the first time in many months, saw a man who, in the wake of his Ethiopian victory, seemed dramatically changed. Heavier, his neck thickened, and his face enlarged, his skin was bright red from the summer days he spent on the beach. With Ciano at his side, his every word seemed false, as if meant for a large audience. The Duce’s distance from Cantalupo, who had known him for years, appeared immense. After a few uncomfortable minutes, Cantalupo departed, but Ciano caught up with him before he left the building.

  “How did you find him?” asked Ciano.

  “I didn’t find him. I found someone else,” Cantalupo replied.

  Ciano smiled. “You know, he has tasted great glory and sees the rest of us from on high as little, little. He lives in a world of his own.… Perhaps it’s for the best that we leave him up there on Olympus, where he can do great things. As for the rest of us … we’ll take care of the things of this world.”19

  Giovanni Bottai, one of the Fascist leaders closest to Mussolini, had a similar experience on his return from Ethiopia. “Not the man, but the statue, stood before me,” he wrote in his diary. A “hard, stony statue, from which a cold voice emerged.”20

  The Duce’s composure cracked briefly when he suffered an unexpected blow: his youngest child, seven-year-old Anna Maria, contracted polio. She struggled between life and death as the Duce looked on helplessly. Finally she recovered, although the signs of the disease remained with her. At a press conference during her illness, when foreign journalists presented Mussolini with a doll to give her, tears rolled down his famously masklike face.21

  But his daughter’s illness did nothing to soften him. He had little use for advice. He insisted that when his ministers and other officials came to see him, they speed-walk across his immense office to his desk, give a Roman salute, and hand him the papers he had requested. After answering his questions, and without offering any unsolicited comments, they would salute again, turn around, and hustle out.22 They were lucky if they escaped without triggering his wrath. Navarra, Mussolini’s assistant, who waited outside the room, regularly heard the Duce’s thundering denunciations. When angry, he banged his fists on his table and convulsively spread and closed his legs, scraping his heels against a footrest under his table. Before long, Navarra reported, the footrest was completely worn down.23

  Mussolini felt that nothing was impossible if he willed it.24 Italy could become one of the world’s great nations, if Italians followed his orders. But amid all his dreams of conquest and glory, he worried that Italians were by nature a weak people, ill suited for his martial designs. At a Grand Council meeting in December, he mused that one day he would have to “march the troops into Naples to sweep aside all the guitars, the mandolins, the violins, the organ grinders.”25

  Mussolini was increasingly leaving day-to-day matters to his associates, but not only because he had to deal with more consequential matters. He also had a new mistress. Clara Petacci was twenty-four years old when their affair began in earnest in 1936; Mussolini was fifty-three. Her family lived in a large apartment close to Mussolini’s Villa Torlonia. Her father was a Vatican physician, caring for assorted monsignors, functionaries, and papal guards. Less than two years earlier, she had married, in a wedding graced by many Vatican dignitaries and presided over by Cardinal Gasparri himself. The marriage did not last long.

  A buxom, vivacious young woman, with green eyes and curly hair—the product of dozens of curlers applied each night—Clara had small teeth and a low, warm, husky voice. She lived for the afternoon calls that summoned her to Palazzo Venezia. To minimize gossip, she would take a taxi to an agreed-upon spot, where she met a motorcycle policeman and hopped into his covered sidecar. At the service entrance of Palazzo Venezia, she was met by Mussolini’s trusted assistant, Quinto Navarra, and escorted to the special apartment Mussolini had reserved for her. There she would lie on a sofa in the Zodiac room—so called because of the gold-painted image on the sky-blue vaulted ceiling. As she waited for the Duce—who typically arrived after six P.M.—she passed the hours reading, listening to records, drawing designs for her clothes, and filling up voluminous notebooks with her daily diary, recounting in loving detail her every encounter with the great man.26 In the closet she kept a dozen bright-colored, frilly dresses and an assortment of gaudy hats. Navarra, who brought her tea, occasionally stopped by to chat.27

  Although Mussolini had had a long trail of lovers, Clara Petacci represented something new. It was not so much that his former lovers were closer to his own age and were plain as often as they were pretty; rather, he developed an unusual emotional dependency on Petacci. Not that he in any way regarded her as an equal—he showed not the least interest in her views. The hundreds of pages of her published diaries give no indication that he cared about her opinion on anything but her total devotion to him. But he found that he could not live without this attractive young woman, without her doting devotion and sexual availability. At a time when his horror at the prospect of getting older was growing, she provided him with a feeling of youth regained; and in the wake of his daughter’s brush with death, and his sense of isolation during the Ethiopian war, she offered him freedom from the pressures of constantly having to pose as the Italian superman.28

  Clara Petacci

  (photograph credit 18.1)

  THE FRONT PAGE OF THE OCTOBER 1, 1936, New York Times carried surprising news: Eugenio Pacelli was to sail the next day from Naples to New York for an extended American visit. Never before had anyone so high up in the Vatican visited the United States.29 Speculation swirled in the world’s capitals about why the pope would be dispatching his secretary of state to America. None took seriously the Vatican’s claim that the visit was purely “personal.”

  Much attention focused on the radio priest Charles Coughlin, whose increasingly vicious attacks on Franklin Roosevelt, in the midst of his 1936 reelection campaign, had divided America’s Catholic community and proven an embarrassment for the Vatican. The reason for Pacelli’s surprising visit, The New York Times speculated, was the pope’s desire to assure President Roosevelt that he had had nothing to do with Coughlin’s assault. Other papers predicted that Pacelli would shut down the fiery radio priest’s operation. Back in Rome, Italy’s ambassador to the Holy See had another explanation for the trip: Pacelli was campaigning to succeed Pius XI and was courting the favor of America’s four cardinals.30

  Boston’s Bishop Spellman took charge of the visit. The two men would fly from one end of the United States to the other, logging over eight thousand miles, making countless stops. Pacelli collected honorary degrees at several Catholic colleges, met with almost all of America’s bishops, and spoke to large gatherings of priests and the faithful from Boston to California.31

  From the moment his visit was announced, press speculation focused on whether the cardinal would meet with the American president. Father Coughlin used his radio program to warn the Vatican secretary of state against such a meeting, since it would suggest Vatican support for Roosevelt’s reelection.32 His listeners responded with a flood of angry letters to the papal delegate in Washington adding their own words of warning. (Lacking formal diplomatic relations with the United States, the Vatican kept a delegate, not a nuncio, in the capital.)33 Bowing to the pressure, Pacelli waited until two days after the election to see Roosevelt.

  Their meeting took place at the president’s family home in Hyde Park, New York. The only record of their conversation comes from Roosevelt’s recollections several years later. What most impressed him, he said, was Pacelli’s seeming obsession with the threat of a Communist takeover in the United States. He sounded, thought the president, much like Father Coughlin. The cardinal kept repeating, “The great danger in America is that it will go communist.” Roosevelt countered that the real danger was that the United States might become fascist.

  Cardinal Pacelli during his visit to New York City, October 1936

  (photograph
credit 18.2)

  “Mr. President,” replied Cardinal Pacelli, “you simply do not understand the terrible importance of the communist movement.”

  “You just don’t understand the American people,” responded Roosevelt.34

  Two days later Pacelli boarded the ocean liner Count of Savoy in New York harbor, bound for home.35

  ––

  ONE NIGHT IN OCTOBER, while Cardinal Pacelli was still in America, the pope fainted, banging his head against a wooden bedpost as he fell. It was a hint of what was to come. By November, the once-vigorous pope had to be carried to his public audiences in a chair borne aloft by attendants. In early December, with his heart showing signs of frightening weakness, the seventy-nine-year-old pope was confined to bed.36

  The pope’s varicose veins caused him terrible pain, eased a bit by his attendants, who massaged his legs for an hour each day. He spent most of the time in bed, and his doctor visited four times a day.37 At night the pope’s two old clerical assistants from Milan took turns sitting by his bedside, for he was too uncomfortable to get much sleep. The only regular appointment he still kept was with Cardinal Pacelli, who came by daily as the pope struggled to keep up with all that was going on.38

  The pope was in such agony that Pacelli could barely contain his tears. Pius kept pressing his doctor to tell him how long it would take to get better. “I don’t want you to hide the truth,” he told the tongue-tied physician, who sputtered that he could not say. The pope drank a little milk in the morning, then some clear soup in the afternoon, listening to classical music on his radio. As Christmas approached, he insisted on giving the cardinals their traditional blessing, offered at his bedside. Meanwhile they began to talk, discreetly, about a successor. At a certain point the pope stopped asking his doctor when his health would improve. He asked only that God grant him a dignified death.39

  The Vatican put out a series of misleading stories to explain why Pius was bedridden. But when the new year came and he still did not reappear, rumors of his declining health could no longer be brushed off. In early January 1937 L’Osservatore romano reported that the pontiff suffered from arteriosclerosis and weak blood circulation. There was some hope, according to the Vatican newspaper, that the pope’s condition might improve, but given the nature of the disease and the pope’s age, a “certain prudence” was called for.40

  The pope was less sanguine. Every night, at his request, his secretary read him historical accounts of the final days of previous popes. “It’s time to go home,” he said wearily. “We need to prepare the bags.”41 As he rested, he gazed at the painting across from his bed. It showed Andrea Avellino, patron saint of the good death. In pain and weakened by age, Pius chafed at his helplessness. The strong, self-assured, demanding pope who had so terrorized those around him seemed to be rapidly receding. But as Pius XI might have said, God works in strange ways. The pope’s greatest battle was yet to come.

  PART THREE

  MUSSOLINI, HITLER, AND THE JEWS

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  ATTACKING HITLER

  NO ONE THOUGHT A CONCLAVE COULD BE FAR OFF. CARDINALS SIZED one another up. American journalists snooped around the Vatican with wads of cash, eager to find someone to tip them off the moment the pope died.1

  Mussolini’s ambassador, Bonifacio Pignatti, kept him abreast of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. In Italy, he reported, “faith in the Duce is absolute and beyond discussion in all of the Episcopal hierarchy and clergy”; Pius XI’s successor “would have to be crazy” to upset the Church’s good relations with the Fascist government. But outside Italy things were different, he warned: the Third Reich’s “immorality trials” of Catholic clergy had united cardinals worldwide against the Nazis. Nor were they pleased by the assault on Catholic parochial schools and the recent closing of the Catholic daily press. The deification of Hitler and German blood, along with the growth of Hitler Youth at the expense of Catholic youth groups, only made matters worse. Pignatti worried that the cardinals’ hostility toward Hitler was affecting their attitude to Mussolini. While Italy’s cardinals would surely want a pope who would support the Vatican’s alliance with Mussolini, the non-Italians might try to elect someone less enamored of Fascism.2

  Surprisingly, the pope began to get better. Those cardinals who had begun packing their bags for a trip to Rome found themselves unpacking. Pius would never again enjoy good health, but he would recover enough to resume his most important duties, meeting with the heads of the Curia congregations and eventually even resuming his public audiences, albeit at a reduced rate. In late March 1937 Cardinal Baudrillart, seeing the pope for the first time in months, observed that he “seems very much changed to me, much thinner, his face emaciated and wrinkled. The expression on his face is softer.”

  On Easter Sunday, the pontiff made a dramatic return to public view, borne aloft in his sedia gestatoria in a cortege that snaked through a packed St. Peter’s Basilica. He looked weak, his face ashen. Many cried with joy, having thought they would never see him again. The pope’s eyes, too, were moist as he traversed the cavernous basilica. After the mass, his attendants carried him to the external balcony, where he looked out at the crowd that filled St. Peter’s Square, awaiting his blessing. “The hour came,” recalled Baudrillart. “The pope’s voice remains strong and clear. The world, this sad world, is blessed!”3

  A few days later, when the pope entered his library for the first time since his illness, he could barely contain his tears. Many nights as he lay awake he had wondered if he would ever see it again. In the weeks ahead, as the pains in his legs were partly relieved by elastic stockings and regular massages, the pope arrived for his public audiences in a chair borne aloft on two poles. Inside his apartment, he used a wheelchair. In those brief but precious moments when he got out into the gardens, he walked haltingly with a cane. He now held his first appointment of the day at ten A.M. and took a long nap after lunch. On Mondays he stayed in bed all day. At night he relaxed by listening to music on the radio.4

  THE VATICAN’S RELATIONS WITH Hitler were only getting worse. The show trials of German priests were generating sensational press coverage, and the number of children in Catholic schools was diminishing to the vanishing point. Yet the Vatican’s alliance with Mussolini remained strong. Months after Italian troops marched into Addis Ababa, Italians still swelled with patriotic pride. “Mussolini’s smile is like a flash of the Sun god,” wrote one fawning Italian journalist, “expected and craved because it brings health and life.”5 Italy’s most prominent Catholic newspaper, L’Avvenire d’Italia, and the Vatican’s L’Osservatore romano both expressed enthusiastic support for the regime.6

  Mussolini’s ties with Hitler had done little to lessen the Vatican’s support for him, but outside Italy the dictator’s luster was fading. In February, Italy’s ambassador to the United States worriedly reported the change: Americans were coming to see Fascism and Nazism as two faces of the same totalitarian coin, and Americans despised the Nazis.7

  But Mussolini still enjoyed Italian Americans’ enthusiastic support. As a result, politicians in areas with large Italian American populations were reluctant to criticize him. In 1937 New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, told a Jewish group that Hitler’s effigy should be put in a chamber of horrors at the World’s Fair, and a year later he branded the Führer a “contemptible coward.” But even though Italy’s anti-Semitic laws were instituted in 1938, La Guardia—whose Italian mother came from a Jewish family—dared say nothing critical of the Duce until 1940, when Italy invaded France and entered World War II on the Nazis’ side.8

  In early 1937 a German reporter arrived at the Palazzo Venezia to interview Mussolini. At the far end of the Hall of the Map of the World, framed by the enormous marble fireplace, sat his host. The Duce sprang to his feet, standing ramrod straight, and extended his right arm in Roman salute. He asked his German visitor how the Führer was. “Very well,” replied the reporter, who was struck by Mussolini’s vig
or. His “Caesarean face” appeared to have gotten younger, and the wrinkles around his eyes had disappeared.

  An epic battle was about to begin, the Duce told him. Communism was threatening to destroy Europe. The democracies had become the centers of infection, “propagators of the communist bacillus.” Europe was at a turning point. “This is the age of strong individualities and predominant personalities,” Mussolini explained. “Democracies are sand, shifting sand. Our political ideal of the State is a rock, a granite peak.” Only Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany could save Europe.9

  AS THE POPE REGAINED some of his strength, he again asked Mussolini to help him with Hitler, but his hopes were in vain. Mussolini told Tacchi Venturi there was little he or anyone else could do to influence the Führer when it came to questions of religion. In relaying this message to the pope, Tacchi Venturi pointed out that the Duce had tried his best. Lest the pope’s enthusiasm for Mussolini diminish, he quickly added that, “with the same kindness,” the dictator had agreed to all the pope’s other requests. He would censor a newspaper that the pope had objected to and confiscate all copies of a pamphlet that American Protestants had recently sent their brethren in Italy.10

  In the summer of 1936, the German bishops had asked the pope to prepare an encyclical urging the Nazi government to respect the terms of its 1933 concordat with the Church. In early 1937, in his sickbed, the pope met with three German cardinals and two bishops who had come to discuss the proposal. Pacelli, not wanting to antagonize Hitler, advised the pontiff against issuing his criticism in the form of an encyclical: he should simply send Hitler a pastoral letter, to be shared only with the German bishops. But Pius XI spurned Pacelli’s advice. He wanted to issue an encyclical that all Germans—and all the world—would read. The result was dramatic. On Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, bishops and priests throughout Germany read the encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (“With Deep Anxiety”), from the pulpit to people unaccustomed to any public criticism of the Nazi regime.11