The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  Word spread among journalists close to the Vatican that Tacchi Venturi and Mussolini were far along in reaching a deal. Achille Starace, head of the Fascist Party, and Lamberto Vignoli, head of Catholic Action, meanwhile met to follow up on points two and three of the agreement.20

  On August 20 The New York Times featured news of the bargain on its front page. “Tensions between the Vatican and the Fascist party over Catholic Action associations, which in recent weeks the Italian press has accused of being hostile to Italy’s racial doctrines, was eased today by the announcement that Achille Starace, Fascist party secretary, and Lamberto Vignoli, president of the Italian Catholic Action, had reached an understanding that places their relations on the basis of the accords of September, 1931.” The Times reporter had learned, albeit in a vague way, of the secret deal at the heart of the agreement. In exchange for Mussolini’s offer to leave Catholic Action alone, the Vatican would go along with the regime’s forthcoming anti-Semitic drive: “as a result of the conversations between Mussolini and Father Tacchi Venturi Catholic Action pledged itself not to undertake any activity that could be interpreted as hostile to Italy’s racial policy. In return the Fascist party gave guarantees that no retaliatory measures would be taken against party members who also belonged to Catholic Action.”21

  On August 21, Rome’s Il Messaggero ran its own account of the agreement under the title “Accords Confirmed Between Party and Catholic Action.” It reported the meeting of Starace and Vignoli and the resulting accord. It accurately described the understanding that Mussolini had reached with Tacchi Venturi on Catholic Action: as long as it abided by the terms of the 1931 accord and confined its activities to the religious sphere, it would be free to operate unmolested. But unlike the American newspaper, the Italian papers made no mention of what Mussolini expected from the pope in exchange.

  The pope held up the Vatican announcement of the deal, seeking further guarantees that Catholic Action members who had lost their Fascist Party membership would indeed get it back. After more meetings between Tacchi Venturi and Mussolini, the pope was finally satisfied. The Vatican daily published news of the agreement on August 25. The dispute over Catholic Action was settled. Again, no mention was made of any quid pro quo involving Vatican support of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign.22

  Encouraged by his advisers, the pope was gradually making peace with the deal that Tacchi Venturi had worked out with Mussolini. But he remained unhappy about Mussolini’s embrace of Hitler and a racial ideology that struck him as anti-Christian. While the world’s press was publishing news of the agreement, the pope privately expressed his anger. Have Tacchi Venturi tell Mussolini, the pope told his secretary of state, that if he wants to kill the Holy Father, the methods that he is using are effective. And he again added a threat. Before he died, he would “let the whole world know how the Catholic religion and the Holy Father are being treated in Italy.”23

  In public the pope was now more circumspect, but some hint of his continuing unease crept into his remarks. In a talk to students at the College for the Propagation of the Faith building in Castel Gandolfo, the pope returned to the topic of “exaggerated nationalism.” Pignatti’s number two, Carlo Fecia di Cossato, who reported the news (Pignatti was presumably off for his August vacation), thought it no coincidence that the pope returned to speak to the same audience as he had in his controversial July 28 remarks on Mussolini’s new racial policy. But this time, the pope’s words were more prudent. As a result of all the criticism he had received, said the diplomat, the pope “put a little water in his wine.” While there was a place for “a just, moderate temperate nationalism, associated with all the virtues,” the pope said, there was also an unhealthy form, an “exaggerated nationalism,” which he deemed “a real curse.” Cossato was pleased by the tenor of the pope’s remarks: “The concern to soften the bad impression produced by the July 28 speech seems clear to me.”24

  Mussolini, sensitive to any hint of criticism, was less pleased.25 “Contrary to what is believed,” he told Ciano, “I am a patient man. It is necessary though, that I not be forced to lose this patience, otherwise I will react, destroying everything in sight. If the pope continues to talk, I will scrape off the layer of clericalism from the Italians, and before you can say it, I’ll make them become anticlerical.” The pope was mistaken if he believed Italians were more devoted to him than they were to their Duce. “The men in the Vatican,” he told his son-in-law, “are insensitive and mummified. Religious faith is on the decline: no one believes in a God who takes care of our suffering.” And with a dose of blasphemy, he added, “I would hold in contempt a God who takes an interest in the private life of the corner cop on the via del Corso.”

  While those around the pope were trying to bring him around, across the Tiber Ciano was trying to calm down his father-in-law. “In the difficult international situation,” he wrote in his diary on August 22, “a conflict with the Church would not benefit anyone.”26

  Applying further pressure on the pope, Italian newspapers continued to cast the new Fascist campaign as simply putting long-standing Church teachings on the Jews into effect. An August 24 story in Giornale d’Italia—the paper that had first published the racial manifesto—recalled Pius XI’s decision, ten years earlier, to suppress the Friends of Israel for opposing the Church teaching that Jews were “perfidious.” The notoriously anti-Semitic newspaper Il Tevere ran a story that day under the identical title, “The Church and the Jews”; the use of the same title in several newspapers was a sure sign the government had planted the stories. “In every era,” the paper reported, “the popes have sought to erect barriers around the Jews’ activities, to isolate them as one does for an epidemic.” The popes had taken harsher measures against the Jews than the ones the Fascist regime was contemplating, as the popes sought “to protect their subjects from the Jews’ diabolical moral influence.” After listing dozens of Church canons warning of the Jewish threat, the article concluded: “The Italian race wants to purify itself from this perfidious, foreign people forever.”27

  The pope sent his nuncio to talk to Ciano about the continuing tensions. Ciano described their meeting, held in late August, in his diary:

  Borgongini Duca, on the Pope’s orders, comes to discuss the announcement which, at least for the moment, will end the dispute between the Party and Catholic Action. I nudged him a bit and he opens up about the Pope. He says that he has an awful personality, is authoritarian and almost insolent. At the Vatican they are all terrified of him. Even Borgongini himself trembles when he is about to enter the Pontiff’s room. He treats everyone arrogantly: even the most distinguished cardinals. Cardinal Pacelli, for example, when he is called by the Pope must, like a petty secretary, take notes by dictation of all his instructions. He is again in good health. He eats cooked fruit and a little meat. He drinks red wine in limited quantities, and does sufficient exercise in the garden. He is 82 years old and still runs the government of the Church down to the smallest details.28

  The government was ramping up a massive anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, relying heavily on its new popular biweekly, La Difesa della razza.29 Doctored photographs and grotesque illustrations filled its pages, chronicling the degeneracy of Jews and Africans. The first issue published an image of a man’s face, in profile, his enormous nose hooking down to rest against his fat lips. It bore the label “Typical photograph of a Jew, clearly showing the characteristics of his race.”30 The magazine’s portrayal of the Jewish threat mirrored that of the Vatican-approved pages of La Civiltà cattolica, with the addition of pseudoscientific claptrap given a patina of respectability by its authors’ academic titles.31 The Jews were behind Communism and capitalism; they were taught by the Talmud to hate all Christians and to rule over them; they had no allegiance to the country in which they lived; they conspired secretly against both the Church and Fascism. One of the feature stories in the first issue of La Difesa della razza was titled “Fifty Years of Polemics in La Civiltà catt
olica,” concluding that “there is no incompatibility between the doctrine of the Church and racism, as it has been expressed in Italy.”32

  Pignatti, upon returning from his summer vacation in late August, was relieved to learn that the pope’s remarks to his most recent audiences were harmless. Although Pius XI had briefly raised the question of racism, he had not said anything that the Italian ambassador found objectionable. But Pignatti remained nervous. “One can only hope,” he told Ciano, “that the pope stops talking. With his mania for speaking … one always fears the worst.”33

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE RACIAL LAWS

  ON SEPTEMBER 1 THE ITALIAN GOVERNMENT REVOKED THE CITIZENSHIP of foreign-born Jews who had become citizens after 1919. It ordered all Jews who were not citizens to leave the country within six months. The following day all Jewish teachers—from elementary school through university—were fired. Christian children could not be taught by Jews. Nor would Jewish children be allowed to attend public schools at any level. Jewish members of honorary societies of arts, letters, and sciences were ejected. For the purposes of these “racial laws,” Jews were defined as those born of parents of the “Jewish race,” even if they might “profess a religion different from Judaism.”

  In announcing the new laws, La Civiltà cattolica expressed no opposition—hardly surprising since it had been calling for just such measures since 1880. But the journal was eager to distinguish the basis of its own anti-Jewish campaign from one based on purity of blood. Jews, in its view, were a threat to Italians not because of their biology but because of their behavior.1 The journal’s own call for government action against the Jewish threat had been “inspired solely by the legitimate defense of the Christian people against”—and here it quoted approvingly from an earlier article—“ ‘a foreign nation among the nations in which it lives and sworn enemy of their well-being.’ ”2

  In the early days of the anti-Semitic campaign, the Fascist press made heavy use of the unofficial Vatican journal to generate popular support for the racial laws. The Vatican turned to the journal’s éminence grise, Enrico Rosa, to clarify the matter. His article, “The Jewish Question and Civiltà cattolica,” expressed no opposition to the new anti-Semitic laws but did take issue with those who, in supporting them, mischaracterized the journal’s rationale for recommending that governments restrict Jews’ rights.

  Events had shown the wisdom, Father Rosa declared, of the journal’s prophecy that granting Jews legal equality would prove catastrophic not only for Christian society but for the Jews themselves. Giving them equal rights had unleashed widespread hatred against them, since they had used their newfound freedom to accumulate occult power and wealth and to persecute the Catholic Church and oppress Christians.3

  Near panic, many Italian Jews sought out parish priests to baptize them. Over the next three years, one out of ten Italian Jews would renounce their faith. Almost fifty of Bologna’s one thousand Jews were baptized in August and September 1938, in a desperate effort to escape persecution.4

  As the Fascist anti-Semitic campaign took its fateful turn from theory to active persecution, the country’s Roman Catholic clergy voiced few objections. In those rare cases where a priest did express criticism, Mussolini had only to get word to Cardinal Pacelli, and the priest was disciplined. Such was the case on September 1, when Pacelli received a report of critical remarks from a priest in a remote village north of Milan, near Lake Como. Don Abramo Mauri lived at a Church rest home, recuperating from nervous exhaustion. The local nuns had invited him to conduct a mass in their little chapel. There, one Sunday, he complained that “they are already starting to inculcate a sense of false pride in these snot-nosed kids of only three years old.” The local Fascist Party leader, who was present, was outraged, sure the priest was referring to Fascist youth groups. To make matters worse, the priest had gone on to criticize the new racial campaign, predicting that it would lead to war.5

  Mussolini with children in a Fascist youth group, 1938

  (photograph credit 24.1)

  Cardinal Pacelli asked the bishop of Como to investigate.6 After looking into the matter, the bishop assured Pacelli that the priest’s comments about the “snot-nosed kids” had been misinterpreted. They referred, he said, to overindulgent mothers who spoiled their children. But the bishop found no way to explain away the priest’s criticism of the racial campaign. As a result, he ordered Don Mauri never to give another sermon in the church.7

  EUROPE, MEANWHILE, WAS MOVING ever closer to war. On September 1 Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede its German-speaking Sudetenland region to the Third Reich. France began to mobilize its troops. In Rome, William Phillips, the U.S. ambassador, looked on with growing concern. Mussolini’s racial manifesto in July had produced shock in the United States and alarm in the U.S. State Department, the latest sign that Mussolini intended to tie Italy’s fate to Nazi Germany. Phillips could see few levers that might prevent this catastrophe, and none more promising than the pope. He had excitedly reported to Washington on the pope’s July 20 speech and his criticism of the Duce’s eagerness to imitate Hitler. A month later his hopes had been dampened when he read the Osservatore romano article supporting restrictions on Jews. Still he had not entirely given up. Perhaps the pope might yet be swayed.

  As soon as the latest racial laws were announced in early September, evicting Jewish children and teachers from Italy’s schools, Phillips asked to see Joseph Hurley, the one American prelate in the Vatican secretary of state office. The two men had met several times in the past, and in the absence of an American ambassador to the Holy See, Hurley kept Phillips informed on what was going on in the Vatican.8

  When the two men met that evening in the U.S. embassy, the ambassador got right to the point. Both he and the American government were horrified by the new anti-Semitic laws. Not only were they outrageous in themselves; they would turn Americans sharply against the Italian government. Phillips saw the racial campaign as part of a larger, worrisome picture. Mussolini was losing his sense of reality, surrounded by sycophants and refusing to meet with foreign ambassadors who might offer a different view. Should things get worse, Phillips told Hurley, “perhaps the Vatican will be able, through its prudent intervention with the Italian Government, to ward off the catastrophe of a general war.”9

  As an incentive, Phillips suggested that should the pope denounce the new racial laws, the American public would be so pleased that it would “disarm the Protestant opposition.” This would allow the American government to establish formal diplomatic relations with the Vatican. The Holy See had sought such recognition for decades, but the American political situation had so far made it impossible. The anti-Catholic prejudices of the Protestant majority, together with the belief that the Vatican was a religious organization and not a sovereign state, had stymied efforts in the past.10 The next day Hurley passed Phillips’s message on to Pacelli.

  Three days later Pius XI held an audience for the staff of Belgian Catholic radio. With the American ambassador’s message fresh in his mind, he spurned his counselors’ advice and let his heart guide him. His voice became laden with emotion and tears came to his eyes as he began to discuss the new racial campaign. “Every time I read the words ‘the sacrifice of our father Abraham,’ ” said the pope, referring to a phrase in the priestly blessing during mass, “I cannot help but be deeply moved.” His voice trembled. “It is impossible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. We recognize that everyone has the right to self-defense and can undertake those necessary actions to safeguard his legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually we are all Semites.”11

  This was just what Ledóchowski, Tacchi Venturi, Borgongini, and Pacelli had feared. But they found a way to limit the damage. When L’Osservatore romano published an account of the pope’s remarks, no mention was made of his anguished words about the Jews.12 That some Catholics noticed the Vatican newspaper’s silence is clear from a police i
ntelligence report filed the day after the pope’s comment. “Many Catholics who had fully approved of what the pontiff recently said in defense of the Jews,” it read, “now do not know how to explain why the Vatican newspaper, the only one not subject to Italian government censorship, has not returned to the subject following the decisions taken by the Council of Ministers. They find this silence to be strange.”13

  How exactly Pacelli and his undersecretary, Domenico Tardini, had ensured that the Vatican newspaper ignored the pope’s explosive remarks remains a mystery. Most of the pages from Pacelli’s log of his meetings with the pope in these months are, curiously, missing from those open to researchers at the Vatican Secret Archives.

  ITALIANS, THOUGHT MUSSOLINI, WERE a weak people. He needed to toughen them up. At an early October Grand Council meeting where additional racial laws were approved, he explained, “It is my task to bust the Italians’ balls. I understand that there are, at the margins, those who love the comfortable life. But they are just the fringes of the nation. We will cut them out.”14