Absolute Monarchs (60 page)

The final break came on Passion Sunday 1937, when the encyclical
Mit Brennender Sorge
, having been smuggled into Germany, secretly printed there on twelve different presses, and distributed by bicycle or on foot, was read from every Catholic pulpit. It should have come at least three years earlier; even now it failed to condemn Hitler and National Socialism by name. But its meaning was clear enough, particularly since it had been written in German rather than the usual Latin. The government of the Reich, it declared, had “sown the tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open hostility to Christ and his Church, fed from a thousand different sources and making use of every available means.”

The eleventh paragraph of the encyclical is of particular interest because, though once again there is no specific condemnation of anti-Semitism, its target is clear. It stresses the value of the Jewish Old Testament, which it describes as being “exclusively the word of God and a substantial part of His revelation”:

Whoever wishes to see banished from church and school the Biblical history and the wise doctrines of the Old Testament, blasphemes the name of God, blasphemes the Almighty’s plan of salvation, and makes limited and narrow human thought the judge of God’s designs over the history of the world.

Non Abbiamo Bisogno
and
Mit Brennender Sorge
together left no doubt in anyone’s mind about the pope’s opinions of the Fascist and National Socialist regimes, and no one was surprised that, when, in March 1938, the führer paid a state visit to Rome, Pius should deliberately slip away to Castel Gandolfo. But he was not yet finished: only five days after the second encyclical he published a third, for which he reverted to the traditional Latin.
Divini Redemptoris
was primarily directed against his greatest bugbear, communism.

This modern revolution … exceeds in amplitude and violence anything yet experienced in the preceding persecutions launched against the Church. Entire peoples find themselves in danger of falling back into a barbarism worse than that which oppressed the greater part of the world at the coming of the Redeemer.

This all too imminent danger … is bolshevistic and atheistic Communism, which aims at upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization.…

Communism, moreover, strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.…

For the first time in history we are witnessing a struggle, cold-blooded in purpose and mapped out to the last detail, between man and “all that is called God.”

This hatred of communism was enough to ensure that when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936 the pope immediately gave his support to General Francisco Franco, though after the Republican government’s brutal separation of Church and state in 1931, which had led to mob attacks on churches and monasteries and massacres of priests, monks and nuns, he could hardly have done otherwise. It was nonetheless embarrassing for him to see Franco’s victory being achieved on the backs of the two dictators—the more so when the Spanish Falangists began to emulate the worst characteristics of the Nazi and Fascist regimes that he had so frequently denounced.

But Pius’s pontificate, overshadowed as it was by the European dictatorships, was by no means exclusively political. It saw the number of Catholic missionaries more than doubled and at the same time a far greater degree of responsibility devolving on recently converted communities; as early as 1926 the pope personally consecrated the first six Chinese bishops, and the total of native priests in India and the Far East increased from 3,000 to more than 7,000. It was a considerable disappointment to him that his efforts toward a reunion of the Catholic and Orthodox churches met with so little response. (They might have had more success if he had not called the churches back to the fold quite so patronizingly, as lost sheep.)

Fortunately, he could always seek consolation in science and the arts. Pius was a genuine scholar, the first since Benedict XIV nearly two centuries before, and was not afraid to show it. He modernized and enlarged the Vatican Library, founded the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, built the Pinacoteca for the Vatican’s by now superb collection of pictures, and transferred the observatory from Rome to Castel Gandolfo. In 1931 he shocked many of the more old-fashioned faithful by installing a radio station and becoming the first pope to make regular broadcasts to the world. One of the most important of these transmissions was made at the time of the Munich crisis of September 1938, when the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to Munich to meet Hitler in a vain attempt to prevent the imminent world war. Pius had little respect for Chamberlain, who, as he instantly saw, was no match for his opponent, but he broadcast a moving appeal for peace which was heard across Europe.

Alas, he was by now a sick man and failing fast. Diabetes was rapidly taking hold, and both his legs were hideously ulcerated. On November 25, he suffered two heart attacks within a few hours of each other. He continued to give audiences—though now from his sickbed—and in January 1939 received Chamberlain and the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, in whom he did his best to instill a degree of courage and determination to resist Hitler’s demands. But he was unsuccessful, as he had known he would be:
“Sono due limaccie,”
he is said to have murmured as they left—“They’re a pair of slugs.”

By this time he was already working on what was to be his most vehement attack on the dictatorships, to be delivered at a meeting of all the Italian bishops on February 11, 1939. He implored his doctors to keep him alive long enough to make what he felt might be the most important speech of his life. Alas, they failed to do so; he died the day before the speech was due to be made. Almost immediately the rumor began to spread that he had been murdered on Fascist orders by one of the doctors, Francesco Petacci.
⁵
What we know for a fact, on the authority of Mussolini’s son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano, is that the Duce was later extremely anxious to find a copy of the speech and actually sent the Italian ambassador to the Holy See to Pacelli, now Pope Pius XII, to inquire about it. Pacelli assured him that it had been consigned to the secret archives, where it would remain a dead letter.

Pius XI had his faults. He was an autocrat through and through. In his concept of Christianity he was bigoted, reactionary, and inflexible: the Roman Catholic Church was right, everyone else was wrong. He had no time for the incipient ecumenical movement; so far as he was concerned, there could be no bargaining over God’s revealed truth. “The encyclical [
Mortalium Annos
, of 1928] made it clear that the ecumenical message of the Vatican for the other Churches was simple and uncompromising: ‘Come in slowly, with your hands above your head.’ ”
⁶
In the earlier period of his pontificate his detestation of communism—which, let it never be forgotten, he had seen at first hand in Poland—made him more tolerant of the Fascists, and at first perhaps even of the Nazis, than he might otherwise have been; but in his last years his open and unflinching hostility to both earned him the respect and admiration of the free world.

POPE PIUS XI
died on February 10, 1939; Pope Pius XII was elected on March 2—his sixty-third birthday—on the third ballot, on the very first day of the conclave. It was the shortest for three hundred years. According to his sister, Eugenio Pacelli had been “born a priest”; while still a child, he would dress up in cassock and surplice and act out the celebration of the Mass in his bedroom. As soon as he was old enough, he studied at the Gregorian University and the Capranica College in Rome, and he was still only twenty-three when he was ordained in 1899. Two years later he entered the papal service, after which he never looked back, serving as nuncio first in Munich and then in Berlin, becoming a cardinal in 1929, and in the following year succeeding Gasparri as secretary of state. In this capacity he had negotiated concordats with Austria and, in July 1933, with Nazi Germany. Although no secretary of state had been elected pope since Clement IX in 1667, Pacelli was by far the best-known, the most experienced, and the most intelligent member of the Sacred College. His predecessor had had a huge admiration for him and, as his own health had progressively collapsed, had entrusted to him more and more of the papal business. His election was, effectively, a foregone conclusion.

Cardinals are known as “Princes of the Church”; few in the last three centuries have been more princely than Pacelli. When, on May 18, 1917, he set off from Rome to Munich, his train included an additional sealed carriage, brought expressly from Zurich, containing sixty cases of food, in case the wartime rations of Germany should offend his notoriously delicate digestion. His private compartment, a luxury specifically forbidden during the war, had had to be specially requisitioned from the Italian State Railways, and all the stationmasters between Rome and the Swiss border were put on red alert. Six weeks later he traveled in similar state to Berlin, where he discussed Benedict’s peace plan first with the imperial chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, and subsequently with Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. Not surprisingly, the talks came to nothing; there could be no accommodation while each side believed it could win. Pacelli returned to Munich and devoted himself once again to war relief.

At this, it must be said, he worked hard—visiting prison camps, distributing food parcels to the prisoners, giving spiritual assistance whenever and wherever he could. One incident only strikes a sour note: when he dealt with a request to the pope by the chief rabbi of Munich to use his influence for the release of a consignment of Italian palm fronds, which his Jewish flock needed for the forthcoming celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles. The fronds, it appeared, had already been purchased but were being held up in Como. Pacelli replied that although he had forwarded the request to Rome, he feared that thanks to wartime delays and the fact that the Holy See had no diplomatic relations with the Italian government, it was unlikely that anything could be done in time. He explained confidentially to Gasparri, however, that

it seemed to me that to go along with this would be to give the Jews special assistance not within the scope of practical, arm’s-length, purely civil or natural rights common to all human beings, but in a positive and direct way to assist them in the exercise of their Jewish cult.

In April 1919, in the confusion following the armistice of the previous November, a trio of Bolsheviks—Max Levien, Eugen Leviné, and Towia Axelrod—seized power in Bavaria. There followed a brief reign of terror, during which the foreign missions came under particular attack; the diplomatic corps consequently decided that it should send representatives to register a protest with Levien. Pacelli, then nuncio, reported to Gasparri:

Since it would have been totally undignified for me to appear in the presence of this aforesaid gentleman, I sent the
uditore
[a certain Monsignor Schioppa].…

The scene that presented itself at the palace was indescribable. The confusion totally chaotic, the filth completely nauseating … and in the midst of all this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with lecherous demeanour and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female rabble was Levien’s mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcée, who was in charge. And it was to her that the nunciature was obliged to pay homage in order to proceed.

This Levien is a young man, of about thirty or thirty-five, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly. He deigned to receive the Monsignor Uditore in the corridor, surrounded by an armed escort, one of whom was an armed hunchback, his faithful bodyguard. With a hat on his head and smoking a cigarette, he listened to what Monsignor Schioppa told him, whining repeatedly that he was in a hurry and had more important things to do.
⁷

Much was to be written in later years of Pius XII’s deep love and admiration of the Jewish people. The last two quotations suggest that such reports may have been somewhat exaggerated. On matters of color, on the other hand, there was no pretense. As early as 1920 Pacelli had complained to Gasparri that black soldiers in the French army were routinely raping German women and children in the Rhineland. To these accusations, which included no suggestion that white soldiers might be inclined to do the same, the army, not surprisingly, issued vehement denials, but Pacelli continued to believe the charges and to urge papal intervention. A quarter of a century later, as pope, he was to ask the British Foreign Office for assurances that “no Allied colored troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned in Rome after the occupation.”

NAZI GERMANY HAD
annexed Austria in March 1938. Exactly a year later, after the fiasco of the Munich Agreement, German troops were massing on the border of Czechoslovakia. Yet, on March 6, 1939, just four days after his election, Pope Pius XII could personally draft a letter to Hitler:

To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of Our Pontificate We desire to express the wish to remain united by the bonds of profound and benevolent friendship with the German people who are entrusted to your care.… We pray that Our great desire for the prosperity of the German people and for their progress in every domain may, with God’s help, come to full realization.