The Pope and Mussolini (35 page)

That Germany’s Catholic population would find the notion of a Jewish conspiracy wholly believable should hardly be a surprise. For years, the Vatican-vetted
La Civiltà cattolica
—among many other Church publications—had warned that Jews were the evil force behind a dangerous conspiracy. They were said to be the secret masters of both Communism and capitalism, all aimed at enslaving Christians.
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The only notable difference in the Nazi version—other than the additional layer of pseudobiology—was the omission of the Protestants.

Among the most influential Vatican figures pushing this conspiracy theory was Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, head of the Jesuit order. In a handwritten letter in 1936, Ledóchowski urged the pope to issue a worldwide warning about the “terrible danger that grows more menacing each day.” The danger came from Moscow’s atheistic Communist propaganda—all the product of Jews, he said—while “the great world press, it too under Jewish control, barely speaks of it.… An encyclical on this argument,” he advised, would, “lead not only the Catholics but others as well to a more energetic and better organized resistance.”
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Sharing Ledóchowski’s belief that Communism posed a grave danger, Pius XI agreed to have a special encyclical prepared and, over the following months, frequently sent him drafts for his comments and suggestions. Unhappy that they said nothing about the Jews, Ledóchowski kept pushing the pope to add language linking them to the Communist danger. “It seems necessary to us in such an encyclical,” he advised, in reaction to one such draft, “to at least make an allusion to the Jewish influence, being certain that not only were the intellectual authors of communism (Marx, Lassalle,
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etc.) all Jews, but also that the communist movement in Russia was staged by Jews. And now, too, although not always openly in every region, if you look more deeply into it, it is the Jews who are the primary champions and promoters of communist propaganda.”

Next to Ledóchowski’s line about the Jews being responsible for Communism in Russia, the pope scribbled a single word,
Verificare—
Verify. He would issue his encyclical denouncing Communism a month later under the name
Divini redemptoris
, but much to the disappointment of the Jesuit head, it would say nothing about Jews.
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La Civiltà cattolica
showed no such scruples, doing all it could to frighten Catholics about the dangerous Jewish conspiracy. A few months after the pope issued his anti-Communist encyclical, the journal published yet another warning, titled “The Jewish Question.” It got to the point with its first sentence: “Two facts, which seem contradictory, are established among the Jews spread around the modern world: their domination over money and their preponderance in socialism and communism.” Not only were the founders of Communism Jews, according to the Jesuit journal, but “the most recent revolutionary leaders of modern socialism and bolshevism are all Jews.”
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While Hitler was developing his own plan for dealing with the Jewish threat, the Jesuit journal considered the proper Christian response. It listed three possibilities. Best would be to convert all Jews to Christianity, but clearly this was not going to happen, for Jews stubbornly insisted on remaining Jews. The second possibility was to relocate Europe’s Jews to Palestine. But the land could not support all sixteen million of them, and even if it could, the Jews would never do the necessary work, for they were “uniquely endowed with the faculty of being parasites, and destroyers have no aptitude and no taste for manual labor.”

There remained only the third option, the approach that the Church had used so successfully for centuries: strip Jews of their rights as citizens.
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Later in the same issue,
La Civiltà cattolica
reported on the recent Nazi congress in Nuremberg, held in September 1936. “With indefatigable tenacity,” Hitler told the crowd, “the Jewish revolutionary headquarters prepares world revolution.” After citing these remarks, the journal quoted, without comment, Hitler’s assertion that 98 percent of the top positions in Russia were “in the hands of the Jews.” In the years
leading up to the Holocaust, both the Nazis and the Jesuit journal would keep hammering on this claim.
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Yet of 417 members of the highest leadership bodies in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s, only 6 percent came from Jewish backgrounds, and this figure dropped sharply in the 1930s, not least because Stalin’s purge trials had strong anti-Semitic undertones. In 1938, while
La Civiltà cattolica
and the Nazi government continued to warn that almost all the leaders of the USSR were Jewish, the most powerful body in the Soviet government, the nine-man Politburo, had only one member of Jewish origin. Of the thirty-seven members of the USSR Presidium, one came from a Jewish background.
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In his 1932 meeting with Mussolini, the pope had expressed his own preoccupation with the Russian Communist threat and had linked it to the “anti-Christian loathing of Judaism.” But much had happened since then. Hitler had come to power and was not only undermining the influence of the Church in Germany but spreading a pagan ideology antithetical to the Christian message. It was becoming ever clearer to Pius XI that the greatest danger facing Christianity came from the Nazis. But his advisers disagreed, viewing Hitler as the Church’s best hope for stopping the Communist advance. They urged the pope not to offend him.

C
HAPTER
SIXTEEN

CROSSING THE BORDER

M
USSOLINI
’
S AMBITIONS
—
AND EGO
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WERE GROWING EVER LARGER
. He wanted to be seen as the man who restored Rome to its ancient grandeur. For this a new empire was needed. His sights turned to Ethiopia, which, aside from Liberia, was the only part of Africa not already in European hands. It also had the advantage of having two Italian colonies, Italian Somaliland and Eritrea, on its borders.

The Duce had already hinted at his intentions. In late 1934, Ethiopian forces had fired on a group of Italian soldiers at Wal Wal, well across the Ethiopian border from Italian Somaliland. Italy’s press cast the incident as an assault on the nation’s honor. Mussolini threatened war unless Ethiopia apologized and offered compensation.
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With much fanfare, he sent several army divisions to Somalia and a fleet of ships to the Red Sea, telling them to await further instructions.
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Pius XI, far from happy, worried that an Italian invasion of Ethiopia would put Catholic missionaries throughout Africa at risk.

The pope was meanwhile becoming ever more conscious of his age. The exertions of the latest Holy Year, which had ended at Easter 1934, had left him exhausted. He had given up his brisk strolls through the Vatican gardens and found that even walking down the hall left him out
of breath. The heat was also bothering him.
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In the poorer parts of the old city and in the rapidly expanding shantytowns on the outskirts, electricity and running water were rare, and tuberculosis and trachoma all too common.
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The previous year Rome had been struck by a typhus epidemic. In the summer of 1934, the elderly pope looked forward to returning to his summer palace in the Alban Hills. “You can see how happy he is,” observed Domenico Tardini, Pizzardo’s assistant, on the day of the pope’s departure. “He seems to be just like a schoolboy about to go on a vacation.” Tardini took advantage of the pope’s unusually jolly mood to get 34,000 lire from him for Russian relief. “Ah,” wrote Tardini, “if the pope would only leave more often!”
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As one informant reported, the pope was now, “if possible, even more irascible, surly, and suspicious.”
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At public functions, dressed in his elaborate white robes, he projected a sense of regal immobility that made everyone around him seem fidgety and nervous. His fringe of hair was sprinkled with gray, but his voice was still firm and resonant, and his eyes, behind his thick spectacles, were ever vigilant. And while he had slowed down physically, he insisted on being informed of everything and deciding everything.
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While the pope was fretting about Mussolini’s threatened invasion, others in the Church took a very different view. Bologna’s
L’Avvenire d’Italia
, Italy’s most influential Catholic newspaper, echoed the Fascist press. Ethiopians were pagan barbarians. War would bring civilization—and Christianity—to the savages.
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The looming war put the pope in an impossible position. It could have disastrous consequences not only for Italy and Ethiopia but for Europe as a whole. Only the pope—so many thought—could prevent it, and calls from abroad urged him to publicly warn Mussolini to stand down. But Pius knew that defying Italy’s dictator in a matter so important to him would put their alliance at risk.

On August 27, 1935, two thousand Catholic nurses from twenty countries climbed into buses at the Vatican. They were on their way to the finale of their conference, an audience with the pope at Castel Gandolfo. Pius addressed them, praising their work, speaking for over an
hour. He then offered a concluding benediction. Pizzardo, who had helped organize the meeting, stood beaming alongside him. But unexpectedly, rather than leave at that point, the pontiff began reflecting on an entirely different subject. A war of conquest, he told the nurses, could never be tolerated. It would be “an unjust war, something beyond all imagination … it would be unspeakably horrible.”
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Pizzardo’s smile melted.

“The nurses, primarily foreigners,” Monsignor Tardini wrote in his diary, “listened with interest and pleasure. Listening with even greater interest, but without any pleasure, was Monsignor Pizzardo. What a disaster!” On the nurses’ return bus ride, to keep them from talking about the pope’s remarks, he insisted they spend the whole trip reciting the rosary. Back at the Vatican, practically in tears, Pizzardo looked “discouraged, undone, pallid, desperate.” He kept murmuring the pope’s words, “an ‘unjust war,’ an ‘unjust war.’ ”
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The next morning, when news of the pope’s speech reached Giuseppe Talamo, Italy’s acting ambassador to the Vatican, he rushed to the Vatican.
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“Mons. Pizzardo showed his consternation,” the Italian diplomat recalled, “telling me that nothing had suggested the Pontiff’s impromptu decision to address such a sensitive subject, without first in any way asking the secretary of state’s office for advice.”

Talamo urged Pizzardo to water down the text of the pope’s speech for publication in the Vatican newspaper. Pizzardo assured him that he and his colleagues were already doing “everything possible to mitigate and attenuate” the pope’s remarks. That evening the
Osservatore romano
journalist who had recorded the speech delivered a typescript of the pope’s text and, with Tardini, undertook a “surgical operation.” “Here I cut a word, there I add another,” recalled Tardini. “Here I modify a sentence, there I erase another. In short, with a subtle and methodical effort we succeed in greatly softening the rawness of the papal thought.”
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The text they produced was far from the clear denunciation of an invasion that the nurses had heard; it was instead a murky series of propositions open to varying interpretations.

The next morning came the ticklish part. Tardini had to get the
pope’s approval for the butchered text. As he handed Pius the typed pages, he tried to be nonchalant. His square face assumed a look of great sincerity. The
Osservatore romano
reporter, he explained, begged the pope’s forgiveness if he had not succeeded in accurately capturing the pope’s every word. The pope had spoken an hour and twenty minutes, and by the end of the speech the reporter had been worn out. He had also been distracted by a terrible toothache. And by the end of the speech, the evening light—for the audience had been held outside in a courtyard—had been fading, making it especially difficult to record the pope’s last words accurately.

As the pope started to read, Tardini tried to go, but Pius raised a hand and stopped him. He put aside all but the last pages and went directly to his final remarks. As he read, he grunted. Each time the pontiff raised his eyes to look at him, Tardini tried to conceal his nervousness. The pope read his mangled remarks on the war aloud. Still Tardini feigned ignorance of any problem: “I adopted the pose of one who wants to pay attention to that which he doesn’t know,” he later wrote, adding parenthetically, “I know that part of his speech by heart!” The pope kept looking down at the text and then up at Tardini. Every time he read a line that Tardini had altered, he repeated, “I truly did not say it that way.” Every time the pope objected, Tardini meekly offered to correct any error. But in the end the pope simply said, “No, let’s leave it alone.” It was just what Tardini and his superiors, Pizzardo and Pacelli, had been hoping for.
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