The Pope and Mussolini (48 page)

At the time, Mussolini’s focus on his plans for Italian greatness was diminished by an unpleasant personal matter. Clara Petacci was growing increasingly prone to fits of jealousy. She had good reason for her suspicions, for even as she camped out in her Palazzo Venezia suite, the Duce continued to have brief trysts with some of his older lovers. Clara lashed out; to calm her down, Mussolini phoned her many times a day. Almost daily through much of July, he sneaked off with her to the beach at Ostia, leaving in mid-morning and returning in mid-afternoon.
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The Duce’s son-in-law was left to manage the fallout from the newly announced racial campaign. On July 20 he sent the Italian ambassador, Pignatti, to the Vatican to learn the pope’s reaction. Two days earlier,
speaking to a group of nuns, the pope had again lamented “exaggerated nationalism.”

“Is it true,” Pignatti asked Cardinal Pacelli, “that the pope is thinking of adopting countermeasures in opposition to the anti-Israelite campaign planned by the royal government?”

Pacelli was noncommittal: the pope had told him of no plans to speak out on the issue, he said. Pacelli expressed no opposition to the anti-Semitic campaign.

What had the pope been referring to with the phrase “exaggerated nationalism”? Pignatti asked. Such comments, he pointed out, could be interpreted as criticizing the new racial policy.

Pacelli hastened to assure him that the pope had no such intention, that his remarks were aimed primarily at Catholics in other countries to warn them not to become too identified with nationalist ideologies there.

Catholic doctrine, argued Pignatti, had to recognize the existence of races.

Cardinal Pacelli responded indirectly. Canon law, he said, was very clear: people who were baptized were to be considered Catholic. Whatever anti-Semitic policies Mussolini planned, it was crucial that he confine them to those who were truly Jewish.
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Six days later Pignatti met Pius at Castel Gandolfo to discuss the racial campaign directly with him. The pope appeared thinner but had regained a good deal of his strength. He still wore elastic stockings to help with the pain in his legs, but he no longer needed daily massages. His personal physician drove up from Rome each morning to check on him but no longer felt the need to spend nights there, as he had the previous summer. The pope had no illusions that he would live very long, but he wanted to die at his desk.
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Pignatti was pleased with the meeting. He gently scolded the pope for condemning “exaggerated nationalism,” telling him his remark was open to misinterpretation. In response, the pope echoed Pacelli’s explanation: he had not been referring to Italy.

Then the pontiff raised a complaint of his own. He had been getting disturbing reports that the Italian government was giving privileged treatment to Protestants in the Italian areas in East Africa. Not only was this bad for Catholicism, it was bad for Italy, he told Pignatti, as the Protestants were acting as British agents in Africa.
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The pope also expressed concerns about the latest accusations that Catholic Action was involving itself in politics. “I pray to the Lord every day,” said the pope, “that Signor Mussolini not touch Catholic Action.” He added, “you can obtain anything from the pope just as long as you don’t attack Catholic Action.”
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A week after the meeting, the pope, ignoring Pignatti’s warning, resumed his attacks on “exaggerated nationalism.” In remarks to two hundred students at Rome’s College for the Propagation of the Faith, he took his criticism a step further. There was but one, big human race, he told the students; and in a comment that would infuriate Mussolini, he added, “One can ask how it is that Italy, unfortunately, felt the need to go and imitate Germany.”
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The pope reserved his strongest words for his defense of his beloved Catholic Action. “I warn you,” he said, clearly addressing Mussolini, “not to strike Catholic Action, and I beg you for your own good, for he who strikes Catholic Action strikes the pope, and he who strikes the pope dies.”

Angered above all by the charge that he was imitating Hitler, Mussolini ordered that no Italian paper publish the pope’s speech.
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Ciano told the nuncio Borgongini that if the pope continued such attacks, he would provoke a major rift. “I spoke very clearly to Borgongini,” Ciano recalled. “I explained the promises and the aims of our racism.” The nuncio again tried to minimize the pope’s remarks. Pius had only wanted to be sure that Italian racism remained within proper bounds. Ciano was pleased: Borgongini “appeared to me to be very convinced. And he revealed himself to be very anti-Semitic.”
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On July 31 the Italian ambassador went to see Cardinal Pacelli to complain about the pope’s latest remarks. The pope could not continue his criticisms and expect to maintain the Church’s productive
collaboration with the regime. Pacelli promised to convey Mussolini’s concerns to the pope. Pignatti thought he had Pacelli on his side but doubted the pope would pay any attention to his advice.
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Ambassador Bonifacio Pignatti (right), with Galeazzo Ciano, May 1939

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photograph credit 22.2
)

“Collaboration was sometimes hard,” Pacelli would later tell Cardinal Verdier, the Paris archbishop, in explaining his relationship with Pius XI. The pope would listen to no one, not even his secretary of state, or so it seemed to him. “My affectionate nature suffered,” Pacelli confided, “but I knew that he loved me, and this thought consoled me.” Later, he offered Verdier another example of this sometimes-tense relationship. Once he had felt so overwhelmed that without realizing it, he “almost violently” banged his fists on the pope’s desk. He could not continue as secretary of state, he told the pontiff. “It does not fulfill me, and I am suffering.”

“The pope looked at me coldly and slowly said these words that I will never forget,” Pacelli recalled. “ ‘We have only one task, you and I, that is to do the politics of good!’ ” Pacelli was touched: “What a magnificent response! Humiliated by the weakness my nerves had caused me, I fell down on my knees at the pope’s feet and begged his pardon.
The Holy Father lifted me up affectionately and hugged me.” “
Quelle tableau!
” observed Verdier, conjuring up the image, “What a picture!”
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Worried about the damage the pope could do to the anti-Semitic campaign, Pignatti turned to a man who could help. On August 4 he traveled south to the Sorrento peninsula, where Father Ledóchowski was staying in a Jesuit residence recovering from a recent illness. “I went to see the general of the Jesuits,” Pignatti later explained, “because in the past … he did not hide from me his implacable loathing for the Jews, whom he believes are the origin of all the ills that afflict Europe.”

The ambassador found Ledóchowski well informed about the problem and highly sympathetic to Pignatti’s cause. “Father Rosa,” he said, “told me that the pope did not understand.” His illness was robbing him of his mental abilities: “It is terrible, but that’s the way it is.” During the pope’s illness, Pius had prayed to God to take his soul to Him, but “the Lord did not grant the pope’s prayer, and as a result the Church today is going through a serious crisis.” Pius “does not reason and does not want to hear reason.” Cardinal Pacelli was at his wit’s end: “The pope no longer listens to him as he once did. He carefully hides his plans from him and does not tell him about the speeches he will give.”

Those around the pope, reported Ledóchowski, were terrified by what would happen if his condition deteriorated further.
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He urged the ambassador not to let the pope’s rants compromise the Church’s good relations with the Fascist regime.

Pignatti replied that they could not ignore the pope’s rants, for the foreign press—especially in France—was exploiting his words, and Catholics throughout the world were heeding them, “ignorant of the fact that the common Father of all the faithful was mentally debilitated.” The pope’s remarks “were causing a tide of hatred against Italy that was compromising it both morally and materially.”

Ledóchowski agreed. A crisis loomed. After pledging the ambassador
to secrecy, he confided: “The danger is too great not to do whatever is necessary to find a remedy.”
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Just what “remedy” the Jesuit general had in mind is far from clear. But he would spend the next months doing all he could to prevent the pope from denouncing Fascist racial policy, offending the Nazis, or offering any hope for the Jews.

C
HAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

THE SECRET DEAL

I
N JULY 1938 FORTY THOUSAND JEWS IN AUSTRIA WERE ROUNDED UP
and placed in “protective custody.” France reaffirmed its commitment to defend Czechoslovakia against Germany. The Germans responded by moving troops to their border with France, soon to be followed by a full military mobilization.

In early August, amid this frightening march toward war, the Italian government followed up on its racial manifesto by issuing a series of anti-Semitic laws. The first banished all foreign-born Jews from attending Italian schools.
La Civiltà cattolica
informed its readers of the measure and published the government’s rationale—which was remarkably similar to the journal’s own previous warnings about the Jewish threat: Jews could never be loyal to the country they lived in, since their real allegiance was to other Jews; Judaism was behind both Bolshevism and Freemasonry; and although only one Italian in a thousand was Jewish, Jews held many high-level positions. The situation was intolerable.
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On August 4, 1938, the pope summoned Giovanni Montini. A few years earlier, in an effort to keep Mussolini happy, he had dismissed Montini as national Catholic Action university chaplain. But late in
1937 he had decided to rehabilitate Montini and made him one of Pacelli’s two undersecretaries. The decision put Montini on a path that, a quarter century later, would take him to St. Peter’s throne. Now Pius wanted him to draft a letter to Mussolini setting out the pope’s position on the Jews and on Catholic Action.

The next day Montini delivered the draft to Pius, and he reviewed it carefully. As far as the Jews were concerned, it said, the pope had no intention of interfering with the state’s “responsibility for taking the opportune measures in defense of legitimate interests”; but he hoped Mussolini would not go beyond what Christian charity allowed. On the question of Catholic Action, the pontiff objected to threats to exclude its members from the Fascist Party. Catholic Action, he insisted, had only religious goals and so did not conflict with Fascist Party membership.

Once again Cardinal Pacelli dissuaded the pope from sending the letter, lest it anger Mussolini. Instead, Tacchi Venturi communicated the pope’s thoughts to the dictator in person.
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The pope’s latest concern about Catholic Action stemmed from a report he received from the northeastern city of Bergamo: local Fascists had attacked a Catholic Action club. When Cardinal Pacelli passed this complaint on to Pignatti, the ambassador was indignant. What did the Vatican expect? Fascist activists were outraged by the pope’s criticisms of the racial campaign. Worse violence might follow.
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Two days later Cardinal Pizzardo, upset by Fascist press allegations that it was he who had persuaded the pope to denounce racism, met with the ambassador. Pizzardo assured Pignatti that he had never spoken to the pope about the matter. Their conversation then turned to the tensions over Catholic Action, where Pignatti proposed a solution. If the organization gave up the practice of having formal membership, it would go a long way to easing tensions. Pizzardo was noncommittal, saying this would be for the pope to decide. The ambassador suspected Pizzardo of encouraging the pope’s defense of the organization. He knew where to look for help. “Since Cardinal Pacelli, who notoriously
has poor relations with Cardinal Pizzardo, is not especially fond of Catholic Action the way it is organized today,” observed Pignatti in his report on their meeting, “I will try to gain him as an ally in this matter.”
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Further evidence of the pope’s isolation came that week, when
La Civiltà cattolica
published a flattering piece about the regime.
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Pignatti was delighted. When it came to the campaign against the Jews, he told Ciano, the Jesuits’ sympathies were clearly with Mussolini. But he added a caution: Italy’s newspapers should stop trumpeting this fact. The Jesuits could not let themselves be portrayed as opposing the pontiff.
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