The Pope's Last Crusade (11 page)

Finally, LaFarge said the pope asked him to work quickly. Given the short amount of time, he asked if the superior general could provide him with an assistant to work on the encyclical. Ledóchowski assigned two Jesuits—one would be Gustave Desbuquois, who LaFarge had met in Paris, the leader of the French Jesuit social organization, Action Populaire. The other, Ledóchowski decided, was to be Gustav Gundlach. “The two Guses,” as they became known, were discreet and both had prior experience in preparing such documents. Ledóchowski knew both men's work and also knew they could be controlled.

Charming though he might have been, Ledóchowski effectively used his skills to oversee the project. He discussed the need for secrecy and speed. Among other things, if LaFarge's work was ever made public, “every government in Europe would have people in 24 hours at the Vatican, urging the expression of their ideas.” All the more reason for LaFarge to go to Paris. He was to leave as soon as possible. Any questions, any doubts should be forwarded back directly to Ledóchowski at the Vatican.

LaFarge mentioned that the Sunday-morning edition of
Osservatore Romano
had as usual listed the pope's activities the previous day in a column on the left side of the front page. One could read in small type under audiences: “Giovanni LaFarge, SJ.” His meeting with the pope was no secret—only the subject discussed was closely guarded. Ledóchowski suggested that LaFarge use a cover story—he would say he had decided to work on revisions of
Interracial Justice
and would be writing and conducting interviews in Paris.

After the meeting, LaFarge was given access to pertinent documents and diplomatic communications at the Vatican. It was a rather quick review, but long enough to note that political affairs and church relations with Italy and Germany were worse than he expected. Probably out of a sense of excitement or overenthusiasm, he broke almost immediately with the pledge to remain silent. He wrote a letter to Francis Talbot, his editor in New York, that described the situation and discussed his delayed return home, adding that the story must be concealed.

“If people get nosey, you can say I am working on a possible second edition of my book, collecting notes, seeing people. Etc. That is generally true—and telling them that here.”

Ledóchowski could consider the meeting with LaFarge as a success. He had followed his precept by making LaFarge think he was getting everything he wanted—full freedom of action. He had established a trusted relationship, and he had employed two known and reliable cowriters who would not stray too far from existing Vatican dogma. And LaFarge's request to work away from Rome was easy to accept. Ledóchowski was probably much happier to have LaFarge at a distance, not able or likely to approach the pope until the work was finished. This would limit the number of people at the Vatican who might find out about the encyclical or with whom LaFarge might be able to communicate. Ledóchowski could interpose himself between Pius XI and his American ghost writer with hopes of toning down the pope's recently increasingly virulent rhetoric.

LaFarge thought he was being given the best possible structure in which to work on one of the most important documents he might ever write. It remained to be seen what the product would be, but LaFarge told a friend that Pius had said: “Remember, you are writing this encyclical for me, not for Ledóchowski.” Even so, LaFarge put his faith in the Jesuit leader, not only out of obedience, but also because of the experiences he had in the past with authority figures.

“I had a curious sensation that I was talking to my own father,” LaFarge recalled about his conversation with the pope. “His gestures were singularly like those of my father, particularly the characteristic one of the joined index and middle finger raised and waved paternally in the air. Little turns of expression remind me of Father, and there was the same atmosphere, as it were, of conversation.” It was easy to understand the comparison between the Holy Father and LaFarge's real father, who now had been dead for more than twenty-seven years. The elder LaFarge had been an inspiring but a somewhat frightening presence in his son's life, and a person LaFarge wanted to please and impress. And now, no one other than the pope was as exalted, awe-inspiring, in John LaFarge's religious life.

But LaFarge did not see Ledóchowski as a father figure, but more as mothering influence. He said the Jesuit superior's “wiry vivacious person reminded me oddly” of Katharine Drexel, a prominent nun and friend in Philadelphia.

LaFarge, nevertheless, left his meeting with the certainty that his Jesuit superior would “facilitate” communications with the pontiff. On June 27, LaFarge packed his bags, bade farewell to McCormick at the Gregorian University, and took a train first to Geneva and then onward to Paris to begin a mission that seemed simple on its face but was to have moral and political repercussions he couldn't imagine.

O
N JULY 19
, about three weeks after John LaFarge arrived in Paris to begin his secret work on behalf of Pope Pius, he took a break for the arrival of Britain's King George VI.

LaFarge had been invited with several other priests to watch the ceremony from a fifth-floor balcony overlooking the Champs-Elysées. The king rode by in an open black limousine. He wore the blue-gray, full dress uniform of the Royal Air Force and was seated next to French president Albert Lebrun, with Queen Elizabeth and Lebrun's wife trailing behind. Spahi cavalry—French Arab regiments—created a phalanx around them, led by that old hero of the Great War, Marshall Philippe Pétain. Soldiers lined the streets, a military band played, and a dirigible maneuvered overhead close to the Arc de Triomphe.

“We had a splendid view,” LaFarge wrote afterward. “It was a wonderful sight, the
Spahis
magnificently mounted, those from Tunis being dressed in red, and those from Morocco in black . . . The Army was idolized by the people and the crowd was cheerful and in good humor. Periscopes were on sale everywhere.”

Reporters compared the event and safety concerns to the spectacle Mussolini had laid out for Hitler in Rome two months earlier. Despite the joyous reaction of the French, tens of thousands of security officers fanned out across Paris. “Two hours before their arrival, troops virtually took over Paris,” reported the United Press. “Army tanks rumbled through the boulevards and took up commanding positions in the Place de Concorde and the Champs Elysee, barring all traffic.”

LaFarge doubted that the pomp and the show of democracy meant anything in the face of Nazi war preparations.

“I found my French friends in a state of political optimism. As for Hitler, they explained to me, there was really nothing to worry about,” LaFarge wrote. “
Nous sommes si calme,
” people kept telling him. “But when you have heard people tell you four or five times a day how calm they are, you wonder just how deep is that tranquility?”

Coinciding with the royal visit, the United States had convened an international conference on refugees in Evian-les-Bains, 350 miles southeast of Paris on Lake Geneva. By now, at least 150,000 German Jews had fled Germany, only a fraction of those teeming to leave Europe. President Roosevelt, the prime mover, sent his friend Myron Taylor, a respected businessman, as the U.S. representative. “A forced migration is taking place and the time has come when governments . . . must act promptly and effectively,” Taylor said in an ardent appeal to the thirty-two countries attending the conference.

It became clear that Roosevelt, facing anti-Semitism at home, expected others to take in Jewish refugees. No country provided substantive help to the Jews.

Hitler mocked the United States and the other participants sarcastically for claiming to have “such deep sympathy for these criminals,” the Jews being expelled from Germany and Austria. World opinion, he said, was “oozing sympathy for the poor, tormented people, but remaining hard and obdurate when it comes to helping them.”

The pope was disturbed by the weak response to the Evian refugee conference. He asked American Catholic leaders to discuss the prospects for resettlement of Jews with U.S. officials in Washington. Meanwhile, he focused on his own campaign. He would not wait for the encyclical before lashing out against anti-Semitism.

LAFARGE WAS WORKING
intermittently on the pope's encyclical. Early in July, he had decided to take a series of trips outside Paris to clear his head and to take time to understand what the pope wanted him to do. He visited friends and relatives and traveled to hallowed battlefields of the last war. The United States had been France's great protector when it entered World War I and helped beat back the German army. More than sixteen million soldiers and civilians died on all sides in the Great War; twenty million were wounded. LaFarge visited Reims, which symbolized the war's madness and the carnage. The cathedral at Reims had been rebuilt with the help of the American philanthropist John Rockefeller. “It is not well to be too reflective,” he wrote in a letter home. “Not well to let the mind rove still further,” LaFarge wrote, “where almost under the spires of the cathedral American boys lie buried by the thousands side by side with German and French lads and many another from other lands, and that freezes the soul still with its silence crying to deaf humanity.”

LaFarge saw the rededication of the cathedral as progress overshadowed by a new round of human folly. “Better to thank God that with a thousand reasons for grief and regret, France at least has the one great thing, she has liberty, narrow liberty, if you wish, liberty that limps. But still liberty for the Church to live . . . liberty to build a new France not patterned upon the old. . . .” But for how long?

After visiting Reims and World War I battlefields, he visited relatives on his father's side whom he had met thirty-five years earlier when he was a seminary student. He stayed at the old Manor House where his father had lived for a time as a young man in the village of Ploujean in Brittany. His brother Grant had made the same journey three years earlier, and, LaFarge wrote in his memoir, they both had the same experience of “suddenly finding a hundred reminders of home in such a remote part of the world. They had laid on my table a big box of family papers and documents. In the shimmering summer evening, I read them until long after midnight. I found Father's old sketchbook made in Brittany the year before he came back to the United States and became acquainted with Mother.”

John LaFarge the son, the youngest of nine children, remembered his father as a distant presence when he was growing up in New England and New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. “I was never part of my father's early life at home,” he recalled, “and had never known him as directly and personally as had my two older brothers, Grant and Bancel. It was Bancel in many ways who took Father's place as a parent, playing the role with me that a young father might assume with his children.”

John's brothers taught him about sailing, and his youth was dedicated to plying the cliffs and coves of Narragansett Bay, close to their home in Newport. “The background of my boyhood was the sea,” he recalled. “I would stroll down to the western end of the beach to watch the vast heaving waves under the moonlight.”

When LaFarge was quite young, his mother told him that his father “does not look properly after us. He means well but nevertheless I am at times forgotten, and there are times when I must turn to Almighty God for help.” LaFarge became his mother's friend and partner, he recalled, and shared “her problems, her anxieties and heartaches. I felt manly and protective.”

The elder LaFarge was an eccentric bohemian and a prominent man in the arts. He was an influential muralist, designer of church mosaics and stained glass, and was one of the seven charter members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. LaFarge the artist was a difficult person to know, all the more because he suffered in middle age from lead poisoning that left him chronically ill and often bedridden.

One of young John's earliest memories of his father involved going with his mother down to the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1891 when he was eleven years old. The elder LaFarge was returning with Henry Adams from an extensive voyage to the South Pacific. “I was glad to know that I really had a father in fact, since my picture of him before that time had been quite indefinite.”

By 1938, LaFarge still ached to learn about the man he really didn't know. One of his father's signature works was the mural
The Ascension of Our Lord
above the altar of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Greenwich Village, not far from the studio on West Tenth Street where young John had visited him. Visitors to the church were spellbound and came just to gaze at LaFarge's creation. A critical appraisal in the
New York Times
said that LaFarge “has shown that we possess at least one artist [in America who is] the peer, if not the superior of the best workmen . . . Composition, drawing and proportions are masterly.”

Henry Adams, in his autobiographical
The Education of Henry Adams,
described John LaFarge as one of his closest confidants and an important and delightful influence in his life and said he was “quite the most interesting person we knew.” The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, the year after Adams died and nine years after the elder LaFarge had died. “To LaFarge,” Adams wrote, “eccentricity meant convention; a mind really eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone—a shade—a nuance—and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity. Of course all artists hold more or less the same point of view in their art, but few carry it into daily life, and often the contrast is excessive between their art and their talk.”

As LaFarge read these words, he recalled that the closest he and his father had ever been was during the several months John had spent with him in New York City. Young John retained a much closer relationship with his mother until her death in 1926. But he did carry something of those days with his father. The elder LaFarge's life work focused on arts that touched on the spirit and influenced the spirit of his son. The young LaFarge developed an impressive knowledge of the arts in his own right and had an expert's eye for stained glass, sacred art, and architecture. He was not eccentric by nature, as Henry Adams had described his father, unless he qualified as being the only member of his immediate family to enter the priesthood. And by becoming a Jesuit, he was dedicated to service and, unlike his father, he was following an uncommon, quiet path. As St. Ignatius would have it, the manner of a Jesuit “was ordinary,” not eccentric.