The Pope's Last Crusade (2 page)

LaFarge took these days at sea as a respite and a time to read, gather notes, write, sleep, and eat. In his letters home to his family, he described the trip as uneventful. His few companions saw him as a serious, introspective, sardonic, middle-aged, bespectacled priest with twinkling brown eyes and a cowlick dangling over his forehead. He was a fifty-eight-year-old Jesuit and had been a priest since his ordination at age twenty-five.

LaFarge, the only member of his patrician family to join the priesthood, was proud to wear the collar. As a Jesuit and a priest, he had taken a vow of poverty. St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, described the Jesuit ideal as striving to be “an ordinary person.” LaFarge interpreted this as a directive to strip himself of pride and ostentation and to live a simple, humble life. Yet he was many other things and often fretted about being prejudged as being a closed-minded cleric. He was a student of history and a lover of art and music, and he played the piano quite well. He was passionately interested in the politics of the day and was committed to education and social development.

LaFarge was born in 1880 and was named after his father, whose father was a Frenchman from Brittany named Jean Frédéric de LaFarge. He had fled captivity after serving under Napoleon. The senior John LaFarge was a prominent artist and stained-glass designer. The story was told that Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi worked out his design for the Statue of Liberty while visiting the elder LaFarge's art studio in Newport, Rhode Island. Mrs. LaFarge, Margaret Mason Perry, was a descendant of Thomas Pence, an early settler at Plymouth, Massachusetts; she was also the granddaughter of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, and most notably, a great-great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin.

When young John LaFarge was seventeen years old in 1897, he took the advice of a family friend, Theodore Roosevelt, to study the classics at Harvard College. At the time, Roosevelt was the police commissioner of New York City, but he had big plans for himself and enjoyed promoting the plans of others. LaFarge breezed through Harvard, and then finally told his father he wanted to join the priesthood. His parents, despite their own varied connections with the church—his mother was far more devout and practicing than his father—were disappointed by this news. LaFarge said he had dreamed of being a priest since he was twelve years old.

He turned once more to Roosevelt, who by then was the vice president of the United States. “The boy has a vocation,” Roosevelt argued with LaFarge's father. “God has sent him certain lights and certain graces and it would be folly not to let him follow them.”

LaFarge entered seminary in Innsbruck, Austria, in the summer of 1901 and was ordained a priest on July 26, 1905. He worked at various temporary assignments and continued studying languages, which he had started while at Harvard. He learned French and German and practiced Italian and the Danish and Slavic languages enough to gain some fluency.

His first full-time assignment as a young priest came in 1911 when he was sent to St. Mary's County, Maryland, one of the poorest precincts of the nation. He worked there for fifteen years, attempting to provide vocation and other education for blacks. LaFarge also worked on the creation of regional Catholic interracial councils that were precursors to the National Catholic Conference on International Justice, which has been cited as a moral force behind the landmark
Brown versus Board of Education
desegregation case.

In 1926, LaFarge was assigned to work in New York City as a staff member of the influential Jesuit weekly,
America,
which the Jesuits founded in 1909. It was the only national Catholic weekly magazine in the United States. In 1937, his book
Interracial Justice
was published. Based on his experience working with blacks in Maryland, this audacious, groundbreaking book was primarily a call for Catholics to promote equality in their teachings. But he was also speaking out in support of civil rights. Interracial justice, he wrote, supposes the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all, including African Americans.

In 1938, when LaFarge left on this, his first foreign assignment, he had already spent twelve years as an associate editor at the magazine.

THE
VOLENDAM
dropped anchor at Plymouth Harbor on the afternoon of May 2, 1938, and LaFarge and nineteen other passengers transferred to a launch that took them the short distance to the port near the mouth of the rivers Plym and Tamar. It was about 5:30
P.M.
when he gathered his bags and portable typewriter and stood before a smiling customs official.

To his horror, LaFarge could not make out a word the Englishman was saying, due to the man's clipped accent. This was not LaFarge's first trip to England, but he had never before had this problem. His only recourse was to provide answers to what he thought were the plausible questions for the circumstance. His destination that evening, he said, was Bristol where cousins awaited him; he had less than forty-five minutes to make the train. The merry old official said something else and again LaFarge was stumped. But according to LaFarge, “the customs officer merely waved a card at my nose, bade me welcome to old England and pushed me into a thoroughly British taxi with a sullen, bearded driver and right-hand drive.”

A quick cab ride took him to the train for Bristol with time to spare. To prepare for the two-and-a-half-hour journey, he reached from the train window down to the platform where a vendor obliged him with a newspaper and a cup of English tea.

As the train pulled away from the Plymouth station, LaFarge opened his newspaper and read a front-page report on preparations for Hitler's visit to Rome for talks with Mussolini. About the same time LaFarge reached Europe, Hitler had boarded a custom railroad car at Berlin's Anhalter station southbound for Rome. Tens of thousands lined the train route to the German border, down through Nazi-occupied Austria and into Italy. Each time the train slowed, Hitler greeted the masses with an open palm salute and toothless smile.

The Nazi propaganda machine was touting the trip as an extension of the German Reich's first great victory six weeks earlier in Austria. The Wehrmacht had plowed south across the Austrian border on March 12, and within hours, Austria belonged to Hitler. Britain was rearming and hoping for peace and did nothing; nor did France, which was more concerned about the German-contested Alsace and the rest of its 290-mile border with the Reich.

When Hitler triumphantly followed his troops into Austria in an open armored car, he had declared that Germany's victory was the first step toward the thousand-year Reich. And when he reached Vienna, church bells rang, and the Catholic Church heralded his arrival. The archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, immediately signaled his support for the führer. “Catholics in the Vienna diocese are asked on Sunday to offer thanks to the Lord God for the bloodless course of the great political change,” he declared. “Heil Hitler.”

Hitler was pleased at the unexpected endorsement from the Catholic Church, but at the Vatican, Pope Pius XI was appalled. The pope thought Innitzer was a weak man and a coward. After Innitzer's declaration, members of the Austrian Catholic Church who disagreed with the cardinal and opposed the Nazis were arrested and beaten.

The pope angrily summoned Innitzer to Rome and berated him for two hours during a private meeting. The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who always argued for moderation, had counseled Pius not to demand Innitzer's resignation. The pope relented, but was adamant on making a public display. He forced Innitzer to publish a retraction of his praise for Hitler.

None of this mattered to Hitler, though he did note that Pope Pius XI was still the troublesome enemy that he and the Catholic Church had always been. Hitler's minions clamped down on Austrian freedoms and sent tens of thousands of opponents, Jews and Catholics, democrats and Communists to concentration camps. With freedom of the press one of the first casualties, Innitzer's retraction was never published or broadcast in Germany or Austria.

Hitler's trip on May 2 was his first venture beyond Germany and Austria and was meant to cement the Axis alliance. The
Times
of London reported that “Herr Hitler's visit . . . seems destined to become legendary, for the preparations which have been made for it are stupendous. The cost is estimated at between three million and four million pounds [$200 to $300 million in 2012 U.S. dollars]. A new railway station and a new road [the
Viale
Adolf Hitler] have been built for the Führer's arrival in Rome. . . . Grandiose effects of decoration and illumination have been devised, not only in Rome but in Florence and Naples as well.”

World attention focused on Hitler's journey to Rome, especially in the United States, where officials monitored the cultish reception. A few hours before Hitler's arrival, Ambassador William Phillips, accompanied by his wife, Caroline Drayton Phillips, had traveled on a regularly scheduled passenger train on the main line from northern Italy down to Rome after a weekend stay in the north. “Every station up till half an hour of Rome was bedecked with German and Italian flags and for long distances every house, villa and hut close to the railway were [
sic
] displaying the two flags,” Phillips remembered. The ambassador noted that the flags and the decorations served to cover over the poverty and slums of the countryside. “I only hope the poor wretches who live in these hovels will be allowed to keep these flags which have been furnished them. They could be turned into much needed clothing,” he also wrote.

The newspaper LaFarge read on the train to Bristol carried detailed coverage of Hitler's tour. Mussolini had converted Rome into a glowing extravaganza, determined to outdo the grand reception he had received from Hitler the previous year. The führer was greeted by a city radiant with torches and monuments bathed in light. The
Times
of London described the event as “one of the most elaborate and magnificent receptions of which there is record even in the annals of the Eternal City.”

There were two news items of special note concerning Hitler's trip to Rome. First, thousands of police would guard Hitler and Mussolini, and ominously, newspapers reported, German Jews in Rome, Naples, and Florence were being detained throughout Hitler's eight-day visit.

LaFarge's newspaper also reported that Pope Pius XI had decided to leave Rome three days before Hitler's arrival. The
Times
of London linked the pope's departure to Hitler's arrival and reported, “the tendency has been shown in some quarters to attribute a political significance to the Pope's decision.”

AS LAFARGE GLANCED
up from the newspaper, he could see little of the English countryside because it was already shrouded in early-evening darkness. From the train, he could not see even the contours of the villages along the way. This was not unusual, because these areas of England rarely had any kind of lighting at night, but as he thought back years later, the scene mixed in memory with the blackouts that would occur across Britain and all Europe when the Germans began their bombing campaigns. As the train moved toward its destination, LaFarge increasingly sensed that he was experiencing an England that was calm but waiting for terror to strike.

LaFarge put aside the newspaper and prepared to visit with his cousins in Bath. He alighted at the Bristol Temple Meads Station, the oldest major train station in the world. For a hundred years, the Temple Meads cathedral-like central clock tower dominated the center of the city with its Tudor spires, spectacular stained glass, and detailed stone and woodwork. He switched quickly to the local train to Bath, where his cousin, Hope Warren and her husband, Robert Wilberforce, received him. “What a curious sensation,” LaFarge recalled, “riding near midnight in that autorail in a totally unknown country, only a few hours off the steamer.”

LaFarge awoke refreshed on the morning of May 3. Quickly reaccommodating to land, he went with his cousins on a tour of the countryside he had known as a young man. He made a point of revisiting the timeless magnificence of England: a visit to the eighth-century Saxon Church at Bradford on Avon and to the Glastonbury Tor, the hill occupied by settlers since the Neolithic period. There he said a prayer to Joseph of Arimathea, who appears in legends about the Holy Grail. All in the rain, no surprise for England.

He then visited the Bath Abbey, first founded in the eighth century and rebuilt in the 1500s. He walked on the slab that entombed Lieutenant General Henry Shrapnel, who gave his name to exploding cannon shells. Contrary to LaFarge's assumption—“I suppose he exploded!”—Shrapnel died of natural causes in 1842 at the age of eighty, supported all the while by a comfortable government stipend for his invention.

LaFarge's first impressions produced the desired result, a marked contrast with America's preoccupation about politics and war. “Just as I had anticipated,” he wrote to his sister Margaret a day after arrival, “people over here seem much less excited over the political situation than at home. I am more and more impressed by the complete isolation, outside of a few superficial contacts, that exists between here and there. It is a different world.”

After a few more days in Europe, however, LaFarge found it impossible to sustain this notion any longer. One could not ignore the sense of impending war. He was haunted by memories of the Europe of his youth in 1905 that represented a lost world “quite as if I had never before set foot beyond the ocean . . . as if one had visited Paris or London or Rome in a previous existence.”

ON MAY 4
, after two days with his relatives, LaFarge traveled to London to conduct meetings and interviews. He would be visiting Czechoslovakia during the trip so he scheduled a luncheon conversation with Jan Masaryk, the Czech ambassador to Britain, a man consumed by and despairing over his country's future. Masaryk was the son of Czechoslovakia's founding father, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. The younger Masaryk was U.S. educated, and his mother was American.