The Pope's Last Crusade (7 page)

Pius was seated in a broadcast room at Castel Gandolfo about five hundred miles away. As he spoke those words, a thunderstorm broke over Budapest and rain drenched the final ceremony of the Eucharistic Congress. As LaFarge and the other participants scattered for shelter, they could not have helped to notice the irony and some might have considered the storm an ill omen.

“The story isn't yet told. The answer to the riddle is to be revealed by history.”

ANNE O'HARE MCCORMICK

T
WO DAYS AFTER
the Eucharistic Congress, the pope celebrated his eighty-first birthday. He had recovered so well from his illness a year and a half earlier that the Vatican doctors had suspended their full-time attendance at the pope's rooms in Castel Gandolfo. Pius awoke daily at around dawn, had breakfast, and then conducted a range of meetings, reestablishing full control of church administration. As the weather warmed in late spring, he also resumed his daily walks behind the summer palace, in the sculpted hedgerows interspersed with Roman statuary, copses where one could stop to meditate, and a balustrade from which one could look down on the Albano valley.

He was a most solitary figure on those walks and did not take counsel easily, not even from Pacelli, who came for meetings at least four times a week. Hitler's anti-Semitic campaign had become the pope's great preoccupation. The issue before him was not just the matter of protecting Catholics, but also the question of protecting humanity. This was the church's moral responsibility.

AS THE NAZIS
increased their threats against the Jews, the pope realized that today it was the Jews, but then it would be the Catholics and finally the world. He could see in the day's news that the Nazis would stop at nothing less than world domination.

Pius envisioned a gesture that would go beyond daily condemnations of each atrocity uttered by the Nazis. He sought a verbal offensive with a major statement that would attack the underpinnings of the Nazi machine. Pius appeared to have found the vehicle; he had received a copy of a book,
Interracial Justice,
written by an American Jesuit named John LaFarge. The book portrayed the lives of American blacks who lived in the poorest strata of society. It said the church had to establish itself as a moral force in combating racism in the United States. The pope did not know LaFarge was in Europe and en route to Rome.

The similarities between the descriptions of racism in America and the threats of anti-Semitism in Europe were easy to see. LaFarge's book was about the plight of blacks in the United States, but the concept applies, he wrote, “to all races and conditions of men . . . all tribes and races, Jew and Gentile alike. . . .” Pius saw that LaFarge's writings could be applied to a new Vatican declaration that would attract international attention, a statement that would sound the alarm and warn world leaders about the Nazis and the Fascists in uncompromising terms.

This was the moment to strike. In March 1937, the pope had last issued an encyclical—the highest statement the head of the Vatican can make—condemning Nazism. But he felt compelled to do so again, this time with the words of an American Jesuit who understood the insanity of race. This time his encyclical would be broadcast throughout the globe, and it would answer the maniacal quest for conquest with basic truths.

The parched days of spring had been broken by occasional early summer rains, but nothing could dampen the spirit of Father John LaFarge on his first visit to Rome since 1905, when he was a young seminary student.

LaFarge was staying in a room at the Gregorian University, the four-hundred-year-old Jesuit college not far from the Spanish Steps. It was a privileged location, central to politics and the eternal nature of Western culture and the heart of Catholicism. As he strolled to the residence, he skirted the Quirinale Palace, several blocks at another level in the other direction, where just a month and a half earlier Hitler had been greeted triumphantly by Mussolini and by the titular monarch, Victor Emmanuel III. The recently completed monument to the king's grandfather, Victor Emmanuel II, was downhill opposite the Piazza Venezia. It was a garish assemblage of columns that Romans jokingly referred to as the wedding cake.

LaFarge had arrived in Rome on June 5 via Yugoslavia, crossed the border at Trieste, and then traveled south from Venice. Immediately he saw Il Duce's jaw-jutting image everywhere: Mussolini, the great leader, supporting the Italian army; Il Duce standing with the people; a joint profile of Hitler and Mussolini in their uniforms and Hitler's swastika prominent on his shoulder.
Viva, viva Mussolini!
was plastered on the walls. LaFarge noted in his diary that, “Magnificent slogans exhorted the people to morality, industry, loyalty, and other virtues, signed in each case with the mysterious letter M. Asking an Italian friend what the M stood for—it might stand for morality or Machiavelli or something else—I received only a shocked glance as a reply.”

One morning, a fellow American Jesuit at the Gregorian University arranged a VIP tour for LaFarge with a high-ranking member of the Fascist City Council. The official arrived late for the tour and said that he had been delayed in a meeting with Mussolini.

“You know, we were having the Council meeting and I told Mussolini that I had an appointment at eleven o'clock with Father LaFarge,” the official said. “But Il Duce said, let Father LaFarge wait. The affairs of state are more important.”

LaFarge was as susceptible to flattery as anyone, but he doubted the story. The official took LaFarge on an extensive tour of Mussolini's signature welfare projects, including a rural reconstruction program, newly established towns built on drained and recovered swampland.

“Nothing that I had seen in the United States, even in the far West, was as new as these extraordinary constructions,” LaFarge said. The buildings were “splendidly built, all Italian style,” he said, “with broad streets, immense squares, imposing municipal buildings and elaborate churches, one of which, in good medieval spirit, included Mussolini as a toiling harvest-worker in the mosaic representing the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.”

When Mussolini visited his urbanization projects, he would recognize nothing short of perfection. Il Duce was reimagining Italy. On one occasion, touring one of the towns he had built on marshes, Mussolini demanded why the buildings had screens on the windows. When told they were a precaution against mosquitoes, he replied, “Mosquitoes have been abolished.” Workers immediately removed the screens.

Mussolini's construction projects were theoretically intended to relocate people from crowded urban working-class conditions to lower-density housing with good sanitation and social services. The projects sometimes fell below projections, forcing the transferred workers to travel long distances to their jobs. And not all the housing projects were completed as well as the model LaFarge was shown. LaFarge had already gone out on his own and peered beyond these Potemkin Village undertakings for the stage set they were and had seen Romans on the periphery who were living in misery. One shantytown, nicknamed Shanghai, was worse than the worst slums he had seen in the American South. Another hovel housed forlorn Italian Army veterans of the recent Fascist conquest of Ethiopia. All were quarantined in squalid boxcars, waiting for further orders if they survived the pestilence some had brought back with them.

At the same time, LaFarge loved the Eternal City of Rome, the ancient objects of the empire, the relics, and the churches. The dome of St. Peter's, which was visible from many points of the city, reminded him of his faith and gave him solace and warmth. The Roman Forum was most prominent and the Coliseum was a bit farther down from the university. He was moved and inspired by the opportunity to say Mass at a chapel in the Santa Brigida Church on the Piazza Farnese. On tours around Rome, he delighted in the food, fresh meats,
bel paese
cheese, and fine wines.

On Wednesday, June 22, LaFarge was capping off his visit to Italy by attending a general audience with Pope Pius XI at Castel Gandolfo. It was not easy to obtain entrance for such group audiences, but Vincent McCormick, the Jesuit rector of Gregoriana University, had made this happen. McCormick had asked the pope's chief of staff the day before if the pope might have time “to say a word in commendation of my work at the general audience,” LaFarge wrote in a diary note. The chief of staff met them on their arrival at Castel Gandolfo and said the request had come too late. “The only thing to do was to have a private audience,” the official said, but such meetings were usually arranged weeks ahead of time. LaFarge was to leave Rome by June 29, and the official held out little hope.

McCormick and LaFarge entered the pope's summer quarters in time for the general audience and stood with a group of clergy while others teemed forward to wait for the pontiff. Four staff-bearing Swiss Guard Halberdier troops stood guard, dressed in their singular uniforms, traditional stripes in the colors of the Medici family, blue, yellow, and red, a metal morion helmet adorned with red ostrich feathers on their heads. Pius XI finally entered the room, smiling and apparently hardy and in good spirits, despite reports he had been weakened by illness.

The audience was rather brief and impersonal and was over quickly. The pontiff spoke about marriage and family and the work of missionaries and blessed those assembled. When the crowd dispersed, LaFarge and McCormick went to the fourth floor in the apostolic palace to visit the papal astronomer, Father Johan Stein, a fellow Jesuit. The Dutch scientist-priest showed them around proudly and advised his guests to step gingerly; the pope's private quarters were directly below them.

LaFarge and McCormick then returned to Rome. LaFarge was content with the day, thinking no more of the event than adding one more pope to the tally sheet—he had now seen three popes, all from a distance.

Then two days later, on Friday, June 24, LaFarge was making preparations to wind up his European tour—he would make a quick trip to Spain where Francisco Franco was consolidating power, then double back through Paris en route to Rotterdam and home—when a messenger arrived with a sealed yellow-and-white envelope that bore the unmistakable mark of the Vatican. Only one person used this stationery with the seal of a crown and the crossed keys of St. Peter. This was a letter from the pope, more properly a summons from him. The Reverend John LaFarge, Society of Jesus, was requested to attend a private audience on Saturday, June 25, at 11:45
A.M.

LaFarge was overwhelmed and humbled. How could it be? “I was mystified,” he wrote in his diary. The summons brought “a sense of wonder which nothing else in the world could give.” How could a little-known American priest with neither pulpit nor station receive direct communication from the Holy Father?

The invitation was cause for analysis and a sleepless night. Pope Pius XI, now eighty-one years old, was said to be frail despite his healthy appearance the other day and was decreasing the frequency and duration of such private meetings.

LaFarge took advice from Father McCormick, who recommended that he jot down notes about his life and highlights of his missionary work that he could recite when asked, along with reminders that would serve to answer any possible question the pope might direct his way. It had been made clear that LaFarge was to come alone. He did not know what to expect.

Rome and its environs.

John LaFarge could be excused for not sleeping well that Friday night. On the morning of the visit, he had coffee and breakfast and then at midmorning borrowed a car from the university motor pool for the drive down the new Appian Way. Hot summer weather had settled in across Italy and all Europe with temperatures exceeding 90 degrees. Open windows offered some respite. The winding road paralleled the route of the famous original Roman road of the same name that was still in existence, rutted and hardly passable for cars.

Leaving Rome to the southeast, he drove past Roman ruins and ancient churches, and then along a sloping portion in the Alban Hills shaded by stands of olive trees, and finally over the bridge named for Pope Pius IX. During an unusually long thirty-one-year pontificate in the 1800s, Pius IX had decreed papal infallibility and rejected any move to accommodating to modern times in the Roman Catholic Church.

LaFarge was in an altered state of mind. He had expected nothing vaguely approaching a meeting of such import, and he was memorizing the little speech he would recite to the pope about his ministry and his writing. The Jesuit knew well that Pius was a man of letters. He also knew the folklore—the pope as mountaineer—and that Pius was the first pope to even set foot beyond the confines of the Vatican in more than half a century, the first pope to ride in a motorcar, and the first to have his voice transmitted by radio.