The Vatican Pimpernel (4 page)

He also kept fit by playing handball and wrote home in July 1928 asking that his brother-in-law Chris would mail him two good handballs. ‘Two is enough or otherwise I would have to pay a heavy tax.'
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Monsignor Dini and O'Flaherty looked after the wishes of the Bishop of Cape Town so well that the young Irishman continued to work in the Propaganda College for a number of years. However, a cloud appeared on the horizon in 1933. He wrote to his sister Bride in November of that year:

He need not have worried; his mentor was looking after his interests and a couple of weeks later he was advised that he would be going to Palestine as Secretary to the Apostolic Delegate.

It is not surprising that Dini took Monsignor O'Flaherty with him as his Secretary, having earlier identified him as a young man of significant promise. Not long into the mission, however, Dini died suddenly and O'Flaherty had to step into the breach temporarily as Chargé d'Affaires. He carried out his duties to great effect and as a result was appointed, in 1934, as Secretary to the Apostolic Delegate to the Republics of Haiti and San Domingo. O'Flaherty spent just a year in this position. However, he was obviously successful in this role because, on his departure, he was decorated by the Presidents of each of the Republics for his work in relation to famine relief and helping to settle a border dispute. In 1936, he was called back to Rome and then sent to Czechoslovakia. He spent two years there before being summoned again to Rome and given a new appointment in the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.

O'Flaherty spent the next quarter of a century working in that Office. It was never made clear what his role had been in Czechoslovakia nor indeed did he talk about it himself. Obviously, it had been a fairly sensitive mission and the fact that it was assigned to him is a clear indication of the high regard in which he was held by his superiors. When he joined it, the Head of the Holy Office was Monsignor Alfredo Ottaviani who was then in the early stages of a distinguished career as a powerful force within the Vatican. These two men had completely different personalities: one outgoing, gregarious and ebullient, and the other austere, careful and extremely conservative. Notwithstanding this, a lifelong friendship developed between them, and there is no doubt that the support of Ottaviani was helpful to O'Flaherty in subsequent years when his unofficial activities came to the attention of the Church authorities.

During this time, O'Flaherty also began to develop a wide range of contacts among Roman society generally. Many of these he would have got to know when he became an active member of the Rome Golf Club. It seems there was a regulation at that time which prohibited priests in the Diocese of Rome from playing golf but this did not seem to bother either O'Flaherty or his immediate superior Ottaviani. Among the many people he got to know then were some members of the old Roman noble families who proved to be of great assistance to him later in his work. Vittoria, the Duchess of Sermoneta, recalls:

When the diplomats of the Allied powers moved into the Hospice of Santa Marta, O'Flaherty was living in the nearby German College. During most of his life in Rome, O'Flaherty lived in this College and he developed a lifelong admiration for the German people and made valiant efforts to conquer their language. Notwithstanding his expertise in Italian, French and Spanish, he always found the German language difficult.

The onset of the war inevitably created huge problems of refugees – homeless, displaced and missing persons – and the Holy Office was assigned by the Pope the duty of dealing with all of those issues. This resulted in a new line of work for O'Flaherty. Within a year or so of Italy joining the War, there were tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war in camps throughout the north of the country. The Pope asked the Papal Nuncio to Italy, Monsignor Bergoncini Duca, to visit these camps to check on the welfare of the prisoners. As Duca had no English, O'Flaherty was asked to go along with him to act as his secretary and interpreter.

They started the work at Easter 1941. The Nuncio took a fairly leisurely approach to this task, visiting one camp per day. However, O'Flaherty approached the role with his usual energy. He regularly hopped on a train and travelled back to Rome, at night-time, with up-to-date lists of names of those whom he had tracked down, to be broadcast promptly by Vatican radio. A New Zealander, Fr Owen Sneddon, worked there and was a friend of O'Flaherty's. While the scripts of his broadcast were prepared by the authorities, Sneddon regularly added in pieces of information which were of huge importance to next of kin at the request of the Irishman. Hugh would then make the train journey back and rejoin the Nuncio in time for the visit to the next camp the following morning. In this way, he could ensure that information would reach the next of kin as quickly as possible. He also cut through red tape to ensure that Red Cross parcels to prisoners were delivered as quickly as possible and he distributed thousands of books around the camps, including a prayer book that he compiled together with another Irish priest, Monsignor Thomas Ryan. O'Flaherty also campaigned successfully to have the number of doctors and Protestant chaplains in prisoner-of-war camps in the south of Italy increased to appropriate levels. His blithe disregard for regulations and red tape in carrying out these duties eventually caused problems. Pressure was brought to bear by the Fascist authorities in late 1942 and as a result he was asked by Vatican authorities to resign from his position with Monsignor Duca and he did so. However, before he left he lodged very effective complaints about the manner in which two Camp Commanders were treating the prisoners. As a result, these Commanders, at Modena and Piacenza, were relieved of their duties. We now know that in December 1942 the Italian censors had discovered a letter from a British prisoner of war to his home which said ‘The Monsignor had told [them] that the war was going well.' Most likely this was the official reason given to the Vatican with the request that his appointment be terminated but:

However, a couple of months later, he made an informal visit with a Monsignor Riberi to a prisoner-of-war camp for Australian and South African prisoners at Tuturano near Brindisi. After the visit, the local Fascist party reported to the authorities in Rome that the visit had raised the morale of the prisoners and lowered that of their guards.

Others had begun to notice him also. Michael MacWhite had been appointed in 1938 as the first Irish Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Italian Government. He had been one of the original members of the Department of External Affairs, along with Joseph Walshe, after independence. On 19 November 1942 he wrote to Walshe at the Department of External Affairs in Dublin:

It is hard to understand the quite strong sentiments expressed in the report from the Irish Legation. It seems to imply that the Monsignor's activities involved more than just cutting through red tape and bureaucratic difficulties when it suggests that the Questura (police headquarters) had him under observation. At the same time, the journey home to Ireland, presumably a fairly innocuous event, hardly seems to merit such strong condemnation. There is no evidence that there was any personal antagonism between the Monsignor and the diplomat. At the same time, MacWhite was a very acute and well-informed observer of the scene in Rome. Very little is known about O'Flaherty's unofficial activities on behalf of prisoners of war at this stage. MacWhite's report gives a strong reason to believe that the Monsignor had commenced this work as early as the autumn of 1942.

There seems to have been some tension between MacWhite and his counterpart at the Holy See, Kiernan. In December 1943, in a report back to the Department, Kiernan notes:

Kiernan was not the sort of man who would hand over any of his responsibilities to another. However, MacWhite may have had reason to be careful in his dealings with Kiernan. As early as December 1942 a clear divergence emerges as to how things ought to be handled. MacWhite drafted a letter to Kiernan which he dated 10 December. As he did not sign it, it is reasonable to presume it was never sent. At the same time it is a clear reflection of his concerns:

Early 1943 saw the turning point in the War, with the Russian success at Stalingrad and the Allied victory in North Africa. The Italian Fascist authorities began to tighten their grip on Rome as a result. As part of this exercise, they began a process of searching out leading figures in the city who they considered might be a focus of dissent in the months ahead. Notable among these were Jews and prominent Italian anti-Fascists who might provide leadership to the Romans. By this stage also, O'Flaherty's reputation as the person to approach if one needed assistance had become well established. Many people whose situation was now precarious had already got to know him at pre-war social events. As one of his closest colleagues described the situation some time later:

Initially the Monsignor's role was merely to make suggestions to friends and acquaintances who felt that they might be in danger of arrest. He very quickly became a rallying point for those who were under threat, most particularly Jews and Anti-Fascists. He referred them to safe locations, usually monasteries or convents, where he felt they might find sanctuary. However, as fears grew and more and more raids became commonplace, his role developed a more active dimension. He began to hide some of those who approached him in his own place of residence which, ironically, was the German College in Rome. This College had, over the years, been home to many German students and was under the care of a German Rector assisted by a staff of Germanborn nuns. In addition, it was home to a number of Vatican officials, including O'Flaherty. Although it was in the shadow of St Peter's, the College was not in the Vatican itself but had the status of an extra-territorial property. Quite soon it became home to some unofficial guests. One of the early arrivals was Princess Nini Pallavicini, a young widow and a member of one of the ancient noble Roman families. Many of these families were quite public in their opposition to the position of the Fascist Government on the War. The authorities were aware that an illegal radio was operating in a particular area of Rome and eventually traced it to Palazzo Rospigliosi-Pallavicini where the Princess lived. As a result, they launched a raid and Princess Nini narrowly escaped by jumping out a window. She immediately sought O'Flaherty's help. He moved her into the German College and, although a very substantial cash reward was posted for information leading to her arrest, she was never betrayed. She spent the rest of the War assisting him in his work, particularly in providing false identity documents for escapees. Regular supplies of such papers were issued to people who came to O'Flaherty for help. It has even been suggested that printing equipment belonging to the Vatican was used in this exercise.