The Pope and Mussolini (52 page)

The French, British, German, and Italian leaders arrived at the conference site on September 29. The thickset Mussolini, dressed in his tight-fitting uniform, his chin jutted forward, and his face set in his best Caesar-like pose, acted as though he—rather than Hitler—were the host. Ciano, also in uniform, hovered around his father-in-law. Chamberlain, with his fancy suit, his abundant eyebrows, lined face, and hands bent by rheumatism, was the picture of the aristocratic diplomat of English stamp. Hitler, in business suit, was ill at ease, constantly in motion, his face pallid. Knowing only German, he clung to Mussolini, the sole German-speaker among the other government heads.
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A photo from the meeting shows Mussolini in his light-colored military uniform, his head shaved bald, staring somewhat menacingly as Chamberlain, in dark suit and high collar, appears to be struggling to convince him of something. For Mussolini, the umbrella-carrying British prime minister was the embodiment of the effete values his Fascist regime was battling. “I never want to see umbrellas around me,” he once said. “The umbrella is a bourgeois relic, it is the arm used by the pope’s soldiers. A people who carry umbrellas cannot found an empire.”
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While the Duce was in Munich, the pope went to the Vatican radio station to broadcast a plea for peace. He spoke not in Latin but in Italian, eager that his message be heard. Tears reddened his eyes as he addressed “all Catholics and the entire universe.” “While millions of men live in fear of the impending danger of war and of the threat of unprecedented massacres and ruin,” he said, “We share in Our paternal heart the trepidation of so many of Our children and We invite the bishops, clergy, members of religious orders, and all the faithful to join Us in the most insistent, hopeful prayer for preserving peace with justice and charity.”
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Back at the Munich conference, Mussolini offered his peace plan—or perhaps more accurately, he presented Hitler’s peace plan and called it his own. Germany was to be allowed to seize the Sudetenland. The British and French government heads agreed to this humiliating capitulation in exchange for Hitler’s promise to stop there. No representative of Czechoslovakia was invited to the meeting that dismembered the country.

Mussolini returned to Italy to a hero’s welcome. In fields alongside the train tracks, farmers got down on their knees to greet the man who had brought peace to Europe. This was only one of many signs that, a month after the racial laws were first announced, his popularity remained high.
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For his part, Hitler would have to wait until the following year to see his war begin in earnest, but he drew an important lesson from the peace conference. In August 1939, as he was about to send German troops into Poland, he told his generals: “Our enemies are small worms. I saw them in Munich.”
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Among those singing Mussolini’s praises was Milan’s Cardinal Schuster. In a gushing public letter, he proclaimed that “Italy is proud because its Duce made such a precious contribution to peace.” He suggested that a new church dedicated to peace be constructed to mark Mussolini’s triumph. Hearing of the archbishop’s proposal, the pope exploded. “What a disaster!” he exclaimed to Tardini. “I would never have believed it! I thought he was more intelligent than that!”
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At a Grand Council meeting a few days after his return, Mussolini took aim at the handful of holdouts against the racial laws. He insisted that the Jews were behind what remained of antifascism in the country. Stung by the pope’s criticisms, he branded Pius XI “the most harmful pope ever for the future of the Catholic Church”
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Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, archbishop of Milan, with Mussolini

(
photograph credit 24.2
)

The pope is a “calamity,” the Duce, in a pontificating mood, told Clara Petacci shortly after the meeting. “Today we are the only ones, I am the only one, supporting this religion.… And he does shameful things, like saying that we are all like Semites.” He worked himself into a fury. “You don’t know the trouble they are causing,” he told Clara, whose interest in such matters was limited. “He has upset all the Catholics, he gives nasty, shocking speeches. In a word, he is evil.” The Duce went on to muse that there was something unlucky about popes
named Pius—they all brought disaster. Pius VI and Pius VII were both thrown out of Rome by Napoleon; Pius IX lost Rome and the Papal States; and Pius X saw all Europe erupt in war. “He is losing the whole world and now he risks destroying everything here as well. Ah, it’s a true calamity.” As a Catholic, he concluded, “I have to say that it would be hard to imagine a worse pope than this one.”
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The Grand Council approved the new racial laws;
La Civiltà cattolica
published them, along with the official justification, all without comment. “Jewish elements lead all anti-Fascist forces,” the government proclaimed, and so further measures against them were urgently needed. Italian Jews were to be thrown out of the Fascist Party; they could not own or direct businesses having more than a hundred employees, own more than fifty hectares of land, or remain in the Italian military. Restrictions on their ability to exercise professions would soon be announced. Special secondary schools for Jews were to be established, joining the Jewish elementary schools that had already been authorized.
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Ciano worried about the pope’s reaction to the latest round of racial laws, but he was relieved to learn that all might work out well after all. The Holy See would offer no objection, his chargé d’affaires at the Vatican told him, as long as the new laws did not treat Catholics who had converted from Judaism as if they were Jews. Most important, the Vatican insisted that nothing be done to violate the terms of the concordat: its language clearly guaranteed state recognition of all Church-sanctioned marriages. “This is the only point in the racist proclamation of the Grand Council,” the Italian diplomat told Ciano, “about which the Church would object.”
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This reading of the pope’s position is confirmed by a note Domenico Tardini made on the day the new racial laws were announced. “This evening, at the request of the Holy Father,” he wrote, “
L’Osservatore romano
will publish a brief article, mentioning some concern and expressing the hope that the future law may remove every reason for reserve.”
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The pope viewed the new racial laws as part of a larger, troubling
pattern. Mussolini, rather than working with the Vatican to bring about a confessional state in which Catholicism infused Fascism with its values, seemed bent on creating a separate Fascist religion. In mid-September, Pius XI addressed this concern in remarks to a group of French union members. Some argue, said the pope, that everything should belong to the state, making it totalitarian. But such a claim was absurd. “If there is a totalitarian regime,” he told them, “totalitarian in fact and by right—it is the regime of the Church, because man belongs totally to the Church.”
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The pope was beginning to question whether he could continue to support Mussolini and his Fascist regime. But although his unscripted remarks continued to make both Fascist officials and his own advisers nervous, his opposition to specific anti-Semitic measures remained limited. Clearly those around the pope did not oppose them. Italy’s chargé d’affaires, Carlo Fecia di Cossato, informed Mussolini and Ciano that according to top Vatican officials, the recent racial laws “have not, as a whole, found an unfavorable reaction in the Vatican.” The only objection raised there regarded the violation of the Church’s right to define what constituted a legal marriage. “I had confirmation of these impressions from Monsignor Montini, substitute for ordinary affairs at the secretary of state office, especially that the major, not to say the only, concern for the Holy See regards the case of marriages with converted Jews.”

Cossato added a note about the Jesuits, echoing Pignatti’s earlier advice. “The Jesuits,” he explained, “have always been convinced anti-Semites—albeit for doctrinal reasons different from ours.” But they could not let themselves be portrayed as opposing the pope. Better, he advised, to let the Jesuits demonize the Jews without calling attention to it, for “in the shadows and on the practical level they have been and they may still be our best allies.”
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That same evening Cossato got to meet with Father Rosa, whose latest article on “the Jewish question” had recently been published in
La Civiltà cattolica
. Rosa told him he had written it on orders from the Vatican, “to dissipate the impression that readers might have of the
total support for the racist measures adopted by the Fascist Government by the organ of the Society of Jesus.” But after speaking with Rosa, the envoy felt reassured. “The Jesuits,” he told Ciano, “are still today clearly and fundamentally anti-Jewish.”
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SHORTLY BEFORE GOING TO
the early October Grand Council meeting, Ciano summoned the papal nuncio and showed him reports he had received from a recent Eucharistic Congress. Borgongini saw the telltale markings of Mussolini’s colored pencil on the sheets. The dictator had been upset to learn of critical remarks made by priests at the congress. One in particular had angered him. “God,” the priest had warned, “will certainly punish the German people and all those who set out on their path.” The Duce did not want any conflict with the Church, said Ciano, but the pope must be told that unless he prevented priests from voicing such criticism, the government would be forced to act.

“If there has been any intemperance of language,” the nuncio assured Ciano, “certainly we will be the first to remind the sacred orators of their duty.” But the pope did not share the nuncio’s craven view. When, some days later, Pius learned of the priests’ “intemperate” words, he exclaimed, “
Benissimo! Giustissimo!
” (“Excellent! Just right!”) He added, “Someone needs to be saying these things!”

At the same meeting with Ciano, Borgongini again conveyed the pope’s plea that Mussolini intervene with Hitler on his behalf. The pope had been upset to learn that the Nazis’ persecution of the Church was now extending to Austria and the Sudetenland. “Since it is clear that no one is able to influence Hitler aside from His Excellency the Head of the Government,” the nuncio told Ciano, “I beg you to tell His Excellence Mussolini that only he can get the Führer to stop his persecution.”

Borgongini then turned to the question of the Fascist Party head in Bergamo. Here his words are of special interest, for they refer to the secret deal with Mussolini in mid-August, granting papal approval for the racial laws in exchange for concessions to benefit Catholic Action.
“I asked the minister [Ciano] to take care of Bergamo,” the nuncio reported afterward to Pacelli, “for it was authoritatively promised that that federal secretary would be fired by the end of September, and yet he was still in his job.”
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Reminded that he had not yet fulfilled his end of the bargain, Mussolini summoned Tacchi Venturi. The Bergamo question, he said, had gone on too long, or as he put it in his more colorful language, it had grown
“la barba troppo lunga,”
too long a beard.
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He would remove the party head there immediately. At the same time, he asked the pope to dismiss four members of the Bergamo Catholic Action board who had once been Popular Party activists.
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When Pius heard what the Duce wanted, he expressed surprise that men with such a past could still be found in Catholic Action leadership positions. He had thought they had all been pruned out.
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Tardini was startled at how readily the pope ordered the four men dismissed. On October 14, the Bergamo newspaper reported the resignation of the four board members and the removal of Bergamo’s Fascist Party head.
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The pope’s moods continued to swing sharply, linked in part to his health. His periods of depression and lashing out were followed by days when he seemed much mellower. In early October, while asking Tardini to send a letter dealing with a Milanese monastery, he joked, “Friars’ stuff! It really is true what they say, ‘Those who wear surplice and hood, never mutter a word to the good!’ ”
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A few days later he asked his staff to find a young priest in Vienna who could send secret reports on what was going on there. He quipped, “If I were younger, I would be very happy to get an assignment like that!”
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