The Pope's Last Crusade (14 page)

He was not alone in focusing on Spain. The civil war had divided Roman Catholic opinion. Some like LaFarge thought Franco was waging a necessary war against the forces of Communism. Others saw him as a ruthless tactician ready to seize dictatorial power from a democratic government. These were the seeds of the view of the “red menace” in Western Europe. LaFarge believed fervently that Franco's victory would stop the advance of Communism elsewhere. “If the Reds would carry on as they were doing in the country of Spain,” LaFarge wrote, “it was evident that if they had the chance, despite their soothing words, they might be undertaking similar projects in France itself.”

Many people, including influential Catholics, disagreed with him. A Communist takeover of Europe was neither evident nor likely, and Communists were not the largest component of the forces fighting Franco. The Spanish Civil War, raging since July 1936, had a major effect on the Catholic Church's response to Nazism in Europe. Many in the church reviled Stalin, who had repressed Catholics in Russia for twenty years. Who was more dangerous? Stalin, who supported the Spanish Republic, or Hitler, who supported Franco and his insurgents? What was the greatest threat facing the world? Spain's Civil War was a bloody debating ground.

LaFarge's notes for an article in
America
describe Franco as a moderate trying to rein in “those in his immediate associates whose record would be favorable to the spread of Nazi ideas.” He thought Franco had been forced to deal with unsavory characters because he needed financial support. LaFarge argued that Franco, once victorious, would emerge as a democrat.

The pope had criticized Franco's continued attacks on Spanish civilians; two weeks before his meeting with LaFarge, on June 10, 1938, the pope demanded that Franco stop such carnage.
Osservatore Romano
said: “Useless massacre of the civil population once more has revived the serious and difficult problem of ‘humanization' of war, which is itself destructive and inhuman.” The Vatican focused on Franco's policies of bombing areas especially in the Basque country, which it said “have no military interest nor are they near military centers or public buildings which affect the war.”

LaFarge and his colleagues labored on despite such political distractions and were relieved when the heat wave across Europe subsided in August with cooling rains and milder weather. But on August 13, LaFarge received a telegram that his brother, Bancel, his substitute father and mentor, had died at age seventy-three, at his home near New Haven.

LaFarge grieved that he could not have been at his brother's bedside. Bancel was the central authority figure in his life. “At his death I reproached myself,” he wrote, “as I have done before and since, that I never had really expressed, as I should all my indebtedness to Bancel, for if it had not been for him I should never have obtained my education, possibly not at college and certainly not abroad.”

A flood of memories came to him: Bancel as a young man teaching this youngest brother to take out their little skiff onto Narragansett Bay and the ocean; Bancel always kind and attentive when the rest of the family was not there. LaFarge recalled that when he attended Harvard, he was often penniless, but Bancel always rescued him with spending money.

Bancel had had a good life, a happy marriage and family with his wife, Mabel, and four children. He was a respected artist and produced beautiful paintings and stained-glass designs, although he neither won the recognition his father had nor had the same satisfaction in his craft. Although they had been apart for years at a time, the brothers felt lasting affection and LaFarge's grief was overwhelming. “I had so hoped to be with Bancel during his last hours,” LaFarge said, “it was a bitter disappointment to find myself on the other side of the ocean.”

LaFarge's Jesuit brethren did all they could to comfort him. Talbot went to New Haven for Bancel's funeral. “I said Mass for your brother Bancel on the day after I heard the news,” Talbot wrote in a letter to LaFarge. “The other members of the Community likewise remembered him in their Masses and Prayers. May God give him eternal rest!”

Talbot also sent word from the parish priest who ministered to Bancel on his deathbed. “Some days before his death, Father Downey was called. He was asked to give the final blessing, for there was imminent danger of death,” Talbot wrote. “Father Downey grasped his hand and said a few words. Bancel meanwhile was mumbling, attempting to express himself. Suddenly, as if with a tremendous effort, in a voice that could be heard outside the room, he almost shouted: ‘Father, I am very happy that you have come to see me.' The members of the family marveled that Bancel had the strength to speak in such a tone. As far as I know, he did not speak aloud after that.”

LaFarge was comforted that Bancel's “last hours were of great peace and really all that was most fitting for such a life. He was laid out in his artist's smock, as befitted one who had given the best of his talents to his chosen profession.”

LaFarge struggled with his emotions and found it difficult to focus on his work. Family members had told him that his eldest brother, Grant, five years older than Bancel, was also seriously ill.

The timeline for returning home had been pushed from August to September and now perhaps not even before autumn. He had to concentrate and finish the encyclical. “About other things at home I just cannot think,” he wrote to Talbot, thanking him for his support. “If I start thinking, it has no end. All I can do is to pray and hope. After all it is God's business, and not mine.”

The Vatican and the Italian government reached a temporary agreement to tone down their hostile rhetoric. But this did not assuage Mussolini's anger at the pope for long and hardly made a difference in the pope's criticism of Fascist policies.

Mussolini told Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, who was also his son-in-law: “Contrary to what people believe, I am a very patient man.” But he added, “I will react harshly. . . . No one should make me lose my patience.”

The agreement fell apart after only a few weeks. On September 5, 1938, the first day of the school year across Italy, the government announced that Jewish children could no longer attend schools and universities and that all Jewish teachers and professors were fired. It was a great shock that raised greater fears for worse times to come. The school ban signaled clearly that Italy would march with Nazi Germany toward the systematic repression of Jews.

The announcement was accompanied by a virulent anti-Semitic newspaper campaign. The newspaper
Tevere
(Tiber in Italian), long known for its rants, praised the school ban as well as a purge of Jews in the armed forces, judiciary, and politics. “During the Ethiopian War, all the forces that acted against Italy were unleashed by Jews,” the newspaper said. “The attempt to strangle Italy was particularly willed and favored by Jewish currents and the Jewish international [conspiracy] with its maneuvers to starve us and stab us in the back.”

Another decree effective on September 5 ordered the expulsion from Italy of an estimated ten thousand Jews who had come to the country since the end of World War I. The law even applied to Jews who were naturalized Italian citizens and to those who had converted to Catholicism. As expected, Mussolini's decision to protect “the purity of the Italian race” was hailed by Germany. The measures came less than a year after Mussolini and Ciano had said that there was no Jewish problem in Italy.

Shaking with anger, the pope responded the following day when he spoke to a group of Belgian Catholic pilgrims. He made a declaration that would symbolize the most important months of his papacy. “Anti-Semitism is a hateful movement, with which we as Christians must have nothing to do. . . . No, it is not licit for Christians to take part in manifestations of anti-Semitism . . . anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”

The declaration, spoken by the pope almost in tears, followed no script. These were words from the heart, written by no one, nor vetted by others at the Vatican such as Cardinal Pacelli, who would have counseled caution and moderation. Instead, Pope Pius spoke without ambiguity. It was the clearest statement a leader of the Roman Catholic Church had ever uttered about the shared heritage of Christians and Jews. The pope had essentially said:
We are the same people
.

The pope's heartfelt words were long remembered and repeated. It became a recurring theme that encouraged bishops and cardinals in Germany, Italy, and around the world to speak out. Not all of them did, but those who took Pius's message to heart made their own speeches. The pope's words were grudgingly debated by churchmen who for decades had followed anti-Semitic tracts, listened to unsubstantiated nonsense that Jews started the French and Russian revolutions, and accepted as fact that the Jews killed Jesus of Nazareth.

Mussolini thundered back at the pope in a speech in the northeastern city of Trieste. He was still irritated by the pope's earlier charge that he was imitating Hitler and said that only “half-wits” could think that. This led to a new round of sparring between the dictator and the Vatican. At one point the Vatican had to ask Foreign Minister Ciano if Mussolini had referred to the pope as a half-wit. Nothing of the kind, Ciano replied, unconvincingly.

The Fascist response to the pope soon took a new tack and had something of truth to it. Roberto Farinacci, the journalist and presiding anti-Semite in Mussolini's Fascist movement, advised his Nazi friends that the pope was becoming irrelevant. “The Germans are mistaken in assuming that the Catholic Church agrees with the Pope on each and every issue. We know that on the racial issue the clergy are split into two camps and that the Pope is powerless to do anything about.” Farinacci went further, though, and accused the pope of siding with the Communists and atheists.

But as long as the pope felt healthy enough, he had the time and the will to control the dissent to his policies inside the Vatican. He could also still receive LaFarge and his encyclical and force its publication. When would it be finished?

John LaFarge was editing the final touches of the draft encyclical and told Talbot he engaged in “healthy debates” with his Jesuit colleagues Gustave Desbuquois and Gustav Gundlach, “the two Guses.” They were often joined by their fellow Jesuit Heinrich Bacht. LaFarge originally feared that these other writers might pressure him to dilute his statements about racism and its connection to the terrorizing of Jews in Europe. He was delighted that Gundlach, who despised Hitler and Nazi Germany, had become his greatest advocate.

The priests knew their words would likely have an impact on politics and history. At breaks from the writing, the men often sipped coffee, ate cake, and, as LaFarge recalled, they debated “the problems of the world.”

The crisis between Germany and Czech Sudetenland had been percolating all summer, and the pressure increased toward the end of August when word spread about an imminent German invasion of Czechoslovakia. The number of Jewish refugees was increasing, although no country was opening its doors to these immigrants. LaFarge had included a passage in the encyclical about the forced exodus of the Jews, “this flagrant denial of human rights sends many thousands of helpless persons out over the face of the earth without any resources. Wandering from frontier to frontier, they are a burden to humanity and to themselves.”

LaFarge had been hearing how near war was for the entire four months he had been in Europe, and now it was turning to reality. By late summer, it was clear that Hitler was prepared to invade Czechoslovakia. On September 15, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden to urge him to seek a road to peace. This began Chamberlain's shuttle between England and Germany, during which he begged Hitler to negotiate a resolution. Britain and France were offering Sudetenland to Germany if Hitler would only take a pledge of peace. Chamberlain would give Czechoslovakia to Hitler, which would result in the disappearance of that country. But Hitler would not stop there.

War was a constant theme in Paris, but LaFarge said that people “managed to put on an appearance of quiet indifference . . . [though] they did appear completely prepared for the worst, as far as defense went. High army officials assure you with what seemed a well-founded satisfaction that every screw was tightened, every man ready to fly to his post; all that was needed was a telephone call, for a ‘button to be pushed,' and in twenty minutes the General Staff would see their planes soaring, their artillery rumbling, to the East.”

On September 18, LaFarge said the encyclical's final draft copies were being edited and typed. The document would be a timely tool in the pope's arsenal for dealing with the European crisis. LaFarge was satisfied, relieved, and amazed that the job was done. He felt himself to be “exhausted to the very limit of my mind and body,” but he thought the final product was a success.

Much of the encyclical was presented in indirect language, especially Gundlach's obscure historical statements and distant references to liturgy. They retained some of the church's rejection of Judaism as a religion; the encyclical did not deny the church's history in that regard. But the Nazi threat led to the conclusion that religious differences should be irrelevant. Even though the entire document would be read widely, only a few pages—those written by LaFarge—would be dissected and published in every newspaper in the world. Those several hundred words would anger the Nazi regime and would be seen as a direct attack on both Hitler and Mussolini. This was what the pope wanted, and in a sense this would be LaFarge's legacy.

The encyclical's title was the first shot to be fired at the monolith of anti-Semitism—
Humanis Generis Unitas
—
The Unity of the Human Race.
The preamble declared: “The Unity of the Human Race is forgotten, as it were, owing to the extreme disorder found at the present time in the social life of man.”