The Pope's Last Crusade (29 page)

An unseen choir chanted throughout the Mass, which lasted two and a half hours. Then followed “the procession of all the cardinals to the throne each one kissing his ring . . . I noticed that the more important cardinals did not kiss the Pope's toe . . . Some of them were very old and feeble and had to be helped up and down the steps leading to the dais.” By tradition, one prelate paused before the pope three times during the ceremony and intoned—
sic transit gloria mundi
—“thus passes the glory of the world”—a reminder to the pope that one day, too, he would die.

The new pope's first message made only the most indirect mention of world affairs. “We invite all to the peace of a conscience,” he said, “tranquil in the friendship of God . . . peace between nations by way of mutual help, friendly collaboration and cordial understanding, for the higher interest of the great human family . . . We have before our eyes the vision of the vast evils with which the world is struggling and to which it is our duty, unarmed but relying on the help of God, to bring succor.”

The media and various pundits engaged in much analysis of how Pacelli would act as pope. They drew threads from his repetition of the word
peace
twice in the same sentence; nothing more telling was available. The use of the word, they said, signaled that he intended to seek peace. But would he confront Hitler and Mussolini as Pius XI had? It appeared to be so. His choice of name, Pius XII, appeared to mean something. Many simply assumed that Pacelli—the pope's loyal servant and most visible understudy—would emulate old Pius's politics.

Analysts generally praised the choice of Pacelli. Ambassador Phillips expressed the opinion of many that “the fact that he has chosen the name of his predecessor is an intimation to the world that he intends to pursue the strong policy of Pius XI.” Dorothy Thompson of the
New York Tribune
said his election was “not only in harmony with the spirit and policies of his predecessor [but] it is in harmony with his diplomatic career.” That was also the impression in France. “The cardinals have marked the clear desire to pursue the politics energetically affirmed by Pius XI,” editorialized the Paris daily
L'Epoque,
“against all doctrines of violence and those that may come in the future.”

Yet there was significant diplomatic dissent. The American consul-general in Cologne, Germany, Alfred Klieforth, told the State Department that Pacelli, though a veteran diplomat, was deluded in his view of the Nazis. Klieforth reported to Washington on March 3 that Pacelli had told him he thought “Hitler was not a true Nazi and ‘in spite of appearances would end up in the camp of the left-wing Nazi extremists where he began his career.'” Another critic, the former German chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, maneuvered out of office by Hitler in 1932, told the British Foreign Office that “he knows Cardinal Pacelli very well and considers that there is a great deal of naiveté” in his view of Hitler and Mussolini.

Dissenters also remained within the walls of the Vatican. Among them were Cardinal Tisserant, who had not only refused to vote for Pacelli, but also told a friend afterward that he had voted for the Jesuit cardinal of Genoa, Pietro Boetto, a wasted vote because a Jesuit had never been and would not be elected pope. Among the other silent critics were Joseph Hurley, who had always maintained a cool relationship with Pacelli; and Gundlach, who doubted that Pacelli as the new pope would ever publish a treatise that condemned anti-Semitism. Gundlach described what hardly anyone outside the Vatican wall realized. He saw the new pope as a wisp of a man, swaying like a thin reed in the breeze, and he feared that his voice would be just as thin.

Three days after the papal coronation, Hitler invaded the remaining independent portion of Czechoslovakia, seized Prague, and annexed the country. As with Austria, exactly a year earlier, the Nazi army met virtually no resistance. Czechoslovakia no longer existed, and Chamberlain's plan for peace in our time was dead, just as Pope Pius XI had predicted.

Pope Pius XII, who had wanted the previous pope to endorse the Munich Agreement, now did nothing to criticize the German invasion. Even before Pacelli's investiture, he made sure that the Vatican would avoid taking sides and stay impartial.

William Phillips noted that the Vatican newspaper,
Osservatore Romano,
had toned down its rhetoric and replaced vitriolic attacks on Italy and Germany with moderate language. Britain quickly saw the same. “Vatican policy changed overnight,” wrote British historian Owen Chadwick. “Pius XI denounced the Nazi ill-treatment of the Churches, or countered Mussolini's anti-Semitic provisions, and generally stood up for justice and liberty. All these good objectives were suddenly seen as secondary to one supreme quest, that of helping the European powers not to destroy each other.”

British officials had wrongly assumed that Mussolini would be unhappy with Pacelli as the new pope; it turned out that his congratulations had been genuine. Ciano told the French ambassador Charles-Roux he was “delighted with the election. I am on the best terms with Cardinal Pacelli . . . His election is a great success for Italy.”

The new pope met with Ciano within a week of assuming office and said he planned to “follow a more conciliatory policy than Pius XI,” Ciano wrote in his diary. Ciano's assessment was succinct: “I believe that we can get along well with this Pope.”

The Germans were also enthusiastic. Pacelli was in touch almost immediately with the German embassy and sent a friendly letter to Hitler within days of his election. Heinrich Himmler spoke to Ciano about the prospects for improved relations. “They like the new Pope and believe that a
modus vivendi
is possible,” Ciano said. “I encouraged him along these lines, saying that an agreement between the Reich and the Vatican would make the Axis more popular.”

The new pope advocated peace negotiations with Hitler and Mussolini on one side and with the Western powers on the other. Critics said the peace negotiations initiated by the new pope did not point to peace. Everyone expected the pope, any pope, to support peace, “to use the authority of his great office to avert the threat of war in Europe,” the
New York Times
said in an editorial in May 1939. But as the new pope sought to be a fair broker and intermediary between the Axis and the Allies, he faced the problem, the
Times
continued, of “creating a will to peace on the part of nations which have been ready to resort to violence in order to achieve their ambitions.”

John LaFarge wrote enthusiastically in
America
about the election of the new pope. He assumed that Pope Pacelli, as he was sometimes called, would follow the policies and the legacy of Pope Pius XI. LaFarge had never spoken with him and had seen him only twice, in Budapest and briefly in the courtyard at Castel Gandolfo, yet he had every reason to be hopeful that his project still could be issued as an encyclical.

LaFarge had read the speculation about what exactly the new pope would focus on. “In a simple sense, of course, the new Pope is ‘political.' He has for years occupied with brilliance a major political position . . . and he has dealt with the world's leading politicians,” LaFarge wrote
.

Yet in another sense, LaFarge repeated what Pope Pius XI had often said. The church is intrinsically not political. It guides and views politics as part of its spiritual mission. And that must be based on humanity and morality.

“For the totalitarian governments,” LaFarge continued, “whether Communist, National Socialist or Fascist, it is practically impossible to see anything else in the Papacy than a rival to their own state-centered autocracy.”

LaFarge wrote that civilization and humanity were at stake. The church creates “an unswerving devotion to human rights and to the common good,” he said. “If we look back to the late Pope Pius XI, “we find this exemplified in his own life and utterances.” LaFarge assumed the new pope would follow the same path.

At the Vatican, on Easter Sunday, April 9, or the following Monday, Pope Pius XII, the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church, met with the Jesuit superior Wlodimir Ledóchowski and considered the words of John LaFarge that condemned anti-Semitism as racism and a crime against humanity. Pope Pacelli indicated that he had never before seen LaFarge's draft encyclical. His good friend Ledóchowski told him that he thought the document was lacking in focus and was too extreme. The pope accepted the word of his friend. That was all Ledóchowski needed to hear.

Ledóchowski's assistant, Zacheus Maher, wrote to LaFarge on Monday and told him the new pope had rejected the encyclical. The Vatican no longer wanted it and banned any reference to it being a papal document. “If you wish, you may now profit by your recent work and proceed to its publication,” Maher said. But “there shall not be the least allusion to the work as having in any way had any connection with anything requested of you by his late Holiness.

“The Lord will surely bless you for all the effort and anguish this work caused you even though it will not have the outlet at first anticipated.”

LaFarge and Gundlach exchanged letters after they each received this news from the Vatican. LaFarge suggested to his German friend that they make a pact not to publish the encyclical on their own, even as an independent document. Perhaps in that case, the new pope might change his mind and publish it one day.

“Slim chance of that,” Gundlach wrote back to LaFarge. But he agreed to hold on to the text. In his view, the “diplomatic” bloc within the Vatican—those who did not support the previous pope's confrontational style—had simply won out.

Gundlach also had received a letter from Maher on behalf of Ledóchowski and described it to LaFarge. “You can imagine that I was very shaken,” Gundlach wrote, “less on account of the content of the note, which I after all had no longer expected in any other fashion, than on account of the peculiar way with which this affair and we ourselves have been handled.

“We are hoping here for the continuation of the true line that once was,” Gundlach continued. But he could see that Pope Pacelli would not take sides in the battle against the rising tide of Nazism. Some defended the pope, Gundlach added, saying Pacelli would “in no way degrade himself and not go astray, even though his decisions and pronouncements be less spirited and more nicely balanced.” Gundlach did not agree.

Gundlach summed up what he believed had happened with Pius XI's encyclical: Ledóchowski's strategy of delay had worked. He blocked the previous pope, and he advised his close friend, Pacelli, the new pope, to discard the encyclical on racism and to silence those who produced it. “Our affair in any case meanwhile went the way of all flesh”—it died with the old pope.

Gundlach was bitter about how he and LaFarge had been treated, but he was mostly motivated by the conviction that the encyclical deserved to be published. He struggled in vain to find a positive side of the story—he thanked LaFarge for involving him in the drafting of the document and for his friendship. He also said how much he had enjoyed that summer working in Paris.

The two Jesuits came away from this experience with an understanding of the modus operandi of the new pope. This would be the course of the church in the midst of inevitable war—standing far back while Europe collapsed before an advancing German army and as the Nazis carried out their persecution of the Jews.

Cardinal Tisserant never spoke out in public against Pope Pacelli; he suffered in silence at first, then began to complain privately and directly to the new pope about his policy of neutrality. Some said the policy was intended to protect the Vatican and protect Catholics in Europe. Others said it was not the pope's role to make political statements. Tisserant vehemently disagreed. “I have insistently asked the Holy Father to issue an encyclical (condemning Nazism and Fascism),” he said in a letter to a fellow churchman. “I fear history will have to reproach the Holy See with having pursued a policy of convenience for itself, and not much more. This is extremely sad, especially for one who has lived under Pius XI.”

Joseph Hurley, Pius XI's personal interpreter and conduit to the U.S. embassy, also thought that Pope Pius XII should speak out. The European war had begun when Nazi Germany seized Poland in September 1939. Chamberlain resigned on May 10, 1940, the final acknowledgment that his policy of appeasement was a failure. He died of cancer six months later. On June 10, 1940, Italy entered the war alongside Germany. Four days later, Hitler's Wehrmacht marched triumphantly into Paris after conquering Belgium and Holland.

Hurley took his first open step toward a break with the Vatican when he issued a remarkable commentary on Vatican Radio in English on July 4, 1940, less than a month after Paris fell to the Nazis. The speech, monitored in Britain and the United States, declared that the time for pacifism was past. “We have sympathy for the pacifists but they are wrong,” Hurley said. “No word in the Gospel or in papal teaching suggests that justice should go undefended, that it is not worth dying for. . . . The Church is no conscientious objector.”

Hurley, the ranking American at the Vatican Secretariat of State, had spoken far beyond his brief, knowing well that the new pope did not like threatening remarks. Hurley's declaration was a throwback to the days of the previous pope—his beloved benefactor. The commentary came on the air without identifying Hurley, but Vatican reporters recognized his voice.

The
Times
of London reported on the commentary, saying that while “
Osservatore Romano
prints no war commentary nowadays,” this particular report shows that “the Vatican still allows strongly worded broadcasts.” Hurley's broadcast was most likely not authorized by the pope or other high-ranking officials at the Vatican. He was speaking as a loyal American and a man of moral force.