The Pope's Last Crusade (6 page)

Everyone present received Communion. When the Mass was completed, LaFarge left silently, went through the back onto the street, and locked the door. He returned to the parish house, said good-bye to Chardon and headed back to the train station where he purchased a ticket for his next destination, Prague. He would discover over the weekend that Czechoslovakia and Germany were on the brink of war.

LaFarge saw something was wrong when the conductors on the night train from Koblenz to Prague dropped the curtains in the dining car. When he returned to his seat in the coach, he noticed that they had also dimmed the lighting, allowing only low-level, blue light in the corridors. None of the crew told LaFarge what was happening, not wanting to alarm the passengers. People were panicked about the possibility that Germany would attack Czechoslovakia and the train crew didn't want the train to be seen from the air and then become a potential bombing target. At that moment Germany was moving troops close to the Czech border, very close to the route the Prague night train was taking. Czechoslovakia had summoned hundreds of thousands of reserves to duty and sent them to the disputed Sudetenland border. War appeared imminent.

Just as World War I was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Europeans knew that provocations, real or imagined, could move Hitler's Wehrmacht into Czechoslovakia. They were also aware that provocation could be manufactured, as it appears to have been.

Before dawn that Saturday morning, two Czechs of German heritage on a motorcycle attempted to run a roadblock at the Czech entry crossing at Eger. They evaded one guard and then drove straight toward a second policeman, who said he had tried to shoot out their tires but ended up wounding both men as they escaped uphill. Czech Sudeten police were familiar with the men, George Hoffman Fonsau and Nicholas Boehm Oberlohna, pro-Nazi provocateurs who had previous run-ins with authorities and had served time in prison. Fonsau and Oberlohna died at the local police barracks.

News of the incident spread quickly, and the German army marched to within miles of the border. Czech president Edvard BeneÅ¡ swiftly deployed four hundred thousand army reservists to the Sudetenland border zone. BeneÅ¡ broadcast an appeal for calm, but the fact he had gone on national radio to do that produced the opposite effect; his words intensified the fear of an impending war. “We are living through the gravest moment since the end of [World War I],” he said. “This calls for calmness [and] cool nerves . . . It means that we must know no fear in the days that are coming. That we must in fact banish fear and stand for everything.”

When Sir Neville Henderson, the British ambassador to Germany, asked German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop about the troop movements, he was told “to mind his own business . . . that Germany did not want to make trouble, but could not stand by while German blood was shed in Czechoslovakia.”

All this was going on during LaFarge's long train ride. Since there was no radio on the train and the train conductors said nothing, he had no idea of what was happening. All he could do was sense the strained, tense atmosphere all the way to the Czech border. Worse still, the border post was Eger, exactly where the two men had been killed hours earlier. The train reached the border midevening; customs inspection on both sides was unusually quick and perfunctory, silent and tense. On the Czech side, people finally told him about what was happening. There was “general fear of an immediate German invasion,” and Czechoslovakia was preparing to defend itself against an anticipated Nazi attack.

The train traveled on into Czech territory for another three hours eastward to Prague. The train lights didn't come on until after they had arrived at Prague's main station. On the platform, people shouted for porters in a cacophony of German and Czech and French among other languages. A porter half dragged and carried LaFarge's cases outside to search for a taxi in the driving rain; the weather added to the gloom and desperation.

But the porter abruptly abandoned LaFarge when an imposing German military officer demanded service first. “Half paralyzed with fear, the porter dropped my things on the sidewalk and lugged the big valises inside under an ever-pointing finger,” LaFarge remembered. It felt like an allegory for what was happening between the two countries. “Behind that threatening voice was the voice of Hitler, and that voice spoke not Czech but imperious German.”

LaFarge found a taxi but by then was soaked by the rain. He tried to make his way swiftly to the Jesuit seminary house where he was staying for the night. The roads and highways were clogged with military vehicles and soldiers heading west toward Sudetenland. Saturday had been a workday, and President Beneš's call to battle was so pressing that men were reporting to their military posts without even going home first. The atmosphere was turbulent.

The Jesuit center was overcrowded and chaotic like everywhere else in Prague that night. LaFarge's host, Father Jaroslav Ovecka, set up a makeshift bed for him in the seminary's geography museum. LaFarge “slept amid maps, globes and charts. Czechoslovakia was still upon the map that night.”

The rain stopped on Sunday, and though news reports said there was less danger of an attack, the constant drone of military traffic suggested otherwise. Appeals came in from Britain, from France, and from around the world for calm and restraint. But the Nazi newspaper
Angriff
kept the propaganda machine running by proclaiming that the Czechs would be held responsible for any violence against “members of the Greater German nation . . . The German Reich, which as the only big power in Central Europe bears the supreme responsibility for peace in this part of the world.”

The German claims were of course twisting the truth. Hitler and the Nazis were responsible for peace because the führer was the one who would decide whether to start the war. With Czechoslovakia, he was waiting even though the incident at the Czech border had been a promising opportunity. His generals told him the Wehrmacht had not completed preparations yet. All in good time. It was not the moment to launch an invasion, especially when Czechoslovakia was mobilized and waiting. The Nazi army would go in when Czechoslovakia was least ready and least able to defend itself. As Joseph Goebbels pushed the propaganda campaign, he noted the fact in his diary. “The Führer . . . knows what he wants. So far he has always hit upon the right moment to act.”

When LaFarge met with Jan Masaryk two weeks earlier, he had only a distant understanding of the Czechoslovakian problem. Now he understood Masaryk's fatalistic view; war appeared depressingly inevitable. He also remembered how the Czech ambassador almost begged him to meet with Beneš when he arrived in Prague. Somehow a Jesuit journalist was supposed to listen, understand, and then move mountains with logic and words of peace. LaFarge heard that Masaryk had traveled from London and was now in Prague, but he decided not to meet with the Czech leaders.

“In all this excitement I did not have the heart to visit either Mr. BeneÅ¡ or Mr. Masaryk.” He feared that such a meeting would have been irrelevant, and that he would come across as “a clerical bore.” “I could not see what I could do about it all.”

As he walked the city's streets, and later in Bratislava on the road to the Budapest Eucharistic Congress, he could sense that these were the last days of Czechoslovakia's freedom from tyranny.

LaFarge's colleagues in New York had to piece together the snippets of words he was cabling back to them. His telegrams were missing articles and participles because each word cost five dollars or more, and he was on a priest's budget. The messages, complete with errors typed in by non-English-speaking cable operators, were spare. His cable from Budapest read:

IMPOSSIBLE EXAGGERATE IMPLACABILITY ENEMY TRAGEDY ALLEN SITUATION . . . WORLD DRAMA ENACTIVA

It was meant to say, “It would be impossible to exaggerate the implacability of the enemy we face and the tragedy of the alien situation. I am the witness to a world drama being enacted before me.”

The disaster was growing. Jews had been dispossessed and stripped of their rights in Austria, and they were wandering in search of an elusive safe haven. Aliens in their own lands, they were being cast out of Austria by the Gestapo, denied entry into Czechoslovakia, expelled once more and hunted down yet again by officials in Hungary, who rejected their presence as well. The Jesuits at America House read the reports too. A reporter for the
New York Times
watched uniformed Nazi thugs on the rampage terrorizing Jews:

It has been a common practice for squads of Storm Troopers to make the rounds of cafes in Vienna, order all Jews to stand up, and then march them out to kneel in the gutter and scrub off the pavements . . . Lye or hydrochloric acid was put in the water. The weather—and it was normally cold and rainy during this time—made no difference in the sport. The hands and knees of the victims were soon rubbed raw.

People whose families had lived in the same country for centuries were now discarded and set to the winds and whims of crude indecency. Jews in Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Romania, and now Hungary were without hope. LaFarge had already seen them fleeing the savagery. To the dismay of LaFarge and others, Catholic leaders themselves were divided between pro- and anti-Semites.

Such was the mood in Hungary, the next stop on LaFarge's European tour. On May 27, he took another train, this time bound for Budapest among thousands of religious pilgrims. Attending the Eucharistic Congress in Budapest had been the central purpose of LaFarge's trip. It was meant to be a great joyous celebration of the faith. But the conference was weighed down by the fall of Austria, the crumbling of Czechoslovakia, and the sense that more was to come.

Scarcely two weeks after Pope Pius XI had snubbed Hitler in Rome, the Nazi leader followed through on a long-standing threat: any Germans—and now newly conquered Austrians—who wished to attend the congress would need to obtain a travel visa. The visa application implicitly obliged would-be travelers to declare they were active in the Catholic Church, a declaration that would certainly place them on a list for potential Nazi harassment and reprisals. No one, not even German or Austrian cardinals, had dared seek permission to travel—and none of the twenty-five thousand Germans and thirty thousand Austrians who had planned to attend did so.

Never before had such a congress taken on so much political significance. The newly formed Hungarian government had passed new anti-Semitic laws that curtailed the ability of Jews to participate in politics and society. It was the first such anti-Semitic legislation outside German jurisdiction.

The pope's personal representative at the Eucharistic Congress was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the elegant, austere Vatican secretary of state. Pacelli arrived in Budapest just as the anti-Semitic laws were announced. Guest of the Hungarian regent, Admiral Nicholas Horthy at the Royal Castle, Pacelli delivered the main speech of the event and avoided criticism of Hungarian anti-Semitism or the Nazis. On the contrary, some of his remarks sounded instead like a veiled attack on the Jews. Jesus, he said, “who so often was the recipient of the rage of his enemies, he who suffered the persecutions of those of whom he was one, he shall be triumphant in the future.” At the same time that Jews were being disenfranchised in Hungary, Pacelli appeared to refer to the old church prejudice that Jews (of whom Jesus “was one”) had killed him. It was doubtful that LaFarge or many of the attendees could parse out the cardinal's words that night. LaFarge saw Pacelli at a distance but did not meet him. Like Pacelli, he was housed among the nobility, at the villa of old friends, the Baron and Baroness de Hedry. The baroness's sister had been a supporter of LaFarge's mission work in rural Maryland.

LaFarge forced himself to be lifted up by the exuberant mood in Budapest. The Eucharistic Congress was an ornate celebration. Children gave flowers to LaFarge and other visiting pilgrims as they arrived at the city. The papal yellow-and-white flag flew all about. The central spectacle was a mystically beautiful ceremony along the Danube, which divides the old city of Buda and much newer Pest on the east bank of the river. The water shimmered with the light of thousands of candles held by worshippers close to shore. The medieval citadel at Gellért Hill and Fisherman's Bastion—the restored stone bulwark where Hungarians could not repel the Turkish siege and invasion five centuries earlier—were alternatively set in relief by five searchlights that swept across the countryside.

Pacelli knelt at the bow of a steamer on the Danube before a three-foot-tall Eucharist altar inset with jewels and silver. An army of Catholic clergy, monsignors, priests, and nuns surrounded him, all holding candles. The candlelight shimmered all along the river as the procession started at dusk.

One thousand choir boys sang as Catholic youth held torches aloft; hundreds of thousands of people knelt along the banks of the river; most also carried a flickering candle. All the heat and light seemed by the force of spirit and numbers to symbolize much more than a religious procession, to burn away, to wash away the reality of impending war.

“A city and a nation, and delegates from many lands, poured out their hearts in solemn adoration to the Eucharistic King, with all the dignity and splendor they could muster,” LaFarge wrote in his memoir.

LaFarge was among them, watching as Cardinal Pacelli “carried the Sacred Host in a spot-lighted glass chamber at the prow of a steamer swiftly moving down the dark Danube, and symbolically limned against the huge mass of Buda's mighty rock.” But LaFarge could not shake the feeling of terror and doom: “One sensed the gathering background of totalitarian hate during the mysterious night procession.”

Afterward, Pope Pius XI's voice could be heard on loudspeakers broadcast via shortwave from Vatican Radio. He prayed for peace and that God might “quell the darkness and perturbation of souls by which we are so troubled.” The pope said that perhaps there was “hope of better times, dissipating the clouds which seem to threaten fresh storms, and illuminating that darkness and claiming that unrest of souls.”