Considering that the encyclical was in the editing domain of Father Rosa and drafted during an era in which the church still referred to “perfidious Jews” in its liturgy, not all its language was friendly to Jews.113 It said “Jewish people . . . promote revolutionary movements [bolshevism] which aim to destroy society and to obliterate . . . the knowledge, reverence and love of God.”114 As a result of being “blinded by their dream of worldly gain and material success” they deserved the “worldly and spiritual ruin” that had befallen them.115 Some of LaFarge’s pioneering work against segregation in America was cited as an argument for the segregation of Jews and Christians.116
Yet all the antiquated prejudices seemed insignificant compared to the overriding theme that condemned any government that pursued racist and anti-Semitic policies. They were “totally at variance with the true spirit of the Catholic Church.” Anti-Semitism and racism were linked for the first time, since “the struggle for racial purity ends by being uniquely the struggle against the Jews.” Moreover, the encyclical castigated governments that treated “innocent persons . . . as outlaws by the very fact of their parentage.”117
Historians are split over whether the Holocaust might have been averted had the encyclical been released. Some consider it a tragic missed opportunity that would have forced Hitler to at least postpone the Final Solution until after the war. Others counter that it would not have slowed Hitler in his war against the Jews but would only have guaranteed that the Nazis sent every German bishop to the concentration camps.118
What is not in dispute is that Secretary of State Pacelli prevented the church from taking any public position condemning the Nazi reign of terror on the Jews. Not only did he keep the church from exercising its moral authority, he ensured that the remarkably direct language of Humani Generis Unitas was buried in the archives. That reaffirmed the Nazi confidence that Pacelli would insist at all costs the church maintain strict neutrality through the war.
* * *
I. While church officials remained quiet about forced sterilization, another controversy in Germany had them in a frenzy: Freikörperkultur Entwicklung, the nudism movement. Shedding clothes in public was a popular avant-garde trend at some bohemian camps during the 1920s and 1930s. Ranking clerics held dozens of meetings about how the church might best battle it. The Vatican condemned it as a “fetish of the flesh.” Pacelli considered nudity “perverse,” and judged it a contributing factor to the declining birth rate among “purely Catholic marriages.” He convinced Mussolini to confiscate and destroy all copies of a book by a Dutch author that encouraged nudity. Germany was the epicenter, said Pacelli, with some five million “mentally imbalanced” adherents. Cardinal Merry del Val called nudism one of the “most detestable and pernicious aberrations of our times. . . . An attack on Christian morality.” The church never issued such unequivocally condemnatory language to address Hitler’s and Mussolini’s anti-Semitic race policies.24
II. The Reichskonkordat never stopped some high-ranking Nazis from attacking the church. In a 1938 speech, Hitler’s military secretary, Martin Bormann, said, “We Germans are the first to be appointed by destiny to break with Christianity. It will be an honor for us.” Bormann reminded Nazi provincial governors in a confidential memo that the German church “must absolutely and finally be broken.” In his book—The Myth of the Twentieth Century—Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s philosopher and ideologue, attacked Jews and also launched an unmitigated assault on Christianity, particularly Catholicism. When the Vatican added Rosenberg’s book to its banned list, Hitler responded by promoting him as overseer of the Nazi Party’s “world view.”30
III. The Obelisk of Axum was placed in a central Roman square, in front of what would become the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Italy resisted returning it for decades, but finally did so in 2005.53
IV. When Pacelli visited the United States that November, he met with seventy-nine bishops in twelve of the sixteen American church’s Ecclesiastical Provinces. And the day after President Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection, Pacelli met the president at his Hyde Park home. There is no indication that the Ethiopian invasion was discussed. Instead, Roosevelt was concerned with the wildly popular but bigoted radio broadcasts of an American priest, Charles Coughlin. And Pacelli wanted to encourage the United States to reestablish relations with the Vatican (the last American diplomat was withdrawn in 1867). Although the substance of those talks was never disclosed, the results were evident. Two days after the meeting, Coughlin announced the last broadcast of his provocative show that reached thirty million listeners. And Roosevelt eventually bypassed resistance in Congress to restoring diplomatic relations with the Holy See by dispatching industrialist Myron Taylor as his personal envoy.68
V. That Pius was old and sick did not stop some inside the Vatican from embracing conspiracy theories about his passing. French Cardinal Eugène Tisserant believed that he had been murdered. According to Tisserant, one of Pius’s chief doctors—who happened to be the father of Mussolini’s film star mistress—had injected him with poison on orders from Il Duce. Tisserant even thought that Pacelli might be an accomplice. The motive was supposedly to prevent the bedridden Pius from releasing to all the bishops a Papal letter in which he savaged fascism. No such letter has ever been found.109
8
A Policy of Silence
As war clouds built in Europe, national political allegiances added an element of uncertainty to the conclave to select a new Pope. Vaticanisti, knowledgeable observers of the church, tried hard to handicap which cardinals tilted toward the Germans or the Allies.1,I
The question of who would be the next Pope made its way even to Hitler. An unidentified intelligence source inside the Vatican approached the Gestapo with a tantalizing offer: the election could be fixed for 3 million gold reichsmarks. Once the secret tariff was paid, the Germans could pick the cardinal they wanted and he would win on the first ballot. Only a handful of top Nazis were let in on the secret proposal, and it ignited a furious debate at the highest level of the Third Reich. Hitler was tempted to approve the bribe but at the last moment he passed, worried the offer was too good to be true and might be a setup to embarrass the Nazis.2
Among the cardinals who would pick the next Pope, the front-runners were the pragmatic Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, and Florence’s Cardinal Elia dalla Costa, a pious scholar. The British and French prelates assumed that because of Pacelli’s extensive diplomatic background he would stand for the democracies and resist the totalitarian governments.3 It is a testament to Pacelli’s accomplishments that he was even on the short list, given that he was an acknowledged Germanophile.4 He made no secret that his happiest years were his dozen serving as Papal Nuncio to Germany. He was fluent in German, surrounded himself with German advisors and housekeepers, and expressed a “special love” for all things German.5
Unknown to the British and French cardinals, the Italian and German ambassadors to the Vatican also encouraged their country’s cardinals to vote for Pacelli.6 They were convinced that his admiration of Teutonic culture and history would tilt him toward the Axis powers. But assuming that Pius would align himself with the Third Reich because he loved its culture and people was too simplistic. Having lived there during the rise of Hitler, he was wary of the Führer’s anticlerical sentiments. In 1935, he had interceded to help Jewish refugees abused by the Nazis in the Saar, a small territory returned to German control that year by the League of Nations. Still, Pacelli thought the Nazis were preferable to the communists. As Papal Nuncio, he dispatched regular reports to the Pope about “ferocious Bolshevism.” Ultimately, as a pragmatist, he concluded that since the Nazis were in power, he had no choice but to work with them.7
The Roman-born Pacelli descended from a long line of Black Nobles. His great grandfather had been Gregory XVI’s Minister of Finance. His grandfather had founded the L’Osservatore Romano newspaper and Pius IX had tapped him to serve as Undersecretary of the Interior
for the Papal States. Pacelli’s father was the chief of Catholic Action as well as the dean of the Consistorial College of Advocates, which prepared cases for beatification. His brother Francesco was a key church negotiator for the 1929 Lateran Pacts. By the time of the conclave, Francesco was a Papal Marquis, and Mussolini had crowned him a prince. Even Pacelli’s two sisters had married ranking Vatican officials.8
Pacelli had begun studying for the priesthood when he was only fifteen. There was no doubt that he was smart and that his family name opened doors.9 By the time he was twenty-two he had doctorates of philosophy, canon law, and theology.10
At six feet and a featherweight 125 pounds—with an ash-gray complexion and a high-pitched, nasal voice—the sixty-three-year-old was delicate. When he had been appointed the Nuncio to Germany, he arranged at considerable cost a private rail car for the trip to Berlin. Baron Carlo Monti, a Black Noble, complained personally to Pope Benedict that Pacelli also had an additional car packed with dozens of cases of groceries that would not trouble his stomach.11 An otherwise glowing 1939 profile in Life noted that his doctors were “very severe with him” because he “suffers from liver trouble and neuralgic headaches.”12
Pacelli was an avid reader and classical music enthusiast, and a moderately talented pianist and violinist. The cardinals who backed him cited his intelligence and his extraordinary memory. He showed it off once by reading twenty verses of Homer just twice and then reciting them.13 He was also not afflicted with Pius’s tremendous rage.14 No one could recall a single incident in which Pacelli had lost his temper. Even during the tensest stages of the Reichskonkordat negotiations, no matter how many times the Nazis provoked him, he maintained an unflappable expression and never raised his voice. That same steely discipline, combined with his insistence that those who spoke to him did so only in soft tones, made him often seem distant and aloof.
He was the most modern frontrunner ever, the first to have flown in an airplane, shaved with an electric razor, embraced daily exercise, used a typewriter and a telephone.15 To his supporters in the College of Cardinals, he seemed well suited to lead the church.
As a high-profile Secretary of State, he had earned his share of entrenched enemies and jealous rivals over the years. His opponents spread unsubstantiated gossip in the hope it might slow his momentum.16 At the start of his clerical career, Pacelli had lobbied for a special Vatican dispensation to live at home with his mother. He stayed there until he was thirty-eight, an unusual accommodation for an ambitious cleric who wanted to rise in the church hierarchy.17 In the all-men’s world of the Vatican, that gave him a “mother’s boy” rap. Combined with his refined and what some deemed effeminate mannerisms (one writer said he “move[d] with almost feminine grace”), he was the subject of salacious rumors inside the gossip-obsessed Curia.18
Pacelli once told Sister Pascalina Lehnert—a fiercely loyal Bavarian nun who had been his confidant since becoming his chief housekeeper in 1917—that they could not go on a skiing vacation alone lest they spark unwarranted backroom chatter.19 There were raised eyebrows and whispered stories about her role as his unofficial gatekeeper. Despite his warning, she accompanied him sometimes on holidays, cooked his food, prepared his clerical robes, and even advised him on whether he was too tired to hold an audience.20 (When he was later Pope, she stood near him after every general Mass to disinfect his right hand since hundreds of the faithful had kissed his fisherman’s ring during the service. Skeptical Curia officials eventually gave her the irreverent nickname of “La Popessa,” the female Pope, and historians rank her as one of a handful of the most influential women who ever lived inside the city-state).21
The gossipmongers even tried raising untoward inferences over Pacelli’s close personal friendship he had while a Nuncio with Francis Spellman, then a young American priest serving in the Secretary of State’s office.22 The two had vacationed in the Swiss Alps and spent so much time together that Pascalina reportedly intervened to separate them. But Spellman, whom Pacelli called “Spelly,” won the nun over.23 Pacelli sent the Curia rumor mill into overdrive when in the summer of 1930 he took both the priest and the nun on a one-month private holiday through Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.24
Most of Pacelli’s critics, however, were not worried about salacious gossip. They were concerned instead about more fundamental shortcomings. He had no pastoral experience since he had spent his career as a diplomat.25 Without having managed his own diocese, there were doubts about whether he had the skills to control the unruly Curia. There was also considerable pre-conclave debate about whether he was too cautious to be a decisive Pontiff. One of Pacelli’s closest aides, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, had said he “was not born with the temperament of a fighter.”26 Diplomats who had worked with him did not think he had a strong enough character.27 “Devoid of will and character,” concluded the Spanish ambassador to the Vatican. Osborne, the British Minister, noted that he was “not devoid of intelligence, but essentially there to obey.”28 The small contingent of foreign diplomats assigned to the Vatican all agreed that while in meetings he was charming, he often seemed uncomfortable. Conversations were frequently reduced to trivial issues and banal niceties. When pressed on any contentious matter, Pacelli would repeat his last sentence several times and then fall silent, hoping that somehow the conversation might change course. In cables to London, Osborne warned British ministers that Pacelli despised a fight and would refuse—even when he thought he was right—to overrule anyone.29
The concerted effort to stop him failed. The fear of war worked in his favor. His years as Nuncio and then Secretary of State convinced most of the cardinals that he was qualified to lead the church during a period of secular strife. On March 2, 1939, in the fastest conclave in three hundred years, Pacelli was selected as the 261st Pope after only three ballots.30 He was the first Secretary of State chosen in more than three centuries.31 He too chose the name Pius.
Only three days after he had become Pope, Nazi troops marched into Czechoslovakia and divided it into two states. The next day Pius convened a meeting with four leading German cardinals. He had not called them together to chastise the Führer for the armed aggression. Instead, Pius—who had chosen a dove carrying an olive branch as his coat of arms—believed that a condemnation would only worsen the tension.32 He told the bishops that his election presented the Third Reich and the Vatican with an unprecedented opportunity to repair the fraying relationship he had inherited.33 He assured them he would personally oversee German affairs and insisted he wanted excellent relations with the country he considered his second home. It was a complete break from the harsh rebuke of Nazi policy that his predecessor had proposed in Humani Generis Unitas. After debating whether he should address the Führer as “Illustrious” or “Most Illustrious,” he gave the cardinals a personal affirmation, in German, to take back to the Reich.34
“To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of Our Pontificate We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people entrusted to your leadership. . . . May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God’s help, to fruition!”35 (The next month he directed Archbishop Orsenigo, his Papal Nuncio to Germany, to host a grand reception for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday.)36
Pius, who started every day punctually at 6:00 a.m., immersed himself in the minutiae of the Vatican’s daily operations. Every bishop worldwide was instructed to send him regular written reports. He insisted on being kept up-to-date on all political developments. Papal Nuncios sent daily dispatches from their capitals. And the new Pope sent back instructions to them by shortwave radio.37 After reinstating the discarded Papal tradition of dining alone, and ordering his three Franciscan servers to remain silent, he used mealtimes for an uninterrupted review of his huge pile of daily paperwork.38 One cardinal who later had to rewrite a letter sixteen times before Pius approved it said that “An audience with Pope
Pius XII was like a university examination.”39
When it came to the church’s financial wizard, Bernardino Nogara, Pius did not immediately embrace him. While Pacelli was still Secretary of State, Nogara had passed a letter from the CEO of the House of Morgan to Mussolini, warning Il Duce that the United States would resist German—and therefore implicitly Italian—aggression.40 Pacelli regarded it a breach of protocol, since he considered diplomacy his exclusive domain; Nogara should stick to finances. Now, as Pope, he announced there would be no further overtures to any government unless he signed off.
But there were other problems when it came to Nogara. Some of those in Pius’s kitchen cabinet did not like Bernardino. Pascalina, for instance, distrusted him.41 So did the Pope’s cousin, Ernesto Pacelli, who had been the first president of the Black Noble–founded Bank of Rome. Nogara had been a trusted advisor since 1925 for Ernesto’s direct competition, Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI).42 Ernesto warned his Papal cousin that Nogara’s loyalty was to foreigners, not to the Pope.43
Since Nogara had reported directly to the late Pope for a decade, no one in the Vatican was quite sure what he did. In an institution where gossip sometimes seemed an avocation, the secrecy surrounding his work resulted in several scurrilous rumors. Some believed he had squandered or stolen the multimillion-dollar settlement from the 1929 Lateran Treaty.44 Others thought he was conspiring with an ultrasecret Masonic lodge against the church.45
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