The Pope's Last Crusade

by Peter Eisner

  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. Beneš 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.

  Budapest, May 27, 1938

  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.”

  Pius was seated in a broadcast room at Castel Gandolfo about five hundred miles away. As he spoke those words, a thunderstorm broke over Budapest and rain drenched the final ceremony of the Eucharistic Congress. As LaFarge and the other participants scattered for shelter, they could not have helped to notice the irony and some might have considered the storm an ill omen.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Pope’s Battle Plan

  “The story
isn’t yet told. The answer to the riddle is to be revealed by history.”

  ANNE O’HARE MCCORMICK

  Castel Gandolfo, June 23, 1938

  TWO DAYS AFTER the Eucharistic Congress, the pope celebrated his eighty-first birthday. He had recovered so well from his illness a year and a half earlier that the Vatican doctors had suspended their full-time attendance at the pope’s rooms in Castel Gandolfo. Pius awoke daily at around dawn, had breakfast, and then conducted a range of meetings, reestablishing full control of church administration. As the weather warmed in late spring, he also resumed his daily walks behind the summer palace, in the sculpted hedgerows interspersed with Roman statuary, copses where one could stop to meditate, and a balustrade from which one could look down on the Albano valley.

  He was a most solitary figure on those walks and did not take counsel easily, not even from Pacelli, who came for meetings at least four times a week. Hitler’s anti-Semitic campaign had become the pope’s great preoccupation. The issue before him was not just the matter of protecting Catholics, but also the question of protecting humanity. This was the church’s moral responsibility.

  AS THE NAZIS increased their threats against the Jews, the pope realized that today it was the Jews, but then it would be the Catholics and finally the world. He could see in the day’s news that the Nazis would stop at nothing less than world domination.

  Pius envisioned a gesture that would go beyond daily condemnations of each atrocity uttered by the Nazis. He sought a verbal offensive with a major statement that would attack the underpinnings of the Nazi machine. Pius appeared to have found the vehicle; he had received a copy of a book, Interracial Justice, written by an American Jesuit named John LaFarge. The book portrayed the lives of American blacks who lived in the poorest strata of society. It said the church had to establish itself as a moral force in combating racism in the United States. The pope did not know LaFarge was in Europe and en route to Rome.

  The similarities between the descriptions of racism in America and the threats of anti-Semitism in Europe were easy to see. LaFarge’s book was about the plight of blacks in the United States, but the concept applies, he wrote, “to all races and conditions of men . . . all tribes and races, Jew and Gentile alike. . . .” Pius saw that LaFarge’s writings could be applied to a new Vatican declaration that would attract international attention, a statement that would sound the alarm and warn world leaders about the Nazis and the Fascists in uncompromising terms.

  This was the moment to strike. In March 1937, the pope had last issued an encyclical—the highest statement the head of the Vatican can make—condemning Nazism. But he felt compelled to do so again, this time with the words of an American Jesuit who understood the insanity of race. This time his encyclical would be broadcast throughout the globe, and it would answer the maniacal quest for conquest with basic truths.

  Rome, June 24, 1938

  The parched days of spring had been broken by occasional early summer rains, but nothing could dampen the spirit of Father John LaFarge on his first visit to Rome since 1905, when he was a young seminary student.

  LaFarge was staying in a room at the Gregorian University, the four-hundred-year-old Jesuit college not far from the Spanish Steps. It was a privileged location, central to politics and the eternal nature of Western culture and the heart of Catholicism. As he strolled to the residence, he skirted the Quirinale Palace, several blocks at another level in the other direction, where just a month and a half earlier Hitler had been greeted triumphantly by Mussolini and by the titular monarch, Victor Emmanuel III. The recently completed monument to the king’s grandfather, Victor Emmanuel II, was downhill opposite the Piazza Venezia. It was a garish assemblage of columns that Romans jokingly referred to as the wedding cake.

  LaFarge had arrived in Rome on June 5 via Yugoslavia, crossed the border at Trieste, and then traveled south from Venice. Immediately he saw Il Duce’s jaw-jutting image everywhere: Mussolini, the great leader, supporting the Italian army; Il Duce standing with the people; a joint profile of Hitler and Mussolini in their uniforms and Hitler’s swastika prominent on his shoulder. Viva, viva Mussolini! was plastered on the walls. LaFarge noted in his diary that, “Magnificent slogans exhorted the people to morality, industry, loyalty, and other virtues, signed in each case with the mysterious letter M. Asking an Italian friend what the M stood for—it might stand for morality or Machiavelli or something else—I received only a shocked glance as a reply.”

  One morning, a fellow American Jesuit at the Gregorian University arranged a VIP tour for LaFarge with a high-ranking member of the Fascist City Council. The official arrived late for the tour and said that he had been delayed in a meeting with Mussolini.

  “You know, we were having the Council meeting and I told Mussolini that I had an appointment at eleven o’clock with Father LaFarge,” the official said. “But Il Duce said, let Father LaFarge wait. The affairs of state are more important.”

  LaFarge was as susceptible to flattery as anyone, but he doubted the story. The official took LaFarge on an extensive tour of Mussolini’s signature welfare projects, including a rural reconstruction program, newly established towns built on drained and recovered swampland.

  “Nothing that I had seen in the United States, even in the far West, was as new as these extraordinary constructions,” LaFarge said. The buildings were “splendidly built, all Italian style,” he said, “with broad streets, immense squares, imposing municipal buildings and elaborate churches, one of which, in good medieval spirit, included Mussolini as a toiling harvest-worker in the mosaic representing the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.”

  When Mussolini visited his urbanization projects, he would recognize nothing short of perfection. Il Duce was reimagining Italy. On one occasion, touring one of the towns he had built on marshes, Mussolini demanded why the buildings had screens on the windows. When told they were a precaution against mosquitoes, he replied, “Mosquitoes have been abolished.” Workers immediately removed the screens.

  Mussolini’s construction projects were theoretically intended to relocate people from crowded urban working-class conditions to lower-density housing with good sanitation and social services. The projects sometimes fell below projections, forcing the transferred workers to travel long distances to their jobs. And not all the housing projects were completed as well as the model LaFarge was shown. LaFarge had already gone out on his own and peered beyond these Potemkin Village undertakings for the stage set they were and had seen Romans on the periphery who were living in misery. One shantytown, nicknamed Shanghai, was worse than the worst slums he had seen in the American South. Another hovel housed forlorn Italian Army veterans of the recent Fascist conquest of Ethiopia. All were quarantined in squalid boxcars, waiting for further orders if they survived the pestilence some had brought back with them.

  At the same time, LaFarge loved the Eternal City of Rome, the ancient objects of the empire, the relics, and the churches. The dome of St. Peter’s, which was visible from many points of the city, reminded him of his faith and gave him solace and warmth. The Roman Forum was most prominent and the Coliseum was a bit farther down from the university. He was moved and inspired by the opportunity to say Mass at a chapel in the Santa Brigida Church on the Piazza Farnese. On tours around Rome, he delighted in the food, fresh meats, bel paese cheese, and fine wines.

  On Wednesday, June 22, LaFarge was capping off his visit to Italy by attending a general audience with Pope Pius XI at Castel Gandolfo. It was not easy to obtain entrance for such group audiences, but Vincent McCormick, the Jesuit rector of Gregoriana University, had made this happen. McCormick had asked the pope’s chief of staff the day before if the pope might have time “to say a word in commendation of my work at the general audience,” LaFarge wrote in a diary note. The chief of staff met them on their arrival at Castel Gandolfo and said the request had come too late. “The only thing to do was to have a private audience,” the official said, but such meetings were usually arran
ged weeks ahead of time. LaFarge was to leave Rome by June 29, and the official held out little hope.

  McCormick and LaFarge entered the pope’s summer quarters in time for the general audience and stood with a group of clergy while others teemed forward to wait for the pontiff. Four staff-bearing Swiss Guard Halberdier troops stood guard, dressed in their singular uniforms, traditional stripes in the colors of the Medici family, blue, yellow, and red, a metal morion helmet adorned with red ostrich feathers on their heads. Pius XI finally entered the room, smiling and apparently hardy and in good spirits, despite reports he had been weakened by illness.

  The audience was rather brief and impersonal and was over quickly. The pontiff spoke about marriage and family and the work of missionaries and blessed those assembled. When the crowd dispersed, LaFarge and McCormick went to the fourth floor in the apostolic palace to visit the papal astronomer, Father Johan Stein, a fellow Jesuit. The Dutch scientist-priest showed them around proudly and advised his guests to step gingerly; the pope’s private quarters were directly below them.

  LaFarge and McCormick then returned to Rome. LaFarge was content with the day, thinking no more of the event than adding one more pope to the tally sheet—he had now seen three popes, all from a distance.

  Then two days later, on Friday, June 24, LaFarge was making preparations to wind up his European tour—he would make a quick trip to Spain where Francisco Franco was consolidating power, then double back through Paris en route to Rotterdam and home—when a messenger arrived with a sealed yellow-and-white envelope that bore the unmistakable mark of the Vatican. Only one person used this stationery with the seal of a crown and the crossed keys of St. Peter. This was a letter from the pope, more properly a summons from him. The Reverend John LaFarge, Society of Jesus, was requested to attend a private audience on Saturday, June 25, at 11:45 A.M.