by Peter Eisner
LaFarge was overwhelmed and humbled. How could it be? “I was mystified,” he wrote in his diary. The summons brought “a sense of wonder which nothing else in the world could give.” How could a little-known American priest with neither pulpit nor station receive direct communication from the Holy Father?
The invitation was cause for analysis and a sleepless night. Pope Pius XI, now eighty-one years old, was said to be frail despite his healthy appearance the other day and was decreasing the frequency and duration of such private meetings.
LaFarge took advice from Father McCormick, who recommended that he jot down notes about his life and highlights of his missionary work that he could recite when asked, along with reminders that would serve to answer any possible question the pope might direct his way. It had been made clear that LaFarge was to come alone. He did not know what to expect.
Rome and its environs.
John LaFarge could be excused for not sleeping well that Friday night. On the morning of the visit, he had coffee and breakfast and then at midmorning borrowed a car from the university motor pool for the drive down the new Appian Way. Hot summer weather had settled in across Italy and all Europe with temperatures exceeding 90 degrees. Open windows offered some respite. The winding road paralleled the route of the famous original Roman road of the same name that was still in existence, rutted and hardly passable for cars.
Leaving Rome to the southeast, he drove past Roman ruins and ancient churches, and then along a sloping portion in the Alban Hills shaded by stands of olive trees, and finally over the bridge named for Pope Pius IX. During an unusually long thirty-one-year pontificate in the 1800s, Pius IX had decreed papal infallibility and rejected any move to accommodating to modern times in the Roman Catholic Church.
LaFarge was in an altered state of mind. He had expected nothing vaguely approaching a meeting of such import, and he was memorizing the little speech he would recite to the pope about his ministry and his writing. The Jesuit knew well that Pius was a man of letters. He also knew the folklore—the pope as mountaineer—and that Pius was the first pope to even set foot beyond the confines of the Vatican in more than half a century, the first pope to ride in a motorcar, and the first to have his voice transmitted by radio.
The pope had a reputation for being a tough, headstrong, withering presence. That was true—policy was directed by the pope not his subordinates, whatever their real opinions about church doctrine, and their politics, might have been. Not even the pope’s closest advisers, such as Cardinal Pacelli, the secretary of state who was said to shudder at merely considering contradicting the pope even on a minor matter, dared challenge Pius to his face.
LaFarge was surprised by the ease with which he could approach the papal residence, drive by well-known cardinals strolling on the cobblestone piazza, and then park unimpeded under olive trees that provided some respite from the blazing heat. Once inside the summer palace, he was directed across the central courtyard to a small elevator that led to the papal rooms. He was there well ahead of the appointed time and a monsignor told him the pope’s meetings were running behind. Three cardinals were ahead of him and he would have to wait for at least forty-five minutes.
The elevator door opened; perhaps the most prominent member of the College of Cardinals emerged—Cardinal Pacelli. The cardinal glared, barely acknowledged the priest’s presence, and walked off. Shortly afterward, Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, a close ally of the pope and one of the pontiff’s best friends, crossed the patio. The two cardinals were a study in contrasts. Pacelli was a gangly, pale, even ghostly presence; Tisserant, a Frenchman, was a burly man who sported a long bushy black beard flecked with gray. He did not seem to notice LaFarge.
After a while, an attendant ushered LaFarge into an anteroom, where he watched as various clergy and laypeople entered and left the pope’s study, which had a sign over the entry door, PIUS XI PONTIFEX MAXIMUS. Finally it was LaFarge’s turn to enter; the pope must have used some silent buzzer to signal the secretaries that he was ready. This was to be a private meeting with the pope. LaFarge stood up nervously. “I was shown into the pope’s study by myself entirely,” LaFarge wrote. “No one [was] there with me, and [the] door shut.”
LaFarge stood for a moment before Pope Pius XI, the 258th successor to St. Peter, and then bent to the carpet to kiss the pope’s shoe. Pius motioned him to rise and take a seat before his desk. LaFarge looked around the room. A walking stick was leaning against a table near the pope’s desk, the pope’s white skullcap rested on the table. LaFarge had the impression that the pope had recently been strolling outdoors. He could see the sumptuous gardens and tree-lined paths beyond the balcony ahead of him and a distant view of the Mediterranean beyond.
The pope made small talk to put him at ease and spoke informally. The first hurdle was to choose the language in which they would speak. Pius understood English, but spoke only haltingly; LaFarge’s Italian was not conversant. The pope was amused by LaFarge’s confusion. They alternated briefly between German and French and then settled on French. LaFarge was struck by the pope’s vigor, “a natural vigor which few who reach that age enjoy.”
Finally, the pope told LaFarge he literally could not sleep when he thought about the rise of Nazism. “He grieved over the present divided state of the world, over the growth of racism, condemned by reason, science and faith,” LaFarge remembered.
Pius told the younger man he had read Interracial Justice and considered it a triumph. LaFarge saw a copy of the book prominent on the pope’s credenza. Americans, the pope said, had a greater understanding of these issues in part because they had access to LaFarge’s book. But he had come to the conclusion that LaFarge’s book also helped explain the deteriorating situation in Europe, that “racialism and nationalism were fundamentally the same . . . the most burning issue at the present time.”
LaFarge was surprised the pope had even heard of his book, which was written in English, distributed mostly in the United States, and published very recently. Interracial Justice was an exhortation for the Catholic Church in the United States to accept and dedicate itself to the letter of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, that African Americans could not and should not be treated differently or deprecated or denied basic human and civil rights.
LaFarge went further in the book, taking quite an absolute progressive stance, writing that “modern anthropological and ethnological science overwhelmingly rejects the theory that even purely physical traits are permanently or fixedly inherited by any large determinable group of human beings. It is an analogy falsely transferred from an animal race: an analogy not unlikely when human beings are treated as animals.”
The pope asked about LaFarge’s views on race in America and discussed the relationship with the case of the Jews in Germany. Pius said he had been searching for just the right person to work with him on his next foray into politics and the most pressing, dangerous matter of the moment. And now, providentially, LaFarge has come to Rome. “We will issue an encyclical on these matters, one which you must prepare,” Pius told LaFarge.
LaFarge was to write an encyclical that would use the same reasoning he employed when discussing racism in the United States. He needed to convey that Hitler’s increasing assault on the Jews was based on a myth. The myth and the barbarity and inhumanity being unleashed in Europe must be challenged. He was to write a papal declaration such as never had been seen before, one that firmly and categorically represented the church’s vision of the conflagration facing Europe. This would be the church’s strongest statement ever, an encyclical that rejected anti-Semitism and the Nazi doctrine that espoused it. So doing, LaFarge would articulate church policy, and his thoughts and words about race and humanity would be inscribed in Catholic doctrine and would be parsed for guidance worldwide. This was overwhelming, a step that a humble Jesuit from Newport could hardly dream of. LaFarge was dumbfounded and flooded with doubts.
How, he asked Pope Pius, could he do such a
thing? The pope smiled and gave him free rein. He said: “Dites tout simplement, ce que vous direz si vous etiez Pape, vous-meme,” LaFarge wrote, recalling the pope’s exact words. “Say simply, just what you would say if you yourself were pope.” LaFarge said he felt unable and unworthy to carry out such a project. The pope would hear none of it. “I could have chosen someone else to write this, more senior, better known writers within the Church,” the pope told the Jesuit. He told LaFarge he certainly was capable of writing what needed to be said. And it was an assignment that might amount to the greatest opportunity the pope had to rally world opposition to the Nazis. “I decided you are the right person for the job,” he told LaFarge. “God has sent you to me to do this. You are heaven-sent.”
The pope expected the statement to be as strong and unyieldingly direct as he thought LaFarge’s words were about racism in the United States. Pius made it clear that no one in the curia knew about his decision to issue the encyclical, likely not even Pacelli, and certainly not Wlodimir Ledóchowski, the leader of the Jesuit order and therefore LaFarge’s superior. “Properly, I should have first taken this up with Father Ledóchowski before speaking to you,” the pope said. But he had not. “I imagine it will be all right . . . after all a pope is a pope.”
The pope told LaFarge that he expected him to complete the job in secret and directly for him. “It is said that a secret of the pope in Rome is Punch’s secret,” a secret that everyone knows but no one admits they know. “But it should not be like that. And in this case, this is a true secret that we are sharing with you,” the pope said. The pontiff told him he would await the final document.
AS LAFARGE drove back to Rome that afternoon, the same words kept coming back to him: “I am mystified” by what has happened. LaFarge was now in the service of the pope. The time was short, and he was to begin work immediately. He was surrounded by a web of shadows and shrouded schemes, and he still could not even fathom how he had come to the pope’s attention. Now, the Vatican was directly asking him to act on a dangerous world stage. “Frankly, I am stunned,” LaFarge told friends in confidence. The task was great and there was little time. “The Rock of Peter has fallen on my head.”
POPES HAD BEEN called “Prisoner of the Vatican” for more than half a century. Locked into ritual and an image and surrounded by acolytes, many popes had dreamed of walking again among the people. The Catholic Church and its popes had governed Rome, the environs, and a broad swath of territory—the Vatican Free States—across central Italy for centuries. After decades of strife—the Napoleonic wars, the Franco-Prussian War—King Victor Emmanuel II consolidated modern Italy and seized Rome in 1870, relegating the remaining papal territory to the confines of the Vatican. For fifty-nine years the popes ranged no farther than the outer circle of the walls around St. Peter’s. Pius had made the strategic decision to conclude a historic treaty with the Italian state that would create guarantees for the Vatican and ultimately provide a new era of political importance and financial stability for the church. The successful negotiations culminated in 1929 with the Lateran Accords. The Lateran Accords designated the Vatican as a city-state and returned the 135-acre territory of Castel Gandolfo to the Holy See. As a result, the Vatican became a nation like any other country in the world. Now the pope was in search of global reach.
Castel Gandolfo, its name of uncertain origin, had been a Roman retreat for almost two millennia as well as a refuge for Renaissance-era nobility. The site had first been used as a papal residence in the late sixteenth century, though by the 1900s it had fallen into disrepair. With the 1929 Lateran agreement, Pius XI authorized a major renovation. The new construction and landscaping linked three-hundred-year-old villas with lands where Roman emperor Domitian built a palace in the first century A.D., subsequently expanded by his successors. Pius XI envisioned Castel Gandolfo as not only the summer home of the Vatican, but also as a modern working farm and self-sustaining community—dairy, stables, chickens and ducks, an olive grove, and a garden with housing for several dozen farm workers and other employees. A reporter touring the grounds as the renovations were under way in the early 1930s said that Castel Gandolfo would be “a spot of rare beauty . . . one of the loveliest spots on earth.”
The pope moved into his renovated sanctuary in 1934, visited each year afterward, and spent six full months there in 1937. He expected to do the same this year, 1938. Key advisers from Rome spent the day, and some moved in for the season so he was able to conduct regular Vatican business all the while. But at break time, as often as his age and illnesses permitted him, the pope would take up his walking stick and stroll along the miles of cool shaded pathways.
The atmosphere at Castel Gandolfo was indeed an important stimulus for the pope, better than being shuttered at St. Peter’s. The crisp air and rolling green cliffs surrounding Lake Albano were good for the soul. Open spaces, the countryside, and mountains had been part of his life before he took the throne of St. Peter.
His first actions when he had taken office in 1922 signaled his expanded view of the role of the Vatican and the papacy. He emerged on the outer balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square and delivered the Urbi et Orbi blessing—to the city and the world—which hadn’t been done since 1870. His decision to step beyond the inner sanctum of the Vatican presaged a significant new role for his office and his stature beyond the Catholic Church. It was after this that he retook Castel Gandolfo.
As he had once climbed peaks never scaled, he now sought other new heights. While some had criticized the 1929 Lateran Accords with Mussolini as an accommodation to the Fascist state, Pius XI used the new role of the church to spur a new era.
But much more than that, the pope promoted and embraced modern science beyond the interests of any predecessor and won a rare distinction. In November 1931, the American magazine Popular Mechanics profiled the pope and his use of technology. “Always the twentieth century wins out, always the old gives way to the new,” the article said. “The Vatican City stands today the symbol and embodiment of science and religion in complete harmony.” Among the innovations, Popular Mechanics wrote about the Vatican Observatory, which had just been transferred to Castel Gandolfo that year from St. Peter’s, including its forty-centimeter German-made Zeiss refractor telescope. The observatory was becoming an international gathering point for astronomers. The pope also established a new fleet of automobiles, which eliminated centuries-old horse-drawn carriages, ordered installation of a modernized set of elevators at the Vatican, an automatic phone system, and a new printing plant, and he considered buying a fleet of helicopters to shuttle around Rome.
THE POPE MARKED his ninth anniversary on the throne of St. Peter on February 12, 1931, with a ceremony that would have profound reverberations. Heralded by a six-man honor guard playing silver trumpets, he swept into an office filled with wires and vacuum tubes to greet Guglielmo Marconi, Italy’s favorite son, the father of radio and now a member of the Italian Senate. These were the newly created offices of Vatican Radio. At Marconi’s instruction, the pontiff turned dials and yanked levers—Marconi spoke for a moment as the pontiff, dressed in white, sat before the microphone and announced: “This is the first time in history that the living voice of the Pope will have been heard simultaneously in all parts of the globe.”
The pope spoke first in Latin, then in Italian. The pope’s first words were a passage from Isaiah: “‘Listen and hear, O Peoples of distant lands.’
“We speak first to all things and to all men, speaking to them here and as follows with the words themselves of Holy Scripture: Hear, oh heavens, that which I shall say, and listen, on earth, to the words of my mouth.
“Listen all people; lend your ear all you who inhabit the globe, united toward the same end. Both the rich and the poor. Hear, oh islands, and listen, oh distant peoples.”
When he was done, Monsignor Francis Spellman interpreted the pope’s words in English. In the course of his speech, the pope praised Marconi “for this new invention,” the w
ireless, which the pope described as “the last word in technicality and science.” Marconi, he said, “had promised us one of the most modern of inventions. This promise he has fulfilled so magnificently that he may ask what yet remains to constitute the latest development in radio.”
Care in transmitting the pope’s words was unprecedented. The sounds were modulated and converted into a series of radio waves. Engineers around the world received and amplified the shortwave signal, then transmitted via a network of global relay stations. At each step, operators adjusted the signal and bounced it along the way. Locally, the signal was transferred to the AM radio bands for direct transmission.
“Listeners in the United States reported hearing a ‘waxing and waning howl’ intermingled at times with the Pope’s words,” the New York Times reported. “Otherwise the program was remarkably clear and free from fading.”
Radio operators in London found it easier to grab the signal back from a station in the United States, but that didn’t work. The static was too great to understand the Italian-accented Latin or Spellman’s translation. Nevertheless, this was a giant step for the Vatican.
Broadcast by wireless, which people in some countries were also referring to as radio, had existed already for a generation, but the novelty was such that the pope was almost redefining the meaning and use of radio: his voice gave new power to radio broadcasting. The occasion of the pope’s inaugural speech on Vatican Radio was declared a miracle itself as a redefinition of what humankind might accomplish. The pope could not only preach to the faithful, but could also counsel the faithless and provide instant order and a unified front among his legions of priests around the world. There would be no doubt or delay in interpreting what the Holy See might think or might judge of the world—here was the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church speaking with all immediacy.
