A still greater challenge to the pope’s statesmanship, however, was the rise of Fascist Italy. At the end of October 1922, less than nine months after the papal election, Benito Mussolini staged his March on Rome and was accepted by King Victor Emmanuel as his prime minister. In the early days, before he became Il Duce, Mussolini might still have been overturned in a parliamentary election. The Socialists and Don Luigi Sturzo’s People’s Party together easily outnumbered the thirty-five Fascist deputies; had they formed an alliance, they might have ensured the survival of freedom in Italy. But Pius would have none of it. For him any association with socialism was out of the question; moreover, he was becoming increasingly concerned by certain distinctly left-wing tendencies of the People’s Party. Don Luigi was accordingly informed that His Holiness considered his political activities incompatible with his priesthood, and he obediently withdrew into exile, first in London and later in the United States (where, however, much to the Vatican’s irritation, he continued his political activity). In Italy his party, powerless without papal support, quietly faded away.
The Fascists, by contrast, were growing steadily stronger. In 1923 the Italian government passed the so-called Acerbo Law, which decreed that any party gaining 25 percent of the votes would have a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Its purpose was transparently to ensure this majority for the Fascists, and after the election of the following year there was no further obstacle to Mussolini’s imposing his dictatorship. By this time he had moderated his early antireligious attitude and was making conciliatory gestures to the Church: reintroducing religion into state schools, erecting crucifixes in the law courts, even, in 1927, himself undergoing a Roman Catholic baptism. That same year, he proposed a treaty and a concordat which, after endless argument and much hard bargaining, were eventually signed at the Lateran Palace by himself and by Pius’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, on February 11, 1929.
Under the Lateran Treaty the pope regained a vestige of his temporal power. Admittedly the land over which he was sovereign ruler amounted to a mere 109 acres—about a quarter the area of the Principality of Monaco—with a population of rather less than five hundred, but the Holy See was once again to rank among the nations of the world. Moreover, in return for his renunciation of his claim to the previous papal territories he was given a payment, in cash and Italian state securities, of 1.75 billion lire, which at that time amounted to some $100 million. Anticlerical laws passed by the Italian government since 1870, including the Law of Guarantees, were declared null and void. In return, the Vatican promised to remain neutral and not to involve itself in international politics or diplomacy.
The concordat dealt with the status of the Church in Italy. It declared Roman Catholicism to be the only recognized religion of the state, recognized canon law alongside state law, provided for Catholic religious teaching in state schools, and validated Catholic church marriages. The Roman catacombs were entrusted to the Holy See, on the understanding that it would allow archaeological excavation and exploration by the Italian government to continue. On the face of it, the Papacy had done remarkably well. It could not be denied, however, that it had given its implied approval to Fascism. The pope had even hailed Mussolini as “a man sent by Providence,” and in the 1929 elections most Catholics were encouraged by their priests to vote Fascist.
The honeymoon could not last. The rupture began with Catholic Action, a movement founded by Pius X which was really little more than a nationwide society dedicated, as the pope had put it, to “restoring Jesus Christ to his place in the family, in the school and in the community.” Mussolini, however, who instinctively mistrusted any national organization which he did not personally control, claimed that it was politically inspired, serving as a front for the People’s Party of the now-exiled Sturzo. The Catholic Scout movement aroused his anger even more; no one better than he understood the importance of early brainwashing. “Youth,” he declared, “shall be ours.” As these and similar bodies suffered increasing physical harassment from the Fascist thugs who came in force to break up their meetings or to seize and impound their records, the pope raised his voice in protest. His encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno of June 1931—drafted, significantly, in Italian—began by answering the Duce’s charges seriatim; as it continued, however, it turned into a general attack on fascism and all it stood for:
What is to be thought about the formula of the oath, which even little boys and girls are obliged to take, that they will execute orders without discussion from an authority which … can give orders against all truth and justice? … Takers of this oath must swear to serve with all their strength, even to the shedding of blood, the cause of a revolution which snatched the young from the Church and from Jesus Christ, and which inculcates in its own young people hatred, violence, and irreverence.… Such an oath is unlawful.…
We have not said that we wish to condemn the [Fascist] party as such.… It [recently] declared that “respect for the Catholic religion and for its Supreme Head is unchanged.” [But this] is the respect which has had its expression in vastly extended and hateful police measures, prepared in the deep silence of a conspiracy, and executed with lightning-like suddenness, on the very eve of our birthday.…
In the same context there is an allusion to “refuges and protections” given to the still-remaining opponents of the party; “the directors of the 9,000 groups of Fascists in Italy” are ordered to direct their attention to this situation.
[We have received] sad information about the effect of these remarks, these insinuations, and these orders, which have induced a new outbreak of hateful surveillance, of denunciations, and of intimidations.
Interestingly enough, the encyclical had a measure of success. It was widely read in Italy and abroad and caused Mussolini to relax his pressure on the Church appreciably. It must also have been very much on the mind of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who in February 1930 had succeeded Gasparri as Pius’s secretary of state. From the outset, Pacelli was fixated on Germany. He knew the country well, having served as nuncio in Munich for three years from 1917 and in Berlin throughout the 1920s. He loved the Germans and spoke their language perfectly, often in preference to Italian. He was also aware that in prewar days Germany had contributed more funds to the Holy See than all the other nations of the world combined. It was not, of course, technically a Catholic country—in 1930 the Catholics made up about a third of the population, although by 1940, after Hitler’s annexations of the Saar, the Sudetenland, and Austria, the proportion had increased to about a half—and neither Pacelli nor Pius had any delusions about the Nazis, whom they saw as little better than gangsters; but they nevertheless believed that National Socialism represented a firm bulwark against communism, in their eyes the far greater enemy.
And so, on July 20, 1933, the German Concordat was signed in Rome by Pacelli on behalf of Pope Pius XI and by Franz von Papen, vice chancellor of the Reich for Adolf Hitler. Generous privileges were granted to the Catholic clergy and to Catholic schools in Germany in return for the withdrawal by the Catholic Church, with its many various associations and its newspapers, from all social and political action. This withdrawal involved, as it had in Italy, the loss of a political party. In the hope of an understanding with Mussolini, Pius had effectively sacrificed the Partito Populare; now, at Hitler’s insistence, Pacelli intimated that the Center Party—the second strongest in the Reichstag, which was also led by a priest, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, and included the vast majority of German Catholics in its ranks—was, so far as the Vatican was concerned, dispensable. It was duly wound up, and Monsignor Kaas, who had by this time fallen completely under Pacelli’s spell and seldom left his side, was brought to Rome, where he was given charge of the physical maintenance of St. Peter’s.2
As did the Italian, the German Concordat came in for heavy international criticism. The Catholic Church could have set itself up in determined opposition to National Socialism; instead, by agreeing to the abdication of all its political rights
and morally obliging all German Catholics to obey their Nazi leaders, Pacelli and Pius had together cleared the way for the unobstructed advance of Nazism—and of its treatment of the Jews. In the minutes of a cabinet meeting held on July 14, 1933, Hitler is recorded as having boasted that “the Concordat gave Germany an opportunity and created an area of trust that was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry.”3 By the outside world the pope was accused of having given both regimes respectability and of increasing their prestige—which indeed, in the short term, he had. But he was soon to show still greater dissatisfaction with the Nazis than he had with the Fascists: in the first three years of their regime between 1933 and 1936, during which their oppression of the Church steadily increased, he was obliged to address no fewer than thirty-four separate notes of protest to the German government. It is worth noting, however, that no protest was made against the publication of the Nuremberg race laws of 1935.4
The final break came on Passion Sunday 1937, when the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, having been smuggled into Germany, secretly printed there on twelve different presses, and distributed by bicycle or on foot, was read from every Catholic pulpit. It should have come at least three years earlier; even now it failed to condemn Hitler and National Socialism by name. But its meaning was clear enough, particularly since it had been written in German rather than the usual Latin. The government of the Reich, it declared, had “sown the tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open hostility to Christ and his Church, fed from a thousand different sources and making use of every available means.”
The eleventh paragraph of the encyclical is of particular interest because, though once again there is no specific condemnation of anti-Semitism, its target is clear. It stresses the value of the Jewish Old Testament, which it describes as being “exclusively the word of God and a substantial part of His revelation”:
Whoever wishes to see banished from church and school the Biblical history and the wise doctrines of the Old Testament, blasphemes the name of God, blasphemes the Almighty’s plan of salvation, and makes limited and narrow human thought the judge of God’s designs over the history of the world.
Non Abbiamo Bisogno and Mit Brennender Sorge together left no doubt in anyone’s mind about the pope’s opinions of the Fascist and National Socialist regimes, and no one was surprised that, when, in March 1938, the führer paid a state visit to Rome, Pius should deliberately slip away to Castel Gandolfo. But he was not yet finished: only five days after the second encyclical he published a third, for which he reverted to the traditional Latin. Divini Redemptoris was primarily directed against his greatest bugbear, communism.
This modern revolution … exceeds in amplitude and violence anything yet experienced in the preceding persecutions launched against the Church. Entire peoples find themselves in danger of falling back into a barbarism worse than that which oppressed the greater part of the world at the coming of the Redeemer.
This all too imminent danger … is bolshevistic and atheistic Communism, which aims at upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization.…
Communism, moreover, strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.…
For the first time in history we are witnessing a struggle, cold-blooded in purpose and mapped out to the last detail, between man and “all that is called God.”
This hatred of communism was enough to ensure that when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936 the pope immediately gave his support to General Francisco Franco, though after the Republican government’s brutal separation of Church and state in 1931, which had led to mob attacks on churches and monasteries and massacres of priests, monks and nuns, he could hardly have done otherwise. It was nonetheless embarrassing for him to see Franco’s victory being achieved on the backs of the two dictators—the more so when the Spanish Falangists began to emulate the worst characteristics of the Nazi and Fascist regimes that he had so frequently denounced.
But Pius’s pontificate, overshadowed as it was by the European dictatorships, was by no means exclusively political. It saw the number of Catholic missionaries more than doubled and at the same time a far greater degree of responsibility devolving on recently converted communities; as early as 1926 the pope personally consecrated the first six Chinese bishops, and the total of native priests in India and the Far East increased from 3,000 to more than 7,000. It was a considerable disappointment to him that his efforts toward a reunion of the Catholic and Orthodox churches met with so little response. (They might have had more success if he had not called the churches back to the fold quite so patronizingly, as lost sheep.)
Fortunately, he could always seek consolation in science and the arts. Pius was a genuine scholar, the first since Benedict XIV nearly two centuries before, and was not afraid to show it. He modernized and enlarged the Vatican Library, founded the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, built the Pinacoteca for the Vatican’s by now superb collection of pictures, and transferred the observatory from Rome to Castel Gandolfo. In 1931 he shocked many of the more old-fashioned faithful by installing a radio station and becoming the first pope to make regular broadcasts to the world. One of the most important of these transmissions was made at the time of the Munich crisis of September 1938, when the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to Munich to meet Hitler in a vain attempt to prevent the imminent world war. Pius had little respect for Chamberlain, who, as he instantly saw, was no match for his opponent, but he broadcast a moving appeal for peace which was heard across Europe.
Alas, he was by now a sick man and failing fast. Diabetes was rapidly taking hold, and both his legs were hideously ulcerated. On November 25, he suffered two heart attacks within a few hours of each other. He continued to give audiences—though now from his sickbed—and in January 1939 received Chamberlain and the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, in whom he did his best to instill a degree of courage and determination to resist Hitler’s demands. But he was unsuccessful, as he had known he would be: “Sono due limaccie,” he is said to have murmured as they left—“They’re a pair of slugs.”
By this time he was already working on what was to be his most vehement attack on the dictatorships, to be delivered at a meeting of all the Italian bishops on February 11, 1939. He implored his doctors to keep him alive long enough to make what he felt might be the most important speech of his life. Alas, they failed to do so; he died the day before the speech was due to be made. Almost immediately the rumor began to spread that he had been murdered on Fascist orders by one of the doctors, Francesco Petacci.5 What we know for a fact, on the authority of Mussolini’s son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano, is that the Duce was later extremely anxious to find a copy of the speech and actually sent the Italian ambassador to the Holy See to Pacelli, now Pope Pius XII, to inquire about it. Pacelli assured him that it had been consigned to the secret archives, where it would remain a dead letter.
Pius XI had his faults. He was an autocrat through and through. In his concept of Christianity he was bigoted, reactionary, and inflexible: the Roman Catholic Church was right, everyone else was wrong. He had no time for the incipient ecumenical movement; so far as he was concerned, there could be no bargaining over God’s revealed truth. “The encyclical [Mortalium Annos, of 1928] made it clear that the ecumenical message of the Vatican for the other Churches was simple and uncompromising: ‘Come in slowly, with your hands above your head.’ ”6 In the earlier period of his pontificate his detestation of communism—which, let it never be forgotten, he had seen at first hand in Poland—made him more tolerant of the Fascists, and at first perhaps even of the Nazis, than he might otherwise have been; but in his last years his open and unflinching hostility to both earned him the respect and admiration of the free world.
POPE PIUS
XI died on February 10, 1939; Pope Pius XII was elected on March 2—his sixty-third birthday—on the third ballot, on the very first day of the conclave. It was the shortest for three hundred years. According to his sister, Eugenio Pacelli had been “born a priest”; while still a child, he would dress up in cassock and surplice and act out the celebration of the Mass in his bedroom. As soon as he was old enough, he studied at the Gregorian University and the Capranica College in Rome, and he was still only twenty-three when he was ordained in 1899. Two years later he entered the papal service, after which he never looked back, serving as nuncio first in Munich and then in Berlin, becoming a cardinal in 1929, and in the following year succeeding Gasparri as secretary of state. In this capacity he had negotiated concordats with Austria and, in July 1933, with Nazi Germany. Although no secretary of state had been elected pope since Clement IX in 1667, Pacelli was by far the best-known, the most experienced, and the most intelligent member of the Sacred College. His predecessor had had a huge admiration for him and, as his own health had progressively collapsed, had entrusted to him more and more of the papal business. His election was, effectively, a foregone conclusion.
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