Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  This argument in itself seems hard enough to swallow, but even if we accept the papal silence to have been justified, another astonishing fact remains to be explained. After the end of the war Pius continued as pope for another thirteen years, during which time not one word of apology or regret, not a single requiem or Mass of Remembrance was held for the 1,989 Jewish deportees from Rome who had met their deaths at Auschwitz alone. There were many people, too, who wondered, in retrospect, why a pope who had thought nothing of excommunicating all members of the Communist Party throughout the world had never apparently considered doing the same to the Catholic Nazi war criminals, including Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, and Hitler himself.

  No condemnation was expressed either for the last Nazi atrocity to take place in Rome before its liberation. It occurred on March 24, 1944, the day after a company of German soldiers was bombed as it marched down Via Rasella; thirty-three men died. On the following evening, on Hitler’s personal orders, 335 Italians, including some 70 Jews, were herded into the Ardeatine caves south of the city and massacred. Once again there was no protest from the Vatican, though two days later its newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, ran an article expressing sympathy with the German casualties and regretting “the 320 [sic] persons sacrificed for the guilty parties who escaped arrest.”

  On the same day as the bombing, March 23, the Germans occupied Hungary; and Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s “architect of the Holocaust,” began to apply the “final solution” to the country’s 750,000 Jews. Now at last the Vatican took note: the nuncio in Budapest, Monsignor Angelo Rotta, made official representations to the Hungarian government, the very first time such a thing had been done by a papal diplomatic representative. Even then, the phrasing was unexpected:

  The office of the Apostolic Nuncio … requests the Hungarian Government once again not to continue its war against the Jews beyond the limits prescribed by the laws of nature and God’s commandments,11 and to avoid any action against which the Holy See and the conscience of the entire Christian world would feel obliged to protest.

  It was not, however, till June 25 that the pope cabled the Hungarian president, Admiral Miklós Horthy, asking him to “use all possible influence to stop the suffering and torments which countless people are undergoing simply because of their nationality or their race.” There was still no mention of the Jews by name, though President Roosevelt, cabling on the following day, showed less delicacy and in fact threatened dire consequences.

  At this point, it is only fair to record, the Catholic Church in Hungary stepped in firmly and efficiently. Vast numbers of hunted Jews were given refuge in monasteries, convents, and churches and often with private Catholic families. During the autumn and winter of 1944, we are told, “there was practically no Catholic Church institution in Budapest where persecuted Jews did not find refuge.” Countless lives were saved; nevertheless, the question remains: Eichmann started his loathsome work in March; could not the rescue operation have begun then, instead of four or five months later?

  WITH THE COMING of peace in the spring of 1945, Pope Pius XII, who since the death of Cardinal Maglione the previous August had been acting as his own secretary of state, found himself once again confronted by his old archenemy, communism. The Italian Communist Party under its brilliant leader, Palmiro Togliatti, saw itself as the true conqueror of Fascism and thus the legitimate inheritor of power. It was fortunately counterbalanced by the glamour of America, whose forces had flooded the country with all the accoutrements of capitalist-consumerist society. Against both these extremes Pius urged a program of Catholic renewal which, unlike communism or capitalism, would be Italian through and through; if he had to choose, however, there was no doubt in his mind that American materialism was by far the lesser of the two evils. On July 2, 1949, he went so far as to publish a decree declaring that no Catholic could be a member of the Communist Party or advocate communism in any way; anyone found guilty of doing so would have the sacraments withheld. In the previous year he had violently opposed—as had the entire Curia—the foundation of the State of Israel. This surprised no one, for Pius, as for the Church down the ages, the Jews were the people who had murdered God.

  By this time the pope was seventy-three. Physically, he was still strong, while his autocratic spirit and self-confidence were growing with every year that passed. The old anti-Semitism was still in evidence: to his dying day he was to refuse recognition to the State of Israel. And his vision was narrowing; he was tending more and more to entrench himself in the tried old orthodoxies and to close his mind to new theological ideas. On September 2, 1950, he issued an encyclical, Humani Generis, which paralyzed contemporary scholarship and categorically condemned any new or original Christian thinking. It went further still. Papal encyclicals had never been considered infallible; henceforth, they made it clear that they were settling a disputed matter once and for all: “It is obvious that that matter … cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians.”

  There followed something not unlike the reign of terror that had existed under Pius X. The American Jesuit Daniel Berrigan reported, “I saw at close hand intellectual excellence crushed in a wave of orthodoxy, like a big Stalinist purge.”12 One of the principal victims was the celebrated Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose work was denied publication and who was eventually exiled to the United States. Another casualty was the French worker-priest experiment, the most exciting and probably the most successful of all the attempts to bring Christianity to the world of heavy industry. Its members exchanged their clerical clothes for overalls and signed on as bargemen, miners, or factory hands; missionary work had never been like this before, and its success was dramatic. But for Pius it was too dangerous, an open invitation to communism. He showed more and more hostility toward it and finally in November 1953 dissolved it altogether.

  For forward-looking Christian thinkers, this was a miserable time; it was in a way a reflection of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s America, where Reds were found under every bed. Nor was it improved by the pope’s ex cathedra proclamation, on November 1, 1950, of the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary—in other words, that the Virgin’s body, instead of corrupting after her death, had been immediately assumed into Heaven. There was nothing new in this theory; the Assumption had long been one of the most popular subjects in Italian religious painting—one has only to think of Titian’s tremendous altarpiece in the Church of the Frari in Venice—and its feast day on August 15 one of the most important dates in the Catholic calendar. On the other hand it was unknown to the early Church and had no confirmation in the Scriptures, and the non-Catholic churches resented what they saw as the arrogance of the pope in claiming infallibility—for the first time since its definition at the First Vatican Council in 1870—when prescribing an article of faith in which they did not for a moment believe.

  By the mid-1950s, Pope Pius’s health was giving cause for concern. Much of the deterioration seems to have been due to the ministrations of his oculist, Professor Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, who had taken over complete responsibility for his physical well-being and was generally considered, by everyone but Pius himself, to be a charlatan and a quack. Galeazzi-Lisi himself was bad enough, but he also introduced the fashionable Swiss doctor Paul Niehans, who claimed to have discovered the secret of eternal youth in the cells drawn from the fetuses of sheep and monkeys, and then a mad dentist who prescribed industrial quantities of chromic acid, a substance used in those days principally for the cleaning of brass musical instruments. It is thought to have been this which was responsible for the chronic hiccups which plagued the last years of the pope’s life.

  He died in the early hours of the morning of Thursday, October 9, 1958. The funeral ceremony was long and impressive; the body was driven slowly through Rome in an open coffin to its lying in state in St. Peter’s. It was unfortunate indeed that the embalming had been left to Galeazzi-Lisi, who announced that he would be employing a new techniq
ue, similar to that used on Jesus Christ himself, “which would leave the body in its natural state.” This it singularly failed to do. From time to time appalling eructations were heard coming from the coffin, and during the lying in state the smell was such that one of the attendant Swiss Guards fainted. Meanwhile, the nose fell off. Finally, to the considerable relief of all those present, the lid was screwed down and Pope Pius XII was lowered into the grottoes beneath the basilica, to take up his final resting place only a few feet from the tomb of St. Peter.

  It is painful to have to record that, on the orders of his successor, the process of his canonization has already begun. Suffice it to say here that the current fashion for canonizing all popes on principle will, if continued, make a mockery of sainthood.

  1. “Support for Maurras was strong among the French Holy Ghost Fathers, one of whom was the rector of the French Seminary in Rome, where the students had a strong Action Française group. Pius sent for the ancient, bearded superior of the Order, and told him to sack the Rector. The old man replied, ‘Yes, Holy Father, I’ll see what I can do,’ upon which the Pope grabbed his beard and shouted ‘I didn’t say see what you can do, I said fire him’ ” (Duffy, Saints and Sinners, pp. 256–257).

  2. It is to Monsignor Kaas that we owe the discovery of the ancient shrine now claimed to be that of St. Peter, revealed while he was reordering the crypt of St. Peter’s to accommodate Pius XI’s tomb.

  3. Catholic priests in Germany were instructed—and in most cases seem willingly to have agreed—to provide the authorities, through the local registers of marriages and baptisms, with details of blood purity. The concordat also trapped the Church into accepting Hitler’s Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, which was to result in the sterilization of some 350,000 people, in most cases without their own or their families’ consent.

  4. Nor, incidentally, would there be a word of condemnation for Kristallnacht, the first major German pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, in which 91 Jews were killed and some 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps. More than two hundred synagogues were burned and thousands of homes and businesses ransacked.

  5. Dr. Petacci’s daughter Claretta was, incidentally, the mistress of Mussolini and would be summarily hanged with him six years later.

  6. Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 262.

  7. For fuller versions of these two quotations, see J. Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, pp. 70 and 74–75.

  8. See chapter 20.

  9. The phrase was later eliminated on the orders of John XXIII. See chapter 28.

  10. The village of his birth.

  11. Author’s italics.

  12. Quoted in Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  Vatican II and After

  When Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected Supreme Pontiff on the twelfth ballot on October 28, 1958, he was less than a month short of his seventy-seventh birthday. Fat, kindly, and convivial, with an easy charm and a ready wit, he endeared himself to all those with whom he came in contact. No one had really loved Pope Pius; it was impossible not to love Pope John XXIII. Nonetheless, he was generally expected to be little more than a papa di passaggio—a caretaker pope. His pontificate did indeed last for less than five years, but there was little of the caretaker about it. On the contrary, it shook the world.

  The first surprise was the name he chose: John. There had been twenty-two legitimate popes of that name, the most recent of whom had reigned at Avignon in the early fourteenth century; few had been men of much distinction, while John XII had been one of the most depraved pontiffs in all history.1 There had also been a previous John XXIII, an antipope deposed by the Council of Constance in 1415.2 Later the pope was to maintain that one of the reasons for his choice was to retrieve this evangelical name from dishonor; at the time of his election, however, he claimed to have chosen it because it was the name of his father, of the humble parish church near Bergamo where his family of thirteen had all been baptized, and of innumerable cathedrals throughout the world, including his own Lateran. Later, he characteristically produced yet another reason: that there had been more popes called John than any other name and that most of them had had remarkably short reigns.

  The new pope was a scholar, author of a five-volume study of his hero, St. Charles Borromeo, the great sixteenth-century Archbishop of Milan and towering figure of the Counter-Reformation.3 This work had naturally brought him into contact with Monsignor Ratti, the Vatican librarian who later became Pope Pius XI. It was he who in 1925 launched Roncalli on a diplomatic career, during which he served first in Bulgaria, then in Turkey and Greece, where, during the German occupation, he worked tirelessly on behalf of the Jews. In December 1944 he was posted as nuncio to Paris, where he strongly supported the movement of worker-priests, and in 1953 he was named a cardinal and Patriarch of Venice, where he remained until his election.

  Once pope, John gave a clear impression of a man in a hurry. On January 26, 1959, just three months after his election, L’Osservatore Romano reported that he was planning three important projects: a Diocesan Synod in Rome, an Ecumenical Council, and a revision of the canon law. Of the three, the second was clearly by far the most ambitious; to many people it seemed curious that it had not been given an announcement of its own. In fact, the pope was almost certainly testing the waters. His time in the Balkans had given him much experience of the Eastern churches, and he was anxious to find out as discreetly as he could how they would view his proposal. If their reaction was favorable, he might broaden the Council to include them; otherwise it would be restricted to the Church of Rome.

  The old guard at the Vatican was appalled. Pope Pius XII had been an icy autocrat: he and he alone gave the orders; the bishops, even the cardinals, existed merely to carry them out. Now here, suddenly, was a proposal to bring together all the world’s bishops for free and uncontrolled discussions. Even the liberal Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the Archbishop of Milan and future Pope Paul VI, believed that the new pope was “stirring up a hornet’s nest.” But John was determined. The days of papal dictatorship were over. Henceforth the Church would be a collegiate body, with pope and bishops sharing responsibility between them. No longer could it turn its face away from the modern age. Aggiornamento was the new watchword, the bringing up to date of both its organization and its teaching. It was time, said the pope, to throw open the windows of the Church and let in some fresh air.

  There was inevitably a vast amount of preliminary work to be done before the projected Council could take place. The Diocesan Synod—surprisingly, the first in papal history—was held at the Lateran in January 1960, but the Second Vatican Council—it was in fact the Twenty-First Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church—did not open until nearly two years later, on October 11, 1962. The opening session in St. Peter’s was attended by 2,540 delegates, mostly bishops and superiors of religious orders, making it by far the largest gathering of any council in Church history. Well under half were European; 250 were African, with roughly the same number from Asia, while Latin America was represented by 600. Seventeen Orthodox and Protestant churches sent observers. In his inaugural address, the pope radiated optimism:

  We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom who are always foretelling disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.…

  The Church should never depart from the sacred patrimony of truth received from the Fathers. But at the same time she must ever look to the present, to the new conditions and new forms of life introduced into the modern world, which have opened new avenues.… For this reason, the Church has not watched inertly the marvellous progress of the discoveries of human genius.…

  The Council now beginning rises in the Church like daybreak, a forerunner of most splendid light. It is now only dawn. And already at this first announcement of the rising day, how much sweetness fills our heart. Everything here breathes sanctity and arouses great joy. Let us contemplate the stars.

  Less
than a year later, on June 3, 1963, and after the shortest pontificate for two centuries, Pope John died of cancer. The Council had been his idea and very largely his creation, and although most of its final decisions were the work of others—above all his successor—it was from first to last imbued by his spirit. In five short years he had opened up the Church to the twentieth century. He had reached out to the other Christian churches and particularly to the Jews, for whom he always showed a special affection. As apostolic delegate in Turkey during the Second World War, he had saved the lives of several thousand Jewish children from Romania and Bulgaria, providing them with blank baptismal certificates, and within a year of his election he did what Pius XII had always refused to consider, deleting the phrase pro perfidis Judaeis (faithless Jews) from the Good Friday liturgy. One day when he was driving through Rome he happened to pass a synagogue just as the worshipers were leaving; he stopped his car to talk to them and bless them. No wonder that, on the night before his death, Rome’s chief rabbi went, with many of the Jewish faithful, to pray in St. Peter’s.