Cardinals of the Curia and other Vatican prelates continued to live in fear of him. The pope, observed the archbishop of Paris, would never admit to being wrong and had a habit of uttering pithy phrases that he took to be unquestioned truths. Gaetano Bisleti, the venerable cardinal who had crowned Ratti with the papal tiara in 1922, prepared for his audiences by going to his favorite Vatican chapel, getting down on his knees on the marble floor, and praying that the pope would find no fault with what he had to say. Monsignor Alberto Mella, who following Caccia’s appointment as cardinal became master of ceremonies, prayed to all the saints in heaven before entering the pope’s study, hoping that the pope would not find him wanting. A number of cardinals, afraid to approach the pope and risk incurring his wrath, confided in Pacelli, hoping he would use his diplomatic skills to get the pope to do what they wanted.18
But especially when dealing with laymen, the pope knew the value of a soft word. A visitor who entered the pope’s presence in the Apostolic Palace genuflected three times. Non-Catholics were supposed to bow as well as Catholics, but this did not come easily to some. One day a group of Protestants visited the pope. All dropped to one knee, except for one man who, ill at ease, remained defiantly—if a bit unsteadily—on his feet. The pope’s aides tensed, exchanging furtive glances to see who would deal with the problem. But while they dithered, the pope walked up to the holdout and asked, “Won’t you receive a simple old man’s blessing?” This was too much for the recalcitrant Protestant, and he too got down on bended knee.19
In the tradition of European monarchs, the pope kept bags of money in his library drawers to dispense to deserving petitioners. Domenico Tardini, Pizzardo’s undersecretary in the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, was in charge of coordinating aid for Russian relief and often had to ask for funds. A short Roman prelate with a square face and thick dark woolly hair, Tardini was highly sensitive to the pope’s moods. “At nine with the pope, another hour of audience,” he wrote in his diary on April 9, 1934. “Today too he is in excellent spirit: the infallible thermometer measured by the size of his donations.” As Tardini detailed his request, the pope, his attention drifting, rearranged the gold coins he had extracted from his drawer, sorting them by size into neat piles atop his desk.
When he was in a good mood, the pope, not known for his sense of humor, was capable of a witty remark. Earlier that year he had urgently summoned the French ambassador to discuss something that was on his mind. Upon his arrival, the ambassador apologized for not wearing his usual formal dress. The pope smiled. “Yes, I know,” he said. “Ordinarily you come in leatherbound edition. Today you come as a paperback.”20
Other times the pope was more irritable. “Today,” Tardini wrote on October 5, “the pope is readier than ever to contradict and oppose. It all depends on his mood, on some painful experience in the past, on … his bad digestion, I don’t know. But what is certain is that the pope is always ready to be suspicious and to do the exact opposite of whatever someone suggests he do.” Tardini, who knew him well, came up with a solution. When the pope was in a bad mood, he could be counted on to deny any request. So on such days, Tardini would propose the opposite of what he wanted and could be sure he would succeed, or so he claimed. “That’s what I did today,” wrote Tardini in his diary one day, “and with excellent results.”21
Although working a punishing schedule, the pope did have his modest diversions. Loving order, he carefully kept every item in his desk in its proper place and wasted nothing. He even kept a neat pile of ribbons removed from packages he opened. The son of a textile factory manager, he took pleasure in little mechanical projects. For many years, he kept a tiny screwdriver in his desk so he could tinker with clocks. When a spray of oil or a drip of ink stained his white vest, he would, when he was sure no one was looking, do his best to scrub it off.22
Now that he no longer had to cast himself as a “prisoner of the Vatican,” the pope could enjoy a new diversion. On July 10, 1933, in a carriage with blinds drawn, he left Rome for the first time, bound for the papal estate at Castel Gandolfo in the Alban Hills. The area’s cool, crisp air, famed wines, and natural beauty had drawn distinguished Romans since ancient times. The papal estate there had been unused since 1869. On his first visit, Pius XI inspected the repair work under way. The next year he began spending his summers there, two months in 1934 and 1935 and longer periods later. Each day he spent at the summer palace, his assistants brought papers for him to review, and he held audiences. But his pace was much reduced. While strolling through the extensive gardens, the pope could glance down a hundred meters at the lake below, formed by the mouth of an extinct volcano. Breathing the fresh air and feeling closer to nature gave him great pleasure, bringing back memories of the small-town life he had left behind.23
MUSSOLINI SHOULD NOT HAVE been surprised that Pius wanted his help in combating the Protestant threat.24 In the wake of the concordat, the pope had been unhappy about the new instructions the government had put out, specifying how non-Catholic religions were to be treated. “I told the head of government,” recalled the nuncio, who brought Mussolini the pope’s complaint, “that the desire to equate the Catholic Religion with the Protestant cults, which are parasites that live by damaging the true religion, was not only entirely unjust but offensive to us.”25 The following year, 1931, the pope sent his nuncio back to renew his pleas. Protestant propaganda, he told Mussolini, posed the greatest danger the country faced. The government had to act more aggressively against it.26
In trying to get the government to repress the Protestants, the pope looked for arguments he thought would appeal to Mussolini. None seemed more promising than the claim that loyalty to the Catholic Church and to the Fascist regime were one and the same. Protestantism, the pope insisted, was anti-Italian, a foreign force that posed as much a danger to Mussolini as it did to the Church.
Catholic Action members were ever on the lookout for signs of Protestant activity. In a typical case, in May 1931, the Catholic Action heads in one central Italian town wrote to Mussolini denouncing a man who was distributing Protestant literature there. They asked the Duce to ensure that “Protestant propaganda be forbidden in any form.”27
For his part, Mussolini was reluctant to break up Protestant meetings and confiscate their literature. In November 1932, when the pope once again sent his nuncio to demand action, the Duce cut him off. “It’s better not to exaggerate,” replied the impatient dictator. The campaign was making a bad impression on leaders in Protestant countries, he added—they were appalled by the Vatican newspaper’s hysterical anti-Protestant screeds.28
Undaunted, a few months later the pope repeated his conviction that Italy’s Protestants were “the greatest cross” he had to bear. On hearing this from the nuncio, Mussolini again pointed out how few Protestants resided in Italy. Again, this made no impression on the pope.29
While the nuncio Borgongini was the pope’s main emissary in these efforts, Tacchi Venturi played a part as well. He would spend years trying to convince Mussolini that a vast, evil conspiracy, led by Protestants and Jews, was at work, aimed as much at the Fascist dictator as at the Catholic Church.30 He relied on a network of informants to feed him the latest news on the occult conspiracy. In June 1933 he sent Cardinal Pacelli a copy of one such report.
“I believe that in communicating the attached information I am not doing something unwelcome,” Tacchi Venturi wrote in his cover note. Of the report’s accuracy, he told Pacelli, “I do not believe it is possible to harbor any doubts, as its author is not only as honest as they come, but in an especially well placed position to know what he is speaking about.”
Tacchi Venturi’s secret informer recounted that he had recently seen a ministry of internal affairs circular addressed to all of Italy’s prefects, telling them to keep an eye out for political activity by priests. This seemed odd, he thought, for “the whole world knows with what great enthusiasm all the clergy, all the Italian Catholic association
s, all the Italian Catholics love the Duce and the Regime.”
There was but one explanation for why the government would waste its resources on such surveillance: “at the center of the government, that is, in the ministries, there are high bureaucratic officials who are either Jews or Masons who want the Prefects to think that the clergy and the Catholics should always be considered … as enemies!!”31 Instead of wasting their time investigating priests, he said, government authorities should be looking into “the formidable, underhanded, subversive activities of the Jews, the Masons, and the Protestants who, disguised as admirers of Fascism, have become practically the feudal lords of Italy, as they never were in the past.” Mussolini had to be warned.32
THE CHARGE THAT JEWS were the evil force behind a worldwide conspiracy against Christianity and European civilization had long been heard in the Vatican; the Jesuits of La Civiltà cattolica were among its most avid proponents.
A feature article, titled “The World Revolution and the Jews,” had appeared in the Vatican-supervised journal in late October 1922, as the Fascists were marching on Rome. It described a world in chaos, where secret forces orchestrated labor strikes and unrest in pursuit of the goal of Communist revolution. The credulous masses participating in the revolts were mere stooges, manipulated by an occult power that showed telltale signs of coming from “the ghetto.”
The world’s future, the article warned, would be determined by the battle then being waged in Russia. The leaders of the Bolshevik reign of terror were not “indigenous Russians” but rather “Jewish intruders” who slyly masked their true identity behind Slavic-sounding pseudonyms. A list of the 545 highest officials of the Bolshevik regime revealed, the author claimed, that true Russians numbered no more than thirty. “Those of the Jewish race comprise a full 447”; the rest were a hodgepodge of other nationalities. In short, although Jews comprised less than five percent of Russia’s population, “this tiny minority today has invaded all the avenues of power and imposes its dictatorship on the nation.”33
The 1922 article has great significance, for its argument would be used by the Nazis as a central justification for their anti-Semitic campaign. Taken up by Church publications throughout Italy and beyond, the myth that the Russian revolutionary leaders were virtually all Jewish—and not “real Russians”—became one of the most important, and deadly, rationales for government action against Europe’s Jews.34
The next issue of La Civiltà cattolica, the first to appear after Mussolini came to power, carried news from Austria under the headline “Jewish-Masonic Socialism Tyrannizes Austria.” Following the Great War, the journal reported, Vienna’s nineteen Masonic lodges had formed a Grand Lodge. “All of its high functionaries, without exception, were Jews.” Their goal was to rule the world “under the domination of the Masons, themselves under the Jews’ power.” If the Jews in Vienna got their way, the journal warned, “Vienna will be nothing but a Jewish city, houses and belongings will all be theirs, the Jews will be the bosses and lords, the Christians their servants.” Austria, La Civiltà cattolica concluded, “will be absolutely the subject, tributary and slave of the Jews, this in short is the guiding idea of our socialist Jewish-Masonic leaders.”35
This belief in a worldwide conspiracy of Jews, Masons, and Protestants was not one that Mussolini shared at the time, but in the next years the pope’s Jesuit emissary Tacchi Venturi would employ all his powers to persuade him to see the world in these terms.36
In 1925, in Mussolini’s home region of Romagna, the official magazine of Catholic Action, La Risveglia, carried a long series of articles warning of the Jewish threat. Jews and Masons, the journal warned, secretly controlled international finance and were “trying with satanic greed to suck all energy from the Christian spirit.” Until Christians rebelled against these agents of Satan, they would continue to be exploited. In another article, most likely drawing on the 1922 Civiltà cattolica piece, the Catholic Action journal blamed Jews for the Russian revolution and for Communism. “The Jews,” it warned, “adorers of gold, dream of crushing the indomitable spirit of Christ.” Embracing the medieval charge of ritual murder, La Risveglia branded Jews “insatiable suckers of Christian blood.”37 Other articles published that year repeated the bogus charge that the great majority of “commissars” of the Russian government were Jews, described as a parasitical “race” whose object was to torment Christians and reduce them to slaves.38
For decades, the Vatican had demonized those it saw as the beneficiaries of the much-vilified Enlightenment: liberals, Masons, Jews, and Protestants. It cast all as doing the devil’s work, seeking to undermine people’s faith in the one true religion. Throughout Italy, the Catholic press stoked this fear.39 Pius XI largely shared in this worldview. In his 1928 encyclical Mortalium animos, he forbade Catholics to take part in groups that encouraged interfaith dialogue.
In March 1928 the Holy Office of the Inquisition—headed by the pope—ordered the dissolution of the international Catholic organization called Friends of Israel. Begun two years earlier, the group followed the accepted Church goal of seeking to convert the Jews. Its membership included not only thousands of priests but 278 bishops and 19 cardinals as well.
But its leaders soon crossed the border of what the Vatican considered acceptable. To persuade the Jews to convert, they believed it was important to treat them with respect. They criticized both the traditional Church teaching that the Jews were Christ-killers cursed by God, and the folk belief that Jews were commanded to drink the blood of Christian children as part of their Passover rites.
Cardinal Merry del Val, former secretary of state and now secretary of the Holy Office, led the Vatican attack on the Friends of Israel. He expressed outrage at their request that the phrase “perfidious Jews” be eliminated from Good Friday prayers. In February 1928 he notified its officers that the organization could continue only if it confined its activities to praying for the Jews’ conversion. They had become dupes of the Jews, he warned, unwitting tools in the Jews’ evil plot to “penetrate everywhere in modern society” and attempt “to reconstitute the reign of Israel in opposition to the Christ and his Church.” Meeting with the pope in early March, Merry del Val found that Pius shared his view that “behind the Friends of Israel one finds the hand and the inspiration of the Jews themselves.”40
The pope agreed that it was important to act but worried that banning a Church organization called Friends of Israel might expose him to charges of anti-Semitism. He insisted that to the decree dissolving the group, a passage be added stating that the Church opposed anti-Semitism.41 To ensure that the faithful understood what the decree meant, he asked Enrico Rosa, his close adviser and former head of La Civiltà cattolica, to explain its rationale in the pages of the journal.
The dissolution decree, Rosa wrote in “The Judaic Danger and the ‘Friends of Israel,’ ” condemned anti-Semitism “in its anti-Christian form and spirit.” He explained that “in the painful struggle against the Jewish danger,” La Civiltà cattolica had “always taken care to balance charity and justice, avoiding and … explicitly combating the excesses of anti-Semitism.” But the Church also had to protect itself “with equal diligence from the other, no less dangerous extreme.” Catholics could not ignore the great peril that the Jews posed. In the nineteenth century, the Jews had been given equal rights—something the Church had long opposed; since then they had become “bold and powerful, making them, under the pretext of equality, ever more predominant, and privileged, especially in the economic sphere.”
Rosa went on to blame the Jews for both the French and the Russian revolutions. Today, in the face of the Jewish threat, he warned, Europe’s governments were being inexplicably lax. As a result, Jews had established their “hegemony in many sectors of public life, especially in the economy and industry, as well as in high finance, where they are indeed said to have dictatorial power. They can dictate laws to states and governments, in political as well as in financial matters, without fear of
having any rivals.” Throughout Europe, he concluded, Jews were at work, “scheming to achieve their world hegemony.”42
ITALY’S JEWS AND PROTESTANTS were feeling increasingly marginalized. The situation of Mussolini’s lover, Margherita Sarfatti, was a good barometer: sensing the regime’s now-tight identification with Catholicism, she decided to be baptized. Tacchi Venturi performed the ceremony in 1928, and her two children soon followed.43
By 1933 the Fascist press was taking up the Catholic press’s warnings of a Jewish conspiracy aimed jointly at the Catholic Church and the Fascist state. A Genoese newspaper, after making the obligatory denial that it had anything against Jews as individuals, proclaimed the need “to combat Jewish-Zionist-Masonic-Bolshevik-international sectarianism, which constitutes a huge and powerful reality, operating to the detriment of Christian civilization.”44
While Tacchi Venturi was fixated on the Jewish danger, the pope was more focused on the threat posed by the spread of Communism.45 In 1932 the new French ambassador, François Charles-Roux, reporting to the French foreign minister, wrote of the pope’s “mania” in continually warning of the Communist danger. Rattled by the Nazis’ dramatic success in the recent election in Germany—they had become the nation’s largest party—the French were most eager to discuss the menace posed by Hitler. But Pius insisted that it was the Communist threat, not the rise of the Nazis, that France should be worrying about.46
Later that year, after Franklin Roosevelt was elected president of the United States, the pope heard a rumor that the new president might offer diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. Giving Moscow such recognition, he feared, would provide a huge boost to Communist propaganda in the United States. He told Pacelli to contact the apostolic delegate in Washington. Pressure might better come from the American Church than from the Vatican, he said, suggesting that Cardinal Patrick Joseph Hayes, archbishop of New York, approach Roosevelt on behalf of the American hierarchy.47
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