The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  Meanwhile the pope kept pushing the Fascist government to restrict Protestants’ rights in Italy. Hitherto police had permitted Protestants to meet privately, most often in their homes, forbidding only public meetings. But in 1934, in response to the pope’s continuing pressure, the government agreed to forbid private meetings of Protestants as well, if they aimed at attracting converts.

  Unhappily for the pope, judges balked at enforcing the new ban. It conflicted, they argued, both with the Italian constitution and with the “admitted cults” language of the concordat. The pope sent his nuncio to complain to the minister of justice. The minister offered his sympathies but said that there was little he could do. Unfortunately, he explained, the judges sometimes decided cases on their own.48

  PIUS WAS MORE SUCCESSFUL on another front. Shortly after coming to power, as we have seen, Mussolini had decided to require Catholic religious instruction in the elementary schools; the 1929 concordat extended this requirement to secondary schools. But the pope was not happy when he learned that the government planned to allow high schools having a sufficient number of non-Catholic children to offer them instruction in their own religion. In March 1933 Turin’s superintendent of schools was about to authorize the city’s chief rabbi to offer religious lessons to Jewish high school students. The pope let Mussolini know of his displeasure. Tellingly, he focused not on the Jews but on the Protestants. “Your Excellency will not fail to see the gravity of the matter,” Cardinal Pacelli wrote the Italian ambassador at the pope’s behest, “once you reflect on the fact that, should this precedent be allowed, there is the danger of an identical request on the part of the Protestants.”49

  Following this protest, the government revoked authorization for the rabbi in Turin and terminated a similar authorization already in place for the rabbi in Milan.50 The pope told Mussolini of his “great pleasure” on hearing the news.51

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  HITLER, MUSSOLINI, AND THE POPE

  WHILE MUSSOLINI KEPT A BUST OF NAPOLEON IN HIS STUDY, Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, had long kept a bust of Benito Mussolini in his.1 The Duce was his role model. Shortly after his swearing-in ceremony, Hitler sent Mussolini a message: Fascism and Nazism had much in common. He hoped to strengthen the ties between the two countries.2

  Mussolini basked in the flattery but had doubts about his acolyte. Hitler was “a dreamer,” better suited to fiery speechifying than to governing. As for Hermann Göring, he was an “ex-inmate of a lunatic asylum.” Both, Mussolini believed, suffered from inferiority complexes.3

  “Hitler is a genial agitator,” said Cardinal Pacelli, “but it is too early to tell if he is a man of government.”4

  German Church leaders had long been wary of Hitler’s extreme nationalism, which they thought bordered on paganism.5 But the Nazi leader, aware that one out of three Germans was Catholic, was eager to win Vatican support. Just as Italy’s Catholic Popular Party had stood in Mussolini’s way, Germany’s Catholic Center Party stood in Hitler’s. Less than a month after Hitler came to power, the German ambassador assured Pacelli that the new chancellor wanted good relations with the Holy See. After all, the ambassador pointed out, Hitler was a Catholic.6

  The pope too had doubts about the Nazis. “With the Hitlerites in power,” asked Pius XI the previous spring, “what could one hope for?”7 But within weeks of Hitler’s appointment, he began to have a more positive view. “I have changed my opinion about Hitler,” he told the surprised French ambassador in early March. “It is the first time that such a government voice has been raised to denounce bolshevism in such categorical terms, joining with the voice of the pope.”

  “These words,” French ambassador Charles-Roux recalled, “pronounced with a firm voice and with a kind of recklessness, proved to me how much the new German chancellor had gained in Pius XI’s eyes by launching a declaration of war to the death against Communism.”8 Britain’s envoy to the Vatican similarly noted how obsessed the pope seemed to be with the Communist threat. It was impossible to understand Pius’s actions, he argued, without realizing this.9

  The pope’s surprisingly positive view of Hitler produced consternation and confusion among Germany’s Church leaders. In the campaign for the March 1933 elections, the German Catholic bishops had unanimously denounced the Nazis and strongly supported the Center Party. On March 12 the pope met with Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, to tell him of the need to change course. On his return to Germany, the archbishop informed his colleagues. “Let us meditate on the words of the Holy Father,” Faulhaber reported, “who, in a consistory, without mentioning his name, indicated Adolf Hitler before the whole world as the statesman who first, after the pope himself, has raised his voice against Bolshevism.” On March 23 Hitler reciprocated by declaring that the Christian churches were “the most important factors in the maintenance of our national identity.” He pledged to protect “the influence to which the Christian confessions are entitled in school and education.” Two days later, speaking with Cardinal Pacelli, the pope expressed his appreciation of what Hitler had said, praising his “good intentions.” By the end of the month, the German bishops announced that they would no longer oppose the Nazi leader.10

  In May Charles-Roux again remarked on the pope’s positive view of Hitler. “The pontiff, impulsive by nature and obsessed with his phobia for Communism,” the French ambassador observed, “has allowed himself a moment of enthusiasm” for the Nazi leader. Conscious of the value of Church support, Italian government officials shared their own successful “recipes” for winning Church approval with their Nazi counterparts.11

  The pope was eager to reach an understanding with the Nazi government that would protect the Church’s influence in Germany. Cardinal Pacelli, an able negotiator, saw the Center Party as one of the Holy See’s major bargaining chips. By offering to end Church support for the party, he believed, the Vatican could extract guarantees protecting the rights of Catholic associations in Germany. But he did not reckon on the precipitous effect that the withdrawal of the bishops’ support would have on the Center Party itself. Before he could reach a deal with Hitler, the party announced its own dissolution.12

  In July, Cardinal Pacelli escorted the German vice chancellor Franz von Papen into his Vatican apartment. The concordat they signed there guaranteed the German Church the right to manage its own affairs and offered various protections for priests, religious orders, and Church property. But much of its language, particularly that dealing with Catholic associations and schools, was vague.13

  Heinrich Brüning, the Center Party leader who had served as Germany’s chancellor from 1930 to 1932, was irate. The Vatican, he fumed, had sold out the Catholic party and cast its lot with Hitler. He blamed Cardinal Pacelli, who, he charged, misunderstood the nature of Nazism. Pacelli’s faith in the “system of concordats,” Brüning later wrote in his memoir, “led him and the Vatican to despise democracy and the parliamentary system.”14

  ––

  THE POPE SOON REALIZED that his “pact with the devil”—as the Church historian Hubert Wolf has described it—was not going to turn out the way he hoped.15 At the same time they signed the concordat, the Nazis introduced their Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which mandated the forced sterilization of those deemed defective—in clear contrast with Church doctrine. Hitler also began moving against the Church’s dense network of parochial schools. The Nazis wanted a church they could fully control. In early fall the Vatican secretary of state office produced an alarming analysis of these efforts; it included the text of a song popular in the Hitler Youth, calling Hitler their “redeemer.”16 In October the editor of Italy’s most prominent Catholic newspaper, L’Avvenire d’Italia, warned that the Nazis were working toward “a German national church in which Protestants and Catholics are to be mixed together.”17 In December, in his annual Christmas address to the cardinals, Pius XI voiced his disappointment with th
e Nazi government. Pacelli and von Papen had signed the concordat only five months earlier.18

  While the pope’s doubts about Hitler were growing, those closest to him were trying to keep relations as harmonious as possible. In early 1934 both Cardinal Pacelli and the papal nuncio in Germany, Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo, cautioned the pope against saying anything that would anger Hitler, lest it further undermine the Church’s position.19 In Berlin, Orsenigo had help in his efforts, having retained Pacelli’s personal assistant from his time as nuncio, the German Father Eduard Gehrmann. As one Vatican observer put it, Father Gehrmann “believed more in Hitler than in Christ.”20

  The fact that Pius XI chose Cesare Orsenigo as nuncio to Nazi Germany reveals much about the pope. Other than the nuncio to Italy, there was no more crucial, or complex, diplomatic assignment in the Vatican, yet Orsenigo was a man of limited intelligence and even more limited worldview. Born near the pope’s hometown, in the Lake Como region north of Milan, Orsenigo like the pope had a father who was a silk factory supervisor. His father’s two brothers married his mother’s two sisters, daughters of a silk factory supervisor in a nearby town. Each of the three couples produced a son who would become a priest. Ordained in 1896, Orsenigo served in a Milan parish, and in 1912 he added the title of canon at Milan’s Duomo.

  Orsenigo had hitherto lived solely in the confines of the Church in and around Milan; he had neither diplomatic experience nor any evident interest in international affairs. Yet barely four months after Pius became pope, he appointed Orsenigo nuncio to Holland, with the title of archbishop. The appointment triggered considerable muttering among the upper clergy, who saw it as but the latest example of the pope choosing his friends from Milan rather than the men of the hierarchy with the most expertise. Cardinal Gasparri presided over Orsenigo’s episcopal consecration ceremony; the Milanese priest proudly wore the cross that Pius had given him to honor the occasion, but aside from some students from the Lombard seminary in Rome, who served as altar attendants, the church was empty.

  After spending two years in Holland, Orsenigo became nuncio to Hungary. In 1928, while Orsenigo was back in Rome for a visit, one of Mussolini’s informers speculated that the pope might choose him to replace Cardinal Gasparri as secretary of state. The pope valued above all, thought the informer, men of unquestionable loyalty. Such a move would be a boon to the regime, the informer added, for Orsenigo was less astute and more pliable than the wily Gasparri.21

  Although the pope passed over Orsenigo for his new secretary of state, he chose him to replace Pacelli as nuncio to Germany. Both Hitler and Cardinal Pacelli would come to view Orsenigo as a lightweight. Certainly Pacelli, himself a former nuncio to Germany, never felt the need to ask for advice about how to deal with Berlin. Cautious and conscientious, Orsenigo worried continually about offending Hitler. Later, when relations with Nazi Germany became Pius’s central concern, he would not replace Orsenigo. The pope wanted neither an independent thinker nor a saber-rattler as his ambassador to Hitler. The mediocre Orsenigo would remain in his post under the next pope throughout the dramatic years of the world war.22

  Worried about anti-Catholic elements in the Nazi movement, the pope was especially upset about The Myth of the Twentieth Century, written by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis’ foremost theoretician. Rosenberg argued that God created humans as separate races; the superior Aryan race was destined to rule over the others. Jesus was an Aryan, he explained, but his Jewish apostles had polluted his teachings. Catholicism was the bastardized product of this Jewish influence. In early 1934 the Holy Office placed this German best seller on the Index of Prohibited Books.23 Hitler himself kept some distance from it, and so for a time some in the Vatican could attribute the Nazis’ anti-Catholic bent not to Hitler but to the party’s anticlerical wing. It was a familiar story in the Vatican, where anti-Church actions in Italy were commonly blamed not on Mussolini but on the anticlerics around him.

  In his efforts to persuade Hitler to honor the concordat, Pius turned repeatedly to Mussolini for help.24 In the spring of 1934, when the Duce was preparing for his first encounter with Hitler, the pope sent him instructions.25 He wanted Mussolini to extract assurances from Hitler that he would observe the concordat. Although it had been in force for less than a year, the Nazis were already ignoring it. Mussolini was also to convey a warning: Hitler would be wise not to harass Germany’s bishops, for while “they can do him a great deal of good, they could also—albeit not wanting to have to—do him a great deal of harm as the Catholics will side with them.”

  Pius also asked Mussolini to persuade Hitler “to free himself from certain acolytes who are making him look bad,” notably Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda. The pope thought both were encouraging attacks on the Catholic Church. The archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Faulhaber, had recently prepared a troubling report on Goebbels, whose writings, including a popular novel he wrote in the 1920s, combined a strong belief in God and Jesus Christ with disdain for the Church and the clergy. “I converse with Christ,” wrote Goebbels in his book. “I believed I had overcome him, but I have only overcome his idolatrous priests and false servants. Christ is harsh and relentless.” To make matters worse, Goebbels, a Catholic, had recently married a Protestant divorcée and was, reported the archbishop, a “notorious homosexual.” Receiving the pope’s request, the Duce was more than happy to play the role of wise statesman and promised to do everything the pontiff asked.26

  Mussolini was not looking forward to the meeting. The Nazis’ goal of creating a greater Germany, uniting all ethnic Germans, inevitably meant they would try to annex Austria. This went directly against Italy’s foreign policy, which regarded Austria as part of an Italian sphere of influence and a buffer against an overly aggressive Germany.27 Mussolini was a strong supporter of Engelbert Dollfuss, the Christian Social head of the Austrian government, who had suspended parliamentary government in March 1933 in response to Nazi-provoked unrest. That same summer Dollfuss, with his wife and children in tow, had visited Mussolini at his summer retreat at Riccione, on Romagna’s Adriatic coast, to seek his help.28 Shortly after Dollfuss returned to Vienna, an Austrian Nazi shot him, wounding him in the arm and ribs.29

  The Führer landed at Venice’s airport on the morning of June 14, 1934, where the well-tanned Duce greeted him. Mussolini wore a magnificent uniform with rows of medals adorning his chest, a black Fascist fez, a dagger wedged in his belt, and knee-high black boots. Hitler wore a yellow trench coat, a floppy brown velvet hat, a dark suit, and simple black shoes. He looked, observed one witness, like “a laborer dressed in his Sunday best.” The pasty German would long suffer by comparison with the virile Mussolini, who delighted in baring his chest in an unending variety of poses. Hitler would never let himself be seen less than fully clothed, and even during his stint in prison in the 1920s he had insisted on wearing a tie every day. While Mussolini reveled in driving fast cars and piloting planes, Hitler preferred to sit in the back of his oversize Mercedes, surrounded by bodyguards, looking, in the words of biographer Ian Kershaw, like “an eccentric gangster.”30

  As he emerged from the plane, the Führer was clearly embarrassed. The confident Mussolini strode up to him and raised his arm in Fascist salute. Word would later spread that, as Hitler raised his arm in response, Mussolini murmured “Ave imitatore!” (“Hail, imitator!”). The impression Hitler made would feed Mussolini’s feeling that he was dealing with a poor copy of the original, a sense that would later prove dangerous.31

  Proud of his fluent German, the Duce insisted on meeting with Hitler alone. He had even taken lessons to improve his German in the weeks leading up to the meeting. But Mussolini found it difficult to follow Hitler’s long rants, as much due to the boredom they induced as to any linguistic limitations.32 His belief that Hitler was a bit crazed only grew over the next two days. Their meeting was not helped by an infestation of mosquitoes, described as “big as quail,” nor by Hitler’s vaunting of the superiority of
the Nordic race compared to the partially “negroid” origins of southern Europeans. The biggest source of tension continued to be Austria, for Hitler made no secret of his goal of uniting it with Germany.

  “What a clown!” quipped Mussolini as Hitler’s plane took off.33 The man boasted of the superiority of the German race. But as Mussolini delighted in telling Italian audiences, when the likes of Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and Augustus were gracing Rome’s magnificent palaces, the illiterate savages who were the Nazis’ ancestors lived in filthy hovels in the forest.34

  Following the Venice meeting, Mussolini wrote to his ambassador to the Holy See, Cesare De Vecchi, to fill him in. “I will spare you all the idiotic things that Hitler said about Jesus Christ being of the Jewish race, etc.”35 When Hitler talked about the Catholic Church, Mussolini told De Vecchi a few days later, “it was as if he had prepared a phonograph record on the subject and proceeded to play it for ten minutes until the end.” Hitler had ranted that the Church was nothing but one of the Jews’ mystifications. “This Jew,” said Hitler, meaning Jesus Christ, had found a way to fool the entire Western world. “Thank goodness,” he told Mussolini, “that you [Italians] succeeded in injecting more than a little paganism [into the Catholic Church], making its center in Rome and using it for your own ends.” While he was himself Catholic, Hitler added, he could see no good purpose that Catholicism served in Germany.36

  Mussolini told the pope none of this, other than vaguely alluding to Hitler’s sciocchezze, nonsense, about Jesus being a Jew. Worried that if the pope learned what Hitler had said, it would only make matters worse, Mussolini offered De Vecchi an expurgated account of his conversation to use with the Vatican. He should let the pope know that he had done his best and that it might be possible in the future for him to get the Nazi leader to take a more conciliatory view.37