Several years later, in the aftermath of a disastrous war, Italians would hold a referendum on whether to keep the monarchy. They turned on the king, blaming him for not standing up to the dictator. Nowhere was Victor Emmanuel’s cowardice clearer—or in retrospect, more humiliating—than in his approval of every racial law that Mussolini proposed. As Jews were thrown out of schools and jobs, vilified by the state and robbed of their livelihood, the king continued to sign all the bills that Mussolini, at their twice-a-week meetings at the Quirinal Palace, brought him. In some ways making matters worse, the king had no sympathy for the Nazis’ deification of the Aryan race or for Mussolini’s attempts to craft an Italian variant; he simply did not have the courage to stand up to the Duce.
The king’s reply to the pope on November 7 reflected this same cowardice.4 Victor Emmanuel thanked the pontiff for his letter and said he had sent a copy of it to Mussolini, hoping a solution could be found that “conciliates the two points of view.” That was it.5 For his part, Mussolini again let the pope know he could not agree to his request, for doing so would mean undermining the whole intent of the new marriage law.6
Earlier in the week Ciano met with Hermann Göring, head of the German air force and Hitler’s minister of planning. Despite his infatuation with the Nazis, Mussolini’s dandified son-in-law found many of their leaders rather boorish. He left a vivid image of Göring in his diary: “Dressed in civilian clothes, with an expensive and loud gray suit. His tie, knotted in an old fashioned style, has a ruby ring pinned on it. Other large rubies on his fingers. On his lapel, a large Nazi eagle with diamonds. He vaguely resembles ‘Al Capone.’ ”
Afterward Ciano filled his father-in-law in on his discussions with Göring. He then brought up the pope’s appeal to the king. “I cannot say,” observed Ciano, “that the Duce is very shaken.”7
Ciano was part of a lunch party that day, held at the American embassy in Rome. The guest of honor was none other than the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Mundelein, on a visit to the Vatican. President Roosevelt, to show solidarity with Mundelein in the wake of the storm that his denunciation of Hitler had stirred up the previous year, had hosted him at the White House before his departure. The president instructed Ambassador Phillips to do everything he could to show American support for the archbishop during his time in Italy.8
The papal nuncio was also present at the lunch party and, spotting Ciano, made his way through the crowd to reach him. The new marriage law was on the Council of Ministers agenda the next day, and Ciano was worried. Mussolini had gotten so worked up about the matter that the text was now much more drastic than the earlier version. If the law were to end Vatican support for the Fascist regime, thought Ciano, it would be a disaster.
“What will the pope do?” Ciano asked Borgongini.
“I don’t know, because the pope doesn’t tell anyone what he will do,” the nuncio responded. “But you can be certain he will do something big.”
“Will it be a diplomatic protest, or a public protest?” asked Ciano nervously.
Borgongini replied that he didn’t know, but suggested that Ciano, as foreign minister, could still intervene to save the Lateran Accords.
“And what can we propose now? Both the Holy Father and the Head of the Government have been dealing with it. So I, as minister of foreign affairs, and you, as nuncio, can’t do anything.”
Borgongini argued that it wasn’t too late, that Ciano could propose a bilateral commission to study the matter. When Ciano asked what he could say to persuade the Duce, the nuncio again stressed how few marriages would be involved. By the end of their conversation, Borgongini was convinced that if Ciano could do anything to prevent a crisis with the Vatican, he would.9
That night, November 9, 1938, remains etched in historical memory as Kristallnacht, a night of horrors in Germany. Using as a pretext the assassination in France of a German diplomat by a teenaged Jewish refugee from Poland, marauding Nazis burned synagogues to the ground, sacked Jewish-owned stores, and hunted down and beat terrified Jews. Scores of Jews were murdered, tens of thousands arrested, and many sent to concentration camps. Hundreds of synagogues were burned to the ground, and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were plundered. In the aftermath of the violence, the German government announced that Jews would no longer be allowed to own stores or other businesses, practice trades, or enter theaters or concert halls, and that what remained of their property would be seized and turned over to Christians. Hundreds of Jews committed suicide. Ciano received a long report from the Italian ambassador in Germany giving the grisly details. Pacelli received a lengthy report from the nuncio in Berlin.10
Italy’s Catholic press had little to say about the horrors visited on Germany’s Jews. Venice’s diocesan weekly aimed all its scorn at the Jewish teenager who shot the Nazi diplomat, the “Jew who coldly aimed his revolver … armed in his heart by a deep sense of hatred, vendetta, and rancor.” It added, “We confess we cannot understand how a man’s hand can, with calculated premeditation, strike a pacific and unknown functionary.” Of the government-sponsored mass murder and destruction of the Jews in Germany, the diocesan weekly said nothing.11
As German synagogues were being torched and German Jews hunted down, Father Tacchi Venturi was in bed, unable to sleep. Knowing that Mussolini’s Council of Ministers would be meeting the next day, he cast about for a way to prevent a break between his two patrons. He rose from bed, turned on the light, and drafted a letter to the Duce.
“The change that I am proposing,” he wrote, “saves the basic principle of the law”—the proposition that Italians are Aryans and Jews are not. “It simply allows for an exception.” Again Tacchi Venturi pleaded how rare such cases would be. “If one takes into account the small number of Italian citizens of Jewish race, the aversion that almost all Israelites have for marrying Christians, and the Christians for Jews, even if converted, I am not afraid of saying that there would be fewer than a hundred such marriages between spouses of different race, but both professing the Catholic religion.” That the normally astute Jesuit would get up in the middle of the night simply to repeat arguments he had already made many times to the Duce shows how desperate he was.12
Meanwhile Roberto Farinacci, delighted to play his part in needling the Vatican, was helping the Duce whip up popular support for the anti-Semitic laws. He cast the new measures as rooted in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The previous summer he had run a series of anti-Semitic articles in his newspaper, citing La Civiltà cattolica to justify the campaign. He titled one “A Lesson in Catholicism for Catholics.” On November 7, in a widely publicized lecture given in Milan, billed as “The Church and the Jews,” he quoted extensively from the New Testament to argue that the Catholic Church was the original source of the Fascist anti-Semitic measures. Unfortunately, he lamented, the pope had recently shown signs of straying from this core Church teaching. “What has happened,” he asked, “to make the official Church today become philo-Semitic rather than anti-Semitic? … Why,” he asked, “do Communists, Freemasons, democrats, all the avowed enemies of the Church, praise her today and offer to help her?” His answer was simple: “To use her against Fascism.”
Il Regime fascista gave Farinacci’s speech full-page coverage, adding a three-column historical insert with the title “The Dispositions of the Councils and the Popes Against the Jews Through the Centuries.”13 Many papers picked up the story. Il Giornale d’Italia, which had first published the Manifesto of Racial Scientists, captured the central message in a few words: “The Honorable Farinacci concludes, amid fervid applause, by stating that it is impossible for the Catholic Fascist to renounce that anti-Semitic conscience which the Church had formed through the millennia.”14
At its November 10 meeting, the government’s Council of Ministers approved the new racial laws. The Duce waited anxiously to see if the pope would follow through on his threats. Despite all his bluster, he was not eager to see the Vatican turn against him. The support
of the Church hierarchy, from the pope down to the parish priests, had proven too valuable, and he now had greater ambitions for his regime. Losing Church backing could be costly.15
If the Duce was not more worried, it was because in all the weeks of frenetic negotiations and brinksmanship, in all the weeks of the pope’s lamentations, neither Pius XI, nor his Jesuit emissary, nor his secretary of state, nor his nuncio had ever voiced any opposition to the great bulk of the racial laws, aimed at stripping Jews of their rights as Italian citizens. The Vatican had not protested the ejection of Jewish children or Jewish teachers from the schools, nor that of Jewish professors from the universities. Neither Pacelli nor the pope’s two emissaries—the offacial nuncio and the unofficial Jesuit—had ever uttered a word to challenge the government’s decision to treat Jews as a danger to healthy Italian society. For anyone eager for a sign of the Vatican view of the new campaign of persecution, including parish priests and bishops seeking guidance on how to respond to it, the message was clear. The state was finally heeding the warnings that had been appearing in the Vatican daily newspaper and that had been regularly repeated in the Vatican-supervised La Civiltà cattolica and in much of the Italian Catholic press, from weekly diocesan bulletins to major daily newspapers.
The recent opening of the Vatican Secret Archives has brought to light a report that makes clear that, as far as the Vatican was concerned, the August 16 agreement Tacchi Venturi negotiated with Mussolini, promising not to criticize the racial laws in exchange for favorable treatment of Catholic Action, remained in effect. Prepared in early November in the secretary of state office, it chronicles the Vatican’s dealings with the Fascist government over the anti-Semitic campaign. Following a description of Pius XI’s July 28 remarks denouncing “exaggerated nationalism” comes a long section titled “Mussolini-Tacchi Venturi Agreement (August 16, 1938).” The entry reads “Meanwhile the Holy See directed Father Tacchi Venturi to reach an agreement. And Father Tacchi Venturi succeeded. The August 16, 1938, agreement consists of three points” and went on to summarize each of them.16
Mussolini thought the Holy See was profiting too much from its alliance with the Fascist state to want to jeopardize it. For years the Vatican had been counting on its privileged relations with the regime to have books and magazines that it found offensive confiscated, Protestants kept from proselytizing, and Church standards of women’s modesty enforced. Mussolini was, after all, the “man from Providence” who had ensured that every Fascist youth group had a priest attached to it, that Italian taxes were used to pay for Church expenses, and that Catholic clergy were given positions of honor at all state functions.
Had Mussolini seen the confidential telegram that Cardinal Pacelli sent to the papal nuncios around the world the day after the marriage law was approved, he would have realized his gamble had paid off. By forbidding marriage between two Catholics of different races, Pacelli informed them, the new law clearly violated the concordat. What lesson were the nuncios to take from this, and what should they be telling those who asked? Pacelli did all he could to minimize the dispute: “It should be noted that the violation of the concordat is limited to a small number of cases … A few dozen, while each year in Italy more than 300,000 religious marriages are celebrated and will continue to be celebrated, all regularly recorded.”17
The racial laws, displayed in La Difesa della razza, November 20, 1938
(photograph credit 26.1)
The Vatican’s official letter of protest to the Italian government could not have been meeker. The pope himself decided to say nothing. After all his threats, in the end he was still unwilling to let the dispute disrupt the mutually beneficial relationship between the Church and the Fascist regime. The pope told Pacelli to prepare the letter. He was to send it not to the king, nor even to Mussolini or Ciano, but to Pignatti, the Italian ambassador.
The letter began by noting that the new marriage law conflicted with article 34 of the concordat. After observing that the Church welcomed people of any race, Pacelli again tried to minimize the Church’s objections to the regime’s new racial theory. The Church, too, he wrote, had long been concerned about race mixing. “The Church, always the loving mother,” explained the future pope, “generally advises its children against contracting marriages that present the risk of defective offspring, and in this sense is disposed, within the limits of divine right, to support the civil authorities’ efforts to achieve this very virtuous goal.” But when, despite the Church’s discouragement, two Catholics of different races insisted on being married, it could not deny them that sacrament.
Pacelli’s note adopted the Fascists’—and Nazis’—view that the Jews were a separate race. He made no effort to disabuse the government of the notion of the possible noxious physical effects of “race mixing” between Italian Catholics and Jews, and he minimized the impact the new law would have. Marriages between Catholics and Jewish converts to Catholicism were extremely rare, he wrote, “a rarity also favored by the aversion common to both Catholics and Israelites of uniting with a person of another race.”
The secretary of state concluded his letter by expressing regret that it had become necessary for him to protest the wound inflicted on the concordat, but he ended on a positive note. He voiced the hope that the government might still make the modest changes needed to restore harmony with the Church.18
The public protest, such as it was, came in the November 15 issue of L’Osservatore romano, in a front-page article titled rather blandly “Regarding a New Decree-Law.” Pacelli carefully reviewed the text before publication. “He wanted to give it,” Tardini noted, “a calm, serene tone, among other reasons so as not to prejudice the possibility of future improvements in the laws and an end to the conflict.”19 The article reflected the language used in Pacelli’s formal protest letter. It concluded by expressing the hope that an agreement might still be found to deal with the “exiguous number of cases affected.”20
But a dramatic story lay behind the bland protest published in the November 15 issue of the Vatican daily. At 10:20 that morning, Monsignor Tardini, the square-faced secretary for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, got an urgent message: Pius XI wanted to see him immediately. He was to bring the material prepared for the Osservatore romano article with him. Fearing what lay ahead, Tardini picked up the file and rushed to the pope’s quarters. “I found the pope red-faced and excited,” he recalled. The pope held a copy of the newspaper in his hands.
Why, asked the pope, was the most important part of the article missing, the one he had reviewed and approved the previous day? The pope had wanted the article to include the text of his letters to Mussolini and the king. Most of all, he had wanted to feature the king’s reply. Victor Emmanuel’s letter, Pius XI insisted, had told Mussolini to alter the marriage law to accommodate the pope’s concerns. The pope wanted the world to know Mussolini had ignored the royal request.
Tardini tried to calm him down. Yes, he said, the pope had told them to publish the text of the letters, but he must have forgotten that Cardinal Pacelli had convinced him the previous evening not to do so. Not only was it not customary to publish diplomatic correspondence without the consent of the other party, Pacelli had argued, but the king’s response, which the pope had put so much stock in, was actually embarrassingly vague and, in the end, totally ineffective. The effect of publishing it would have been to let the world know that the king “counted for nothing.” Pacelli had not wanted to publish the king’s reply for another reason as well: it would have called attention to the fact that Mussolini had not bothered to respond, which would put Mussolini in a bad light. When Pacelli raised this point, the pope had interrupted him: “Sovereign courtesy opposed to supreme villainy!” Undaunted, Pacelli had held his ground. Highlighting Mussolini’s failure to respond, he insisted, could lead to government reprisals.
Tardini’s attempt to remind Pius XI of that conversation did nothing to stem the pope’s anger. In an aside, Tardini observed that the pontiff
—famous for his attention to detail—was lately becoming increasingly forgetful. It was because he had entirely forgotten his conversation with his secretary of state the previous evening that he was so upset by the Osservatore romano story. When Tardini mentioned Pacelli’s hope that Mussolini might still do something to lessen the impact of the new law, the pope again grew agitated. “But who gave you these hopes?” If there was any basis for hope, thought the pontiff, it was because the king had asked Mussolini to act, and it was exactly this request that they had excised from the article.
At this point, Cardinal Pacelli joined them, and the pope tore into him. It had made him sick, he said, to see what they had done to the story. Pacelli expressed concern for the pope’s health, for he had not been well and was not sleeping. But these attempts to distract the pope were in vain.
“Who wrote the article?” asked the pope.
“I did, Holiness,” Tardini replied.
“I don’t like it at all,” he responded.
Cardinal Pacelli, unwilling to stand by while Tardini took the blame, interrupted: “Holiness, I reviewed the article, and I take all responsibility.”
Calming down a bit, the pope insisted they rectify the problem by publishing the king’s reply in the next issue of the Vatican newspaper. Neither Pacelli nor Tardini wanted to allow this. Tardini went to find Tacchi Venturi, who might persuade the pope to change his mind. The Jesuit rushed to the Vatican.
He had been speaking with people close to Mussolini, Tacchi Venturi told Pius, and was delighted to report that the measured tone of that day’s Osservatore romano article had made a very good impression. If he hoped this news would please the pope, he was mistaken. The pope interrupted: “No wonder I’m upset! But this evening I am having them publish a new press release!” Tacchi Venturi was alarmed, but his pleadings failed to change the pontiff’s mind.21 Once again Cardinal Pacelli and his colleagues, by allowing the pope to vent his anger, were able to prevail. L’Osservatore romano never did publish the king’s letter.22
The Pope and Mussolini Page 36
