That night, as the pope lay in bed, his condition worsened and last rites were again given. In the early hours of Friday morning, February 10, it was only with the help of an oxygen mask that he could breathe. Around four A.M. Cardinal Pacelli and others nearby were alerted and joined the sorrowful scene. Weeping, they asked for the pope’s blessing. With great effort, Pius opened his eyes and, too weak to speak clearly, mumbled a few words, stopped, then mumbled something else. Most could not make out what he said, but those closest to him later reported his words as “God bless you, my children,” followed by an even weaker “Let there be peace.”49
At 5:31 A.M., the long-suffering Pius XI died. Following tradition, the chamberlain, Cardinal Pacelli, was charged with officially verifying the death. He knelt beside the bed, drew back the veil that had been placed over the pope’s face, and in a loud voice addressed him using his baptismal name, Achille, while tapping his forehead gently with a silver mallet. There being no movement from the pope, Pacelli uttered the ritual declaration: “The Pope is truly dead.” He pulled the Fisherman’s Ring from the pope’s cold finger.50
The bishops had already arrived in Rome for the celebration that had meant so much to the pope, a celebration for which Ciano had his hopes and Mussolini his fears. On the pope’s desk was the folder of Humani generis unitas, the encyclical prepared by Father LaFarge. Rejecting the idea that a good Christian could embrace racism, it demanded an end to the persecution of the Jews. It was Pius XI’s fervent hope that such a statement be issued, but among those who survived him, many were eager to see it buried along with the pope.51
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
A DARK CLOUD LIFTS
ALTHOUGH HE HAD MET WITH PIUS XI MANY TIMES, THE FRENCH ambassador had never seen his private quarters. Now, a few hours after the pope’s death, he joined the macabre scene on the top floor of the papal palace. He entered a large, high-ceilinged room, its majestic appearance ruined, he thought, by the jumble of mismatched, amateurish artwork that littered its walls. One displayed “an exotic embroidery of mediocre taste,” an offering of the nuns who had woven it. Assorted other objects decorated the rest of the room, gifts to the pope from missions around the world.
After signing his name in the guest book, Charles-Roux made his way through the narrow hallway that led into the pope’s bedroom. There the pope’s body lay on his iron-frame bed, dressed in a white soutane, a red, ermine-edged papal cap pulled down to his ears. His head rested on a simple pillow. In his hands, which lay together on his chest, were a crucifix and a rosary. “Life,” observed the French ambassador, “had abandoned his body in a pitiful state.” His face was completely changed, “defeated, ravaged.” A large candle burned at each corner of the bed. A Noble Guard stood at attention on each side, clutching his saber.
As he passed back into the reception hall, Charles-Roux was appalled. Other members of the Noble Guard, awaiting their turn, were biding their time chatting in small groups with an assortment of high prelates and lay functionaries. The men talked loudly, showing no trace of sorrow or respect.1
“The Pope is dead,” Ciano wrote in his diary on February 10. “The news leaves the Duce completely indifferent.” That afternoon Ciano went to the Vatican to pay his respects. Cardinal Pacelli met him and escorted him up to the Sistine Chapel. The pope’s emaciated body had just arrived. It lay on a high platform beneath the vaulted ceiling, frescoed by Michelangelo. From below, Ciano could only see the pope’s white sandals and the hem of his robe. As they walked back down to the courtyard, Ciano recalled, Pacelli “spoke to me about the relationship between State and Church with very agreeable and hopeful expressions.”2
Mussolini still felt aggrieved, and in any case he had become so enamored with himself that his aides had to massage him before he could bring himself to display any sign of mourning. The Vatican expected the Duce to join the wake that day at the Sistine Chapel, but he did not come. One mourner noted his absence: “Today the king went at about seven P.M. to visit the body,” he observed in his diary. “Mussolini did not go, perhaps because he did not deign to; perhaps because he did not want to displease Hitler.”3
Pignatti and Ciano had given a great deal of thought to this moment. Despite Mussolini’s occasional claim that he didn’t care what happened in the upcoming conclave, they knew how important it was that the next pope be someone with whom they could work. Their constant worry that the pope might do something to turn Italy’s Catholics against them had been a nightmare.4
And although the Duce professed little interest in the conclave, he heard something that worried him. In cleaning out the pope’s room, Vatican officials had apparently discovered a secret document on his desk. They promptly gave it to Cardinal Pacelli. On February 12, Mussolini asked Ciano to find out what it was. Ciano passed the order on to Pignatti, leaving himself free to spend the unusually warm, sunny February day at his golf club.5 Mussolini, too, had other plans. When, at four-thirty that afternoon, Clara Petacci arrived at their apartment in Palazzo Venezia, carrying sandwiches and a bouquet of violets, she was surprised to find her lover already there, sitting in an armchair, reading some papers. She suspected he had gotten there first to be sure nothing incriminating remained from his latest tryst. “Give me a kiss,” said the Duce, “sit on my lap.” Over the next hours, as the faithful filed by the pope’s body in the Vatican, they made love twice.6
Cardinal Pacelli accompanies Galeazzo Ciano in viewing the body of Pius XI, February 10, 1939
(photograph credit 28.1)
While the Duce was thus occupied, Pignatti was on his way to see the nuncio Borgongini to ask about the rumored secret document left behind by the pope, and about another disturbing report he had heard. A foreign newspaper reported that when Italy’s bishops had gathered at the Vatican Saturday morning, the day after the pope’s death, they were each given a copy of a secret document denouncing Fascism. It had been the pope’s last wish that they receive this message, should he not live long enough to give it to them himself. Borgongini assured the ambassador there could be no truth to the story, as he himself had been with the bishops that morning. Perhaps, he speculated, the rumors had started because, as the bishops emerged from the Vatican, each carried a large envelope in hand. In one of his last moments, the pope had decided to give each of the bishops a thousand lire to pay their travel expenses and sponsor a mass back home in honor of the occasion. These were the contents of the envelopes the reporter had seen.7
It is not clear whether the rumors that the pope was about to deliver a denunciation of Fascism drew on leaks about the pope’s plans for a secret encyclical against racism. There is every indication that Fathers LaFarge and Gundlach, although unhappy that their efforts had been sabotaged, kept their vow of secrecy, and neither Ledóchowski nor Rosa had any interest in letting anyone outside know of the pope’s plan. Pius XI, having received the text only three weeks before his death, never had a chance to do anything with it.
Learning of Mussolini’s concern, Pacelli moved quickly. On February 15 he ordered the pope’s secretary to gather up all written material the pope had produced in preparing his address. He also told the Vatican printing office to destroy all copies of the speech it had printed, copies that Pius had intended to give the bishops. The vice director of the office gave his assurance that he would personally destroy them, so that “not a comma” remained. Pacelli acted two days after learning of Ciano’s worries that the text of the pope’s speech might get out. Pacelli also took the material that Ledóchowski had sent the pope three weeks earlier—what has since come to be known as the “secret encyclical” against racism—eager to ensure that no one else would see it.
The words the pope had so painstakingly prepared in the last days of his life would never be seen as long as Pacelli lived. Only twenty years later, four months after Pacelli died, would Pope John XXIII, in one of his first acts, release excerpts of the speech. But he excised those passages that were most critical of the Fascis
t regime, presumably to protect Pacelli, suspected of having buried the speech in order not to offend Mussolini or Hitler. Only with the opening of the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XI in 2006 has the world seen the full text.
The speech was far from the ringing denunciation of the Fascist regime that Mussolini had feared, but the Duce would not have been pleased to have it heard by Italy’s bishops and then read by millions around the world. The pope complained about efforts to conceal and misrepresent his speeches, and warned the bishops to be on their guard when they spoke with “the so-called hierarchs” of the government. “Be careful, dearest Brothers in Christ, and do not forget that often there are observers and informers (you would do well to call them spies) who, of their own initiative or because charged to do so, listen to you in order to condemn you, after, it is understood, having understood nothing at all and if necessary just the opposite.” He went on to bewail “these pseudo-Catholics who seem happy when they believe they have identified a disagreement or discrepancy between one Bishop and another, or even better between a Bishop and a Pope.” He then urged the bishops never to use a telephone when saying words they did not want known, for their lines were likely tapped. (“We have never once in all these years used the telephone,” the pope proudly noted.)
Pius XI briefly lamented the persecution of the Church in Germany and castigated those who denied it. His concluding remarks hit the note he was most eager to impart to the bishops: he looked forward to the day when “all peoples, all the nations, all the races, all joined together and all of the same blood in the common link of the great human family” would unite in the one “true Faith.”8
Along with the text of the pope’s Saturday speech, Pacelli took the notes the pope had prepared for his Sunday address to the bishops. Although these notes have not been found, Tardini saw the materials and left behind a description. Among the major points the pope planned to address were three that would have not pleased the Duce: Catholic Action; the religious situation in Germany; and the “wound inflicted to the concordat by the prohibition of marriages between Aryans and non-Aryans.”9
Mussolini would never learn that it was Pacelli who had ordered the suppression of the pope’s last projects. What he heard instead was that a special gathering of the Sacred College of Cardinals had decided to bury the speech, judging it too hostile to Mussolini. The cardinals, or at least the Italian majority, Pignatti reported to him, were now eager to concentrate their votes on a person who would take a more conciliatory view toward the Fascist regime.10
Mussolini hoped that Pignatti was right, but he had reason to worry. Speculation regarding the most likely choice ranged dizzyingly from Jean Villeneuve, archbishop of Quebec—said to be the most likely non-Italian—to Mussolini’s recent antagonist, Cardinal Schuster. The Boston Globe published pictures of Cardinal Schuster and Cardinal Giovanni Piazza, patriarch of Venice, reporting them to be the leading candidates.11 The New York Times reported Piazza as the favorite, followed by eight other cardinals in the order of their presumed chances. Eugenio Pacelli was at the bottom of the list. He had no pastoral experience—all the others presided over archdioceses—and there was a long tradition against choosing either a secretary of state or a chamberlain; Pacelli was both.12
Even though many outsiders thought Pacelli had little chance, Mussolini had long been getting reports from police informants identifying him as the front-runner. Pius XI was said to have regarded his secretary of state as his most qualified successor. Indeed, Mussolini was told, the pope had sent Pacelli on so many missions abroad—to France, to South America, to the United States, and elsewhere—to help him win over the foreign cardinals. All this was good news for the Duce. A secret police report a year earlier described Pacelli as a “man of great intrinsic merit, an excellent Italian, a great and sincere friend of our regime.” It added a bit of advice: for this reason, “the good Vatican circles fervently hope in the wisdom of our government, which—especially in this moment—they say, should completely avoid showing—even remotely—the least sympathy for Cardinal Pacelli.”13
In the wake of the pope’s death, similar reports kept coming in. One police informant spoke with Cardinal Angelo Dolci, a former papal nuncio, who also thought Pacelli the most likely choice. “Dolci, who is a good Italian and very sympathetic to Fascism and an admirer of the Duce,” reported the informant, “continues to be convinced that Pacelli would be a true friend of the regime as pontiff.” Cardinal Dalla Costa of Florence—a man seen as so holy that he could work miracles—was also said to have a good chance. If one of these two were elected, the conclave would be very short; if not, it could last weeks.14
The government proclaimed the day of the pope’s funeral a holiday, closing schools, offices, and theaters. Reluctantly, Mussolini attended the memorial requiem, held in the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome, as did other high government officials, along with the king and queen.15
Mussolini and the other Fascist leaders felt as if they had woken up to find that an irritating sore that had long plagued them was miraculously gone. Pacelli’s firm hand could be seen in a dozen ways. In the oceans of ink that the Vatican and Italian Catholic press devoted to Pius XI’s papacy, the subject of his conflict with the regime was not mentioned; nor was his conflict with Hitler and the Nazis. The Italian newspapers quickly got the message. In their prodigious coverage of Pius XI’s papacy, they gave great play to the Conciliation. If the pope had ever had anything negative to say about Mussolini or Fascism, it was all forgotten.16
On the day of the pope’s death, Pignatti provided the Foreign Ministry with a list of all the conclavists and their ages, from the eighty-eight-year-old Cardinal Pignatelli di Belmonte to the fifty-five-year-old Cardinal Tisserant. Of the sixty-two members of the Sacred College, thirty-five were Italian.17
On the eighteenth, as the cardinals gathered in Rome, Diego von Bergen, Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See, came to talk to his Italian counterpart. Bergen was eager to tell Pignatti of his recent conversation with Cardinal Pacelli: the cardinal had been moved by Hitler’s message of condolence and asked to have his own personal thanks, and that of the Sacred College, communicated to the Führer. Pacelli also wanted to let Hitler know that he hoped conciliation between the Reich and the Holy See would now be possible. The message had greatly pleased the Nazi government.
“The ambassador told me,” recounted Pignatti, “that if the conclave’s choice should fall on Cardinal Pacelli, Pacelli would do everything he could to reconcile with Germany, and probably he would succeed.”
The Italian ambassador offered Bergen some advice, in the spirit of helping both their causes. The Reich’s relations with the Vatican could be repaired, he said, only if the German government took steps to improve the atmosphere. First, the German newspapers needed to tone down their criticism of the Vatican. The cardinals paid close attention to what was said in the foreign press, and recent hostile articles from Germany were not helping.18
Pignatti also urged the German ambassador to do everything possible to get the four German cardinals to take a conciliatory attitude at the upcoming conclave. Should they preach a holy war against the Nazi regime, he warned, “all will be lost.” It was crucial they convince the other cardinals that an understanding with the Nazis was still in reach. Bergen said he would telegraph Berlin immediately to ask for an end to the polemics in the press. As for the German cardinals, he said, he was optimistic.19
For the Italian ambassador, the question of how the German cardinals would behave at the conclave was too important to leave entirely to Bergen. On February 21 he visited Ledóchowski to enlist his aid; the Jesuit general said he would do all he could to help.20
As the conclave neared, Pignatti checked back in with the German embassy, speaking to Bergen’s number two, Fritz Menshausen. The Nazi envoy, Pignatti reported, “repeatedly insisted on the candidacy of Pacelli as pope and Tedeschini”—former nuncio to Spain—“as secretary of state. This would represe
nt the best solution for Germany and would make possible an easing in relations between the Holy See and the Reich.”21
Pignatti rushed from one Italian cardinal to another, trying to convince them of the wisdom of choosing a pope who was favorably disposed toward the Fascist regime and would not publicly criticize the Nazis. With the German cardinals supporting Pacelli, if the French cardinals fell in line, he believed the rest of the non-Italians would as well. The Italian cardinals were a different story. They faulted Pacelli “for a weakness of character, for being easily influenced, and sometimes stumbling, as happens to people who are weak.” Pignatti related all this to Ciano, adding, “These points are, in my opinion, quite well founded.”22
Cardinal Baudrillart’s train from Paris arrived in Rome on February 20. Deeply devoted to Pius XI, he was disturbed to hear many of his colleagues be so critical of him. “One quickly stops being a great man in this country,” the French cardinal observed. Two days after his arrival, he went to see Cardinal Pacelli, who, after a moment of hesitation, was willing to reflect on his chances at the upcoming conclave. “In the end,” Baudrillart predicted, “he will be a conciliator.”23
The main holdout among the French cardinals was Eugène Tisserant, who thought Pacelli too eager to please the Germans; he preferred the former nuncio to France, Luigi Maglione. The French cardinals discussed the matter and came up with a compromise: Pacelli as pope and Maglione as secretary of state. Tisserant went to see Pacelli, who, apparently unaware that Tisserant had reservations about him, confided his nervousness. The Italian cardinals of the Curia, he was convinced, did not like him and would not vote for him. “I may as well get my passport to go to Switzerland right after the conclave,” said Pacelli, referring to his regular vacation spot.
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