Absolute Monarchs (59 page)

7.
The decree of 1868 forbidding Catholics to take part in Italian political life. See chapter 25,
this page
.

CHAPTER XXVII

Pius XI and Pius XII

E
lected at the fourteenth ballot, and then only to break a deadlock in the conclave, Pope Pius XI came as a considerable surprise. Achille Ratti was a sixty-five-year-old scholar, an expert on medieval paleography who had spent most of his working life as a librarian and much of his leisure time climbing mountains in the Alps. In 1919 Benedict XV had sent him as nuncio to Poland, which had, after 123 years, just regained its independence as a sovereign state. It was not a happy mission; Ratti was resented and mistrusted by the Polish hierarchy, which saw him simply as the agent of a pro-German pope. Within fourteen months of his arrival, however, the situation had changed dramatically. The Bolsheviks had invaded Poland and in the summer of 1920 had marched on Warsaw. Had they captured the city, there was nothing to stop them taking over the whole of Eastern Europe; no foreign observer would have given the Poles a chance against them. But somehow—and many both inside and outside the country considered it nothing short of a miracle—Marshal Józef Piłsudski managed to launch a massive counterattack and at the last moment turned the tide.

Ratti could easily have escaped back to Rome; instead, he had categorically refused to leave Warsaw. It was many centuries since a papal envoy had stood with the army of Christendom as it defended its frontier, and with the danger finally averted it was no wonder that his popularity soared. He himself never forgot the experience, which left him with the lifelong conviction that of all the enemies with which Christian Europe was faced, communism was by far the most terrible. In the spring of 1921 he returned to Italy to the cardinalate and in June to the archbishopric of Milan, but his life as an archbishop was short—only seven months later he was elected pope.

He started as he meant to go on. After informing the cardinals of his chosen name, his first act as Supreme Pontiff was to announce that he would give the traditional papal blessing, “Urbi et Orbi,” from the outside balcony of St. Peter’s. It would be for the first time since 1870, but there was no consultation, no seeking for advice; that, as his entourage quickly discovered, was not his way. Pius knew precisely what he wanted and was determined to get it.

His strength of character—one might almost say his ruthlessness—was soon amply demonstrated in his dealings with France. The restoration of friendly relations had begun with his predecessor, Benedict; the canonization of Joan of Arc had had a remarkable impact and had been attended by representatives of the French government as well as by no fewer than eighty parliamentary deputies from Paris. There was, however, a problem—in the shape of a dangerously popular right-wing movement and newspaper, pseudo-Catholic, monarchist, and deeply anti-Semitic, both known as Action Française. Their founder, a deeply unpleasant demagogue named Charles Maurras, had long since lost whatever faith he might once have possessed, but he saw the Church as a pillar of the reaction in which he fanatically believed and had no scruples in exploiting it for his own ends. Large numbers of French Catholics, including several bishops, read his newspaper and shared his views, which included a detestation of the French Republic. It thus became clear to Pope Pius that there could be no further improvement in relations with France while Maurras and Action Française continued to claim papal backing. In 1925 he put them both on the Index, and two years later he formally excommunicated all the movement’s supporters. When the eighty-one-year-old French Jesuit Cardinal Louis Billot subsequently wrote to the newspaper expressing his sympathy, the pope summoned him to an audience and obliged him to resign his red hat.
¹

A still greater challenge to the pope’s statesmanship, however, was the rise of Fascist Italy. At the end of October 1922, less than nine months after the papal election, Benito Mussolini staged his March on Rome and was accepted by King Victor Emmanuel as his prime minister. In the early days, before he became Il Duce, Mussolini might still have been overturned in a parliamentary election. The Socialists and Don Luigi Sturzo’s People’s Party together easily outnumbered the thirty-five Fascist deputies; had they formed an alliance, they might have ensured the survival of freedom in Italy. But Pius would have none of it. For him any association with socialism was out of the question; moreover, he was becoming increasingly concerned by certain distinctly left-wing tendencies of the People’s Party. Don Luigi was accordingly informed that His Holiness considered his political activities incompatible with his priesthood, and he obediently withdrew into exile, first in London and later in the United States (where, however, much to the Vatican’s irritation, he continued his political activity). In Italy his party, powerless without papal support, quietly faded away.

The Fascists, by contrast, were growing steadily stronger. In 1923 the Italian government passed the so-called Acerbo Law, which decreed that any party gaining 25 percent of the votes would have a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Its purpose was transparently to ensure this majority for the Fascists, and after the election of the following year there was no further obstacle to Mussolini’s imposing his dictatorship. By this time he had moderated his early antireligious attitude and was making conciliatory gestures to the Church: reintroducing religion into state schools, erecting crucifixes in the law courts, even, in 1927, himself undergoing a Roman Catholic baptism. That same year, he proposed a treaty and a concordat which, after endless argument and much hard bargaining, were eventually signed at the Lateran Palace by himself and by Pius’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, on February 11, 1929.

Under the Lateran Treaty the pope regained a vestige of his temporal power. Admittedly the land over which he was sovereign ruler amounted to a mere 109 acres—about a quarter the area of the Principality of Monaco—with a population of rather less than five hundred, but the Holy See was once again to rank among the nations of the world. Moreover, in return for his renunciation of his claim to the previous papal territories he was given a payment, in cash and Italian state securities, of 1.75 billion lire, which at that time amounted to some $100 million. Anticlerical laws passed by the Italian government since 1870, including the Law of Guarantees, were declared null and void. In return, the Vatican promised to remain neutral and not to involve itself in international politics or diplomacy.

The concordat dealt with the status of the Church in Italy. It declared Roman Catholicism to be the only recognized religion of the state, recognized canon law alongside state law, provided for Catholic religious teaching in state schools, and validated Catholic church marriages. The Roman catacombs were entrusted to the Holy See, on the understanding that it would allow archaeological excavation and exploration by the Italian government to continue. On the face of it, the Papacy had done remarkably well. It could not be denied, however, that it had given its implied approval to Fascism. The pope had even hailed Mussolini as “a man sent by Providence,” and in the 1929 elections most Catholics were encouraged by their priests to vote Fascist.

The honeymoon could not last. The rupture began with Catholic Action, a movement founded by Pius X which was really little more than a nationwide society dedicated, as the pope had put it, to “restoring Jesus Christ to his place in the family, in the school and in the community.” Mussolini, however, who instinctively mistrusted any national organization which he did not personally control, claimed that it was politically inspired, serving as a front for the People’s Party of the now-exiled Sturzo. The Catholic Scout movement aroused his anger even more; no one better than he understood the importance of early brainwashing. “Youth,” he declared, “shall be ours.” As these and similar bodies suffered increasing physical harassment from the Fascist thugs who came in force to break up their meetings or to seize and impound their records, the pope raised his voice in protest. His encyclical
Non Abbiamo Bisogno
of June 1931—drafted, significantly, in Italian—began by answering the Duce’s charges
seriatim;
as it continued, however, it turned into a general attack on fascism and all it stood for:

What is to be thought about the formula of the oath, which even little boys and girls are obliged to take, that they will execute orders without discussion from an authority which … can give orders against all truth and justice? … Takers of this oath must swear to serve with all their strength, even to the shedding of blood, the cause of a revolution which snatched the young from the Church and from Jesus Christ, and which inculcates in its own young people hatred, violence, and irreverence.… Such an oath is unlawful.…

We have not said that we wish to condemn the [Fascist] party as such.… It [recently] declared that “respect for the Catholic religion and for its Supreme Head is unchanged.” [But this] is the respect which has had its expression in vastly extended and hateful police measures, prepared in the deep silence of a conspiracy, and executed with lightning-like suddenness, on the very eve of our birthday.…

In the same context there is an allusion to “refuges and protections” given to the still-remaining opponents of the party; “the directors of the 9,000 groups of Fascists in Italy” are ordered to direct their attention to this situation.

[We have received] sad information about the effect of these remarks, these insinuations, and these orders, which have induced a new outbreak of hateful surveillance, of denunciations, and of intimidations.

Interestingly enough, the encyclical had a measure of success. It was widely read in Italy and abroad and caused Mussolini to relax his pressure on the Church appreciably. It must also have been very much on the mind of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who in February 1930 had succeeded Gasparri as Pius’s secretary of state. From the outset, Pacelli was fixated on Germany. He knew the country well, having served as nuncio in Munich for three years from 1917 and in Berlin throughout the 1920s. He loved the Germans and spoke their language perfectly, often in preference to Italian. He was also aware that in prewar days Germany had contributed more funds to the Holy See than all the other nations of the world combined. It was not, of course, technically a Catholic country—in 1930 the Catholics made up about a third of the population, although by 1940, after Hitler’s annexations of the Saar, the Sudetenland, and Austria, the proportion had increased to about a half—and neither Pacelli nor Pius had any delusions about the Nazis, whom they saw as little better than gangsters; but they nevertheless believed that National Socialism represented a firm bulwark against communism, in their eyes the far greater enemy.

And so, on July 20, 1933, the German Concordat was signed in Rome by Pacelli on behalf of Pope Pius XI and by Franz von Papen, vice chancellor of the Reich for Adolf Hitler. Generous privileges were granted to the Catholic clergy and to Catholic schools in Germany in return for the withdrawal by the Catholic Church, with its many various associations and its newspapers, from all social and political action. This withdrawal involved, as it had in Italy, the loss of a political party. In the hope of an understanding with Mussolini, Pius had effectively sacrificed the Partito Populare; now, at Hitler’s insistence, Pacelli intimated that the Center Party—the second strongest in the Reichstag, which was also led by a priest, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, and included the vast majority of German Catholics in its ranks—was, so far as the Vatican was concerned, dispensable. It was duly wound up, and Monsignor Kaas, who had by this time fallen completely under Pacelli’s spell and seldom left his side, was brought to Rome, where he was given charge of the physical maintenance of St. Peter’s.
²

As did the Italian, the German Concordat came in for heavy international criticism. The Catholic Church could have set itself up in determined opposition to National Socialism; instead, by agreeing to the abdication of all its political rights and morally obliging all German Catholics to obey their Nazi leaders, Pacelli and Pius had together cleared the way for the unobstructed advance of Nazism—and of its treatment of the Jews. In the minutes of a cabinet meeting held on July 14, 1933, Hitler is recorded as having boasted that “the Concordat gave Germany an opportunity and created an area of trust that was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry.”
³
By the outside world the pope was accused of having given both regimes respectability and of increasing their prestige—which indeed, in the short term, he had. But he was soon to show still greater dissatisfaction with the Nazis than he had with the Fascists: in the first three years of their regime between 1933 and 1936, during which their oppression of the Church steadily increased, he was obliged to address no fewer than thirty-four separate notes of protest to the German government. It is worth noting, however, that no protest was made against the publication of the Nuremberg race laws of 1935.
⁴