Collected Essays (40 page)

Since the days of Pius X that word ‘Peace’ seems to chime through all the encyclicals and papal letters and speeches, just as it chimes through the Mass so that we become accustomed to it in its every declension,
pax, pads, pacem.
Pius X was Pope when the First World War broke out. When he was asked to bless some armaments, he replied, ‘War! I don’t want war, I don’t bless war, I bless only peace. Gladly I would sacrifice my life to obtain peace.’ A fortnight after war was declared he was dead.

Benedict XV, his successor, whose peace proposals in 1917 were rejected, who was called Papa Bosch by the French and ‘The French Pope’ by the Germans, said. ‘They want to silence me, but they shall not succeed in sealing my lips; nobody shall prevent me from calling to my own children, peace, peace, peace.’ And his successor, to whom he said these words. Pius XI remarked to an English archbishop as the alignment for the new Hitlerian war became evident, ‘Peace is such a precious good that one should not fear to buy it even at the price of silence and concessions, although never at the price of weakness.’

The world has darkened progressively since those days. Pius X was an old man ready to give his life, but a prayer is not always answered as we want it answered. Benedict believed in reasoned diplomacy and failed. Pius XI believed in a mixture of shrewdness and pugnacity, and he failed too. Now a new note sounds from the man who was his Secretary of State and who from that inner position saw the shrewdness and pugnacity outwitted, and observed the limits of diplomacy. Isn’t there a hint of despair, so far as this world is concerned, in Pacelli when he speaks of ‘Golgotha – that hill of long awaited peace between Heaven and earth’? Sometimes we almost feel he is abandoning those vast hordes of people we call nations, the dealings with the War Lords and Dictators, and like a parish priest in the confessional, a curé d’Ars, he is concentrating on each individual, teaching the individual that peace can be found on Golgotha, that pain doesn’t matter, teaching the difficult lesson of love, dwelling on the liturgy of the Church while the storm rages – the storm will pass. In 1943, the year of the North African campaign and the final disaster to the Italian armies, he issued two encyclicals – on ‘The Mystical Body of Jesus Christ’ and on ‘Biblical Studies’. They must have seemed to the Italian people very far removed from their immediate worries, but those worries pass, and the subject of the encyclicals goes on as long as human life.

And yet, one cannot help exclaiming in parentheses, if only they were more readable: less staid, tight, pedantic in style. I doubt whether many of the laity read these encyclicals and yet they are addressed by form ‘to all the clergy and faithful of the Catholic world’. The abstract words, the sense of distance, the lack of fire make them rather like a leading article in a newspaper: the words have been current too long. There are no surprises. ‘As it is by faith that on this earth we adhere to God as the source of truth, so it is by virtue of Christian hope that we seek Him as the source of beatitude.’ The words have no bite, no sting, no concrete image: we feel that a man is dictating to a dictaphone. Compare the encyclicals with such writing as St Francis de Sales, using his chaste elephant or his bees as metaphors, arousing our attention with a startling image: ‘My tongue, while I speak of my neighbour, is in my mouth like a lancet in the hand of the surgeon, who wishes to make an incision between the nerves and sinews: the incision that I make with my tongue must be so exact that I say neither more nor less than the truth.’ In the encyclicals the incision has not been made: the words clothe the thought as stiffly as a plaster cast on an injured limb.

Not all the Popes have been quite so dry or cautious in their encyclicals – Leo XIII in his
Rerum Novarum
wrote with a kind of holy savagery on the abuse of property (didn’t the Bishop of San Luis Potosi in Mexico preserve the copies in his cellar till the revolution for fear of offending the rich?) and Pius XI, attacking the Hitlerian State in
Mit Brennender Sorge
, allowed the personal tone of voice to be heard.

But a Pope – or a saint or a parish priest – is not necessarily a writer, and in any case many – if not most – of Pacelli’s encyclicals are not personally written by himself, only very carefully revised and approved. (The comparison with a newspaper article is reasonably apt. One can always tell for example which leader in the London
Times
is written by the Editor: there is a masterfulness, a lack of caution – not the same as lack of prudence – which appears also in the encyclicals of Pius XI who was usually his own author.) I express, of course, a private opinion based on translations. One distinguished writer has compared the Pope’s style to the Roman fountains, formal even in their ornateness, the Latin words, colourless as water but pure and exact, falling with certainty into the ageless basins – Roman? Renaissance? Is his formality closer perhaps to music than literature? Bossuet, Dante, St Augustine these are among the very few literary references that occur in his writing, but he speaks with real understanding of music. Again one is reminded of many parish priests whose worldly interests seem narrowed by the love of God to a few books and the enjoyment of classical music.

This is the essential paradox in a Pope who many believe will rank among the greatest. By the gossipers of Rome he is often described as a priest first and a diplomat afterwards. But how was it with his background that he did not become a diplomat first and foremost? He belongs to an aristocratic Roman family. Although his own inclinations seem to have been to ordinary parish work and to the confessional, he was steered by those who may have known his talents better, from a very early period in his life as a priest, towards an official career, first the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, which is the papal Secretariat of State, under Monsignor Gaspari who was to assist Pius XI in framing the Vatican Treaty. The paradox persisted: Pacelli combined his official work with pastoral work, just as during his public audiences he has been known to go into a corner of the audience hall at a peasant’s request and hear his confession.

The steady ecclesiastical career drove on: Papal Nuncio in Munich in 1917 so that he could act as intermediary for the Pope in his efforts to attain peace (here he: saw violent revolution for the first time when the Communists broke into his palace); in 1920 with the formation of the German Republic he became Nuncio in Berlin and later when Hitler began his campaign for power he maintained close ties with the Centre Party. The leader of the Centre Party, now Monsignor Kaass, has remained the Pope’s friend, is administrator of St Peter’s and is responsible for the excavations under the Vatican which have disclosed the old Roman cemetery where St Peter was buried. He has built the Pope a private staircase, so that he can make his way alone into these caverns and talk to the workmen. Walking with me among his tombs the Monsignor referred with affection to his friend, pointing a finger upwards, ‘him up there’.

In 1929 when Pacelli left Germany the inevitable Cardinalate followed: the parish priest was doomed, you would have said, and yet he obstinately stayed alive. We can hear him speaking in the words of Pacelli’s farewell so different from the formal encyclicals that were to follow. “I go the way in which God, by the mouth of the Pontiff, commands me to go. I go this way fully conscious of my weakness, believing in Him who uses the weak to put the strong to shame. What I was, is nothing; what I am is little; but what I shall become is eternal.” ‘What I shall become.’ As the Pope placed the Red Hat on his head he spoke the traditional words that in our day have taken a real significance: ‘Accept the red hat, a special sign of the Cardinal’s dignity. This means that you should be ready to shed your blood and to die, if need be, in the fearless defence of our Holy Faith, for the preservation of quiet and peace among the Christian people. . . .’

Only a month later he was appointed Secretary of State to Pius XI. perhaps the most politically active Pope since the Middle Ages, the man who revived the Vatican State, who fought Mussolini so firmly that Mussolini rejoiced in public at his death, who began the struggle against Hitler not only by his encyclicals but by personal affront – he left Rome when Hitler came there and closed the Vatican Museum which Hitler had intended to visit. On his death bed in February 1939 he finished his last encyclical – the final words written on the night he died, his last blow, it was to have been, so they say, at the Totalitarian State. His successor never issued it.

Yet the new Pope as Secretary of State had been closely associated with his predecessor’s policy, and his attitude to affairs in Germany was well known. At a party which he gave in Rome after his return from Germany, an old Conservative friend of his, the Marchese Patrizi, was overheard by him to remark that it was a good thing Germany had a strong man now who would deal with the Communists. Cardinal Pacelli turned on him. ‘For goodness’ sake, Joseph,’ he said, ‘don’t talk such nonsense. The Nazis are infinitely worse.’ We can assume therefore that neither Hitler nor Mussolini were gratified when the Conclave, breaking a tradition of nearly 300 years, elected the Secretary of State Pope in March 1939 at the age of sixty-three. Perhaps the foreign Cardinals turned the balance in Pacelli’s favour. He was almost the only Cardinal they could have met personally.

For this is another paradox of the Pope – that this priest, whom I have heard described as a Franciscan by one who knows him well, is regarded as a very travelled, very modern man. There are the new gadgets of the Vatican, from the white typewriter and the white telephone and the electric razor to the short-wave wireless station and the latest television equipment provided by an American company. But the television transmitter is apparently not working very well and the service is starved for money, while the programmes of the Vatican radio are astonishingly uninspired – relays of leaders from the
Osservatore Romano
, local pieces of Catholic news.

As for travel it is true that Pacelli moved about a good deal of the earth’s surface before he became Pope, but it is a reasonable guess that the only two countries that made any deep impression on him were Germany and America. For both countries he has retained great affection. The administrator of St Peter’s is German and only recently Cardinal Faulhaber was invited to consecrate the new altar of the restored basilica of Constantine under St Peter’s. As for America his personal feeling of friendship for Cardinal Spellman seems certain, though somewhat surprising considering the marked divergency of their characters (the cynical sometimes point out that the United States is the only country of importance left that is able to transmit Peter’s Pence to Rome: the Catholics of other nations are bound by their currency laws).

As for his other travels they have been widespread but brief and filled with the official duties of the Pope’s representative: to the Eucharistic Congress at Buenos Aires in 1934; to Lourdes in 1935 on the nineteenth centenary of the Redemption; to Lisieux during the Eucharistic Congress in 1937; and to the Congress in 1938 at Budapest. How much during such journeys does the Pope’s representative see? There is a passage in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
that describes the travels of an army.

A soldier on the march is hemmed in and borne along by his regiment as much as a sailor is by his ship. However far he has walked, whatever strange, unknown and dangerous places he reaches, just as a sailor is always surrounded by the same decks, masts and rigging of his ship, so the soldier always has around him the same comrades, the same sergeant-major, the same Company dog, and the same commanders.

The Papal Secretary of State moving from country to country, Eucharistic Congress to Eucharistic Congress, is hemmed in by the pack wagons of the Church, the dignitaries in skull caps, the distant crowds that hide by their pious bulk even the shape of the buildings.

One cannot believe that the journeys of Pacelli have influenced him much except in so far as they have driven him to learn many languages. One must not exaggerate his knowledge, however. We hear the gentle precise voice: speaking to us in English, and we forget the strict limits of his vocabulary. He sends his blessings to our families ‘with deep affection’ – that is a favourite phrase often repeated and emphasized – but inevitably he has to address the pilgrim in certain set formulas.

For the priest this is a smaller handicap than for the diplomat. A priest in the confessional toe is apt to speak in formulas, but into the straitjacket of a limited vocabulary some priests are able to introduce an extraordinary intimacy, gentleness, a sense of love. That is Pius XII’s achievement, if we can call the grace of great charity an achievement. We become aware that he loves the world as another man may love his only son. The enemies whom Pius XI pursued with such vigour, he fights with the weapon of charity. In his presence one feels that here is a priest who is waiting patiently for the moment of martyrdom, and his patience includes even the long drawn conversations of the nuns who visit him. From another room one hears the stream of aged feminine talk while the Monsignors move restlessly in their purple robes, looking at their watches or making that movement of the hand to the chin forming an imaginary beard, that is the Latin way of exclaiming at a bore. Out comes the last nun, strutting away with the happy contented smile of a woman who has said her say and out from his inner room comes the Pope with his precise vigorous step ready to greet the next unimportant stranger ‘with deep affection’.

How endless these audiences must seem to him – private audiences to diplomats, authors, civil servants, the people ‘with a pull’, public audiences to Italian cyclists, to actors, Boy Scouts, aircraft engineers, directors of American companies. Fiat workers, bankers, tram conductors. We seem to hear a village priest speaking, rather than the ex-Nuncio to Berlin, the ex-Secretary of State, when he speaks to the tram conductors and describes their own troubles to them. ‘He has to warn some passengers, to give advice to others, and in selling the tickets he usually has to give the change – a duty which complicates things still more. He must see to it that people enter by the rear door and leave by the front door and that they observe the smoking regulations.’ How long is it since the Pope travelled in a tram? The description is so simple that we smile. ‘A duty which complicates things still more.’ We had not thought of the complication of change-giving, but the conductors had and so had the Pope.