Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (60 page)

The last years of Pius XII increasingly resembled the regime of Pius X, as new initiatives in theology and pastoral work were suppressed, and the pope became preoccupied with the struggle with the universal enemy, Communism. Catholics in the Soviet Union, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania lived under Communist rule, and papal denunciations could make life harder for them. But this struggle had a particular urgency in post-war Italy, where Communists were reaping the benefits of having led the anti-Fascist resistance. In Emilia between 1944 and 1946 fifty-two priests had been murdered by Communists.

The Vatican did not forget. The pope believed that the freedom of the
Church would be at an end in an Italy ruled by Communists, he talked gloomily about being ready to die in Rome, and he did everything he could to ensure that Communists would not win elections. The Vatican pumped funds into the Christian Democratic party, and promoted links between Italy and America. In 1949 Pius excommunicated anyone who joined the Communist Party or supported Communism in any way. The ruling unleashed a flood of anti-Catholic measures in Eastern Europe. Mgr. Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office (the Inquisition) boasted that people could say anything they liked about the divinity of Christ and get away with it, but that ‘if, in the remotest village in Sicily, you vote Communist, your excommunication will arrive the next day’.
²⁷
In 1952, the Vatican encouraged an anti-Communist political alliance between Italian Christian Democrats and neo-Fascist and other extreme rightwing groups. Catholic politicians unhappy about this ‘opening to the right’ were elbowed aside. Pius watched in anguish the arrest, torture, and show-trial of Cardinal József Mindszenty by the Communist regime in Hungary in 1948–9. When the Russians sent in the tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 he published three encyclicals of denunciation in ten days. ‘If we were silent,’ he insisted in his Christmas message for 1956, ‘we would have to fear God’s judgement much more’.
²⁸
The contrast with the silences of the war years was striking.

In France the most exciting Catholic experiment for generations, the Worker Priest movement, fell victim to this growing hatred and fear of Communism. The movement had begun from the war-time recognition by clergy like Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, that huge tracts of urban France were effectively de-Christianized, mission territory as much in need of evangelization as anywhere in Africa or the Far East. Suhard and other bishops authorized a small group of priests to shed clerical garments and life-style, to take jobs as factory-workers or dockers, and to explore a new type of ministry. The French Dominican Order was closely associated with this movement, and provided its theological rationale. Many of the priests became involved in union activities, many developed Communist sympathies. A few were unable to sustain their vocation to celibacy. In 1953, the year in which it signed a new Concordat with Franco’s Spain, the Vatican ordered the suppression of the Worker Priest experiment.

In the Vatican an atmosphere of suspicion and denunciation of the modern world flourished, feeding off the inflated rhetoric of a century of papal condemnation of modernity. In response to the prompting of
Mgr. Alfredo Ottaviani at the Holy Office and Cardinal Ruffini of Palermo the pope toyed with the idea of calling a General Council, which would denounce modern errors like existentialism and polygenism (the view that the human race evolved from more than a single pair), and define the doctrine of the Virgin Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven. The Conciliar plan was abandoned, but its condemnations reappeared in 1950 in
Humani Generis
, and in the same year the pope, for the first time since the definition of Papal Infallibility in 1870, exercised the Infallible
Magisterium
and defined the doctrine of the Assumption in his own right. The definition embarrassed many Catholic theologians, since it was unsupported in Scripture and was unknown to the Early Church, and it was a disaster for relations with other churches, even those which, like the Orthodox churches, believed the doctrine, but rejected the unilateral right of the pope to define articles of faith. In 1950 Pacelli also canonized the anti-Modernist Pope Pius X, whose embalmed body, enshrined in glass, was sent on a sacred tour of Italy.

The pope himself retired into ever more remote isolation. Giovanni Battista Montini, one of his two closest assistants during the war, and widely tipped as the next pope, fell under suspicion of holding dangerously liberal sympathies. A sensitive, warm, and highly intelligent man, Montini, though himself impeccably loyal and sharing something of Pius XII’s mystically exalted view of the papacy, sympathized with the new theology and disliked the reactionary ethos which Pius had let loose. In an age when Vatican attitudes to other churches were characterized by hostility or dismissiveness, he was an ecumenist, cultivating friends among Anglicans and Protestants, seeking to make and maintain contacts in other churches. He did what he could to protect potential victims of the new ultra-orthodoxy, and even rescued stocks of condemned books by the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac. He had especially close links with the Church in France, and sympathized with the Worker-Priest experiment. He strongly disapproved of the Vatican-backed political alliance between Christian Democracy and neo-Fascists.

In 1954 the inevitable happened. The pope’s mind was poisoned against Montini by a whispering campaign, and he was dismissed from his Vatican post, and kicked upstairs to be Archbishop of Milan. This post invariably carried with it a cardinal’s hat, but Pius XII, who had last held a consistory to name new cardinals in 1953 never held another. Whether or not the withholding of the Red Hat was a deliberate rebuke, Montini, who would increasingly be seen as the inevitable choice as next pope, was in fact
excluded from the succession.

Surrounded now by ultra-conservative advisers, his privacy jealously guarded by his German nun-housekeeper, the dragon-like Sister Pasqualina, Pius XII retreated into a suffocating atmosphere of exalted piety exacerbated by hypochondria. His health, always a subject of acute anxiety to himself, visibly deteriorated. A quack remedy designed to prevent softening of his gums tanned and hardened his soft-palate and gullet: he developed a permanent uncontrollable hiccup. As he weakened, his doctor tried to keep him alive with injections of pulverized tissue taken from slaughtered lambs. Rumours of visions of the Virgin and participations in the sufferings of Christ granted to him circulated. He cultivated his role as Vatican oracle. Teaching gushed from him, unstoppable, a speech a day. Since the pope was the Church’s hotline to God, everything he had to say must be of interest. Pius himself came to believe that he had something valuable to contribute on every subject, no matter how specialized. He lived surrounded by encyclopedias and monographs, swotting up for the next utterance. Midwives would get an update on the latest gynocological techniques, astronomers were lectured on sun-spots. One of his staff recalled finding him surrounded by a new mountain of books in the summer of 1958. ‘All those books are about gas,’ Pius told him – he was due to address a congress of the gas industry in September. The notion of pope as universal teacher was getting out of hand.

IV T
HE
A
GE OF
V
ATICAN
II

Pius XII died on 10 October 1958. As always at the end of a long pontificate, the conclave that met two weeks later to replace him was deeply divided between an old guard committed to continuing and extending Pacelli’s policies, and a group of younger cardinals disillusioned by the sterility, repression and personality cult of the last years of Pius XII’s regime. The ‘youth’ of these men was relative. Pius XII had held only two consistories during his long pontificate, and although for the first time Italian cardinals were outnumbered almost two-to-one, nearly half the Sacred College were in their late seventies or eighties. The ideal pope of those who hoped for change, however, was Archbishop Montini, electable in theory, even though he was not a cardinal, (he got two votes during the Conclave) but in practice ruled out by his absence. Deadlocked, the cardinals looked around for an interim, seat-warming pope. Their choice fell on the fat seventy-seven year old Patriarch of
Venice, Angelo Roncalli, a genial Vatican diplomat who had been made Patriarch as a retirement job, with a reputation for peaceable holiness and pastoral warmth, and who clearly did not have long to live. He was too elderly to rock any boats, and everyone believed that a few years of King Log inactivity would give the Church time to take stock before choosing a younger and more vigorous man to set the Church’s agenda for the second half of the century. Human calculation has seldom been more spectacularly mistaken.

Roncalli, even more than Pius X, was a peasant pope, the son of poor farming people from Bergamo who shared the ground floor of their house with their six cows. He had spent an entire life in the papal diplomatic service, mostly in obscure posts, in wartime Bulgaria and Turkey. In the process he had come to know a good deal about the Eastern churches, about Islam, about the non-Christian world of the twentieth century. A keen student of Church history, he had a special interest in the career of San Carlo Borromeo, the great sixteenth-century Archbishop of Milan, and he arranged his coronation as pope for San Carlo’s feast day. Antiquarian interests of this sort seemed harmless enough; no one noticed that what he valued about San Carlo was the fact that he was above all things a pastoral bishop, translating into action the reforming programme of an Ecumenical Council – the Council of Trent.

John himself was certainly no radical: his own theology and piety were utterly traditional. As Nuncio in France, during the early stages of the troubles over the Worker Priest experiment, he showed some sympathy but little real understanding of the issues, and as pope he was to renew Pius XII’s condemnation of the movement. He was also to issue an encyclical demanding the retention of Latin as the language of instruction in seminaries. Yet under the stuffy opinions was a great human heart. He had managed to live a long life in the papal service without making any enemies, winning the affection and trust of everyone he came in contact, Catholic and non-Catholic, Christian and non-Christian. As pope, he took the name John partly because it was his father’s name, and that human gesture set at once the keynote of his pontificate, his transparent goodness and loveableness. After the arctic and self-conscious sanctities of Pius’ reign, the world awoke to find a kindly, laughing old man on the throne of Peter, who knew the modern world, and was not afraid of it. In part, it was because he had the freedom of an old man. Announcing his name, he had jokingly pointed out to the cardinals that there had been more popes called John than any other name, and that
most of them had had short reigns.

He was unconventional: he hated the white skull-cap popes wear, which would not stay on his bald scalp, so he reinvented and wore with aplomb the red and ermine cap seen in portraits of Renaissance popes. He cut through papal protocol, and was a security nightmare, sallying out of the Vatican to visit the Roman prisons or hospitals. Disapproving of Marxism, he welcomed Communists as brothers and sisters, and was visited in the Vatican by the daughter and son-in-law of the Russian Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. He sent stamps and coins for Khrushchev’s grandchildren and asked their mother to give a special embrace to the youngest, Ivan, because that was the Russian form of John. Under the warmth of his overflowing humanity the barriers which had been constructed between Church and world melted away.

And the personal warmth was matched by a willingness to rethink old issues. His first encyclical,
Mater et Magistra
, published in 1961, broke with Vatican suspicion of lurking socialism by welcoming the advent of the caring state, and it insisted on the obligation of wealthy nations to help poorer ones. The CIA thought the pope gave comfort to Communists. His last encyclical,
Pacem in Terris
, published on Maundy Thursday 1963 was characteristically addressed not to the bishops of the Church but ‘to all men of good will.’ It welcomed as representative of ‘our modern age’ the progressive improvement of conditions for working people, the involvement of women in political life, and the decline of imperialism and growth of national self-determination. All these were signs of a growing liberation. He declared the right of every human being to the private and public profession of their religion, a break with the systematic denial of that right by popes since Gregory XVI. Above all, he abandoned the anti-Communist rhetoric of the Cold War. He denounced as ‘utterly irrational’ the nuclear arms-race, declaring that war in an atomic age was no longer ‘a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice,’ as near as a pope could get to repudiating the value of just war theory in a world of nuclear weapons. Even the Russians were impressed, and the Italian Marxist film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, dedicated his masterpiece, the film
The Gospel According to St Matthew
, to Pope John.

One of the earliest acts of the new pope was to make Archbishop Montini a cardinal, the first of his reign. It was a clear signal that a new regime had arrived, that there would be no more of Pacelli’s later policies. Then, staggeringly, less than three months after his election, on 25 January 1959, John announced the calling of a General Council. King
Log was going to disturb the pond after all.

There had in fact been some discussion of a Council under Pius XII. What had been imagined, however, was a continuation of the First Vatican Council, a docile assembly which would denounce secularism and Communism, compile a new list of heresies in the spirit of the Syllabus of Errors, wipe the floor with the Ecumenical Movement, and perhaps define infallibly the doctrine that Mary was the Mediatrix of all Graces, a favourite belief of Pius XII which would have further alienated the Protestant and Orthodox churches. John, however, had different ideas. He conceived his Council not as one of defiance and opposition to the world and the other churches, but as a source of pastoral renewal and of reconciliation between Christians, and with the wider world. It was time, in his words, for
aggiornamento
, bringing up to date, a word that to conservative ears sounded suspiciously like
Modernism.