The Pope and Mussolini (25 page)

Not everyone was happy with this forced homage to the dictator. A story made the rounds that one day Mussolini decided to go to a theater, wearing a disguise. When everyone stood up as his image came on the screen, he remained seated. A man standing behind him in the darkened theater tapped him on the shoulder and whispered in his ear: “
Signore
, I feel the same way you do, but I would advise you to stand up if you don’t want one of these goons to crack your head open.”
²⁸

At public appearances, the Duce’s aides made sure he was surrounded by adoring crowds, even if it meant recruiting police agents dressed in civilian clothes. Navarra, Mussolini’s personal assistant, recalled that once when a picture was published of the Duce waltzing
with a peasant woman, a rumor circulated that his dancing partner was really a policeman in disguise.

Mussolini sometimes forgot that the workers, peasants, and artisans with whom he was photographed were his own police agents. But at one dedication ceremony for a new building, the thought did occur to him. Turning to the “bricklayer” who was standing beside him, he asked, in a whisper, if he was a policeman.

“No, Duce!” the man replied.

“Ah, bravo!” the delighted Mussolini replied. “So what are you then, the master mason?”

“No, Duce,” he responded, “I am an army sergeant.”
²⁹

C
HAPTER
ELEVEN

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE SON

B
Y THE TIME THE LATERAN ACCORDS WERE RATIFIED, SEVENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD
Cardinal Gasparri had been secretary of state for fifteen years under two popes. In 1922, after helping secure Ratti’s election, he could count on having the pope’s support, and Pius valued his secretary of state’s experience. But as the years passed, conflict between the two was bound to emerge, for the pontiff would tolerate no separate pocket of power in the Vatican.
¹

Gasparri rarely left Rome, except to spend the summer vacation in his mountain hometown, northeast of the capital. There his extended family treated him like a celebrity, the local boy made good. When Gasparri was in Rome, his staff members came by his office each morning. He sat at a large round table, covered with piles of documents and correspondence. As each staff member entered, Gasparri gave him his own little stack. When he was at his summer retreat, his aides took turns bringing him papers. There they found the short, rotund cardinal, dressed in a simple clerical black gown, his large black, round-brim
cloth hat nestled beside him, sitting underneath a large tree enjoying the shade, the fresh air, and the view.
²

Gasparri’s down-home sense of humor put others at ease, but ambassadors to the Holy See did not find him completely forthcoming. As the British envoy reported, he was “far from candid … or put more bluntly, he can lie well.” When the French ambassador accused him one day of not telling the truth, Gasparri replied that he was simply doing what was required of all diplomats, adding, with a sparkle in his eye, that if necessary the pope would give him absolution.
³

Thomas Morgan, an American reporter, tells of visiting Gasparri’s office during the height of a crisis with the Mexican government that, in the 1920s and beyond, shut down large numbers of churches and seminaries. Morgan found Gasparri remarkably calm, talking “like a great sage.” The Church, he said, had survived for many centuries and had endured much worse. It would continue to outlast its foes.

“
Non prevalebunt
,” he repeated, in Latin. “They shall not prevail.”

As the cardinal ushered the reporter to the door, the parrots that Gasparri kept in his rooms began squawking. “
Non prevalebunt! Non prevalebunt!
” Apparently the secretary of state had taken the time to teach them this lesson in Church history.
⁴

As early as 1926, however, rumors spread that the pope was unhappy with his secretary of state. In an effort to get him to resign, the pope was said to be humiliating him, making him wait in the anteroom before seeing him, and mortifying him in ways, as one police informant put it, that not even a servant would tolerate.
⁵

The signing of the Lateran Accords in 1929 proved to be Gasparri’s greatest public triumph. Few photographs were more familiar than the one showing him with pen in hand sitting alongside Mussolini. But the agreement turned out to be a mixed blessing. Pius, angered by Mussolini’s parliamentary speeches and worried that the dictator was not going to cooperate as he had hoped in establishing a Catholic state, decided he needed a new secretary of state. He first informed Gasparri in July that he thought it was time for a change and told him to think the
matter over. From his summer mountain retreat, Gasparri responded in a letter to the pope: “I have not forgotten (and how could I forget it) what Your Holiness told me last July, which, if I am not mistaken, is that, especially in view of the likely struggles with the Fascist Government in defense of Catholic Action, Your Holiness thought it opportune that someone else take my place.” He added that he too had been thinking of leaving the position he had held so many years, “although for different reasons than the one Your Holiness cited.” At his age, he said, he no longer had either the memory or the energy he once did.
⁶

The pope waited another several months before making the change. He saw Gasparri less and less often, relying on others, especially his undersecretary, Monsignor Pizzardo.
⁷
The strain of waiting to be dismissed eroded what diplomatic reserve the secretary of state had left. “It’s a difficult life,” Gasparri sighed after one meeting with the pope. Pius XI, he told the Italian ambassador, had many merits, but he was often “as cold as marble.”
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The secretary of state’s replacement became a topic of intense speculation.
⁹
Gasparri hoped the pope would appoint his disciple, Cardinal Bonaventura Cerretti, and had reason to believe that the pope might follow this advice. In 1925, shortly after Cerretti returned from his post as nuncio to Paris and was named a cardinal, the pope had hinted that he might want him to succeed Gasparri one day. One of the Vatican’s leading diplomats, Cerretti had served in Mexico, the United States, and Australia and had represented Pope Benedict XV at the postwar peace negotiations in Paris. But in the fall of 1929, Cerretti told a journalist he did not want the post. “With Pius XI,” he explained, “the secretary of state has little to do. He’s more of a decorative figure than someone with any power or independence. He can’t assume any direct, serious responsibilities, nor give his personal stamp to the Church government. You could say, in other words, that he is simply an executor of orders from above.”
¹⁰

Cerretti’s comments are a bit suspect, for while many saw him as the obvious choice, he had reason to fear that the pope would pass him
over. Cerretti’s sympathies for the democratic countries, and for the Popular Party in Italy, were well known, and as the pope was aware, he opposed the deal Pius had struck with Mussolini.
¹¹
In December the pope chose instead his nuncio to Germany, Eugenio Pacelli, to be the new secretary of state. Cerretti was indignant. He was certain that Francesco Pacelli, a mere layman, had used his frequent meetings with Pius XI to build up his brother in the pope’s eyes.

“That Pius XI will prefer Pacelli over me, to everything I have done for him, to my tenacious loyalty, to my diplomatic experience of over thirty years … it makes me furious to think of it, I can’t accept it,” Cerretti fumed. “Pacelli and his brother, servants and slaves of Fascism, accomplices bought by Mussolini, bring discredit on the Holy See. They humiliate the papacy, weaken its power, and lower its moral and educational authority in the eyes of all the Catholic powers.”
¹²

Mussolini’s ambassador to Germany, Luigi Aldrovandi, viewed the appointment much more sympathetically. Eugenio Pacelli was a person of stature, he said, combining deep intelligence with the ability to stay calm. He projected both dignity and a deep religious faith. Perhaps most important, thought the ambassador, he would be a friend of the Fascist government. “Monsignor Pacelli,” he reported, “had expressed his admiration for His Excellency Mussolini even before the Lateran Accords.”
¹³

In many ways, Pacelli was Gasparri’s opposite. His father’s father had served as a minister in the papal government of Pius IX, fled with the pope in 1848 when the revolution in Rome drove him into exile, and on their return helped found
L’Osservatore romano
. Pacelli’s father was the dean of the Vatican lawyers and had served from 1886 to 1905 on Rome’s city council. Eugenio, born in Rome in 1876, was a shy, frail child who wore spectacles from an early age and enjoyed playing the violin. He showed no interest in sports or children’s games.
¹⁴

At age eighteen, Pacelli entered the Almo Collegio Capranica, Rome’s oldest seminary and, over the centuries, the launch pad for many high Vatican diplomatic careers. Although he did well in his
studies, he craved solitude and missed home. Given his family’s clout, he won a rare dispensation and was allowed to live at home through the rest of his studies.
¹⁵

In 1901, two years after his ordination, Pacelli received a doctorate in civil and canon law and took a position in the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs in the Vatican secretary of state office. He could not have risen so rapidly over the next years without participating in the antimodernist campaign, a prerequisite for advancement under Pope Pius X.
¹⁶
But Pacelli was cautious and measured in his speech and befriended Giacomo Della Chiesa while they were both in the secretary of state office. In 1914, when Della Chiesa became Pope Benedict XV, he promoted Pacelli to undersecretary of state.

Three years later the pope appointed Pacelli to be nuncio to Bavaria. For the first time, the forty-one-year-old left his mother and his parental home. A few years later he would be named nuncio to Germany and move from Munich to Berlin.

When he first departed for Munich, Pacelli took up two compartments in the train, one for himself and a second for the sixty cases of food he brought with him.
¹⁷
Once there, he asked to have nuns take care of his household. One, the twenty-four-year-old Pascalina Lehnert, was destined to play an important role in his life. She was smitten by the nuncio. “Tall and slender, his face extremely thin and pallid,” she wrote, recalling her first impression, “he had eyes that reflected his soul and gave him a particular beauty.” She came to think he would be helpless in handling the daily necessities without her.

In 1919 Pacelli suffered a trauma that would stay with him all his life. In April of that year, amid the postwar chaos, a Soviet Republic was briefly proclaimed in Munich. A Communist commandant, leading a squad of hastily formed militia armed with rifles, revolvers, and hand grenades, banged on the door of the nunciature. When the frightened staff opened the door, the commandant said he had come to requisition the nuncio’s limousine. Pacelli was called down to confront the intruders. Horrified by the invasion, he was especially pained by their demand for the car, since he had a soft spot for his Mercedes-Benz,
describing it fondly as a “splendid carriage, with pontifical coat of arms.” Rejecting the demand as a flagrant violation of international law, he tried to show them the certificate of extraterritoriality protecting the nunciature. The commandant, described by Pacelli as “a horrible type of delinquent,” was unimpressed, and one of the men put a rifle to his chest. The invaders pushed past the nuncio and went to the garage, but the chauffeur had disabled the car. Frustrated, they told Pacelli that if he did not have the limousine ready for them the next day, they would arrest them all and blow up the building.

Accounts of the next twenty-four hours differ sharply. In his report to Gasparri, Pacelli said that immediately following the men’s departure, he was struck by a bad bout of the flu, made worse by “a bad stomach,” and left Munich to recuperate in a rest home. But it appears that as soon as the squad left, Pacelli had collapsed, unnerved. He hastily left Munich, recuperating in a nursing home a hundred miles away. When the squad returned the next day, he was not there.
¹⁸

While in Germany, Pacelli did his best to enforce top-down rule from the Vatican—no simple matter in a country where bishops had long valued their own authority. Father Hubert Wolf, one of the foremost authorities on Pacelli’s years in Germany, describes his time there: