The Pope and Mussolini (33 page)

Later that year, after Franklin Roosevelt was elected president of the United States, the pope heard a rumor that the new president might offer diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. Giving Moscow such recognition, he feared, would provide a huge boost to Communist propaganda in the United States. He told Pacelli to contact the apostolic delegate in Washington. Pressure might better come from the American Church than from the Vatican, he said, suggesting that Cardinal Patrick Joseph Hayes, archbishop of New York, approach Roosevelt on behalf of the American hierarchy.
⁴⁷

Meanwhile the pope kept pushing the Fascist government to restrict Protestants’ rights in Italy. Hitherto police had permitted Protestants to meet privately, most often in their homes, forbidding only public meetings. But in 1934, in response to the pope’s continuing pressure, the government agreed to forbid private meetings of Protestants as well, if they aimed at attracting converts.

Unhappily for the pope, judges balked at enforcing the new ban. It conflicted, they argued, both with the Italian constitution and with the “admitted cults” language of the concordat. The pope sent his nuncio
to complain to the minister of justice. The minister offered his sympathies but said that there was little he could do. Unfortunately, he explained, the judges sometimes decided cases on their own.
⁴⁸

PIUS WAS MORE SUCCESSFUL
on another front. Shortly after coming to power, as we have seen, Mussolini had decided to require Catholic religious instruction in the elementary schools; the 1929 concordat extended this requirement to secondary schools. But the pope was not happy when he learned that the government planned to allow high schools having a sufficient number of non-Catholic children to offer them instruction in their own religion. In March 1933 Turin’s superintendent of schools was about to authorize the city’s chief rabbi to offer religious lessons to Jewish high school students. The pope let Mussolini know of his displeasure. Tellingly, he focused not on the Jews but on the Protestants. “Your Excellency will not fail to see the gravity of the matter,” Cardinal Pacelli wrote the Italian ambassador at the pope’s behest, “once you reflect on the fact that, should this precedent be allowed, there is the danger of an identical request on the part of the Protestants.”
⁴⁹

Following this protest, the government revoked authorization for the rabbi in Turin and terminated a similar authorization already in place for the rabbi in Milan.
⁵⁰
The pope told Mussolini of his “great pleasure” on hearing the news.
⁵¹

C
HAPTER
FIFTEEN

HITLER, MUSSOLINI, AND THE POPE

W
HILE MUSSOLINI KEPT A BUST OF NAPOLEON IN HIS STUDY
, Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, had long kept a bust of Benito Mussolini in his.
¹
The Duce was his role model. Shortly after his swearing-in ceremony, Hitler sent Mussolini a message: Fascism and Nazism had much in common. He hoped to strengthen the ties between the two countries.
²

Mussolini basked in the flattery but had doubts about his acolyte. Hitler was “a dreamer,” better suited to fiery speechifying than to governing. As for Hermann Göring, he was an “ex-inmate of a lunatic asylum.” Both, Mussolini believed, suffered from inferiority complexes.
³

“Hitler is a genial agitator,” said Cardinal Pacelli, “but it is too early to tell if he is a man of government.”
⁴

German Church leaders had long been wary of Hitler’s extreme nationalism, which they thought bordered on paganism.
⁵
But the Nazi leader, aware that one out of three Germans was Catholic, was eager to win Vatican support. Just as Italy’s Catholic Popular Party had stood in
Mussolini’s way, Germany’s Catholic Center Party stood in Hitler’s. Less than a month after Hitler came to power, the German ambassador assured Pacelli that the new chancellor wanted good relations with the Holy See. After all, the ambassador pointed out, Hitler was a Catholic.
⁶

The pope too had doubts about the Nazis. “With the Hitlerites in power,” asked Pius XI the previous spring, “what could one hope for?”
⁷
But within weeks of Hitler’s appointment, he began to have a more positive view. “I have changed my opinion about Hitler,” he told the surprised French ambassador in early March. “It is the first time that such a government voice has been raised to denounce bolshevism in such categorical terms, joining with the voice of the pope.”

“These words,” French ambassador Charles-Roux recalled, “pronounced with a firm voice and with a kind of recklessness, proved to me how much the new German chancellor had gained in Pius XI’s eyes by launching a declaration of war to the death against Communism.”
⁸
Britain’s envoy to the Vatican similarly noted how obsessed the pope seemed to be with the Communist threat. It was impossible to understand Pius’s actions, he argued, without realizing this.
⁹

The pope’s surprisingly positive view of Hitler produced consternation and confusion among Germany’s Church leaders. In the campaign for the March 1933 elections, the German Catholic bishops had unanimously denounced the Nazis and strongly supported the Center Party. On March 12 the pope met with Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, to tell him of the need to change course. On his return to Germany, the archbishop informed his colleagues. “Let us meditate on the words of the Holy Father,” Faulhaber reported, “who, in a consistory, without mentioning his name, indicated Adolf Hitler before the whole world as the statesman who first, after the pope himself, has raised his voice against Bolshevism.” On March 23 Hitler reciprocated by declaring that the Christian churches were “the most important factors in the maintenance of our national identity.” He pledged to protect “the influence to which the Christian confessions are entitled in school and education.” Two days later, speaking with
Cardinal Pacelli, the pope expressed his appreciation of what Hitler had said, praising his “good intentions.” By the end of the month, the German bishops announced that they would no longer oppose the Nazi leader.
¹⁰

In May Charles-Roux again remarked on the pope’s positive view of Hitler. “The pontiff, impulsive by nature and obsessed with his phobia for Communism,” the French ambassador observed, “has allowed himself a moment of enthusiasm” for the Nazi leader. Conscious of the value of Church support, Italian government officials shared their own successful “recipes” for winning Church approval with their Nazi counterparts.
¹¹

The pope was eager to reach an understanding with the Nazi government that would protect the Church’s influence in Germany. Cardinal Pacelli, an able negotiator, saw the Center Party as one of the Holy See’s major bargaining chips. By offering to end Church support for the party, he believed, the Vatican could extract guarantees protecting the rights of Catholic associations in Germany. But he did not reckon on the precipitous effect that the withdrawal of the bishops’ support would have on the Center Party itself. Before he could reach a deal with Hitler, the party announced its own dissolution.
¹²

In July, Cardinal Pacelli escorted the German vice chancellor Franz von Papen into his Vatican apartment. The concordat they signed there guaranteed the German Church the right to manage its own affairs and offered various protections for priests, religious orders, and Church property. But much of its language, particularly that dealing with Catholic associations and schools, was vague.
¹³

Heinrich Brüning, the Center Party leader who had served as Germany’s chancellor from 1930 to 1932, was irate. The Vatican, he fumed, had sold out the Catholic party and cast its lot with Hitler. He blamed Cardinal Pacelli, who, he charged, misunderstood the nature of Nazism. Pacelli’s faith in the “system of concordats,” Brüning later wrote in his memoir, “led him and the Vatican to despise democracy and the parliamentary system.”
¹⁴

––

THE POPE SOON REALIZED
that his “pact with the devil”—as the Church historian Hubert Wolf has described it—was not going to turn out the way he hoped.
¹⁵
At the same time they signed the concordat, the Nazis introduced their Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which mandated the forced sterilization of those deemed defective—in clear contrast with Church doctrine. Hitler also began moving against the Church’s dense network of parochial schools. The Nazis wanted a church they could fully control. In early fall the Vatican secretary of state office produced an alarming analysis of these efforts; it included the text of a song popular in the Hitler Youth, calling Hitler their “redeemer.”
¹⁶
In October the editor of Italy’s most prominent Catholic newspaper,
L’Avvenire d’Italia
, warned that the Nazis were working toward “a German national church in which Protestants and Catholics are to be mixed together.”
¹⁷
In December, in his annual Christmas address to the cardinals, Pius XI voiced his disappointment with the Nazi government. Pacelli and von Papen had signed the concordat only five months earlier.
¹⁸

While the pope’s doubts about Hitler were growing, those closest to him were trying to keep relations as harmonious as possible. In early 1934 both Cardinal Pacelli and the papal nuncio in Germany, Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo, cautioned the pope against saying anything that would anger Hitler, lest it further undermine the Church’s position.
¹⁹
In Berlin, Orsenigo had help in his efforts, having retained Pacelli’s personal assistant from his time as nuncio, the German Father Eduard Gehrmann. As one Vatican observer put it, Father Gehrmann “believed more in Hitler than in Christ.”
²⁰

The fact that Pius XI chose Cesare Orsenigo as nuncio to Nazi Germany reveals much about the pope. Other than the nuncio to Italy, there was no more crucial, or complex, diplomatic assignment in the Vatican, yet Orsenigo was a man of limited intelligence and even more limited worldview. Born near the pope’s hometown, in the Lake Como
region north of Milan, Orsenigo like the pope had a father who was a silk factory supervisor. His father’s two brothers married his mother’s two sisters, daughters of a silk factory supervisor in a nearby town. Each of the three couples produced a son who would become a priest. Ordained in 1896, Orsenigo served in a Milan parish, and in 1912 he added the title of canon at Milan’s Duomo.

Orsenigo had hitherto lived solely in the confines of the Church in and around Milan; he had neither diplomatic experience nor any evident interest in international affairs. Yet barely four months after Pius became pope, he appointed Orsenigo nuncio to Holland, with the title of archbishop. The appointment triggered considerable muttering among the upper clergy, who saw it as but the latest example of the pope choosing his friends from Milan rather than the men of the hierarchy with the most expertise. Cardinal Gasparri presided over Orsenigo’s episcopal consecration ceremony; the Milanese priest proudly wore the cross that Pius had given him to honor the occasion, but aside from some students from the Lombard seminary in Rome, who served as altar attendants, the church was empty.

After spending two years in Holland, Orsenigo became nuncio to Hungary. In 1928, while Orsenigo was back in Rome for a visit, one of Mussolini’s informers speculated that the pope might choose him to replace Cardinal Gasparri as secretary of state. The pope valued above all, thought the informer, men of unquestionable loyalty. Such a move would be a boon to the regime, the informer added, for Orsenigo was less astute and more pliable than the wily Gasparri.
²¹

Although the pope passed over Orsenigo for his new secretary of state, he chose him to replace Pacelli as nuncio to Germany. Both Hitler and Cardinal Pacelli would come to view Orsenigo as a lightweight. Certainly Pacelli, himself a former nuncio to Germany, never felt the need to ask for advice about how to deal with Berlin. Cautious and conscientious, Orsenigo worried continually about offending Hitler. Later, when relations with Nazi Germany became Pius’s central concern, he would not replace Orsenigo. The pope wanted neither an independent
thinker nor a saber-rattler as his ambassador to Hitler. The mediocre Orsenigo would remain in his post under the next pope throughout the dramatic years of the world war.
²²