The Pope and Mussolini (38 page)

Not since the days when popes ruled the Papal States had the Catholic Church been so closely identified with the government. Not since the time of the Crusades had it played such a central role in urging Catholics to foreign conquest.

War fever nourished the darkest conspiracy theories, as priests and
bishops warned the faithful that countries opposing the invasion did so because of their joint hatred of both Fascist Italy and the Roman Catholic Church.
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The Vatican encouraged these views. The day after Christmas Monsignor Pizzardo told the Vatican’s emissary to Canada that he was to counteract opposition to the Ethiopian war.
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The opposition, he explained, took aim jointly at both Fascism and the Church. It was “an aversion that comes naturally,” he added, “against a great Catholic state like Italy, which maintains good relations with the Holy See.” The attacks were motivated by “the hatred of the Church’s enemies who, by striking at Italy, would like to strike a blow against the Catholic Church and the Holy See.”

In his reply, the Vatican envoy noted that opposition to the Ethiopian war was widespread in Canada. Unfortunately, he wrote, Protestants, Communists, and “those who are very attached to democratic principles” had long opposed Fascism. But “the good people, as well as the more dispassionate politicians, have had to admit what marvelous work Fascism had done.” As for Pizzardo’s warning about the Church’s occult enemies, he added, he would do his best to spread the word.
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IN THE SAME MONTH
as Mussolini held his Day of Faith, Pius XI announced the appointment of twenty new cardinals. Fourteen were Italian. Much was made of this fact: as a number of observers noted, virtually everyone in the Vatican secretary of state office was Italian, and all the nuncios were Italian. In Germany, newspaper articles and political circles linked the pope’s choice of new cardinals to the Fascist regime’s growing influence in the Vatican. One German newspaper ruefully noted the contrast between Italy’s bishops’ enthusiastic support for Mussolini’s war in Ethiopia and the failure of Germany’s bishops to show similar enthusiasm for the Nazi regime.
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Defying expectations, the new archbishop of Westminster, Arthur Hinsley, was not among those given the cardinal’s hat. Two months
earlier the archbishop had defended the pope by saying there was little he could do to prevent the war. “He is a poor helpless old man,” he explained, “with a small police force to guard himself, to guard the priceless treasures of the Vatican, and to protect the diminutive State which ensures his due independence.” The archbishop’s line of defense had not pleased the pope, and his denunciation of the Fascist regime as tyrannical—a “present day deification of Caesarism”—had angered Mussolini. The pope’s decision to pass over Hinsley was widely attributed to his wish not to offend the Duce.
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The Italian government greeted the pontiff’s choices for the Sacred College warmly. Not only had he returned Italians to a clear majority but, as one police informant put it, “one can with all confidence state that of the fourteen [Italians] nominated, almost all are—more or less—friends of the Regime.”
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Westminster’s archbishop was not the only churchman slighted. On January 9 the pope called in Tacchi Venturi to tell him that, although he had wanted to name him a cardinal, he had decided the time was not right. “Poor Father,” said the pope to his crestfallen envoy, “the cardinal’s hat was going to go to you! But what was one to do?” Given the delicate moment internationally, making his private emissary to Mussolini a cardinal might be misinterpreted. What, asked the pope, would the English have thought? In any case, he told the Jesuit, it was too important to keep him in his current role, something that would be impossible should he become a cardinal.
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Among the twenty men who were given the cardinal’s hat that December was the oft-accused pederast Camillo Caccia. The pope’s master of ceremonies thought the promotion was long overdue. When the list of new cardinals in 1929 had come out and his name was not on it, Caccia was furious.
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In October 1930 Turin’s newspapers reported rumors that he was about to be named the city’s archbishop. The stories, according to a police informant in the Vatican, prompted “rather salacious comments.”
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Another informant, in March 1931, relayed that Caccia was furious with the commander of the Papal Gendarmes for reporting on Caccia’s recent intimate relationship with a young
priest. The pope had learned the news and was not pleased. Earlier, the informant recalled, only his old ties with the pope had saved Caccia from the fate that Pius had meted out to Monsignor De Samper under similar circumstances.
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Despite the stories surrounding Caccia, rumors that the pope was about to name him a cardinal had gathered force. This led to a new burst of allegations in 1933, as others in the Vatican came forward claiming to have seen Caccia with boys and young men in compromising situations. Among them, a count from the black aristocracy—those elite Rome families who had stuck with the popes in their decades-old battle against the new Italian state—told of the time Caccia, in his apartment at the Vatican, had been caught in the act of fondling two students while plying them with wine and liquor. Interrogated, the boys, still drunk, said that Caccia had lured them to his rooms by promising them a large sum of money. Rome’s clergy, claimed the informant, disliked the pope, viewing him as an ill-tempered despot. Should he go ahead, despite Caccia’s predatory reputation, to name him a cardinal, his popularity, or so the informant argued, would reach a new low.
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Caccia got a clear sign of papal favor, and a presumption that he would at last be named a cardinal, when Pius asked him in August 1934 to be part of the papal delegation at the Eucharistic congress in Buenos Aires.
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But around the same time, another police informant raised doubts as to the pope’s intentions. One of Caccia’s supporters, during an audience with the pope, had put in a good word for him, praising the hard work Caccia had done on the pope’s behalf. Given his increasing girth, the friend argued, Caccia was encountering difficulty in maintaining his frenetic pace, so perhaps the time was right to reward him. The pope, irritated by the request, turned his back on his visitor. “Have him eat less!” he muttered.
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Yet Pius retained an affection for Caccia, whom he had known since he was a boy in Milan, and so in the end, he added him to the list of new cardinals in 1935. If the allegations against him were well known within the Vatican, they seem not to have diminished the enthusiasm of his reception among his new colleagues. “Stout, jovial and humorous,” the
British ambassador to the Holy See observed in mid-1938, “Cardinal Caccia is perhaps the most popular member of the Sacred College.”
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THE POPE CONTINUED TO
worry about the impact the Ethiopian war was having on American attitudes. On January 4, echoing Pacelli’s earlier suggestion, he advised the Duce to strengthen his pro-war propaganda in the United States.
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Mussolini told the pope not to worry, for the situation was now much improved, thanks especially to that “Irish priest”—the radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin—“who has set out to combat the offensive with quintessentially American methods which are extremely efficient with Americans.”
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Ever since the sanctions were announced, Coughlin had used his half-hour national radio broadcast every Sunday to denounce them. “The League of Nations and its sanctions,” he had told his millions of listeners in late November, “exist for but one single purpose—to act only when British interests are at stake.”
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When a problem did arise in the United States, Mussolini knew he could count on those around the Vatican to help him. In early 1936 the influential U.S. Jesuit magazine
America
published an article critical of the war.
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The Duce sent his ambassador to speak to the head of the Jesuit order to enlist his help.

Founded in the mid-sixteenth century, the Jesuits had a reputation as intellectuals of the Church, and Pius XI had continued the tradition of relying on them for advice. Elected in 1915 to be Jesuit superior general—a position he held until his death over a quarter century later—Włodzimierz Ledóchowski had come from an aristocratic Polish family. As a boy, he had served as a page in the Austrian imperial court. His father, a count, had been a cavalry officer in the Austrian army. His uncle, a cardinal, had been prominent in the Curia, serving as prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.
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Ledóchowski’s office, in the Jesuits’ world headquarters, was but a stone’s throw from the Vatican.

Prince Bernhard von Bülow, who served as chancellor of the German
Empire in the first decade of the century, described Ledóchowski in his memoirs: “The General is a man of middle height with unusually intelligent eyes, the wrinkled and moulded features of a savant, and the certainty of manner of a born aristocrat.” When the prince visited the Jesuit leader in Rome in 1924, he was struck by the simplicity of his room, bare except for a statue of the Virgin and a few portraits of popes. He could easily understand why Jesuit generals had always refrained from accepting appointments as cardinals: their own position was more influential.
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Ledóchowski had presided over a rapid expansion of the Jesuit order, bolstering its presence in the Americas while multiplying its missions in Asia. Although in some ways tyrannical and certainly austere, he was not without a sense of humor. When one of his close collaborators came to his office to see him one day, he noticed a very large fellow
member of the order leaving. “Don’t you know him?” asked the Jesuit general. “That is Father B, one of our best. Did you see how fat he is? When he sits down he takes up at least three seats. That’s why I always send him to official ceremonies. Because the press can say: there was a large representation of the Society of Jesus.”
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Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, superior general of the Society of Jesus

(
photograph credit 17.1
)

The Jesuit leader had made no secret of his enthusiasm for the Fascist regime. From the time when Mussolini came to power, he had done what he could to stamp out Church opposition to the Duce.
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At their meeting in early 1936, the Italian ambassador told Ledóchowski that Mussolini wanted
America
’s anti-Fascist editor fired and a pro-Fascist editor put in his place. Ledóchowski accommodated him readily. “The Father General immediately, without any hesitation,” Pignatti wrote, “gave me the head of the director of the North American Jesuit magazine.” Soon a new editor was in place, suitably enthusiastic about the Fascist cause.
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Gratified by this support, Pignatti remarked that Italy’s enemies were the Church’s enemies. Ledóchowski agreed. The attacks on Mussolini for waging his war in Ethiopia, he replied, were simply “a pretext from which international Judaism is profiting in order to advance its attack on western civilization.”
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THE DUCE WAS UNDER
enormous pressure. “If the League of Nations,” he later told Hitler, “had followed [British foreign secretary Anthony] Eden’s advice and extended the sanctions against Italy to include oil, I would have had to beat a retreat from Abyssinia within a week. It would have been an unspeakable catastrophe for me.”
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The Italian economy was suffering from the costs of the war and the sanctions. Mussolini’s calm public appearance, the pope’s top financial adviser told the pontiff, masked his “state of physical depression.”
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Fascist propaganda had imagined the war would be a brief, triumphal march of a modern European army through a barren countryside defended by spear-bearing savages, but instead the Italian troops suffered one embarrassment after another. On December 6, two months
after the initial invasion, when Italians began bombing the town of Dessie, a photographer snapped a picture of the emperor, Haile Selassie, personally machine-gunning Italian planes as they passed overhead. Worse, the photographer also recorded Italian planes bombing the American hospital there, its Red Cross units clearly in view. Later that month the Ethiopians massed tens of thousands of men and briefly stopped the Italian army’s advance. In early January, Italians marched on Tembien, unaware that an army of more than one hundred thousand Ethiopians awaited them. Units of Blackshirts, the Fascist militia, led the attack. Half the militia’s officers were killed in one day. The panicked survivors were saved from an unceremonious retreat only by the last-minute arrival of Italian airplanes that dropped deadly pay-loads of poison gas.
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