The Pope and Mussolini (42 page)

AS THE POPE REGAINED
some of his strength, he again asked Mussolini to help him with Hitler, but his hopes were in vain. Mussolini told Tacchi Venturi there was little he or anyone else could do to influence the Führer when it came to questions of religion. In relaying this message to the pope, Tacchi Venturi pointed out that the Duce had tried his best. Lest the pope’s enthusiasm for Mussolini diminish, he quickly added that, “with the same kindness,” the dictator had agreed to all the pope’s other requests. He would censor a newspaper that the pope had objected to and confiscate all copies of a pamphlet that American Protestants had recently sent their brethren in Italy.
¹⁰

In the summer of 1936, the German bishops had asked the pope to prepare an encyclical urging the Nazi government to respect the terms of its 1933 concordat with the Church. In early 1937, in his sickbed, the pope met with three German cardinals and two bishops who had come to discuss the proposal. Pacelli, not wanting to antagonize Hitler, advised the pontiff against issuing his criticism in the form of an encyclical: he should simply send Hitler a pastoral letter, to be shared only with the German bishops. But Pius XI spurned Pacelli’s advice. He wanted to issue an encyclical that all Germans—and all the world—would read. The result was dramatic. On Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, bishops and priests throughout Germany read the encyclical,
Mit brennender Sorge
(“With Deep Anxiety”), from the pulpit to people unaccustomed to any public criticism of the Nazi regime.
¹¹

“It is with deep anxiety and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the [German] Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action.” Thus began the encyclical. While the Church had entered into the concordat with the German government in good faith, said the pope, “anyone must acknowledge, not without surprise and reprobation,
how the other contracting party emasculated the terms of the treaty, distorted their meaning, and eventually considered its more or less official violation as a normal policy.” He lamented the destruction of Catholic parochial schools, despite the concordat’s provision protecting them. He castigated those who idolized race and nation, deeming them guilty of distorting and perverting “an order of the world planned and created by God.” He took aim at efforts to blend Christianity with race worship: “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe.” Although he never mentioned Nazism by name, he thanked those priests and laypeople “who have persisted in their Christian duty and in the defense of God’s rights in the teeth of an aggressive paganism.” The reference was clear.

While the encyclical was hard-hitting, it could have been harsher. For months, the Holy Office of the Inquisition had been working on a separate document, offering a list of fundamental tenets of Nazism that the Church deemed to be grave errors. Among them were passages clearly taken from Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
.

Worried that branding Nazi ideology un-Christian might lead Hitler to renounce the concordat altogether, the pope had decided on a less direct attack. He was supported not only by Pacelli but by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, Germany’s most important archdiocese. Throughout the drafting project, the Jesuit general Ledóchowski did all he could to prevent the pope from denouncing Hitler, urging the pope to “avoid going into questions that are very difficult and subtle.” The term
Nazi
was deleted from the draft; nor was any mention made of the persecution of the Jews. The encyclical was to have been accompanied by a list of errors condemned by the Church, including basic tenets of Nazism, but it never made it out of the Vatican.
¹²

Diluted though the encyclical was, Hitler was furious, outraged not only by the unprecedented public attack but by the pope’s ability to have the message distributed so widely without his knowledge. He ordered
the police to close down Catholic publishing houses and sent agents to diocesan headquarters and monasteries throughout the country to seize their files. “I will heap disgrace and shame on the Catholic Church,” he told one visitor, “opening unknown monastic archives and having the filth contained in them published!”
¹³
Convinced that he knew the Church’s weak point, he threatened to reveal graphic tales of sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy and moved quickly to gather incriminating evidence. When word of the police raids got out, the bishop of Berlin and the archbishop of Breslau ordered all files dealing with complaints against priests burned. The pope urged all of Germany’s bishops to follow their example.
¹⁴

Worried that Italian newspapers might portray the encyclical as a denunciation of Nazism rather than a plea that the terms of the concordat with Germany be respected, the pope let the Duce know that this was not his intention.
¹⁵
Pacelli, for his part, was eager to avoid a break with the Nazi government, afraid it would leave the Church there defenseless.
¹⁶

In May, Mussolini took up the pope’s cause with the German foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath. The dispute with the Church, Mussolini told him, was harming the Third Reich’s reputation. Based on his own experience, he advised the Nazis to allow religious instruction in the public schools, something he had done to great profit in Italy. By doing “small favors to the higher clergy,” Mussolini suggested—he gave as examples providing free railway tickets and tax concessions—he had won them over, “so that they even declared the war in Abyssinia a holy war.”
¹⁷

It was advice that, in one form or another, the Duce was regularly giving the top Nazi leaders. The previous fall Germany’s justice minister, visiting Rome, had asked him how he had succeeded in nourishing such good relations with the Church in Italy. Mussolini boasted that after a brief period of difficulty in 1931, he had brought the Vatican in line. But he advised: Never let your guard down. The Catholic Church, he explained, is like a rubber ball. If you don’t keep up the pressure, it will return to its original shape.
¹⁸

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IN LATE MAY
1937 five hundred Chicago priests gathered at a local seminary, as they did four times a year, to attend their diocesan conference.
¹⁹
When Archbishop George Mundelein rose to speak, there was no indication that what he would say would be of any interest outside Chicago. But his remarks would trigger an international cause célèbre.
²⁰
Lashing out at the Nazi regime for its persecution of the Church, he told his priests, “Perhaps you will ask how it is that a nation of sixty million intelligent people will submit in fear and servitude to an alien, an Austrian paper hanger, and a poor one at that, and a few associates like Goebbels and Goring, who dictate every move of the people’s lives.”
²¹

The outraged German government demanded an apology from the Vatican. Cardinal Pacelli, replying on behalf of the pope, refused. No such apology could be considered, he said, unless the German government first ordered a stop to the constant stream of attacks on the Church in Germany’s newspapers.

Berlin recalled Diego von Bergen, Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See. “The Holy See will realize,” he warned, “that its unexpected and incomprehensible conduct in this matter, as long as it is not remedied, has eliminated the conditions necessary for a normal state of relations between the German Government and the Curia. The full responsibility for this development rests solely with the Curia.”
²²

If Cardinal Pacelli took the lead in this crisis, it was partly because the pope was still in such bad shape. Weakened by his failing heart and short of breath from his asthma, the pope had little of his old energy. One visitor said the pope looked as though he had “a ray of eternity on his face.” Pius XI’s illness, Pacelli observed, had left him “extremely emotional.” He could not see the frail pope, he told a fellow cardinal in April, without crying. Ever more frequently, when asked to act, the pope responded, “That will be for our successor to do.”
²³

By May the pope had retreated to Castel Gandolfo, where loudspeakers were installed for his public audiences to amplify his thin
voice. On his eightieth birthday, he was supposed to inaugurate the new Pontifical Academy of Sciences, but he had to cancel at the last minute.
²⁴

Tensions between the Holy See and Germany triggered speculation that the ailing pope might soon excommunicate Hitler.
²⁵
The pope’s disgust with the Nazis was also having an impact on his attitude to the Spanish civil war, as he was suspicious of Franco’s close ties with Hitler. Mussolini was sending men and munitions to support Franco’s struggle against “communism,” but the pope, he complained, while denouncing Communism in an encyclical, was doing nothing to support the revolt.
²⁶
Meeting in May with the primate of Spain, Cardinal Isdro Gomá, Franco told him how important it would be to have the pope’s public backing. Gomá agreed and informed the Vatican secretary of state office that a letter signed by the Spanish bishops would be published announcing their support for Franco. Pacelli urged the pope to have the document published as part of the Vatican’s official acts—the
Acta Apostolicae Sedis
—but the ailing pope refused. “This, cardinal,” he said simply, “no.”
²⁷

For Catholics outside Italy, the Holy See’s support of the Italian Fascist regime was becoming ever more uncomfortable. The Vatican’s latest embarrassment came on June 9, when French fascist thugs murdered Carlo Rosselli, a founder of the most important Italian anti-Fascist organization in exile. Matteotti, Amendola, now Rosselli—Mussolini’s minions had murdered three prominent leaders of the opposition, men of great moral stature.
²⁸

Tacchi Venturi was meanwhile working tirelessly to stamp out Catholic criticism of the Italian dictatorship. On July 12 Dino Alfieri, minister of popular culture, asked him to handle the latest incident. England’s most important Catholic magazine had recently published a letter blasting Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Its author, a Dominican, was upset that British fascists were claiming to have Vatican support. He cited Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical,
Non abbiamo bisogno
, to argue that the pope opposed Fascism.

Informed of the matter, Monsignor Pizzardo, the Vatican undersecretary
of state, drafted a letter to the archbishop of Westminster, leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.
²⁹
The offending piece in the British magazine, complained Pizzardo, “places Italian fascism and German racism on the same level with regard to the Catholic Church as if the former merited the same reproval and the same condemnation as the latter.” Its author should have distinguished more clearly between the two regimes. While the Church had condemned “the excesses of National Socialism,” the controversy over Italian Catholic Action in 1931 had quickly been settled. “Since that time,” Pizzardo concluded, “it is true that not only have there been no noteworthy cases of friction between the Ecclesiastical Authority and the Italian Government, but there has often been even a fruitful collaboration between them.”

Pizzardo sent the draft to Tacchi Venturi, who returned it with suggestions for strengthening its praise of the Fascist regime.
³⁰
He also advised that a copy be sent to the master general of the Dominican order, so that he could add his own “just warning.” Pizzardo made all the suggested changes and sent the letter. The chastised offender duly published a humiliating retraction in the magazine.
³¹

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
threatened to drag Europe into a larger conflagration. In August, Italian submarines began sinking ships bound for Republican-controlled Spanish ports, while Hitler accelerated Germany’s rearmament. Despite the rising world tensions, Mussolini still found time for his daily visits with his young mistress, Clara Petacci, and for sporadic flings with other women.

Mussolini had hitherto been able to keep details of his many affairs out of the world press. This changed in early 1937, thanks to a seductive twenty-nine-year-old French reporter. Magda Fontanges gained worldwide notoriety when she shot and wounded the French ambassador to Italy. She had tried to kill him, she said, because she blamed him for ending her affair with Mussolini. Her trial filled the world’s press with steamy stories describing their trysts. Fontanges later published her own bodice-ripping account in an American magazine under
the title “I Was Mussolini’s Mistress.”
³²
In three lurid installments, Magda described in breathless detail how Mussolini had seduced her. The second installment opened with a full-page illustration of Fontanges in Mussolini’s arms as they kissed. Its inscription read: “Holding me tightly, he gives me his first kiss. I feel a sensation of intoxication.” Later in the piece she described the dictator’s love nest in Palazzo Venezia as he guided her toward the sofa in the darkened room.

“He has embraced me again, growing very tender,” she recalled. “Then a sort of frenzy sweeps him, he becomes brutal, and he says, ‘You have known Il Duce—now you shall know the man!’