The Pope and Mussolini (54 page)

A month earlier, much to the surprise of the Vatican diplomatic corps, Cardinal Pacelli had left for his regular vacation in Switzerland.
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He arrived back in Rome on the overnight train, Sunday morning, October 30, and went directly from the station to the pope’s office.
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Tacchi
Venturi, who was already there, reported the latest developments. The pope agreed to let him make one last attempt to speak with Mussolini and find an amicable solution.
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In an attempt to get through to the Duce, the Jesuit gave Buffarini a note. The Holy Father, it said, was distressed to think of all the damage that would be done to Catholic support for the regime if the government went ahead with the new racial law without coming to an understanding with the Vatican. It would bring “immense joy to the anti-Fascists of every language and nation.” The pope believed there was still time to find wording for a new marriage law that would be “to the mutual satisfaction of both parties.”
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Although Pius was ailing, over the next weeks he met repeatedly with Tacchi Venturi, Pacelli, and Tardini to direct the frenetic, last-minute negotiations. On November 2, when they finally procured a copy of the proposed new law, the pope asked the group that had been meeting at Cardinal Jorio’s apartment to convene again.

Article 1 of the draft law stated, “Marriage between an Italian citizen of the Aryan race with a person belonging to another race is prohibited.” It excepted only those marriages provided for in article 7, which Mussolini had added as a sop to the Vatican: it allowed exceptions for a person who was dying or to legitimize children.
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Tardini repeated the advice he had earlier given the pope: the Vatican should officially oppose the racist principle behind the new law and let the world know it had not had a hand in its drafting.

But the others rejected Tardini’s pleas. Terrified of opening a rift with the regime, Borgongini, the nuncio, proposed that they threaten to announce that the new law conflicted with the concordat but, should it go into effect, not actually make any public protest. This would allow them to continue to lobby behind the scenes for the changes they sought.
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“It is obvious,” wrote Tardini, in later reporting that day’s developments, “that the nuncio’s great concern was to avoid a conflict between the Holy See and the Italian government. And since any declaration or protest by the Holy See (no matter how attenuated) might have been
exploited by Fascism’s enemies both internally and especially abroad to provoke a conflict, the nuncio sought to find a way—with some opportune modification of the law—to avoid any protest at all by the Holy See.”

Borgongini recalled that in its October 6 statement, the Fascist Grand Council declared that the children of a mixed marriage who professed another religion (namely, Catholicism) would not be considered Jews under the law. If the Vatican could get the regime to agree to insert this language in the new law, it would substantially reduce the number of marriages between Catholics that would be affected. That would be enough, thought the nuncio, to allow the Holy See to permit the new law to go into effect without protest.

But the pope did not agree, for under such terms Catholic converts from Judaism would still be considered Jewish. He insisted that the new law contain an exception permitting marriages of former Jews with other Catholics.
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Tacchi Venturi took the suggested revisions to Buffarini, although he knew the pope’s proposal had no chance of winning the dictator’s approval. Reading the suggested text as Tacchi Venturi looked on, Buffarini shook his head. He would not show it to the Duce, he said. It would only make matters worse.

That same evening Tacchi Venturi received the final text of the marriage law. Even the few exceptions contained in the earlier version, he saw, had been deleted.
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Mussolini was willing to bet that, despite all his threats, the pope would not in the end break with the Fascist regime.

C
HAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

FAITH IN THE KING

I
NCREDULOUS THAT MUSSOLINI WOULD SO BRAZENLY VIOLATE THE
concordat that had served them both so well, Pius XI wrote to the Duce to warn him of his folly.

“To Our Dearest Son,” the pope began. He made no mention of the first article of the new law, which established that “marriage between an Italian citizen of the Aryan race with a person belonging to another race is prohibited.” Rather he objected to article 7, which clearly violated the concordat’s provision that Church-approved marriages be civilly recognized. “Such a
vulnus
[wound] can easily be avoided,” the pope told the Duce, “if instead of the text of the above-mentioned article … one substituted the version that we provided to your collaborators, but that unfortunately we do not see accepted here.” The pope appended his recommended text, the revision of article 7 that Buffarini had so angrily rejected a day earlier. It would permit marriage between two Catholics, regardless of their “race.”
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In a last desperate effort to sway the dictator, Tacchi Venturi sent him a personal appeal. As someone who served the Duce for so many years and who had constantly proved his faithfulness and his love, he begged him to accept the pope’s request.
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Mussolini rejected the pontiff’s last-minute appeal out of hand, letting him know the next morning that he would make no change in the law. Furious at the brush-off, the pope decided to appeal to the king. Never had Pius written to Victor Emmanuel other than for ceremonial purposes. Now he asked him “to intervene with Your supreme authority to obtain that which we were not able to accomplish … with Your Prime Minister.” The pope reminded the king of the treaty that had been solemnly signed in his name in 1929, and the fact that the proposed marriage law ran directly contrary to its provisions. He attached his proposed alternative version of article 7.
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Several years later, in the aftermath of a disastrous war, Italians would hold a referendum on whether to keep the monarchy. They turned on the king, blaming him for not standing up to the dictator. Nowhere was Victor Emmanuel’s cowardice clearer—or in retrospect, more humiliating—than in his approval of every racial law that Mussolini proposed. As Jews were thrown out of schools and jobs, vilified by the state and robbed of their livelihood, the king continued to sign all the bills that Mussolini, at their twice-a-week meetings at the Quirinal Palace, brought him. In some ways making matters worse, the king had no sympathy for the Nazis’ deification of the Aryan race or for Mussolini’s attempts to craft an Italian variant; he simply did not have the courage to stand up to the Duce.

The king’s reply to the pope on November 7 reflected this same cowardice.
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Victor Emmanuel thanked the pontiff for his letter and said he had sent a copy of it to Mussolini, hoping a solution could be found that “conciliates the two points of view.” That was it.
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For his part, Mussolini again let the pope know he could not agree to his request, for doing so would mean undermining the whole intent of the new marriage law.
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Earlier in the week Ciano met with Hermann Göring, head of the German air force and Hitler’s minister of planning. Despite his infatuation with the Nazis, Mussolini’s dandified son-in-law found many of their leaders rather boorish. He left a vivid image of Göring in his diary: “Dressed in civilian clothes, with an expensive and loud gray suit. His
tie, knotted in an old fashioned style, has a ruby ring pinned on it. Other large rubies on his fingers. On his lapel, a large Nazi eagle with diamonds. He vaguely resembles ‘Al Capone.’ ”

Afterward Ciano filled his father-in-law in on his discussions with Göring. He then brought up the pope’s appeal to the king. “I cannot say,” observed Ciano, “that the Duce is very shaken.”
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Ciano was part of a lunch party that day, held at the American embassy in Rome. The guest of honor was none other than the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Mundelein, on a visit to the Vatican. President Roosevelt, to show solidarity with Mundelein in the wake of the storm that his denunciation of Hitler had stirred up the previous year, had hosted him at the White House before his departure. The president instructed Ambassador Phillips to do everything he could to show American support for the archbishop during his time in Italy.
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The papal nuncio was also present at the lunch party and, spotting Ciano, made his way through the crowd to reach him. The new marriage law was on the Council of Ministers agenda the next day, and Ciano was worried. Mussolini had gotten so worked up about the matter that the text was now much more drastic than the earlier version. If the law were to end Vatican support for the Fascist regime, thought Ciano, it would be a disaster.

“What will the pope do?” Ciano asked Borgongini.

“I don’t know, because the pope doesn’t tell anyone what he will do,” the nuncio responded. “But you can be certain he will do something big.”

“Will it be a diplomatic protest, or a public protest?” asked Ciano nervously.

Borgongini replied that he didn’t know, but suggested that Ciano, as foreign minister, could still intervene to save the Lateran Accords.

“And what can we propose now? Both the Holy Father and the Head of the Government have been dealing with it. So I, as minister of foreign affairs, and you, as nuncio, can’t do anything.”

Borgongini argued that it wasn’t too late, that Ciano could propose a bilateral commission to study the matter. When Ciano asked what he
could say to persuade the Duce, the nuncio again stressed how few marriages would be involved. By the end of their conversation, Borgongini was convinced that if Ciano could do anything to prevent a crisis with the Vatican, he would.
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That night, November 9, 1938, remains etched in historical memory as
Kristallnacht
, a night of horrors in Germany. Using as a pretext the assassination in France of a German diplomat by a teenaged Jewish refugee from Poland, marauding Nazis burned synagogues to the ground, sacked Jewish-owned stores, and hunted down and beat terrified Jews. Scores of Jews were murdered, tens of thousands arrested, and many sent to concentration camps. Hundreds of synagogues were burned to the ground, and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were plundered. In the aftermath of the violence, the German government announced that Jews would no longer be allowed to own stores or other businesses, practice trades, or enter theaters or concert halls, and that what remained of their property would be seized and turned over to Christians. Hundreds of Jews committed suicide. Ciano received a long report from the Italian ambassador in Germany giving the grisly details. Pacelli received a lengthy report from the nuncio in Berlin.
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Italy’s Catholic press had little to say about the horrors visited on Germany’s Jews. Venice’s diocesan weekly aimed all its scorn at the Jewish teenager who shot the Nazi diplomat, the “Jew who coldly aimed his revolver … armed in his heart by a deep sense of hatred, vendetta, and rancor.” It added, “We confess we cannot understand how a man’s hand can, with calculated premeditation, strike a pacific and unknown functionary.” Of the government-sponsored mass murder and destruction of the Jews in Germany, the diocesan weekly said nothing.
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As German synagogues were being torched and German Jews hunted down, Father Tacchi Venturi was in bed, unable to sleep. Knowing that Mussolini’s Council of Ministers would be meeting the next day, he cast about for a way to prevent a break between his two patrons. He rose from bed, turned on the light, and drafted a letter to the Duce.

“The change that I am proposing,” he wrote, “saves the basic principle
of the law”—the proposition that Italians are Aryans and Jews are not. “It simply allows for an exception.” Again Tacchi Venturi pleaded how rare such cases would be. “If one takes into account the small number of Italian citizens of Jewish race, the aversion that almost all Israelites have for marrying Christians, and the Christians for Jews, even if converted, I am not afraid of saying that there would be fewer than a hundred such marriages between spouses of different race, but both professing the Catholic religion.” That the normally astute Jesuit would get up in the middle of the night simply to repeat arguments he had already made many times to the Duce shows how desperate he was.
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