So where is God's hand in all of this?
Carl Jarvis
On 9/5/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
The Pope Who Tried
by Alexander Stille.
The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015 Issue
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/04/23/pope-who-tried/
A review of:
The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of
Fascism in Europe
by David I. Kertzer
Random House, 549 pp., $32.00; $20.00 (paper)
During the past fifty years, most of the debate on the Catholic Church's
relationship with fascism has focused on the wartime period and the
Vatican's response to the Holocaust. Did the virtual silence of Pius XII,
who became pope in early 1939, about the mistreatment and extermination of
Europe's Jews facilitate Hitler's Final Solution, as his critics insist, or
was it, as Pius's defenders maintain, a heroic act of self-discipline that
prevented Nazi reprisals against the many thousands of Catholic institutions
that were secretly hiding and helping Jews? The debate, as Pius XII inches
his way toward sainthood, has become somewhat sterile since it depends
partly on difficult-to-prove arguments about what might have happened had he
spoken out.
One of the many virtues of David Kertzer's The Pope and Mussolini is that it
reframes the discussion by shifting attention away from World War II and
looking closely at the papacy of Pius XII's predecessor, Pius XI, who became
pope in 1922, the year that Benito Mussolini came to power, and died in
early 1939, several months before Hitler invaded Poland. Taking advantage of
the gradual opening of Vatican archives, Kertzer offers us a much more
detailed portrait of the inner workings of the Vatican in this period. The
many revelatory incidents, documents, and scenes he adds to the story are
bound to reanimate the older debate on Pius XII.
When Mussolini seized power in his so-called March on Rome in October 1922,
Achille Ratti, a scholarly librarian and former archbishop of Milan, had
only recently become Pope Pius XI. The Catholic Church had not been
particularly supportive of fascism during its rise. Mussolini, after all,
had started out his career as an outspoken atheist and anticlerical
firebrand. The Church supported its own specifically Catholic party, the
Partito Popolare, or Popular Party, which competed with both the Socialists
and the Fascists.
To the pope's surprise, on taking power Mussolini immediately began a
concerted campaign to win the Church's support. He used his first speech to
Parliament to articulate his vision of a Fascist society that placed the
Church at the center of Italian life: the Fascist Party would be the
unquestioned authority in political life and the Church would be restored to
its primacy over the spiritual life of the nation. Mussolini followed up his
speech with a series of concrete actions: crucifixes were placed in every
public school classroom, courtroom, and hospital room; insulting a priest or
disparaging the Catholic religion was made a criminal offense; Catholicism
became a required subject in public schools; and considerable state funds
were spent on priests' salaries, as well as Church-run schools overseas.
This represented a remarkable departure--not just for Mussolini but for
Italy. The battle to create a united Italian state had been fought, in part,
at the expense of Church power, and resulted in the end of the pope's
temporal rule over Rome and much of central Italy. It took the popes decades
to realize that Italy was a permanent reality that they needed to accept.
Mussolini offered them the possibility of doing so on highly favorable
terms. Almost immediately he began secret negotiations for a treaty between
the Vatican and the Italian state. This concordat, known as the Lateran
Treaty, was signed in 1929; it made Catholicism Italy's state religion and
compensated the Church for its lost territories with a generous financial
settlement. Pius XI was so pleased with the treaty that he referred to
Mussolini as the "man sent by providence.
The general outlines of this story have always been matters of public
record, but Kertzer's book deepens and alters our understanding
considerably. The portrait that emerges from it suggests a much more organic
and symbiotic relationship between the Church and fascism. Rather than
seeing the Church as having passively accepted fascism as a fait accompli,
Kertzer sees it as having provided fundamental support to Mussolini in his
consolidation of power and the establishment of dictatorship in Italy.
The Vatican's first and perhaps most important contribution was the
dismantling of the Popular Party, which in the first years of fascism
remained one of the greatest obstacles to dictatorial rule. As Mussolini
began to negotiate the Lateran Treaty, he made it clear that he considered
it an intolerable contradiction for the Church to enter into a partnership
with his regime while at the same time fielding an opposition party that
criticized it. Just eight months after the March on Rome, Pius XI forced
Father Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the Popular Party, to resign as party
secretary.
Kertzer writes that Pius XI may have had a crucial part in supporting
Mussolini at a moment when he might well have fallen from power. In 1924,
Italy held elections that were badly marred by violence, intimidation, and
fraud. Not surprisingly, the Fascists obtained a majority, but the Popular
Party and the Socialists, braving impossible conditions, held on to
significant minorities. When the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti
denounced the conduct and outcome of the elections, he was kidnapped and
murdered in downtown Rome. The Matteotti killing shocked the Italian middle
and upper-middle classes, who suddenly began to rethink their support of
fascism. As the investigation unfolded, the opposition suddenly regained
vigor. Mussolini went into a kind of personal crisis, seeming to regard his
own resignation as inevitable. Even pillars of the Italian establishment
like the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera now called on him to step down.
What was left of the Popular Party, the Catholic party, was also calling for
a new government. This would almost certainly have required a coalition
between the Catholics and the Socialists.
The Vatican, instead, decided to support Mussolini. An internal political
briefing from this period stated:
Catholics could only think with terror of what might happen in Italy if the
Honorable Mussolini's government were to fall perhaps to an insurrection by
subversive forces and so they have every interest in supporting it. Pius XI,
through his personal emissary, Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, sent Mussolini
a private message of encouragement and solidarity. On a more concrete level,
the pope also silenced Father Sturzo, who although no longer the head of the
Popular Party remained a prominent public figure denouncing fascism. Sturzo
was ordered to stop publishing his views and reluctantly agreed to leave
Italy.
Without a unified opposition, the crisis passed and Mussolini regained his
footing. "If Mussolini was not deposed as a result of the Matteotti crisis,"
Kertzer writes,
it was because the opposition--not least due to the pope's constant efforts
to undermine any possible alliance to put an end to Fascist rule--failed to
offer a credible alternative. Lacking this alternative, neither the king nor
the army was willing to act. In 1926, all opposition parties were forced to
dissolve, including, of course, the Popular Party, which the pope accepted
without difficulty. As Father Sturzo wrote in protest, the pope was getting
rid of the one party "that is truly inspired by Christian principles of
civil life and...today serves to limit...the arbitrary rule of the
dictatorship.
It is perhaps surprising to some today that the pope would not have been
more concerned about killing off Italy's Catholic party and its democracy as
well. But for the Vatican, democracy was hardly a positive value and it had
only reluctantly allowed the creation of the Popular Party in 1919. After
all, the movement toward parliamentary democracy in modern Europe had gone
hand in hand with a series of other movements calling for reforms that would
break the Church's power in much of European society: freedom of speech,
individual rights, separation of church and state, public secular education,
the confiscation of Church lands, and equal rights for other religions or
even those who held no faith at all.
With the Lateran pact, both the Vatican and the Fascist regime saw
themselves as having entered into a form of partnership. The Vatican turned
to Mussolini to ban books the Church found offensive and to prevent
Protestants from trying to spread their faith. In return, Mussolini expected
the Church to support the dictatorship. Having done away with opposition
political parties, fascism would instead hold public referendums in which
voters were asked to vote yes for the regime and for a preselected slate of
candidates for Parliament. Before the first referendum in 1929, the pope, as
Kertzer shows, insisted on vetting the potential candidates, rejected some
three quarters of them as insufficiently Catholic, and demanded a new list
that was "free from any tie with Freemasonry, with Judaism and, in short,
with any of the anticlerical parties.
The pope considered this extraordinary request a fulfillment of the Lateran
Treaty. As a Vatican letter to Mussolini explained:
In this way the Duce will place...the most beautiful and necessary crown
atop the great work of the treaty and the concordat. He will show one more
time that he is (in conformity with what His Holiness recently called him)
the Man sent by Providence. When the regime complied, Italy's priests
literally led their congregations to the ballot boxes.
It is shocking to see the Vatican insisting on the exclusion of Jews from
political life nearly ten years before the Fascist regime introduced
anti-Semitic legislation, in 1938. In what are likely to be the most
controversial parts of Kertzer's book, he shows that some elements of the
Vatican were urging fascism toward anti-Semitism well in advance of its own
decision to make a public issue of race. The Jesuit father Pietro Tacchi
Venturi, Pius XI's emissary to Mussolini, a man who thus had the ear of both
the pope and the dictator, was a rabid anti-Semite who appears to have
firmly believed that "the worldwide Jewish-Masonic plutocracy" was the
Church's greatest enemy. As Kertzer writes:
In September 1926 Tacchi Venturi gave the Duce a recently published
fifteen-page pamphlet, Zionism and Catholicism, which had been dedicated to
the Jesuit himself. The pamphlet, after recalling that God condemned the
Jews to wander the earth and cursed them for rejecting Jesus, turned to the
more immediate dangers the Jews posed. "No one can doubt," its author
warned, "the Jewish sect's formidable, diabolical, fatal activity throughout
the world. There is no indication that the Duce paid much attention to the
pamphlet or that it reflected the views of the pope. But Tacchi Venturi made
no secret of his views, and they obviously didn't diminish his standing as
one of the pope's most trusted advisers. Belief in the Jewish conspiracy was
a widely held and entirely respectable position in the Catholic Church of
the 1920s and 1930s. On reading Kertzer's book, one would have to say that
some form of anti-Semitism--the tendency to regard Jews as a troublesome
minority fundamentally hostile to the Church-was the norm at the highest
levels of the Vatican in the 1930s.
The intensity of this belief varied considerably, moving along a spectrum
from mild to virulent anti-Semitism. Pius XI was on the milder end. He
recalled with fondness his days in Milan when he received Hebrew lessons
from a local rabbi to help him with his Bible studies. He regarded
anti-Semitic legislation in Italy, where Jews were a mere one in a thousand
of the population, as unnecessary, but he accepted that some countries where
Jews were far more numerous might need to take measures to avoid Jewish
"dominance. When he was papal nuncio to Poland, he warned that much of the
disorder that followed World War I was the result of the Poles falling into
the clutches of the evil influences that are laying a trap for them and
threatening them.... One of the most evil and strongest influences that is
felt here, perhaps the strongest and the most evil, is that of the Jews. In
1928, Pius XI endorsed the decision of the Vatican's Holy Office (the
successor to the Inquisition) to suppress the Catholic organization called
the Friends of Israel. Although devoted to the eventual goal of converting
the Jews, the group called for the Church to treat the Jews with greater
respect and sympathy. Its members included thousands of priests, 278
bishops, and nineteen cardinals.
The group evidently went too far when it called on the Church to abandon the
tradition of referring to Jews as Christ-killers and to give up the
traditional Easter prayer referring to the "perfidious Jews. Cardinal Rafael
Merry del Val, the head of the Holy Office, a former Vatican secretary of
state and one of the most powerful cardinals in Rome, insisted that the
Friends of Israel had been unwitting tools of the Jews' plan to "penetrate
everywhere in modern society...to reconstitute the reign of Israel in
opposition to the Christ and his Church. After meeting with Pius XI, Merry
del Val reported that the pope shared his view that "behind the Friends of
Israel one finds the hand and the inspiration of the Jews themselves.
One of the most valuable achievements of Kertzer's book is that it creates
an institutional portrait of the Vatican. While it deepens our understanding
of individual historical figures--Pius XI, but also his secretary of state,
Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pius XII--it shows extremely well that even in
an autocratic organization like the Vatican, the pope does not always act
alone. There is a permanent bureaucracy with deep institutional biases and
tendencies that can often shape and mold papal action.
Kertzer's evidence makes it clear that it became almost irrelevant whether
Pius XI was or wasn't anti-Semitic or pro-fascist. He was surrounded by a
powerful group at the Vatican who shared authoritarian, anti-democratic
political views and whose thought was deeply permeated--to varying
degrees--by anti-Semitism.
Perhaps the most dramatic account in The Pope and Mussolini is the story of
how, during the last years of Pius XI's papacy, he apparently underwent a
transformation: he soured on fascism and became disillusioned with Mussolini
and disgusted by Hitler. Unlike his principal advisers, he seems to have
gradually understood that fascism was not just another conservative movement
but a dangerous pagan ideology that was deeply at odds with Christianity.
"Tell Signor Mussolini in my name," the pope told the Italian ambassador to
the Holy See in 1932, "that I do not like his attempts at trying to become a
quasi- divinity and it is not doing him any good either.... Sooner or later
people end up smashing their idols.
During these years the Vatican bureaucracy worked hard to suppress, weaken,
water down, or quash virtually all the pope's criticism of Mussolini or
Hitler in order to smooth over or avoid diplomatic conflict. In 1935, when
Italy invaded Ethiopia, Pius XI denounced it as an "unjust war,"
"unspeakably horrible" in front of a group of religious nurses who had come
for a papal audience.
In Rome, the curia set about adulterating the pope's remarks so as to
obfuscate their real meaning when they appeared in L'Osservatore romano.
"Here I cut a word, there I add another," recalled Domenico Tardini, a
high-level official in the Vatican secretary of state's office, noted
proudly in his diary. "Here I modify a sentence, there I erase another. In
short, with a subtle and methodical effort we succeed in greatly softening
the rawness of the papal thought.
Similarly, when America, an influential Jesuit magazine in the US, published
a strong criticism of Italy's war in Ethiopia, the Italian government went
behind the pope's back by protesting to W? odzimierz Ledochowski, the
general superior of the Jesuit Order, a man known for his pro-fascist
leanings and virulent anti-Semitism. Ledochowski obliged by replacing
America's anti-fascist editor with one who supported the regime.
Pius XI was mortified that Mussolini invited Hitler to Rome in May 1938 and
turned the entire city into a welcoming platform for the author of Mein
Kampf, plastering the city of the popes with swastikas. Pius, in a very
clear gesture, left Rome during Hitler's visit and closed the Vatican
Museums, preferring to avoid what he called "the apotheosis of Signor
Hitler, the greatest enemy that Christ and the Church have had in modern
times.
And when, during the summer of 1938, it became clear that Mussolini was
ready to follow Hitler in adopting an official policy of biological
anti-Semitism, the pope was scathing. He told a group of students about the
dangers of "exaggerated nationalism," insisting on the essential unity of
the human race and lamenting Mussolini's aping of Hitler. "One can ask how
it is that Italy, unfortunately, felt the need to go and imitate Germany.
Terrified by the prospect of a major public condemnation of Mussolini's new
racial policy, the regime asked for the help of Father Ledochowski, who as
head of the Jesuits was one of the most powerful figures in the Church. "I
went to see the general of the Jesuits," Italian ambassador Pignatti later
explained, "because in the past...he did not hide from me his implacable
loathing for the Jews, whom he believes are the origin of all the ills that
afflict Europe.
Ledochowski described in letters what he regarded as the feelings of
desperation within the Vatican. The closest advisers of Pope Pius XI, he
wrote, had come to regard him as in dangerous decline, making ill-advised
remarks without consulting them. "Cardinal Pacelli was at his wit's end:
'The pope no longer listens to him as he once did. He carefully hides his
plans from him and does not tell him about the speeches he will give.'
As a result, the pope's advisers were trying to silence him. When he told a
group of Belgian Catholics, "Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually we
are all Semites," the Vatican made sure that those remarks were missing from
the account of the pope's remarks in L'Osservatore romano. Kertzer
attributes the censorship of the pope to Cardinal Pacelli, who as secretary
of state was effectively running the Vatican during Pius XI's final
illness.
While old and very sick, Pius XI was clearly thinking seriously about the
problem of race and came across a book called Interracial Justice, by an
American Jesuit named John LaFarge, who had worked with African-American
congregations during his ministry. The pope was struck by LaFarge's call for
racial tolerance and asked him to write an encyclical on the subject. "Say
simply what you would say if you yourself were pope," he said. But LaFarge's
superior, Jesuit General Ledochowski, made sure that this did not happen. He
appointed two more experienced theologians (whose views were much closer to
his own) to help LaFarge draft the encyclical. Rather than forward it to the
pope, Ledochowski sat on it for several months, cutting and modifying, until
he produced a much shorter draft that was very far in spirit from LaFarge's
Interracial Justice but that kept some of the original intent and was called
"On the Unity of Humankind. Ledochowski did not pass on this document to the
pope until he was just weeks from death and too sick to do anything with
it.
During these same months, Vatican officials succeeded in preventing a break
with Mussolini's government over the racial laws that were passed in the
fall of 1938. The Church's main objection was to the laws' biological
definition of race, which did not exempt Jewish converts to Catholicism,
mixed marriages between Jews and Catholics, or their children. But it was
difficult for the Church to object to the overall message of the racial
laws, since after all, the regime, as the Fascist press enjoyed pointing
out, was not doing anything that the Church had not done for centuries and
continued to advocate in some of its most authoritative publications.
In May 1937, more than a year before the passage of the racial laws, the
Jesuit magazine La Civilta cattolica published an article on "The Jewish
Question and Zionism," making its point of view clear from the start: "It is
an evident fact that the Jews are a disruptive element due to their spirit
of domination and their preponderance in revolutionary movements. A year
later, precisely when the regime was beginning to prepare its own racial
laws, La Civilta cattolica published a long, enthusiastic article on newly
introduced anti-Semitic legislation in Hungary. "In Hungary," the journal
explained,
the Jews have no single organization engaged in any systematic common
action. The instinctive and irrepressible solidarity of their nation is
enough to have them make common cause in putting into action their messianic
craving for world domination. As Kertzer writes:
Hungarian Catholics' anti-Semitism was not of the "vulgar, fanatic" kind,
much less "racist," but "a movement of defense of national traditions and of
true freedom and independence of the Hungarian people. Thus, despite his
evolving thoughts on racism, Pius XI was not really able to mount a
comprehensive critique of the racial laws, limiting himself to a rather
weak, general plea for Christian mercy. "We recognize," said Pius, "that it
is up to the nation's government to take those opportune measures in this
matter in defense of its legitimate interests and it is Our intention not to
interfere with them. But according to Kertzer, "the pope felt duty-bound to
appeal to Mussolini's 'Christian sense' and warn him 'against any type of
measures that were inhumane and unchristian.'
In a memo the Fascist government assured the Vatican that
"the Jews, in a word, can be sure that they will not be subjected to
treatment worse than that which was accorded them for centuries and
centuries by the popes who hosted them in the Eternal City and in the lands
of their temporal domain."
Despite his serious misgivings over the fate of converted Jews, Pius XI
eventually accepted the compromise worked out by his senior advisers, which
was really no compromise at all: all Jews, including converted Jews, were
subject to the legislation.
During the final months of his life, Pope Pius XI, despite being near death,
worked feverishly on an address he hoped to give to the Italian bishops on
the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Treaty, scheduled for March 1939. He
hoped, Kertzer shows, to use the occasion to offer a tough criticism of the
regime and the ways it had violated the concordat with the Vatican.
Pius XI felt strongly enough about this speech that he insisted on having
copies of it printed up in case he was not well enough to deliver it. Among
other things it contained a reference to "all peoples, all the nations, all
the races, all joined together and all of the same blood in the common link
of the great human family. He ended up dying a few weeks before the
scheduled meeting with the bishops.
Rumors began to reach both Mussolini and his foreign minister and son-in-law
Galeazzo Ciano, who had good informants inside the Vatican, about the
existence of an explosive document the pope had left behind. As Kertzer
writes:
Learning of Mussolini's concern, Pacelli moved quickly. On February 15 he
ordered the pope's secretary to gather up all written material the pope had
produced in preparing his address. He also told the Vatican printing office
to destroy all copies of the speech it had printed, copies that Pius had
intended to give the bishops. The vice director of the office gave his
assurance that he would personally destroy them, so that "not a comma"
remained. Pacelli acted two days after learning of Ciano's worries that the
text of the pope's speech might get out. Pacelli also took the material that
Ledochowski had sent the pope three weeks earlier--what has since come to be
known as the "secret encyclical" against racism--eager to ensure that no one
else would see it. The words the pope had so painstakingly prepared in the
last days of his life would never be seen as long as Pacelli lived..