The Pope and Mussolini (22 page)

Cesare De Vecchi, Italian ambassador to the Holy See, 1929–35

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photograph credit 9.2
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Those days, De Vecchi assured him, were past. Since Fascism had come to power, priests were treated with respect.
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A month later De Vecchi again met with the pope, but this time their encounter was far less pleasant. He stepped into the pontiff’s library with some trepidation, knowing how angry the pope was about the recent publication of Mussolini’s parliamentary speeches. As he entered, a trick of the sunlight shining through the window made it look as if fire were flaring from the pope’s eyeglasses. The pope tore into De Vecchi in terms the ambassador described as “harsh, resentful, often crude and cutting.” “Things can’t go on this way,” he warned, shaking his head, “they absolutely cannot go on this way. Your behavior,” said the pope, referring to the government’s publication of the speeches, “offends the Church and its head. I went out to meet Italy with an open heart and in payment for our loyalty Signor Mussolini has shot us in the back with a machine gun.” Riffling through papers on his desk, the pope pulled out reports of recent mistreatment of local Catholic Action chapters. In some areas, officers had been roughed up, and people had been told that good Italians did not join Catholic Action.

De Vecchi tried to defend the government. It could hardly be expected to stand by, he said, while anti-Fascists hid behind the Catholic groups.

The pope reacted as if he had been stung by a wasp and banged the table with his palm. “I don’t want to hear this!” He had given explicit orders that Catholic Action not engage in politics, and the government had no right to harass its members.

That was all well and good, replied De Vecchi, but it was one thing to give orders and another to have them obeyed.

Darkness fell during their two-and-a-half-hour meeting. As De Vecchi prepared to leave, the pope, calmer now, said, “Tell Signor Mussolini, in my name, not to confuse his friends with his enemies and vice versa, for confusion of that kind would limit the place that he will have in history.… And,” added the pope, “tell him that every day, in my prayers, I ask the Lord to bless him.”
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In mid-September the pope addressed a huge group of young Italian Catholics. Still upset about the treatment of Catholic Action, he bewailed the “martyrdom” they faced. Soon afterward, De Vecchi told the pope how upset Mussolini had been to hear of his remarks. It would be best, he suggested, for the pope to remain silent about his Catholic Action complaints so that De Vecchi and others could work through diplomatic channels to resolve them.

The ambassador should have known better. The pope slammed his hand on the desk and asked indignantly, “So you don’t want me to speak, you don’t want me to say that which it is my duty to say?”

“That’s not exactly what I mean, Holiness,” responded De Vecchi. “I know the person on the other side and my advice is meant only to aid the common good.”

“For the common good,” Pius repeated. “Let me tell you how I will proceed from now on to satisfy you on certain occasions. I will open this window”—here the pope, his voice rising, pointed with his finger to the window behind his desk—“and I will shout so that everyone in Saint Peter’s Square can hear me!”

De Vecchi was momentarily speechless. “That’s what I will do,” the pope repeated, “whether you like it or not, Mr. Ambassador!”
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Later in the fall, the hapless De Vecchi suffered through another bout of papal temper. Prince Umberto, the king’s son and heir, was eager to be married in one of Rome’s major churches, either in St. John in Lateran or in the monumental Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. But the pope turned down the request. Since the Savoyard kings had so long kept the popes a prisoner of the Vatican, he said, he himself had not yet visited either church, and it would not be appropriate for the great-grandson of the king who had deprived the popes of their lands to be married there.
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De Vecchi came to ask the pope to reconsider. “He is in a foul mood,” Gasparri warned the ambassador, before he entered.
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But under pressure from the royal family, the mustachioed monarchist nonetheless pressed the case.

In response, the pope “flew into a rage, sharply raising his voice,
and often interrupting when I tried to speak,” De Vecchi recalled. Unable to get a word in, he sat straight, immobile, in an effort to wait out the tirade. He tried his best to be expressionless but found it difficult to keep a nervous smile from his face.

The pope gesticulated dramatically. “I am offended, mortally offended,” he kept repeating, shaking his head and twisting in his seat. “Open your mouth, and your breath offends the Pope; you move, and you humiliate me; you get your sinister brain in motion and you do it to plot things that insult the Church.… Enough! Enough!”

Then the pope returned to complaining about how Catholic Action members were being treated. The overmatched ambassador again tried to defend his leader, but the pope got so angry, he jumped to his feet. The muscles in his face pulsed, his mouth clenched. The heavy marble statue of Christ on his desk swayed as the pope pounded his fist. “Lies! Lies!” he shouted.

Pius paced the room, talking angrily as if to himself. He stopped periodically to bang his fist again on his desk. “This is what you have done,” he exclaimed, regaining volume. “You have deceived the Pope! Everyone is saying so, everyone knows it, they are writing about it everywhere, inside Italy and abroad!”

De Vecchi endured it all, but when the pope went on to say, “Rome is mine,” the ambassador could not contain himself.

“Rome,” he sputtered, “is the capital of Italy, home of His Majesty the king and the government.”

“Rome,” replied the pontiff, “is my diocese.”

“Certainly,” agreed the ambassador, “in matters of religion—”

“Yes,” the pope interrupted, “all the rest is just a matter of keeping the streets clean.”
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THE CARDINALS OF THE CURIA
were murmuring about the pope, tired of his angry outbursts and unhappy not to be consulted on important Church matters. They were particularly upset that during the two and a half years of negotiations with Mussolini, he had not thought it necessary
to consult them.
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In late 1928, at the pope’s instruction, Gasparri had convened all of Rome’s cardinals in his quarters to let them know that an agreement was near. Bombarded by requests for more details, he replied that the pope would tell them in due course. As it turned out, they would get to read the text of the Lateran Accords only on February 11, 1929, the day it was signed and made public. Cardinal Cerretti, on a ship returning from Australia at the time, did not hide his anger. Mussolini, he quipped, had the pope eating out of his hand.
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Among the cardinals unhappy with the pope’s deal with Mussolini, none was more vocal than Basilio Pompili, cardinal vicar of Rome since 1916. Like a number of cardinals in Rome, the seventy-year-old Pompili saw Mussolini as no more trustworthy than the previous prime ministers, and no more Catholic. Ever since Italian armies seized Rome in 1870, the Church had insisted that the Eternal City could have no ruler but the pope. For Pius XI to abandon this claim and receive, in the cardinal’s eyes, so little in return, was a scandal, a sentiment he shared not only with his inner circle but with a larger group of acquaintances. What especially grated on him was the fact that the pope had never consulted him, the cardinal vicar of Rome.
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“They gave away Rome, its prestige, its historical importance, its monuments, its churches,” he complained, “as if they were dealing with an Abyssinian village.”
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The pope was “incompetent, weak, the scourge and the ruin of the Church that he has betrayed by placing himself at the mercy of a government that doesn’t remotely deserve the name of Catholic.”

The pope repeatedly urged Pompili to show more respect for the papacy. But when reports of his fulminations kept coming in, he lost patience and asked him to resign.
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The cardinal vicar, part of one of Rome’s most prominent noble families, was not intimidated. “Holiness,” responded Pompili, “you have the power to remove me from my post, and go ahead and do it if you please. But until the day I die, I will never willingly leave this position that I have held now for so much time, and of which I have never shown myself unworthy.”
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A few months later, when the pope appealed once more for him to step down, Pompili again dug in his heels. “I am going to keep shouting
the same thing until you can’t stand it anymore: ‘I will not move, I will not move, I will not move!’ ”
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As it happened, natural causes solved the pope’s problem. In 1931 Pompili died.
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JUST AS MUSSOLINI NAMED
De Vecchi to be Italy’s first ambassador to the Vatican, Pius XI appointed Francesco Borgongini-Duca, Gasparri’s protégé, to be the Holy See’s first nuncio to Italy. As the secretary of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, Borgongini had served as one of Gasparri’s two undersecretaries of state.

On Borgongini’s appointment, the pope moved the other undersecretary,
fifty-one-year-old Giuseppe Pizzardo, the substitute secretary of state, to the newly vacated position. Pizzardo came from a modest family near Genoa but had somehow made his way to the Pontifical Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics in Rome, the traditional training ground for the upper reaches of Vatican diplomacy. He had joined the Vatican secretary of state office shortly after his ordination. In 1909 he was sent to Germany as secretary to the papal envoy in Munich but found himself out of his element there and managed to return to the Vatican three years later. His own friends, reported a police informant, saw his desperate desire to return so quickly as the product of his “morbid and elephantine psychosis for power and bureaucratic office.”
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Monsignor Giuseppe Pizzardo

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photograph credit 9.3
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By the time of the Lateran Accords, Pizzardo was the member of the secretary of state office enjoying the closest relationship with the pope. A police informant in the summer of 1929 described him as the leading candidate to replace Gasparri. According to the report, Pizzardo, small and slender, his dark eyes darting with nervous energy, was “the true arbiter of the pope’s heart and the one to dominate every Vatican situation.” Many in the Vatican resented his influence. His adversaries called him a chameleon, a man lacking in character and dignity, a bully with those below him and a coward in the face of those above. Suspected of intrigue and of feathering his own nest, he was little loved, least of all by those who worked for him.
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According to these accounts, what especially recommended Pizzardo to the pope was his eager subservience, “cowering like a little dog” at the pope’s frequent scoldings.
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As chaplain of the Knights of Columbus, Pizzardo had access to American money. In 1924, recognizing the growing importance of the Church in the United States, Pius XI had doubled the number of American cardinals, elevating Patrick Joseph Hayes, archbishop of New York, and George Mundelein, archbishop of Chicago. “American gold had something to do with the promotion of the two archbishops,” Odo Russell, Britain’s envoy to the Holy See, remarked at the time.
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Once they were made cardinals, the two American archbishops did little to change Russell’s opinion. In 1927, in a spectacle that was breathtaking in its lavishness, even for those who lived amid the splendor
of the Vatican, Mundelein hosted an International Eucharistic Congress in Chicago. To transport the cardinals who had crossed the Atlantic for the gathering, he commissioned a special train from New York City, which he had painted cardinal red and named for the pope. On June 11 the train arrived at the Chicago station, carrying ten cardinals, along with assorted bishops, archbishops, and the benefactor who paid for it all. Neither of America’s two senior cardinals had been willing to make the journey in Mundelein’s “Pius XI Express.” Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia arrived in his own private railroad car, and Cardinal O’Connell of Boston landed with five hundred pilgrims in a private yacht. To cap the ceremonies off, Cardinal Mundelein sent the pope a gift of one million dollars.
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