The Pope and Mussolini (51 page)

Mussolini with children in a Fascist youth group, 1938

(
photograph credit 24.1
)

Cardinal Pacelli asked the bishop of Como to investigate.
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After looking into the matter, the bishop assured Pacelli that the priest’s comments about the “snot-nosed kids” had been misinterpreted. They referred, he said, to overindulgent mothers who spoiled their children. But the bishop found no way to explain away the priest’s criticism of the racial campaign. As a result, he ordered Don Mauri never to give another sermon in the church.
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EUROPE, MEANWHILE, WAS MOVING
ever closer to war. On September 1 Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede its German-speaking Sudetenland region to the Third Reich. France began to mobilize its troops. In Rome, William Phillips, the U.S. ambassador, looked on with
growing concern. Mussolini’s racial manifesto in July had produced shock in the United States and alarm in the U.S. State Department, the latest sign that Mussolini intended to tie Italy’s fate to Nazi Germany. Phillips could see few levers that might prevent this catastrophe, and none more promising than the pope. He had excitedly reported to Washington on the pope’s July 20 speech and his criticism of the Duce’s eagerness to imitate Hitler. A month later his hopes had been dampened when he read the
Osservatore romano
article supporting restrictions on Jews. Still he had not entirely given up. Perhaps the pope might yet be swayed.

As soon as the latest racial laws were announced in early September, evicting Jewish children and teachers from Italy’s schools, Phillips asked to see Joseph Hurley, the one American prelate in the Vatican secretary of state office. The two men had met several times in the past, and in the absence of an American ambassador to the Holy See, Hurley kept Phillips informed on what was going on in the Vatican.
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When the two men met that evening in the U.S. embassy, the ambassador got right to the point. Both he and the American government were horrified by the new anti-Semitic laws. Not only were they outrageous in themselves; they would turn Americans sharply against the Italian government. Phillips saw the racial campaign as part of a larger, worrisome picture. Mussolini was losing his sense of reality, surrounded by sycophants and refusing to meet with foreign ambassadors who might offer a different view. Should things get worse, Phillips told Hurley, “perhaps the Vatican will be able, through its prudent intervention with the Italian Government, to ward off the catastrophe of a general war.”
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As an incentive, Phillips suggested that should the pope denounce the new racial laws, the American public would be so pleased that it would “disarm the Protestant opposition.” This would allow the American government to establish formal diplomatic relations with the Vatican. The Holy See had sought such recognition for decades, but the American political situation had so far made it impossible. The anti-Catholic prejudices of the Protestant majority, together with the belief that the Vatican was a religious organization and not a sovereign
state, had stymied efforts in the past.
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The next day Hurley passed Phillips’s message on to Pacelli.

Three days later Pius XI held an audience for the staff of Belgian Catholic radio. With the American ambassador’s message fresh in his mind, he spurned his counselors’ advice and let his heart guide him. His voice became laden with emotion and tears came to his eyes as he began to discuss the new racial campaign. “Every time I read the words ‘the sacrifice of our father Abraham,’ ” said the pope, referring to a phrase in the priestly blessing during mass, “I cannot help but be deeply moved.” His voice trembled. “It is impossible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. We recognize that everyone has the right to self-defense and can undertake those necessary actions to safeguard his legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually we are all Semites.”
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This was just what Ledóchowski, Tacchi Venturi, Borgongini, and Pacelli had feared. But they found a way to limit the damage. When
L’Osservatore romano
published an account of the pope’s remarks, no mention was made of his anguished words about the Jews.
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That some Catholics noticed the Vatican newspaper’s silence is clear from a police intelligence report filed the day after the pope’s comment. “Many Catholics who had fully approved of what the pontiff recently said in defense of the Jews,” it read, “now do not know how to explain why the Vatican newspaper, the only one not subject to Italian government censorship, has not returned to the subject following the decisions taken by the Council of Ministers. They find this silence to be strange.”
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How exactly Pacelli and his undersecretary, Domenico Tardini, had ensured that the Vatican newspaper ignored the pope’s explosive remarks remains a mystery. Most of the pages from Pacelli’s log of his meetings with the pope in these months are, curiously, missing from those open to researchers at the Vatican Secret Archives.

ITALIANS, THOUGHT MUSSOLINI, WERE
a weak people. He needed to toughen them up. At an early October Grand Council meeting where
additional racial laws were approved, he explained, “It is my task to bust the Italians’ balls. I understand that there are, at the margins, those who love the comfortable life. But they are just the fringes of the nation. We will cut them out.”
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In the eyes of many Italians, Mussolini had assumed godlike qualities, but along with the adulation came a dash of fear. As two members of the Institute of Fascist Culture were leaving the institute’s headquarters, they ran into the elderly caretaker. One of them jokingly pointed to the other and told the befuddled custodian, “Do you see that man? He’s an immortal.”

“What do you mean?” replied the old man. “All men are mortal!”

“Ah! I see! So you think Mussolini too is a mortal!”

“I didn’t say that!” insisted the frightened custodian.
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Around the same time, Foreign Minister Ciano had a visitor, Prince Philipp of Hesse, a man Hitler often used to send messages to Mussolini. It was Hesse who, earlier that year, had hand-carried Hitler’s letter to Mussolini informing him of the imminent invasion of Austria. Grandson of a German emperor and great-grandson of Britain’s Queen Victoria, Hesse had been a Nazi Party member since 1930. He had done much to win the German aristocracy over to the Nazi cause. When he arrived at Ciano’s office that day, he was clearly embarrassed. He had come, he explained, to see Ciano about a private family matter. In 1925 Hesse had married Victor Emmanuel’s daughter, and his mother-in-law, Queen Elena, had asked him to intercede on their behalf with the Duce. They wanted an exception to the racial laws to be made for their Jewish doctor. “It seems,” Ciano wrote in his diary, “that the Queen is very angry about the expulsion, and also the King, who trusts this doctor very much, but does not dare to speak to the Duce. And both of them count on my friendly mediation.” Delighted to have the upper hand with the nervous German aristocrat, Ciano smiled. What would the Führer say, should he mention Hesse’s request to him? he wondered aloud. At this the blood drained from Hesse’s face.
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In early September Pius XI told Tacchi Venturi to draft a message for Mussolini, on the need to exempt baptized Jews from the racial
laws. The pope approved the draft, then added something else. Tell Mussolini, he instructed his Jesuit envoy, that Italy’s racial laws might well “provoke reprisals on the part of Jews throughout the world.”
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A few days later Tacchi Venturi brought Mussolini a more pointed papal message. As an Italian, the pope said he was truly saddened to see “a whole history of Italian good sense forgotten, to open the door or the window to a wave of German anti-Semitism.”
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But as the first racial laws were made known, what most upset the pope, and certainly what most bothered those around him, was not their impact on Italy’s Jews but the fact that they were to apply to Catholic converts from Judaism as well.

After meeting with the pope on September 20, Tacchi Venturi prepared a memo, as he often did, to convey the pope’s wishes to Mussolini. Jews who had shown special merit—especially in military service in the Great War—had, he noted, been exempted from the new laws. The pope was pleased to learn of this exception but wondered why no similar provision had been made for Jews who had “separated themselves from the Synagogue, asking for and receiving baptism.” The Church “wants each of them to abhor Judaic perfidy and reject Jewish superstition, [and so] cannot forget these, its children.” These converts were especially at risk, added the pope’s envoy, because their own families shunned them, regarding them as traitors.

It made no sense, argued Tacchi Venturi, for Mussolini to exempt Jews who had served in the war and not those who had embraced Catholicism. The merit of the former was “certainly inferior to that much larger one that is the renunciation of the blindness and obstinacy of their error without which a Jew could not become a true Christian.”
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In the wake of the racial laws, a parade of Jews and former Jews sought help from Italy’s bishops. Uncertain what the pope expected of them, the bishops bombarded the Vatican with requests for guidance. In a typical letter, in late September, the archbishop of Turin told of all the Jews who had come to ask for his aid. If they thought they would get it, they were mistaken. “I must ordinarily limit myself,” he reported, “to suggest they remain calm, that they wait for further regulations, and
they have faith in the government, etc.” But while he could dismiss the Jews, he did not feel he could do the same for those Catholics who had converted from Judaism and were being treated as if they were Jews. It was for this reason that he wrote.

Tardini, saying that he had shared the archbishop’s letter with the pope, replied with a promise to bring the Turin cases, mentioned by the archbishop, to the government’s attention. He asked Tacchi Venturi to take up the matter.
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Italy’s Jews were feeling increasingly isolated. Primo Levi, then a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Turin, recalled those first months of the racial laws. “My Christian classmates were civil people. None of them or my professors directed a hostile word or gesture toward me, but I felt myself being distanced from them.… Every glance exchanged between them and me was accompanied by a small but perceptible glimmer of diffidence and suspicion. What do you think of me? What am I for you? The same as six months ago—one of your equals who does not go to mass—or the Jew?”
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In a September diary entry, a Jewish woman described her family’s plight. Her husband, a scientist, was despondent: he had recently received a letter containing an article he had written and submitted to a journal. “ ‘The editor returns it herewith,’ ” his wife noted; “a few embarrassed words, ‘no longer able to proceed with publication, most regretful,’ etc. He opened the next letter. ‘The president of the Academy of Science wishes to advise that, following instructions received to that effect, he is removing his name from the membership list.’ … The fearful sense of emptiness invaded him again, sweeping over his heart. He saw, suddenly and for the first time how his one true reason for living had been torn from him.”
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In another Jewish household, a young girl refused to come out of her room and would not eat. It was to have been her first day of school, but she would not get to share in the excitement with the other girls, for she was Jewish. Distraught, her mother entered her room “with my heart in my throat,” as she recalled in her diary. She described the scene: “Young people’s tears are so difficult to dry.… The room was
quiet, looked empty. Then I saw her, stretched across the bed, asleep. Her cheeks were still wet and her hand still clutched her handkerchief, and her ‘why’ still echoed in the quiet room.”
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HAVING GOBBLED UP AUSTRIA
in March, the Nazis were now threatening to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. In a September 12 speech at Nuremberg, Hitler vowed that should the territory not be given to them, the Germans would take it by force.
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Panic spread through Europe. By late September, six hundred thousand people had fled Paris, worried that a German attack was near.

In the midst of this frenzy, the Duce seized an unusual opportunity. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, invited him to mediate the Sudetenland dispute at a peace conference to be held in Munich.