The Pope and Mussolini (57 page)

The next day the Duce summoned both Ciano and Pignatti to discuss the latest developments. He was still mulling over the phrase “incomparable minister” that the pope had used in referring to him in his Christmas address. He was sure the pope was being sarcastic, taking him for a fool. “We do not want a conflict,” Mussolini told the two men, “but we will not shy away from one, and in that case we shall arouse all the dormant anticlerical rancor.” Fearful of where Mussolini’s temper might lead, Pignatti tried to defend the pontiff, and Ciano too thought it madness to risk alienating the Church. But Mussolini wanted to apply pressure and prepared a sharp note of warning for his ambassador to deliver to the Vatican secretary of state.
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Pignatti presented the Duce’s note to Pacelli the next day. The cardinal insisted that the phrase that had so upset Mussolini—“incomparable minister”—had been sincere. The pope had intended to express his appreciation for all that Mussolini had done for Italy and the Church. Pignatti replied that relations with the Holy See were at a dangerous juncture. If the Church were not careful, he warned, it would find itself in trouble.
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What made the past months so painful to the pope was his realization that his dreams of turning Italy into a confessional state—one where the machinery of the authoritarian regime would be at the service of the Church—had been so naïve. True, he had been able to do what no modern pope before him had done: get the government to impose the Church’s will on the Italian population. Catholic clergy now played active roles in many state institutions—from schools to government-sponsored youth groups—where before they had been absent. But the battle over the marriage law had made it clear that for any matter that Mussolini deemed crucial to his regime, it was he who would decide, not the pope.

The London
Daily Mail
published a story by its Rome correspondent claiming that Pius XI was planning a secret gathering of the cardinals to draft a ringing denunciation of racism. Rumors spread that the pope was preparing a secret encyclical with the same aim. Cardinal Pacelli denied the reports but told the Italian ambassador that the pope
had warned that he “would have more to say and that at his age he had no fear.” In conveying these remarks to Ciano, Pignatti nervously recalled the pope’s comment that “before dying, he might do something that Italy would remember for a long time.”
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THE POPE
’
S CRITICAL REMARKS
about racism had left Italy’s Church leaders some room to voice criticisms of their own. Cardinal Schuster of Milan had been the most clamorous case. The possibility that other high prelates might follow his example had Mussolini and his acolytes worried.
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Roberto Farinacci led the attack on Schuster, asking in
Il Regime fascista
how someone who had been a “super-Fascist” could so suddenly go to the other extreme. It could certainly have nothing to do with the Catholic religion, Farinacci argued, for in battling the Jews, Fascism was fighting “the enemies of Christianity, who offend and insult Christ.”
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Farinacci turned to the influential head of the Catholic University of Milan for help. Father Gemelli, the rector, was scheduled to give a major public lecture in Bologna.

Two days before it was to take place, Farinacci sent Mussolini a letter, telling the Duce how he had recently gotten Giovanni Cazzani, the bishop of Cremona, to give a sermon supporting the anti-Semitic campaign. Then he added, “I hope to have persuaded Father Gemelli to give one of the same kind in Bologna.”

A week later
L’Osservatore romano
, the Vatican daily, would publish the Cremona bishop’s sermon, which had all the appearance of offering a Vatican endorsement of the anti-Semitic laws. All of Italy’s bishops were in agreement on the treatment of the Jews, the paper’s editor explained in his preface, and their views were in perfect harmony with the pope’s.

“Germanic exaggerated racism,” warned Bishop Cazzani, was a “doctrine contrary to the revealed truth.” But the fact that the Nazis had gone about their anti-Jewish campaign for the wrong reasons did not mean that Italy’s racial laws were unjustified. The problem with the
Nazis’ exaggerated racism was that it extended its reach to Catholics. “The Church,” said the bishop, “has always judged living together with the Jews—as long as they remain Jews—to be dangerous to the faith and to the tranquility of Christian peoples. It is for this reason that you find an ancient and long tradition of ecclesiastical legislation and discipline, directed to stopping and limiting the action and influence of the Jews in the midst of the Christians and the contacts of Christians with them, isolating the Jews and not permitting them to exercise those offices and those professions by which they could dominate or influence the spirit, the education, the custom of Christians.” The Church, he insisted, had been unfairly accused of opposing the laws aimed against the Jews. What the Church had condemned was “exaggerated Germanic racism.” It “has not and does not condemn any political defense of the integrity and the prosperity of the race, and any legal precaution taken against an excessive and damaging Judaic influence in the life of the Nation.”
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Father Gemelli was in Bologna on January 9 to take part in a high-profile tribute to a fourteenth-century surgeon who had lived there. Jarringly—for the surgeon was not Jewish—at the end of his remarks, he turned his attention to the Jews. Italians today, Gemelli told his illustrious audience, “have suffered most of all from that conflict between church and state that, as a result of the efforts of the Judaic-Masonic cabals, sought to reduce Religion to a private affair.” Thanks to the resolution of the Roman question, he said, Italians had become “one in blood, religion, language, custom, hopes, ideals.” Meanwhile, “that terrible sentence that the deicide people brought on themselves and for which they go wandering through the world, is fulfilled. They are incapable of finding the peace of a homeland, while the consequences of that horrible crime follow them everywhere and in every time.”
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Bologna’s
L’Avvenire d’Italia
, Italy’s most influential Catholic newspaper, gave Gemelli’s remarks heavy coverage. The lesson to be drawn from the talk was “that the cardinals and the bishops have always and everywhere combated foreign racism, but that that has nothing to do with Italy’s racial policy.” Returning to the speech a week
later, the paper informed its readers that “Father Gemelli’s speech and Monsignor Cazzani’s sermon … are an authorized and solemn illustration of this Catholic doctrine that is professed and taught by all in the Church hierarchy from top to bottom and by the sovereign pontiff in the infallibility of his magisterium.”
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THE AILING POPE WAS SHOWING
signs of losing control of the Church he had long ruled with an iron hand. Those around him were frustrating his every attempt to prevent Italy from joining the Nazi cause. When Pius read Gemelli’s text, he broke down and cried, sending Pacelli out of his room so that he could be alone.
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But that same week the Vatican newspaper had approvingly published the Cremona bishop’s justification of the racial laws.
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And if Pius was upset with Gemelli for his remarks, it seemed to do nothing to affect their close relationship. The pope continued to give him unusual access, receiving Gemelli again on January 22.
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For those Italians who perceived any dispute between the Fascist state and the Vatican over the racial laws, what was at issue was not laws aimed against the Jews, for these the Vatican embraced, but Mussolini’s flirtation with Nazi racial ideology, which conflicted with the Church’s doctrine and its universal ambitions.

Convinced he hadn’t much longer to live, the pope saw the upcoming tenth anniversary of the Lateran Accords as his final chance to address Italy’s bishops, two-thirds of whom he had named.
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He felt responsible for them, and amid all the dangers the world faced, and all the threats to Christian values, he believed he had a sacred duty to convey God’s will.

The pope was eager to learn if Mussolini would be in St. Peter’s for his speech. Cardinal Pacelli told him he didn’t know but thought it unlikely. “If he does not want to celebrate the tenth anniversary,” replied the pope, “I will do it by myself.”
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There was no escaping the sensation in the Vatican that an era was ending. After almost seventeen years, there would soon be a new pope. Rumors rocketed around Europe. French papers reported that the ailing
pope, angry at Mussolini, wanted to leave Italy and move to France and was weighing the relative merits of Avignon and Fontainebleau. The London
Daily Mail
and various radio broadcasts announced that, as he prepared the Catholic world for his successor, the pope was planning to move to Castel Gandolfo in midwinter, to prepare a final testament denouncing all the errors of the time.
L’Osservatore romano
ridiculed the stories, in an article under the heading “Cronache della Befana” (Fairy Tales). The pope, reported the Vatican paper, was in “excellent health.”
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Mussolini was still fuming over the pope’s complaints about the persecution of Italian Catholic Action in his Christmas remarks to the cardinals, which the foreign press had quoted to trumpet the pope’s unhappiness with the regime.
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The Italian ambassador reported the Duce’s displeasure to Cardinal Pacelli. No one, replied Pacelli, could prevent such papal outbursts. “The Holy Father’s irritability gets more pronounced every day,” the ambassador reported to Ciano, “and makes his collaborators’ work extremely difficult.”

According to Pignatti, the pontiff was fixated on the idea that the government was persecuting Catholic Action groups. The pope was taking minor incidents and turning them into major problems. At a recent meeting, Pius had asked Tardini for the latest news of Catholic Action. When he responded that there were no significant incidents to report, the pope blew up. Thrusting a stack of letters in front of the hapless Tardini, he shouted, “You never know anything. Read what they are writing me.”

“I fear,” Pignatti told Ciano, “that there isn’t much to be hoped for as long as the present pontificate endures.” Pius XI, he added, suffered from “pathological cerebral irritation,” a condition that worsened as he aged.

Things were likely to improve when the pope died, but nothing should be left to chance. The government needed to work discreetly with Italy’s cardinals. “It is necessary,” he advised, “… that there be a good group of cardinals in the future conclave that can authoritatively affirm that the Fascist government has remained faithful to its agreements
and to the spirit behind them. The decree on mixed marriages is a minor matter, blown up by the pope’s irritability.”
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Mussolini faced a dilemma. He dreaded participating in a Vatican extravaganza in which all attention would focus on the pontiff. Yet not to take part in commemorating what the world saw as one of his greatest triumphs could be seen as a sign of weakness, as if he felt he no longer had the Church behind him.
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Mussolini got word to Cardinal Pacelli that he was willing to discuss how best to organize the festivities. He proposed a series of events in which he was at the center, the kinds of Fascist celebrations that he presided over regularly. He and the pope would give separate speeches, exchange messages of congratulations, and hold a mass. Mussolini wanted to hold his mass at the huge Roman sports field that had been built in his honor. He would not step foot in St. Peter’s. He also wanted to host a reception for Italy’s bishops while they were in Rome.

Pacelli conveyed the Duce’s proposals to the pope the next day, hoping to find a way to present the event as a joint celebration by the Holy See and the Italian state. But the pope again went off on a tangent, tearing into Mussolini for not responding to the letter he had sent him on the marriage law. Then, turning to Mussolini’s suggestions for the celebration, the pope said he could accept the exchange of messages but would not allow the bishops to attend a reception at Palazzo Venezia. He was the one who had invited them to Rome, not Mussolini. And if Mussolini wanted to hold a mass somewhere else in Rome, the pope would certainly not have anything to do with it.

The more the pope mulled over Mussolini’s proposals, the more upset he got. Two days later he told Pacelli he had changed his mind and would not exchange messages of congratulation with Mussolini. The Lateran Accords had been signed in the king’s name, he said, and any such exchange should be with the monarch, not with the Duce.
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IT WAS NOW SEVEN MONTHS
since the pope had secretly summoned Father LaFarge to Castel Gandolfo to prepare a draft encyclical on racism
and anti-Semitism. But he had received nothing. Unable to keep the secret from his advisers any longer, he told Tardini about the project and asked him to find out from Ledóchowski what had become of the American Jesuit’s work.

When, months earlier, Ledóchowski had sent the draft encyclical to Rosa, he had enclosed a cover note: “I send Your Reverence a copy of Father LaFarge’s work with the prayer that you look through it and tell me … if it can be presented in this form to the Holy Father as a first draft.” Ledóchowski quickly answered his own question: “I very much doubt it!” Rosa never got to finish his revisions.
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On Saturday evening, November 26, while sitting at his desk, the sixty-eight-year-old former
Civiltà cattolica
editor suffered a heart attack and died.
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