Pius XI
After fourteen separate ballots in the papal conclave in 1922, a somewhat surprising new pope was elected. Achille Ratti, a sixty-five-year-old scholar of medieval paleography who had spent most of his life working as a librarian and climbing the Alps. He took the papal name of Pius XI. He had previously gained notoriety for standing by the Poles in 1919 when he was dispatched by Pope Benedict XV to Eastern Europe shortly before the Bolsheviks invaded. “It was many centuries since a papal envoy had stood with the army of Christendom as it defended its frontier, and with the danger finally averted it was no wonder that his popularity soared. He himself never forgot the experience, which him with the lifelong conviction that of all the enemies with which Christian Europe was faced, communism was by far the most terrible” (429). He returned to Italy in 1921 where he served as a cardinal and archbishop of Milan for a mere seven months before being elected pope.
“His strength of character –one might almost say his ruthlessness—was soon amply demonstrated in his dealings with France” (430). The canonization of Joan of Arc under his predecessor had left a remarkable impact on repairing relations with France. However, there was by now a dangerous right-wing movement on the rise –a pseudo-Catholic, monarchist, and deeply antisemitic movement—known as Action Francaise (with its own accompanying propagandistic newspaper). The founder was an unpleasant demagogue named Charles Maurras, who viewed the church as a mere vessel toward advancing his reactionary political agenda, with the goal of abolishing the French Republic. Pope Pius swiftly put Maurras and Action Francaise on the Index and excommunicated all the movement’s members two years later.
However, a greater threat to the pope’s statesmanship was also on the rise in Italy. At first, the pope showed strong opposition to the dominance of the socialist movement and Don Luigi’s Sturzo’s People’s Party. He promptly exiled Don Luigi who fled to London and then to the United States as his party gradually dissipated and a right-wing ultra-nationalist group under Benito Mussolini took its place. Despite initial hostilities, in time, Mussolini’s Fascist party struck a more conciliatory tone toward the church –reintroducing religion into state schools, erecting crucifixes in all the courts, and finally converting to Catholicism himself. He signed a concordat at the Lateran in 1929 with Pius’s Secretary of State. In it, the pope was given back a small vestige of his temporal power –a mere 109 acres (about the size of Monaco) with some 500 citizens to oversee. The Holy See was once again to be recognized as the leader of a nation –and the pope was paid handsomely for renouncing his claim to all other Italian territories. In return for being charitably granted this humble territory in the Lateran Treaty of 1929 (which was the birth of the modern Vatican), the pope agreed to remain neutral in matters of politics and diplomacy.
However. in doing so, the papacy had “given its implied approval to Fascism.” Indeed, the pope had hailed Mussolini as “a man sent by Providence” and in the 1929 elections, the Catholic Church leaned heavily in favor of the Fascists. Still, tensions emerged between Mussolini and various right-wing nationalist movements which were not already controlled by his party –such as Pius X’s Catholic Action group which sought to push for Jesus to be represented in every public place imaginable.
And with respect to the Nazis, Germany had been one of the largest financial contributors to the pope’s coffers, so the pope was reticent to provide any comment on Hitler. This trend of ambiguous silence only continued when Hitler invaded and annexed the Saar, the Sudetenland, and Austria. “…neither Pacelli [the pope’s new secretary of state] nor Pius had any delusions about the Nazis, whom they regarded as little better than gangsters; but they nevertheless believed that National Socialism represented a firm bulwark against communism, in their eyes the far greater enemy” (433). And thus a concordat was signed by Pacelli on behalf of Pope Pius XI and by Franz von Papen, vice chancellor for the Reich for Adolf Hitler. It effectively spelled the end of the Catholic right in Germany and the Center Party (which was then the second largest party in the Reichstag to which most Catholics belonged). As was the case previously with the concordat in Italy, understandably, the church received widespread criticism and condemnation.
“The Catholic Church could have set itself up in determined opposition to National Socialism; instead, by agreeing to the abdication of all its political rights and morally obliging all German Catholics to obey their Nazi leaders, Pacelli and Pius had together cleared the way for the unobstructed advance of Nazism –and of its treatment of the Jews. In the minutes of a cabinet meeting held on July 14, 1933, Hitler is recorded as having boasted that ‘the Concordat gave Germany an opportunity and created an area of trust that was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry.’ By the outside world the pope was accused of having given both regimes respectability and of increasing their prestige –which indeed, in the short term, he had” (434).
However, when the oppression of the church began, the pope issued no less than thirty-four notes of protest to Germany. But it was simply too little, too late. It’s worth noting that the Catholic Church issued no objection to the 1935 Nuremberg race laws, as well. The papacy never explicitly condemned Hitler, Nazism, or antisemitism, though it did issue a veiled critique from its German pulpits claiming the Reich was sowing discord, suspicion, fear, and hatred. However, the bulk of the church’s objections were primarily lodged against “Bolshevistic and atheistic communism.”
As with the other Fascist dictators, the pope threw his support behind Francisco Franco in Spain, especially after a violent separation between church and state which led to violence in the streets. Pius XI was the first pope to install a radio station in the Vatican (“Vatican Radio”) from which he could issue worldwide broadcasts, such as his declaration of support for Neville Chamberlain’s vain appeal for peace during his meeting with Hitler in Munich in September 1938. But by now the pope was elderly and ailing from diabetes and he had heavily ulcerated legs. He lived just long enough to meet with Neville Chamberlain and the British foreign secretary Lord Halifax, whom he dubbed “a pair of slugs.” Apparently, the pope was set to issue a speech in 1939 denouncing all the rising right-wing dictatorships he had helped advance, but he died the day before on February 10, 1939 –and almost immediately thereafter conspiracy theories began to spread about a Fascist assassination of the pope. All we do know is that Il Duce was deeply interested in the whereabouts of the pope’s intended speech.
“Pius XI had his faults. He was an autocrat through and through. In his concept of Christianity he was bigoted, reactionary, and inflexible: the Roman Catholic Church was right, everyone else was wrong. He had no time for the incipient ecumenical movement; so far as he was concerned, there could be no bargaining over God’s revealed truth… In the earliest period of his pontificate his detestation of communism –which, let it never be forgotten, he had seen at firsthand in Poland—made him more tolerant of the Fascists, and at first perhaps even of the Nazis, than he might otherwise have been; but in his last years his open and unflinching hostility to both earned him the respect and admiration of the free world” (438).
Pius XII
Eugenio Pacelli had been born to be a priest. According to his sister, he would dress up and act out Mass in his bedroom as a young child. After studying at the Gregorian University and the Capranica College in Rome, he gradually rose in the papal ranks, achieving the position of secretary of state. “Although no secretary of state had been elected pope since Clement IX in 1667, Pacelli was by far the best-known, the most experienced, and the most intelligent member of the Sacred College. His predecessor had had a huge admiration for him and, as his own health had progressively collapsed, had entrusted to him more and more of the papal business. His election was, effectively, a foregone conclusion” (438-439).
He was a delicate man with princely tastes and a notoriously sensitive stomach. Unlike many of his predecessors, he was not entirely contemptuous of the Jewish people, however the same could not be said of his views toward other groups. During World War I, he spread false racist theories that black soldiers in the French Army were raping women and children throughout the Rhineland. And later as pope, he asked the British Foreign Office for assurances that “no Allied colored troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned in Rome after the occupation.” Just a few days into his pontificate, the first official letter penned by Pius XII was a fawning note to Adolf Hitler as Nazi forces were amassing on the border of Czechoslovakia. In the ensuing weeks the pope refused to join the democratic states condemning the German annexations in Europe. Catholic Poland lost some 70,000 men, France and England both declared war on Germany, and still there was no response from the Vatican. Finally, at long last, the pope issued a vague encyclical decrying bloodshed especially for the Catholics in Poland.
In November 1939, the pope was curiously invited to partake in a German conspiracy to oust Hitler from within, but the conspirators wanted a guarantee that the pope and the allied powers would not take advantage of any ensuing chaos in Germany in the wake of Hitler being toppled, such as by imposing more humiliating terms in the manner of the Treaty of Versailles. However, the plot ran into roadblocks with Neville Chamberlain and it gradually disappeared. This was an incredibly risky plan for the pope to even consider, as Hitler would have likely massacred Catholic populations in response (and as it turns out, Hitler was also exploring a plot to assassinate the pope).
“And so we come to the mighty question mark that casts its shadow over the pontificate of Pope Pius XI: his attitude to the Holocaust. A strong vein of anti-Semitism had always run through Catholic thinking: had not the Jews murdered Christ? The Tridentine Mass, promulgated by the Council of Tridentine the sixteenth century, contained a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of “the perfidious Jews,” and the right-wing Catholic parties in France, Germany, and Austria made no secret of their anti-Semitic feelings. It is hardly necessary to say that such views found no place in the official teaching of the Church; but… they were shared at least to some extent by the young Pacelli –and he is unlikely to have been alone” (444).
While Hitler was declaring that “the Jews will be liquidated for at least a thousand years,” and active persecutions were well underway in Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, and Marshal Petain’s unoccupied France, the pope maintained a deafening silence. As mass deportations began in 1942 (with 42,000 French Jews sent to Auschwitz alone), President Roosevelt sent an urgent envoy to the pope, begging him to condemn the war crimes. But still Pius refused. Fearing for his own safety, as the pontiff was often wont to do, Pius grew concerned that the Allies were planning to bomb Rome and so he was not eager to pick sides. Finally, after considerable moral outrage around the world, the pope issued a broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1942 –it was a long, turgid, boring speech that ended with a call to all men of goodwill to make a solemn vow “to bring back society to its center of gravity, which is the law of God.” It was a plea for compassion, but still no mention of Jews, Nazis, or even Germany. And by now, Mussolini had enacted a string of his own anti-Semitic laws in Italy.
Then suddenly in July 1943 everything changed: the Allies invaded Sicily and bombed Rome; Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci were shot and left hanging from the roof of a garage; and German troops had poured into Italy. By September 11, Rome was under German occupation, martial law was declared, and the SS gave the order to round up all the Jews in the city (recall that Jews had historically predated Christians in Rome). A handful of powerful voices began speak out against the Nazis bussing Italian Jews to Auschwitz, but what was needed was the pope to join them in vehement protest. Tragically, nothing came from the pontiff and the deportations continued as planned.
“How can we explain this contemptible silence on the part of Pius XII? It all goes back first to his innate anti-Semitism and then to his fear of communism –always, both to his predecessor and to himself, a far greater bugbear than Nazi Germany. As he himself put it in conversation with the American representative at the Vatican, Harold Tittman, he believed that a protest would provoke a clash with the SS; he could have added –but did not—that such a clash might well have resulted in a German occupation of the Vatican and his own capture and imprisonment. That in turn would have played directly into the hands of the Communists. He himself had come up against them in Munich, and he was fully aware of the atrocities that they had committed against the Church in Russia, Mexico, and Spain. With Europe in its present state of chaos, a Communist takeover in Rome could not be discounted, and to avoid that, even the deportation of Roman Jewry would be a small price to pay… this argument in itself seems hard enough to swallow, but even if we accept the papal silence to have been justified, another astonishing fact remains to be explained. After the end of the war Pius continued as pope for another thirteen years, during which time not one word of apology or regret, not a single requiem or Mass of Remembrance was held for the 1,989 Jewish deportees from Rome who had met their deaths at Auschwitz alone. There were many people, too, who wondered, in retrospect, why a pope who had thought nothing of excommunicating all the members of the Communist Party throughout the world had never apparently considered doing the same to the Catholic Nazi war criminals, including Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, and Hitler himself” (448).
Likewise, there was never a condemnation by the pope of the final atrocity to take place in Rome before its liberation –on March 24, 1944 a company of German soldiers was bombed killing 33 men, but on the following evening (on Hitler’s personal orders), 335 Italians including some 50 Jews, were herded into the Ardeatine caves south of the city and massacred. Yet again there was no protest from the Vatican. Even as Eichmann began to apply the “final solution” to Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, the pope still sent a humble and mild message requesting that “the Hungarian Government once again not to continue its war against the jews beyond the limits prescribed by the laws of nature and God’s commandments…” Mercifully, many Hungarian Jews found refuge with local Catholics in the area and defenders of the Catholic Church are often quick to paint Pius as a quiet supporter of German resistance groups as well as victims of the war. At the very least, he was considered neither an ally of the Allies nor the Axis powers.
The latter part of Pius’s reign, after the end of the war, concerned his fight against the Communist Party in Italy, his opposition to the state of Israel (since according to him, it was Jews who murdered Christ), and his decision to stifle any new forms of Christian theological thinking (the era was akin to an orthodox reign of terror, crushing intellectual excellence wherever possible). Meanwhile, Pius’s health began to deteriorate no thanks to his personal doctor, Professor Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, who was reportedly a “quack” and a “charlatan.” Alongside another amusing character, Paul Niehans, there were talks of the hidden secret to eternal life as found in the fetus cells of sheep, as well as heavy doses of chromic acid being pumped into the pope’s body which likely caused the chronic hiccups that plagued his final years of his life.
Pius XII died on October 9, 1958 and after a lengthy ceremony in which his body was driven through the streets of Rome, it came to rest in an open coffin in St. Peter’s. However, his embalming had been inexplicably left to Galeazzi-Lisi who announced that he would be using a similar technique as the process supposedly used on Jesus Christ himself, which would leave the body to its natural state but, of course, this imbecilic idea failed and instead, the stinking corpse of the late pope began bursting open at points during his funeral and it left such a vile, retched odor wafting through St. Peter’s that at least one Swiss Guard fainted. Then the late pope’s nose fell off and his body began quickly decomposing so it was quickly enclosed and lowered to its final resting place beneath St. Peter’s. Surprising no one, Galeazzi-Lisi later sold photos he captured of the dying pope to French magazines. At the time of writing (2011), John Julius Norwich noted that there was already a process underway to beautify and canonize Pope Pius XII –“Suffice it to say here that the current fashion for canonizing all popes on principle will, if continued, make a mockery of sainthood” (452).
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.