CHAPTER FOUR

The Great War and After (1915–25)

Angelo Roncalli made an unusual soldier, to say the least. He was even stouter than the first time he had entered the army as a young seminarian in 1901. His countenance in photos taken at the time is one of serenity and benevolence, not martial determination. He grew and carefully groomed a moustache—“a weak moment on my part,” as he later put it—but it didn’t help. He was who he was, a man of God.

After reporting for duty in Milan, he was given his old rank of sergeant, assigned to the medical corps, and then sent back to Bergamo to work in the hospitals there. During the next three years, the Italian Army would attack the Austrians along a front in northern Italy about 200 miles north of Bergamo. By war’s end, Italy had suffered 66,000 dead and 190,000 wounded. Bergamo was a major receiving center of these casualties, which placed it in the bloody center of the war.

Working feverishly in the hospital, Roncalli seldom slept more than five hours a night, working as both lowly medical orderly and priest. When there was nothing he could do physically for his patients, he spent his time ministering to them spiritually, as he was to write, “offering to the dying the last consolation of friendship and the reconciliation of final absolution.”

As a priest, he was an unusual presence in his unit, especially for the anticlerical individuals among the officers and men. One lieutenant colonel dealt with him so rudely and sarcastically that Roncalli, afraid his men would begin to do the same, complained about the man. The officer returned with a sarcastic but strangely prescient apology: “I am only a poor lieutenant colonel,” he said, “whereas you are only at the beginning and shall probably become a cardinal.” At the very least, however, Roncalli was able to spend more time keeping track of his large family and offering his services to them in any way he could. Four of his brothers had been inducted into the army; a cousin had just been killed in combat. He was especially concerned about Zaverio and their youngest brother, Guiseppe.

After Zaverio passed his induction exam in September 1915, Roncalli wrote to him, “Keep up your spirits and your confidence in God; with God it is always good, whether at the front or not.”

In March 1916, all the priests in the Italian Army were made chaplains and promoted to officer. Sergeant Roncalli was now Lieutenant Roncalli. He grew even busier. In addition to this work in the city’s hospital—particularly its huge military reserve hospital, New Shelter—he was assigned to the civil defense department of Bergamo as a clerical adviser. He continued to teach at the seminary, wearing his clerical garb, although his sleeves and round hat carried two gold stripes to connote his military rank.

At the same time, he somehow found the energy to finish his biography of Radini-Tedeschi and even traveled to Rome to present a copy to Pope Benedict XV. In the introduction, he penned, “These pages were written while in Europe the war went on, the horrible war that caused so much bloodshed and tears. I have written these lines and worked on this book not in the sweet quietness of the life of studies but amidst the most varied occupations . . . first for several months as a simple soldier, then as a noncommissioned officer of the lowest rank, and finally more direct as a priest.”

Roncalli’s modest listing of the various roles he played during the war gives one some idea of his useful ability to adapt himself to new situations and to get along with the people he meets in them. The troops Roncalli was ministering to were, for the most part, simple peasants who knew little of the reasons for which they were fighting; they suffered with such great humility, Roncalli later wrote, “that I had to fall on my knees and cry like a child, alone in my room, unable to contain the emotion I felt.”

While Roncalli’s journal entries from wartime are mostly lost, one entry survives from March 1917. It captures the simple piety of the men he administered to, as well as his own:

 

How dear to me is Orazi Domenico as he struggles with a violent crisis of bronchial pneumonia in a room not far from mine. He’s 19 and comes from Ascoli Pisceno. A humble peasant with a soul as limpid as an angel’s. It shines out from his intelligent eyes and his good and ingenuous smile. This morning and evening, as I listened to him murmuring in my ear, I was deeply moved. [He said to me:] “For me, Father, to die now would be a blessing: I would willingly die because I feel that by the grace of God my soul still remains innocent. If I died when I were older, who knows how lumpish I’d become.”

 

Despite Roncalli’s prayers, Domenico died a month later. Roncalli mourned him greatly, not only for who the boy was but also for what his innocent piety represented. “The world needs such chosen, simple souls who are a fragrance of faith, of purity, of fresh and holy poetry,” Roncalli reflected. “And we priests need them too to feel encouraged to virtue and zeal.”

Roncalli’s mourning for the shattered youth of Italy would increase in fall 1917, when the Austrians, bolstered by Russia’s collapse on the eastern front and aided by seven crack German divisions, launched a massive offensive against the Italian Army at Caporetto. Within two weeks, they had taken 300,000 Italian soldiers prisoner and sent the rest reeling south, driving them to within 15 miles of Venice, a loss of 70 miles of territory. Forty-five thousand Italians were killed and wounded, many of them by poison gas, in a catastrophic defeat that left a million and a half civilians under Austrian rule. The Italians were able to hold on only with the aid of French and British reinforcements sent from France and Belgium.

The retreat was so headlong and ignominious that Italian commanders ordered those who fled decimated, in the old Roman tradition—that is, one out of every ten was shot as an example to the others. But it did not seem to stop the thousands of peasant Italian soldiers who were simply turning away from a war that was not of their own making and in some ways concerned them little.

Roncalli’s life became an exhausting cycle of caring for the wounded who flooded Bergamo, overflowing the hospital facilities, lying on stretchers and crude pallets on church pews and in the hallways of public buildings. But he had a more personal reason for concern; he had sent a letter to his brother Guiseppe, only to have it returned “Addressee Missing in Action.” Guiseppe, only twenty-three years old, had gone missing during the great battle. It wasn’t until early 1918 that Roncalli discovered that he was safe, though wounded and ill, a prisoner of the Austrians.

By April 1918, the war had quieted on the Italian front, and Roncalli wrote, “I am almost without patients here.” He began to turn his mind to other matters. Bishop Luigi Marella of Bergamo asked him to set up a student hostel, and he threw himself wholeheartedly in the project, a way to think hopefully ahead, to a time when the war would end. He found a building on the Via San Salvatore in the old city, refurbished it, and paid for its furnishings himself with a 2,000 lire loan (paying interest of 5 percent) and a gift from his father.

He invited his two unmarried sisters, Ancilla and Maria, who had previously kept house for him, to become the housemothers of the hostel.

The student hotel—Casa dello Studente—was not for seminarians, but for those lay students studying in Bergamo with nowhere to go. The thirty-seven-year-old Roncalli knew how to appeal to the young men. On the first floor he hung a full-length mirror over which he had lettered, in Latin, the ancient aphorism, “Know Thyself.” When one unshorn student stared at it, wondering aloud what it meant, Father Roncalli walked up behind him and said, “You need a haircut.”

The Casa dello Studente was a great success, but as the days progressed more sorrow came into Roncalli’s life. In October, his sister Enrica died of cancer at the age of twenty-five. His brother Giuseppe Luigi was finally repatriated to Italy, although he remained seriously ill before eventually recovering. At the same time, a reorganized Italian government launched a new offensive against the Austrians to gain back the ground lost at Caporetto.

Finally, the war ended, on November 11, 1918. Roncalli could not have been happier. Officially released from the army in February 1919, he burned his uniform in farewell and celebration.

“During these last years,” Roncalli wrote in his journal in April 1919,

 

there have been days when I wondered what God would require of me after the war. Now there is no more cause for uncertainty, or for looking for something else: my main task is here, and here is my burden, the apostolate among students. . . . How true it is that when one entrusts oneself wholly to the Lord, one is provided with everything needful!

 

The period immediately following the war was a peaceful one for Roncalli, as well as for Italian society as a whole. As well as running the Casa dello Studente, he served as spiritual director of the Bergamo seminary. He also continued as spiritual adviser of his Catholic Action women’s groups and organized the first postwar eucharistic congress, a dream of his mentor Radini-Tedeschi. It was held in Bergamo in 1920, and Roncalli spoke on “The Eucharist and Our Lady, Loves of the Christian.” According to one of the attendees, Roncalli’s speech was interrupted by applause numerous times and ended in a standing ovation.

Before that, in 1919, Roncalli visited Rome for a conference of the National Union of Catholic Women, hoping to stroll through some of his old Apollinare haunts, but things did not go well. His wallet and 800 lire were stolen at the train station in Milan, and he found the bustle of Rome tiresome. He did, however, get an audience with Benedict XV, although he had to spend all morning waiting for one (“This blessed audience,” he later wrote in his journal, “is becoming a positive torture for me”). Little did Roncalli know this pope would soon change his life dramatically.

Although Benedict had been unsuccessful in a peace plan he had put forward in 1917 in an attempt to bring warring parties to the treaty table, he was extremely energetic in the years immediately following the war in reversing some of the isolationism the Church had felt during the papacy of Pius X. After Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Point Plan echoed Pius’s own peace plan, visited the Vatican, other countries sought diplomatic ties with the Holy See, and Pius encouraged Italian Catholics to return to politics within their own country.

Developing a Catholic political base was wise policy. Italian Socialists, inspired by their Russian counterparts, tangled with right-wing activists—soon to be known as Fascists, the precursor to Benito Mussolini’s black shirts. Benedict was also concerned about the fate of the worldwide Church in developing countries, feeling the first stirrings of independence after years under the yoke of imperialism.

Benedict’s November 30, 1919, encyclical Maximum illud (On the Propagation of the Catholic Faith Throughout the World) focused on the importance of missionary activity as the Church entered a new era. Since 1822, Catholic missions had been funded by an organization called Propaganda Fide, or the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. The society had started in France, but other, similar branches had grown up in numerous countries around the world, providing food, medicine, and catechisms to those the Church was attempting to convert and educate, particularly in Africa and South America.

These groups had done worthy work, but they were disorganized and too independent, and their approaches to missionary work were sometimes antiquated. Benedict XV wanted to put them under the central authority of the Church in Rome, bringing them together under the direction of a single Vatican department. He needed a man to do this for him—someone who could handle the delicate task of persuading wealthy clergy to share funds they had raised and laymen money they had earned for the common good of the missions.

Presented with a list of possible candidates in December 1920, Benedict apparently pointed to Roncalli’s name and said, “That one, that one.” Whether he remembered Roncalli because of his biography of Radini-Tedeschi or his work on the eucharistic congress, his desire was clear. Cardinal Willem van Rossum, the Dutch prefect of the Propaganda Fide—so powerful within the Church that he was known as the “Red Pope”—sent a letter to Bishop Marella of Bergamo requesting Roncalli for the job.

Marella passed the summons on to Roncalli, who found himself, as he would later write, “in perplexity and pain.” Naturally, such a summons flattered the thirty-nine-year-old priest, but Roncalli didn’t think he possessed the organizing ability, or the tact, for such a big job. Rather amusingly, he told Bishop Marella that he considered himself “someone who doesn’t get much done; by nature lazy, I write very slowly and am easily distracted.”

It did not work out as he anticipated. As a last resort, Roncalli wrote a letter to Cardinal Andrea Carlo Ferrari, the archbishop of Milan, who had continued on as his mentor after the death of Radini-Tedeschi. Ferrari, dying of throat cancer and barely able to speak, wrote him back on December 15, 1920: “You know how fond I am and, too, this is an obligation to Monsignor Radini. For this reason, here is my frank, unhesitant opinion. The will of God is perfectly clear. The Red Pope is the echo of the White Pope and the White Pope is the echo of God. Relinquish everything and go, and a great blessing will go with you.”

And so he did. Arriving in Rome in January 1921, Roncalli was taken to a private audience with the pope, in the papal apartments on the fourth floor of the Apostolic Palace. Benedict told him that he was to be “God’s traveler,” heading for Propaganda Fide centers within Italy and in France, Belgium, and Germany, where his job would be to convince those who had long held power in the organization that they needed to let go of the reins of authority.

That spring, Benedict made Roncalli a monsignor, which made his family proud and gave him some cachet with the men he would be dealing with, but mainly he had to operate using his own instincts and the skills of persuasion he had learned firsthand in the company of prelates like Radini-Tedeschi and Cardinal Ferrari (Ferrari died on February 2, leaving Roncalli once again without a spiritual mentor).

Before his travels, he found a house in Rome where he could stay upon his return. His two sisters, Ancilla and Maria, who depended on him for their livelihood, agreed to look after the house in his absence. Concerned about his old seminary rector Monsignor Vincenzo Bugarini, who was ill and approaching seventy, Roncalli moved him into the house, as well.

Roncalli had little money—“Let us hope that Providence will help us make ends meet,” he recorded—but, with a home for himself set up and those he cared about taken care of, he set off on his travels.

After visiting throughout Italy in the summer and fall, Roncalli headed to France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, traveling from December 17 to January 8. On his trip, he learned exactly how each mission was funded and set up and how the Vatican would eventually assume control. Shortly after Roncalli returned to Rome, the normally healthy Pope Benedict XV contracted pneumonia and died on January 22, 1922, at the age of sixty-seven.

There followed a historic conclave in which both progressive and conservative elements of the Church vied to have their candidates succeed Benedict.

The conclave began on Thursday, February 2. All but one of the fifty-three electors in Rome attended (he was ill with influenza), and two others were sick enough to miss the first two ballots, which revealed the division within the College of Cardinals. Each existing faction put forward candidates, promising another deadlocked process. By the time the cardinal electors were at full strength, with fifty-three electors in attendance, the blocs were clarified: twenty-eight liberals to twenty-five conservatives, with thirty-five votes required for election.

The conclave turned to Cardinal Achille Ratti, former librarian at the Ambrosiana in Milan and, later, at the Vatican, who had been made a cardinal by Benedict XV on June 13, 1921, and succeeded Ferrari as appointed archbishop of Milan. Ratti won forty-two votes on the fourteenth ballot on Monday, February 6. He took the name Pius XI.

Ratti was a brilliant, scholarly man, but, politically speaking, a bit of a cipher. Though widely assumed to be a moderate, no one knew for certain. This is one reason for his election. Regardless of his politics, however, he supported Roncalli’s work for the missions.

When Roncalli and Cardinal van Rossum, the Red Pope, outlined the details of transferring authority of the society from the Propagation of Faith to the Vatican, the pope issued it under his own signature in March.

Despite this vote of confidence, Roncalli was a little leery of the politics of the position. In July of that year, he wrote a friend:

 

The new Holy Father is well. I saw him again in a long audience a few days ago. He had the goodness to treat me with the trust that befits an affectionate friend of Mgr. Radini-Tedeschi and the prefect of the Ambrosian Library. Yet I get between his feet as little as possible, and feel shivers run down my spine every time I have to go through these Vatican halls. Despite my constant and heart-felt attempt to serve the new pope as best I can, I don’t envy—indeed I feel compassion—towards those who have to work in the Vatican.

 

It was not distaste for the new pope that kept Roncalli away from the Vatican, but distaste for politics in general. But he continued to succeed. Between 1920 and 1922, he raised the society’s collection from 400,000 lire to more than a million. Ever mindful of the power of the printed word, he started a magazine called The Propagation of the Faith in the World that told stories of the founding of the society and the labors of the faithful, both lay and clergy, throughout the world.

Yet he did all this with typical tact. He was always sure to praise the heads of local missionary societies. He also used his connections with Monsignor Bugarini, his housemate and the former seminary rector, to forge bonds with former Apollinare graduates throughout Italy. He had come to love his travels. Of one visit to Sicily, where he had never been, he wrote in glowing terms, “It is like a garden. . . . I can truly say it is a semi-paradise.” And the food was so good it had given him “an extraordinary appetite.”

As happened so many times in Roncalli’s life, the occupation he thought he had established was replaced by another one. Italy of the early 1920s was a tumultuous place. Plagued by economic problems, high unemployment, and continual strikes, the country saw the violent and vocal Fascist groups, led by Mussolini, continue to grow. In 1922, Fascists attacked a Corpus Christi parade, shouting Abasso il Papa (“Down with the pope!”). Although they were still in the minority in Parliament, their violence threatened to bring down the government, and a weak King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini—soon to be il Duce—to form a new government. In October 1922, Mussolini took power and began his decades-long dictatorship.

This was the beginning of the complicated and often unsavory relationship between the Italian Church and fascism. Though Mussolini was an atheist, he knew he needed the Church. “Since the Italian people is all but completely Catholic,” he famously said, “and Catholicism is the ancient glory of Italy, the Italian nation can be nothing less than Catholic.” In order to keep Catholics from rallying against him, he introduced religious education to public primary schools and even endorsed the return of crucifixes to public buildings, where they had not hung since the nineteenth century.

His gestures paid immediate dividends. In January 1923, in advance of the 1924 spring elections, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, Vatican secretary of state, handed Mussolini a list of supporters of the Partito Popolare, the nascent political party that would eventually become the Christian Democrats, “unreliable and mistaken men” within the Vatican who could not be trusted.

Additionally, the meeting marked the beginning of the secret negotiations that would ultimately lead to the 1929 Treaty of the Lateran, in which the Holy Father renounced claims to the former Vatican states, and the Italian government recognized the inviolability and independence of what came to be known as Vatican City State, which still exists today as a tiny independent nation, with the pope as sovereign head of state.

If this level of collaboration on the part of the Vatican with Mussolini is shocking, it must be remembered that at this early stage Mussolini had numerous international supporters, among them Winston Churchill and Herbert Hoover. Still, in February, Roncalli sent his family a letter, telling them, “I recommend everyone not to get too excited about the elections. Vote when the time comes. Now it is better to let things be. Keep quiet and stay at home; think it out for yourselves.” He, however, vowed that he would “remain faithful to the Partito Popolare.” In another letter sent to them just before the elections, he spoke even more forcefully: “In my conscience as a priest and a Christian, I don’t feel I can vote for the Fascists. . . . Of one thing I am certain: the salvation of Italy cannot come through Mussolini even though he may be a man of talent. His goals may perhaps be good and correct, but the means he takes to realize them are wicked.”

Roncalli’s comments about Mussolini’s means were proven correct that election day, as his Fascists mobbed election booths, intimidating voters, en route to sweeping the election. The following September, Roncalli traveled to Bergamo on the tenth anniversary of Radini-Tedeschi’s death—on the occasion of his remains being moved from a city cemetery to the crypt at the Bergamo Cathedral. The sermon he made that day was, according to one biographer, “the finest or the most foolhardy” he would ever make.

Speaking of patriotism and national pride, Roncalli said that such feelings were good and important for a nation, but that the Church must determine “the true good of a country” in other ways, not just via “military enterprises, diplomatic agreements or economic successes,” but by “justice embodied in law.” Roncalli noted that differences in opinion between clergy and civil authorities should not preclude their cooperating, but he criticized Mussolini’s concessions regarding religious education and crucifixes in public buildings as a kind of window dressing, particularly regarding education, since the state still had firm control of education beyond primary schools. He went on to say that, in any event, such changes were more due to the “champions of the just cause of educational freedom in Italy such as Radini-Tedeschi” than the Fascists.

Did Roncalli know that he was playing with fire? If so, to what extent? It seems that Roncalli was speaking more out of loyalty to the memory of Radini-Tedeschi than with any desire to tweak the Vatican or Mussolini, but his very real and instinctive distaste of the Fascists, whom Pope Pius was hoping to appease, comes through clearly.

Nothing happened in the immediate aftermath of the Bergamo sermon. The pope had made him a leading member of a commission to prepare for the coming Holy Year of 1925. Roncalli was put in charge of organizing lodging for thousands of pilgrims to Rome, a significant assignment that tested his organizational and executive skills. He was also asked to lecture on patristics, the study of Church fathers, at the Lateran Seminary, where he apparently shocked students by claiming, “In certain cases, it may be quite all right to sanction a mixed marriage [between Catholic and non-Catholic].”

But then, on February 17, 1925, the boom fell. Cardinal Gasparri told Roncalli the pope had named him apostolic visitor to Bulgaria, a predominantly Greek Orthodox nation with a small Catholic minority. After a certain period of time there, Gasparri told him, Roncalli would enter the Vatican diplomatic corps and then be reassigned to a different and presumably more desirable—and more Catholic—country.

Roncalli immediately objected, saying that he was not a diplomat and that he did not have any experience in Eastern Europe, but Gasparri dismissed his objections away, as he did Roncalli’s somewhat desperate suggestion that he could not go because it would leave his two sisters unemployed.

In a personal interview with Pope Pius XI on February 22, Roncalli learned the even more astonishing news that he would be made a bishop because, as the pope said, “it is not a good thing when an apostolic prelate goes to a country and has to deal with bishops without being one himself.” In fact, as the pope’s envoy, Roncalli would have the rank of archbishop.

All of this was a great deal for Roncalli to take in. While the new position was a promotion, it required him to leave Italy, in the same way that his mentor, Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi, was dispatched from Rome in 1905. It appears that he, too, had been tagged as a “modernist.” (In fact, years later, asking to see his personnel file as pontiff, Roncalli found that it contained the notation, “Suspected of Modernism,” which angered him so much he asked for a pen and then wrote, “I, John XXIII, Pope, declare that I was never a Modernist!” Later, cooling down a little, he had the humor to say, “I am the living example that a priest who has been placed under observation by the Holy Office can still become pope.”)

Whatever the Vatican’s motive in the matter, Roncalli had little choice. After installing his beloved sisters back home in Sotto il Monte (Monsignor Bugarini had died the previous year), Roncalli was consecrated archbishop on March 19, 1925. In the days leading up to the ceremony—held in Milan, at a church dedicated to Saint Charles Borromeo, Roncalli’s favorite—he wrote in his journal, “I have not sought or desired this new ministry: the Lord has chosen it for me, making it clear that it is his will and that it would be a grave sin for me to refuse.”

As with other great moments in Roncalli’s life, he had not sought this change; it had sought him. And he would make the best of it. On April 23, 1925, he boarded the Simplon Orient Express in Milan and set off for his new assignment.