CHAPTER FIVE

Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey (1925–45)

When the newly consecrated Archbishop Roncalli arrived in the Bulgarian capital city of Sofia, he entered a country that was essentially in a state of war. During World War I, Bulgaria had sided with the Central powers. Because of their alliance, Bulgaria lost its territories in Macedonia, which included economically crucial access to the Aegean Sea. In the political turmoil that followed, communists and right-wingers struggled violently for control of the government. In 1924, there were more than 200 political assassinations.

A few weeks before Roncalli came on the scene, King Boris III was nearly killed in an assassination attempt. Though he survived, his prime minister was killed the next day. On April 17, at the prime minister’s funeral in the Orthodox cathedral of Svate Nedelja, radicals set off a bomb planted high in the cathedral’s dome, killing 150 mourners and wounding hundreds more. In response, Boris ordered his secret police to imprison, torture, and kill thousands.

As Roncalli stepped off the Orient Express, the local Catholic newspaper recounted the aftermath of the bombing: “Smoke lay over the entire country and nobody could see the way out. The blood of the victims and the tears of the afflicted are still fresh.” Roncalli’s first official act was to visit the victims of the bombing, regardless of their religion. This was much appreciated by those who watched the portly new envoy in action, but there was still a great deal of suspicion of the Roman Catholic visitor who was, after all, the first envoy the Vatican had sent to Bulgaria in 600 years.

The national census prior to World War II showed there were some 45,000 Roman Catholics in Bulgaria, plus 5,000 Uniates, followers of the Byzantine or Eastern Catholic, as opposed to the Latin, Rite. The largest religion, according to the same census, was Islam, with 780,000 practicing Muslims of either Turkish or Bulgarian descent. There were about 48,000 Jews in Bulgaria.

The Holy Synod, the ruling body of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, complained through its newspaper that Roncalli’s visit smacked of “imperialism” and might be the beginning of a plot to overthrow the Orthodox religion in the country.

Following his own instincts rather than instructions from Rome, Roncalli sought to dispel this suspicion. He first stayed with Monsignor Stefan Kurtef, a member of the Uniate group of the Eastern Catholic Church, which acknowledged the authority of the pope in Rome but used Byzantine liturgy. It was not quite like lodging with an Orthodox priest, but it was a step in the right direction. He also sought an immediate audience with King Boris, attempting to mend a relationship that had become badly frayed.

In the late nineteenth century, the Bulgarian royal family broke with the Church, when Boris’s father, Czar Ferdinand, told Pope Leo XIII he was going to baptize his son Orthodox, the majority Christian church. According to various reports, an infuriated Pope Leo rose from his throne and pointed at the door, essentially kicking Ferdinand out of the Vatican.

The young Boris, at least, seemed open to talking to Roncalli, a minor victory, though a huge setback loomed. In the meantime, however, Roncalli set about his mission of learning more about Bulgaria’s Catholics by journeying all over the country with Father Kurtef as an interpreter. It was in many ways an adventure.

The rough and mountainous back roads were impassable to motor vehicles, so Roncalli and Kurtef traveled by horseback, mule, and crude carts, spending the entire spring and summer traversing the country from the Black Sea to Turkey. It was a time he would always remember. The countryside was beautiful and the people welcomed him warmly, despite the fact that they were plagued by bandits, terrorist massacres, and extreme poverty. Rural Catholics were surprised to see him; no one from the Church except their lowly parish priests had paid any attention to them. They called Roncalli Diado, which meant “the good father,” although sometimes they referred to him as “the round one,” because his struggle with his weight had become decidedly pronounced. But he felt at home with Bulgarian peasants, who reminded him of his own family and the poor mountain people of Sotto il Monte.

Roncalli’s sense of his mission in Bulgaria was twofold. First, he ministered to the needs of Bulgaria’s Catholics, who were often widely separated in distance and who were in large part tended to by imperious French missionary nuns and priests. Roncalli ordered that prayers after Mass be in Bulgarian, not French, and tried to put an end to rivalries between the numerous French religious orders, which included the Assumptionists, Vincentians, Christian Brothers, and Capuchins.

The second part of his mission was to establish rapprochement with the Bulgarian Orthodox Church; this was far easier said than done. The schism between Eastern and Latin Churches had lasted 1,000 years and remained wide. The Orthodox Church did not recognize the supremacy of the pope. The Roman Church recognized the validity of Orthodox sacraments but consistently urged reconciliation (or “return”) on the Orthodox faithful, an attitude Orthodox Christians found patronizing and unrealistic. Already bearing within his heart the seeds of ecumenism that would blossom in the Second Vatican Council, Roncalli understood that he needed to approach the Orthodox faithful in a spirit of love and respect rather than condemnation. He met with Patriarch Basil III in Sofia. He showed up unannounced at the Orthodox monastery at Rila, a city outside of Sofia, where he prayed at its altar.

This was not the Vatican stance. On January 6, 1928, Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical Mortalium animos (The Minds of Men) on religious unity, which spoke of religions that “would willingly treat with the Church of Rome, but on equal terms, that is as equals with an equal: but . . . it does not seem open to doubt that any pact into which they might enter would not compel them to turn from those opinions which are still the reason why they err and stray from the one fold of Christ.”

The Church of Rome, in other words, would not bend to establish true parity with other faiths; despite this, Roncalli continued to deal with those Orthodox faithful with whom he established a relationship in Bulgaria via “the miracle of love” and “the primacy of charity.” And Roncalli’s ecumenism was not at all of the philosophical sort, either. In the spring of 1928, central Bulgaria suffered a series of severe earthquakes. Roncalli rushed to the region the very next day, assessed the situation—thousands homeless, severe flooding—and cabled the Vatican for emergency aid. He was in the city of Philippopolis (now Plovdiv) when another earthquake hit, and he spent the night on the street along with thousands of others.

In the next month, as he traveled back and forth to Sofia, he used money the Vatican had sent him, as well as any funds he could beg from friends back in Italy, to establish what became known as the “Pope’s Soup Kitchens,” which fed people in the devastated region throughout the next few months. Roncalli slept in tents among refugees. His empathy was as evident as it was profound. “Unfortunately,” he wrote to his sisters Ancilla and Maria, “the continual rain has made life dreadfully hard for the numberless poor people who do not yet dare re-enter their tottering houses.”

Roncalli’s work with the victims of the earthquake brought tangible results, but he was not so sure about the rest of his efforts in Bulgaria. He successfully recommended that Monsignor Stefan Kurtef be made bishop of the Uniates—the Eastern Rite Catholics—so that a Bulgarian, rather than an emissary from Rome, represented them. But his larger plan to get the Vatican to approve a seminary to train Bulgarian priests failed. By 1930, five years after he arrived in Bulgaria, Roncalli had started to question his purpose there.

In his annual retreat in the spring of 1930, he wrote in his journal, “Make me love thy Cross,” a thirteenth-century hymn to Mary.

 

A whole series of recent events has conferred on this retreat a special sense of loving abandonment to God, suffered and crucified, my Master and King. The trials . . . have been many: anxieties concerning the arrangements for founding the Bulgarian seminary; the uncertainty which has now lasted for more than five years about the exact scope of my mission in this country; [and] my frustrations and disappointments at not being able to do more.

 

Roncalli tried to reconcile the frustrations of his job, but it was not easy. Most of the time, the Vatican paid scant attention to him—he could not even get a reply about receiving extra funds to enlarge the small house he lived in so that his sisters could join him. When he did receive notice, it could be quite unpleasant. In 1930, King Boris decided to marry Princess Giovanna, the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel of Italy. The king approved of this match, as did Mussolini, who thought it might help extend his power into the Balkans, but Pope Pius balked because Boris was Orthodox and Giovanna Catholic.

Roncalli was entrusted with the delicate mission of convincing King Boris that he should accept the pope’s conditions that the marriage must be solemnized only in the Catholic Church and that the children must be raised Catholic. The king was apparently willing enough, but the Bulgarian constitution specifically stated that only an Orthodox prince could reign in Bulgaria.

Through careful negotiations spearheaded by Roncalli, Boris eventually agreed to marry in a Catholic Church and raise his future children in the Roman Catholic faith.

The Catholic ceremony took place on October 25, 1930. Six days later, however, Boris held what he assured Roncalli was merely an Orthodox “blessing” of the couple. In fact, it was an official Orthodox wedding ceremony, held in an Eastern cathedral in Sofia. When he heard about this, Pius summoned Roncalli to Rome, where he forced Roncalli to kneel before him while he berated him for embarrassing the Church. Roncalli later claimed he had informed the Vatican that they should not trust Boris under any circumstance.

This was not to be the last of Boris’s apostasy. On January 13, 1933, Queen Giovanna gave birth to a daughter. With great pomp, Boris baptized her in the Orthodox Church. Though Roncalli lodged a formal protest, the king refused to receive him.

Roncalli exchanged heated words with the Italian minister to Bulgaria who had helped arrange the marriage. “Don’t be so upset, Your Excellency,” the minister reportedly told Roncalli. “After all, King Boris is Orthodox, and it’s a matter for his conscience. As to Queen Giovanna, she’ll just have to go to confession.”

The queen, in fact, was more in need of Roncalli’s consolation than his absolution. King Boris had taken the baby from her arms and had baptized her without the queen’s consent.

In December 1934, Roncalli was named apostolic delegate to Turkey and Greece. He was ready to move on. Although he felt he had accomplished as much as he could in Bulgaria, he did not want to leave behind his many new friends. In his farewell Christmas sermon, delivered in Sofia, he made reference to the Irish custom of leaving a lit candle in the window to show the way to Mary and Joseph:

 

Wherever I may go, if a Bulgarian passes by my door, whether it’s night-time or whether he’s poor, he will find that candle lighted in my window. Knock, knock. You won’t be asked whether you’re a Catholic or not. . . . Two fraternal arms will welcome you and the warm heart of a friend will make it a feast-day.

 

Roncalli arrived in Istanbul—or Constantinople, as many Christians continued to call it—in January 1935. There he faced at least as many challenges as he had when he had first set foot in Bulgaria. Of Turkey’s 18 million people, approximately 79,000 were Jewish, and 100,000 were Orthodox Christian. Only 35,000 or so were Roman Catholic. The vast majority of the country worshiped Allah.

To complicate matters, the government of President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, heirs of the Young Turks who overthrew the caliphate of Turkey before World War I, was in the middle of westernizing, or modernizing, the state. Now known as “father of the Turks”—a name he bestowed upon himself—Atatürk immediately banned religious displays of any kind, be they Islamic, Orthodox, or Catholic. He outlawed fezes, the distinctive, flat-topped and tassled hats worn by Muslim men, and, shortly after Roncalli arrived, he prohibited Turks from wearing religious habits.

Some apostolic delegates might have protested, but Roncalli knew when to pick his battles. “What does it matter,” he wrote to a friend, “whether we wear the soutane or trousers as long as we proclaim the word of God?” A tailor made him a few dark business suits, and he started to wear a bowler hat. As one biographer wrote, he looked “like a Milanese bank clerk at the wedding of the managing director’s daughter.” He sent a few photos of himself in secular garb to his parents at Sotto il Monte with the note, “You will recognize your son the bishop dressed as the new law requires.”

Roncalli understood his position in Turkey. He sent out no official letter announcing his arrival, telling his aides instead, “Let it be clearly understood here and now that in this country the apostolic delegate is a representative with no diplomatic standing.” Roncalli knew he could do little about the Atatürk government’s campaign against religion. He had to watch as Catholic schools were shut down one by one, replaced by state-run primary schools, but he could still continue the pastoral work that he loved—baptisms, celebrating Mass, delivering homilies—in different parts of the country.

Roncalli’s work was interrupted in July 1935 by the very sad news that his father, Giovanni, had died at the age of eighty. Word came by telegram, and it caused Roncalli to go to his private chapel and “weep like a child.” Unfortunately, he was unable to leave Turkey for his father’s funeral, although he did return in September to spend time with his mother.

Roncalli’s spirit of ecumenism served him greatly in Turkey. Conflicting ideas about religion and the state had brought about Atatürk’s reforms, and antireligious fervor remained within the political sphere. Censorship of the press impinged directly on the archbishop’s ability to communicate freely with Catholics. Roncalli expressed his hopes that he would still be able to preach about the need for charity. From the pulpit of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, Roncalli sought fit to preach in the language of his listeners. Officiating in Turkish at the Sacrifice of the Mass, an unprecedented act, reflected his desire to apply the ecumenical outreach in which he so fervently believed.

In 1936, he added the Turkish words Tanre Mubarek olsun (“Blessed be God”) to the Divine Praises in the Mass. He also read the Gospel and Litany in Turkish. He saw this as a genuinely “catholic” step, but people left his services infuriated, and some even complained to Rome. “The difference,” he wrote in his journal, “between my way of seeing situations on the spot and certain ways of judging the same things in Rome hurts me considerably; it is my only real cross.”

Yet another cross, however, was his health. Though generally in good shape for a fifty-five-year-old, within his first year in Turkey he developed a small hernia that he left untreated. His weight also ballooned. “For my health’s sake,” he wrote in his journal in October, “I must stick to a diet as regards food. I eat little in the evenings already but now I must eat less at midday too. It will be good for me to go out for a walk every day. O Lord, I find this hard and it seems such a waste of time, but still it is necessary and everybody insists I should do so.”

These same “everybodies” insisted he try yogurt for his health. “You see how it is,” he wrote to his family. “We must become like children again and eat the food of the poor.”

 

Even with all his concerns in Turkey, Roncalli did not forget that he was also apostolic delegate to Greece.

Greece presented distinctly different challenges. Roman Catholicism was not held in high regard there. Greece was Orthodox and considered Rome—and its insistence on Latin language and Latin traditions—an affront to its history and culture. Frankish hordes had brought the Crusades to the Greek peninsula in the thirteenth century; rape and pillage is not easily erased from the national psyche. In the twentieth century, political turmoil led to a military coup by General Ioannis Metaxas, who quickly became embroiled in the continued civil unrest on the streets and the vagaries of the various national agendas at play in the region. On October 2, 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). Greece criticized the Italian invasion at the League of Nations and opposed the country’s territorial ambitions in Albania, which infuriated Mussolini, straining relations between the two countries. Because of his Italian heritage, Roncalli was viewed with suspicion, even though he was an apostolic delegate from the Vatican.

Wherever Roncalli went in Greece, government agents followed. As in Turkey, he was careful not to overreach. He kept his visits brief, traveled inconspicuously, and never presumed he was more important than the people to whom he was speaking. There was a good deal of distrust for the Italians during this period. Greece was overwhelmingly Orthodox. For all intents and purposes, Orthodox Christianity was the state religion. There were only about 50,000 Roman Catholics, most of whom were viewed with suspicion.

Roncalli visited Catholics in Greece on numerous occasions. Though he traveled there three times in his first year in Turkey, he had a difficult time connecting with the Greek government, which did not recognize the Vatican envoy. Believing Mussolini and Pope Pius were allied, in part because of the Lateran Pact, General Metaxas refused to allow Roman Catholics to marry or to build churches. “There are so many things to fix in this country,” Roncalli wrote to his mother in 1938, “but since the people are all Orthodox and frightened of the Holy See and the pope, one has to act slowly, cautiously, and with extreme sensitivity.” During his time in Greece, Roncalli gradually, patiently, worked his magic over the authorities. He convinced the government to allow Greek Catholics to marry in their Church. They also allowed Uniate Catholics to build a new cathedral. As he did in Bulgaria, he continued to visit Greek Orthodox shrines, churches, and monasteries, even making the arduous journey to the famous monastery on Mount Athos. “One has to take the most difficult paths on horseback,” he wrote to his mother, “and this made me entrust myself to Saint Joseph and my ancestors—as I always do—so as not to fall off. I didn’t fall off once.”

Outside Turkey, cascading events created a growing momentum in the direction of worldwide conflict in 1938. The ailing Pope Pius XI issued two encyclical letters in March, denouncing the barren wastelands of Nazi idolatry and Soviet atheism. Roncalli reacted to the growing alarm as the dedicated pastoral leader he had always been and would continue to be. He was adamant in his belief that the Church must continue to seek understanding with the broader community of believers. Adapting to the needs of the locale and the requirements of the indigenous peoples was the key to the future.

Meanwhile, Hitler and Mussolini cavorted in Rome that May and appeasement reared its head in the signing of the Munich agreement in September. Then Kemal Atatürk died in Istanbul on November 10, 1938, a date commemorated still throughout the nation he forged as a modern state.

Nor did Roncalli “fall off his horse” on the mission to both Greece and Turkey, but in some ways there was very little headway an apostolic delegate could make in either country. As the world headed toward another great war, with Italy one of the aggressors, suspicions fell harder on the Church of Rome and its powerful prelates. Fewer and fewer doors were open to Roncalli. This was especially true after Mussolini’s Ethiopian adventure. Italy and Greece traded belligerent words, and after Mussolini allied himself with Hitler, war broke out between the two countries in fall 1940.

Before that, however, Roncalli received a severe blow. His mother, Marianna, died of the flu on February 20, 1939, ten days after the death of Pope Pius XI. Roncalli mourned the pope, although Pius was a man he perhaps admired more than he loved. Marianna’s death, however, crushed him. During her illness, he was unable to leave Istanbul and, even after her death, his duties did not allow him to return for the funeral. His sisters Ancilla and Maria wrote him, “Frequently she would recall her children, and especially you who are so far away; and you should have seen how, poor thing, she came to life again when she got a letter from you.”

Marianna was eighty-five years old and had lived a full life, and Archbishop Roncalli consoled himself with this thought. In lieu of his presence at the funeral, he wrote the prose poem that appeared on the back of the funeral card:

Dear and respected by all.

Dearer to her children

Who grew numerous and strong

In the fear of God and the love of men,

And to the sons of her sons

Whom she saw multiplied in joy

In her home

Even to the third and fourth generation

Blessed her memory.

Roncalli was by now the main support of his ever-growing family; often their needs exceeded what he could provide. “Without having taken a vow of poverty,” he wrote ruefully to a friend, “I am practicing it.” Years earlier, he purchased the family home and was still trying to pay off the mortgage and the yearly taxes. At the same time, he was forced to borrow money (12,000 lire in 1939 alone) to help support his sisters. He could occasionally sound a little irritable at the demands on his depleted purse. “But now for a little time I want to be left in peace and not appealed to for further needs,” he wrote Ancilla, but it was evident how extraordinarily important his family was to him and how responsible he felt toward them.

In March 1939, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the papal secretary of state, was elected pope as the obvious choice of the majority of cardinal electors after a one-day affair with only three ballots, the shortest conclave since the seventeenth century. He was the first Vatican secretary of state to be elected since Clement IX, 272 years earlier. “Being pope today,” Roncalli remarked with typical humor, “is enough to turn your hair as white as your soutane.” Pacelli took the name Pius XII.

Unable to be in Rome, Roncalli listened to the ceremony at Saint Peter’s on the radio: “What a miracle the invention of the wireless is!” He had reason to be happy. Through Roncalli’s efforts, a representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch Benjamin I was present at requiem for Pius XI—the first time the head of the Orthodox Church had attended a funeral Mass at the Vatican—and for the celebratory Te Deum for the new pope. As Roncalli wrote to his friend, the Anglican minister Austin Oakely, personal representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose relationship with Roncalli was yet another example of the latter’s spirit of ecumenism, there was a high wall between the Eastern and Western churches, but “I try to pull out a brick here and there.” Once again, Roncalli’s modest approach bore fruit.

On Good Friday 1939, Italy invaded Albania, exacerbating the growing tension on the Greek peninsula. On August 23, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and on September 1, Germany invaded Poland, followed closely behind by their new allies, the Russians. World War II had begun, and Roncalli’s world changed dramatically.

Soon England and France were at war with Germany; Mussolini, in a highly unpopular decision within Italy, invaded an already-defeated France in June 1940. When Mussolini attacked Greece from Albania in October, the Near East erupted. The outnumbered Greeks drove the Italians back into Albania, but at this point Germany and Bulgaria—recently brought into the war through King Boris’s alliance with the Axis powers—invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. Both countries quickly surrendered despite the fact that Britain had joined the Greeks in attempting to fend off the Axis attack.

Roncalli, in neutral Turkey, watched these events unfold in horror. The Vatican ordered him to concentrate as much as possible on Greece, and he made three trips there in 1940—all now by plane, a cross for a man who hated flying. At one point, he arrived in Greece in June and did not leave until October. Despite the fact that he had reached the age of sixty, “the year in which a man begins to get old, and admits it,” as he wrote in his journal, he was indefatigable. He visited Italian occupation troops, wounded German soldiers, and British prisoners of war and continually worked to provide relief for the hard-hit Greeks.

During the Axis occupation, 400,000 Greeks were imprisoned, 60,000 were executed, and millions were made homeless. The country was, as Roncalli wrote his family, “a place of desolation.” The most pressing issue was food—the British blockade of Greece made it impossible for shipments of urgently needed grain to reach the island. Using Vatican funds, Roncalli established food depots, set up clinics for the sick, and begged for food and medicine from neutral countries.

But by September 1941, people were dying of starvation at the rate of 1,000 per day. Roncalli was asked by a delegation of Greek laymen if he could get the Vatican to intercede with the British to allow food shipments through the blockade. He immediately went into action, contacting Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou, the only effective Greek leader in a country that had seen its king and his entire government flee to London.

The archbishop passed Roncalli a letter, signed by Orthodox leaders, that begged Pope Pius to use his influence to help Greece. Roncalli personally delivered this letter to the pope at a private audience in October, and the Holy Father agreed to press Britain to allow the grain through to the starving Greeks.

Historians of the war disagree over the outcome of Roncalli’s and Pius’s intervention—some claim that the grain helped avert a worse famine, others that only a trickle got through. But what is indisputable is that Roncalli’s pressuring of the Vatican at least alerted the Holy See to the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Greece, causing it to funnel more funds to that country.

It was at this point in the developing catastrophe that Roncalli began to expand his charitable ministry. The apostolic delegate was dedicated to performing corporal works of mercy among the people. Obedience and charity were the cornerstones of his vocation. Negotiating diplomatic terms was one thing, providing for the basic necessities of life was entirely another. It was the gospel mandate by which he lived.

Diplomacy, however, remained a critical element of his office. Dictated by the neutrality of Vatican policy, his methodology nonetheless was geared to a more personal interaction between him and the important players with whom he came in contact in Istanbul and Athens in these early months of the war.

One of these players was Franz von Papen, German ambassador to Turkey. Von Papen was a holdover from the Weimar Republic. He had been one of a group of politicians who had supported the Nazi assumption of power in 1933 in the hope that Germany could benefit from the discipline espoused by National Socialism. Deputized by Hitler to oversee the annexation of Austria in 1938, he was now in Istanbul at the crossroads of East and West. The relationship that developed between the Catholic von Papen and Archbishop Roncalli illustrates the ambivalent nature of the diplomatic process.

Von Papen would serve as a conduit, both for information and misinformation, as well as a link in the escape route for Eastern European Jews. Throughout 1940, Roncalli traveled between Istanbul and Athens attending to the many exigencies the two locales presented. Germany’s territorial ambitions in Western Europe were actualized on June 22, 1940, when the French signed an armistice at Compiègne. Earlier that month, Italy officially entered the war as the third belligerent of the Axis powers.

In February 1942, Roncalli wrote, “I live in the exercise of charity, charity for all.” As the situation worsened in Greece, the apostolic delegate spent most of his time in Istanbul, where he worked tirelessly to save lives. He begged the German commander in Athens to spare the lives of Greek partisans captured there, but he failed to sway the Nazis, and the executions went on as ordered. Roncalli also spent much of his time working with the Red Cross to track prisoners of war and provide their families with information.

As the war progressed, Istanbul was a hotbed of espionage and a way station for those attempting to escape the onslaught of Nazi aggression.

During the early years of the war, Roncalli became aware of Germany’s campaign of extermination of European Jews, probably from reports by Polish refugees. He repeatedly forwarded requests to the Vatican from Chaim Barlas, head of the Jerusalem Jewish Agency, to pressure neutral countries like Portugal and Sweden into accepting displaced Jews.

Barlas also wanted the Vatican to aid in “the transfer of Jews to Palestine.”

Secretary of State Cardinal Maglione stated confidentially, “One cannot prescind from the strict connection between [Jews reaching Palestine] and that of the Holy Places, for whose liberty the Holy See is deeply concerned.” In other words, Pope Pius seemed to be more interested in preserving Jerusalem and its sacred places for Christian pilgrims than in saving Jewish lives.

Despite this indifference—to put the very best light on it—on the part of the Vatican diplomatic machinery, Roncalli did everything he could.

As the war entered its second year, severe shortages of food in Greece became an overriding concern for the archbishop. The Allies were enforcing a total blockade of supplies to belligerent countries in pursuit of unconditional surrender by the Axis powers. Allied war aims were not part of Roncalli’s mission; feeding hungry people was. To alleviate the pressing need for food stores in Greece, he met with the Orthodox Metropolitan Damaskinos, a meeting not previously considered, such was the historical hostility between the two rival churches.

Roncalli’s involvement with relief efforts introduced him to Raymond Courvoisier, coordinator of the Red Cross/Red Crescent efforts in Ankara. Attempting to mediate on the part of prisoners of war held in the Soviet Union, the archbishop became acutely aware of the hostility inherent in Soviet policy toward humanitarian initiatives. The position of the Vatican as protector of the suffering was not held in high regard within the Soviet foreign ministry, which focused almost singularly on Soviet power.

Roncalli’s relationship with Courvoisier, however, became crucial to his efforts to save European Jews. Turkey remained a neutral country, and Istanbul a critical point of departure from blood-soaked Europe. Approached by members of the Jewish Agency from Palestine, Archbishop Roncalli met with the Grand Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog. Formal requests of the Vatican to intercede with Great Britain on the issue of the Mandate for Palestine and the concomitant restriction on immigration were unsuccessful. It became incumbent upon Roncalli to facilitate action of an independent nature. And so he did. It is a matter of record that Archbishop Roncalli personally signed transit visas for thousands of Slovakian Jews, whose destination and eventual refuge was, indeed, Palestine.

Assisting Archbishop Roncalli in this essential work of mercy was von Papen, Hitler’s emissary in Turkey. The personal relationship between the two men enabled Roncalli to effectively channel resources to German-occupied areas.

Despite his alliance, King Boris responded to Roncalli’s personal pleas and delayed the transfer of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. He arranged for transit visas to Palestine. As many as 24,000 Jewish lives were saved in this way. Unfortunately, Boris died mysteriously after a visit to Hitler in Germany—he may have been poisoned by the Nazis for not being loyal enough—and Roncalli was unable to save additional lives in the Balkans. In 1944, Roncalli forwarded to Vatican diplomats in Hungary and Romania so-called immigration certificates prepared by the Palestine Jewish Agency. According to legend, these were forged baptismal certificates prepared by Roncalli himself. This was not the case. Roncalli was not in the business of faking baptisms, even to save Jewish lives. But he did aid in getting the immigration certificates to Jews in these beleaguered countries, where such paperwork sometimes helped them escape.

Maintaining relationships within German-occupied countries and retaining diplomatic status in Axis-controlled capital cities were fundamental goals of the Vatican diplomat throughout the duration of the war.

Pius XII had served as nuncio to Berlin and as secretary of state immediately prior to his election as pope. Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Pius’s secretary of state during World War II, prioritized Vatican diplomatic outreach and considered the plight of Jewish refugees as secondary to the position of the Holy See as an international diplomatic institution. Critical historians have posited that political influence outweighed considerations of humanitarian relief.

In December 1944, Roncalli’s life then took another fateful turn. He received a cable from the Vatican that read, “His Holiness nominates you nuncio to Paris. Letter follows.”

At first, Roncalli thought the cable was a mistake, but his secretary confirmed its authenticity. Here was the invitation to serve as an official ambassador, the Vatican’s top diplomatic post to France, a country whose future was very important to the Vatican. He did not know that Pope Pius’s first choice had turned him down for health reasons. He just knew that, at the age of sixty-three, he was on his way to the most important job of his career.