The Vatican-Mussolini partnership was set against the backdrop of Italy’s flourishing alliance with Germany’s Third Reich, the so-called Rome-Berlin Axis. The church had good reason to monitor that political union. A third of Germans were Catholic. Despite the godless ideology promoted by Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party, the church realized it had to work with the Nazis if it meant safeguarding the rights of Catholics.
The Vatican saw in the Nazis the same fervent anticommunism that was an integral element of Mussolini’s fascism. Pius knew, however, that deciding how best to deal with Germany was not as simple as concluding that Hitler was less evil than Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The Vatican feared that Hitler was more passionate about his anticlerical rhetoric than was Mussolini. Nazi policy was that the state alone should be revered. Since Hitler was raised Catholic and a few Third Reich ministers occasionally spoke of “positive Christianity,” some church officials hoped Hitler might soften his antichurch theme over time. The Führer gave conflicting signals. Once he declared that churches should be an integrated element of German national life. Another time he said: “You are either a Christian or a German. You cannot be both.”1 Privately, however, Hitler promised colleagues that he would “eradicate” Christianity from Germany.2
If anyone had faith that the Germans could be trusted despite the harshness of their rhetoric, it was Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli. An admitted Teutophile, he had been the Papal Nuncio to Germany for twelve years. Within weeks of Hitler’s 1933 appointment as Chancellor, Pacelli sent the Führer a private letter in which he obliquely endorsed the Nazi’s strong anticommunist policies.3 At the time, no European country yet had recognized Hitler’s government. Hitler saw an opening in Pacelli’s note. He reasoned that if the Vatican conferred the stamp of its moral authority on the Third Reich, it might encourage other nations to follow. The same impetus had propelled Mussolini into a pact with the Vatican. And although Hitler wanted to crush the church, he did not want to repeat the mistake of his predecessor, Bismarck, by taking on so early a widely popular faith.4 The Nazi hierarchy knew that Pacelli was as likely as any church official to be receptive to a deal. During his tenure as Nuncio, Pacelli had hammered out concordats with Bavaria (1924), Prussia (1929), and Baden-Württemberg (1932).5
Hitler dispatched to Rome Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen—a Papal Knight—to determine whether the Holy See might entertain a formal treaty with the Third Reich.6 Hermann Göring, a decorated chief of the Luftwaffe and one of Hitler’s closest aides, accompanied Papen to emphasize to the Vatican that the Germans were serious. Starting in April 1933, Pacelli and Papen began secret negotiations.7 That was the same month that the Nazis ratcheted up their war against the Jews. On April 1, the National Socialists launched a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses.8 Nazi storm troopers burned Jewish shops and assaulted Jews.9 Three days after the start of the hooliganism, the Third Reich passed its first decree directed at Jews—the Law Regarding the Admission to the Bar—banning Jewish attorneys.10 It was the start of what some historians have called “plunder by decree.”11 A few days later a law dismissed Jews from the civil service since they were not “Aryan.” A week later another law prohibited them from serving as teachers and judges.12 The number of Jews allowed to study in universities was set at a fixed quota of one percent. Jewish war veterans and their families—more than 32,000 Jewish German soldiers had died in World War I—were cut off from benefits. On April 11, for the first time the Nazis defined Jews by blood: one Jewish grandparent marked someone as “non-Aryan.”13 Thousands of instructional charts were distributed to help average Germans distinguish Jews from Aryans.14 In May, the Nazis celebrated the first in a series of public-spectacle book burnings. They were meant to expunge from public libraries the literary and scientific contributions of Jewish intellectuals and scholars, including books by Kafka, Hesse, Brecht, Einstein, and Freud.15
The violent national boycott, the exclusionary law, and the book burnings were all an early test for the church. Would it tolerate the Nazis’ unrelenting anti-Semitism? During those first seminal months—while negotiations with the Nazis were under way—no Vatican official or German bishop condemned what was happening to Germany’s Jews.16 Breslau’s Cardinal Adolf Bertram instead dismissed a plea for intervention by averring that the Nazi “measures [were] directed against an interest group which has no very close bond with the Church.” In any case, said Bertram, “The press, which is overwhelmingly in Jewish hands, has steadfastly remained consistently silent about the persecution of Catholics.”17 Munich’s Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, one of the most influential clerics, distributed an order directing German clergy to support the Nazi state. He reiterated his full “confidence” in the Third Reich.18 Faulhaber later wrote a letter to Pacelli: “We bishops are being asked why the Catholic Church, as often in its history, does not intervene on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at this time because the struggle against the Jews would then, at the same time, become a struggle against the Catholics, and because the Jews can help themselves. . . .”19
On April 25, thousands of German priests became part of what historian John Cornwell calls an “anti-Semitic attestation bureaucracy,” by surrendering their parish marriage and baptism records.20 The Nazis used those documents to verify blood purity. In less than two months, on July 14, the Nazis enacted the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. It institutionalized sterilization for people determined to have one of nine supposedly hereditary conditions, including deafness and blindness, bipolar and schizophrenia, “feeblemindedness,” physical deformity, and even alcoholism. Vatican officials discussed what to do since such mandatory sterilization was a gross violation of church teachings and a 1930 encyclical Pius had issued, Casti Connubii (Of Chaste Wedlock).21 The Pope feared, however, that any criticism might jeopardize the ongoing negotiations with the Third Reich. The Vatican stayed silent.22 Pius privately told his bishops not to rule out a future campaign against the sterilization decree, but neither did he encourage them to start one. Eventually 400,000 Germans were sterilized, and the Vatican did not issue a Pastoral Letter against it for another decade, only after the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Nazis).23,I
Less than a week later, on July 20, Papen and Cardinal Pacelli signed a thirty-three-article pact—a Reichskonkordat—that was the result of nearly three months of negotiations.25 Hitler granted, at least on paper, many of the safeguards the church wanted. The National Socialists guaranteed the right of Catholics to practice their faith as well as the freedom to express it publicly without retribution. Catholics were “protected in their establishments and their activity.” Religious orders were exempted from paying taxes on stipends they received from the church. The right to operate Catholic schools was reaffirmed.26 Government workers were forbidden from criticizing the church.27 And there was a special accommodation for the Kirchensteuer, the church tax on German Catholics that had been in effect since 1919. The church often had trouble getting the faithful to pay it voluntarily, so the Third Reich agreed to collect the 8 to 10 percent tariff through automatic payroll deductions of Catholic wage earners.28 It was the first time that any country had agreed to provide the Vatican a share of government-collected tax money. It uniquely tied the church to the Third Reich.29,II
In return, the Vatican gave Hitler the formal endorsement he wanted. Article 16 of the Reichskonkordat required German bishops and cardinals to swear an oath of loyalty to the Third Reich. It was a dramatic reversal from 1932 when a German bishops’ conference had banned membership in the Nazi Party and forbade anyone wearing a swastika from receiving the sacraments.31 The agreement also decreed that a “special prayer . . . for the welfare of the German Reich” be inserted into every Sunday and Holy Day Mass.
The Germans also prevailed on the most contested provision, Article 32: it banned all clergy from joining any political party. That accelerated the demise of the Catholic Center Party, forcing the resignation of priests who had been elected to the Reichstag.32 And all church organizations and orders were prohibited from expressing any political opinions. The definition of “political” was left to the discretion of the Nazis. The Reichskonkordat was clear: anything that was not about “the dogmatic and moral teachings and principles of the Church” was suspect.33
And to ensure the purity of the priesthood, the Nazis required all priests practicing in Germany to be natural-born citizens who had a German education. They would answer only to German superiors. Religious instruction had to encourage patriotism and devotion to the state.34
Pacelli had tried inserting a sentence to protect Catholics who had converted from Judaism, what the Nazis dubbed “non-Aryan Catholics.” Under the Third Reich’s race laws, such converts were considered Jews. Even children and grandchildren of converts, of whom there were some 300,000 in Germany, were still Jews according to the Nazis.35 Church officials fretted that if only blood controlled Jewish identity, there would be no further inducement for Jews to convert to Catholicism.36 In the worst historical persecutions against Jews—even the bloody Spanish Inquisition—converting was enough to avoid torture or death. Pius XI had made conversion one of the central tenets of his Papacy.
But the Germans rejected any protection for “non-Aryan Catholics.” Nazi theorists considered converted Jews dangerous. By adopting Catholicism they might be able to mask their Jewishness and become sleeper agents spreading corruption inside Germany.37 (Five years later Pacelli issued an appeal to bishops to help obtain up to 200,000 exit visas for non-Aryan Catholics.)38
A delighted Hitler boasted that the “treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgment of the National Socialist State by the Catholic Church.”39 The Reichskonkordat convinced ordinary Germans that the Vatican approved of the Third Reich. German Catholics embraced the Nazis without any lingering reservations. In the months following the agreement, a record number of Catholics became Nazi Party members (some clergy also joined, with one bishop entering the SS).40
That September (1933), after the German Reichstag ratified the agreement, the Papal Nuncio to Germany, Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, celebrated with a Pontifical High Mass at Berlin’s grand eighteenth-century St. Hedwig’s cathedral. Catholic SS members received special invitations. The cathedral’s vaulted dome was festooned with Papal flags that hung next to those emblazoned with swastikas. In his sermon, Orsenigo praised Hitler as “a man marked by his devotion to God, and sincerely concerned for the well-being of the German people.” Since the crowd was so large—thousands could not squeeze into the standing-room-only cathedral—loudspeakers broadcast the service to enthusiastic throngs outside.
The Reichskonkordat was important for the Nazis.41 It gave them the parliamentary votes of the Catholic Center Party, further tightening their grip on government.42 And Hitler was right. His first treaty with a foreign power—even one as Lilliputian as the Vatican—polished his image.43 In a Sunday sermon, Cardinal von Faulhaber, who came to regret the deal, praised the Führer: “This handshake with the papacy, the greatest moral power in the history of the world, is a feat of immeasurable blessing. . . . May God protect our Chancellor for our people.”44
The Nazis were proud the Vatican stayed the course through the negotiations during the first major escalation of their campaign against Jews. Hitler told other Nazis that the treaty had created a political tone that was “especially significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry.”45 The Führer boasted privately: “I shall be one of the few men in history to have deceived the Vatican.”46
Two weeks after the Pontifical High Mass in Berlin, the Nazis issued new race orders that excluded Jews from all artistic, dramatic, literary, film, and news enterprises. The following day, Jewish farmers were banned from owning farmland and were denied inheritance rights to family property.
Just a month after the agreement, Pope Pius XI told a British diplomat that he knew about “German persecutions of the Jews.”47 But he gave no indication that he intended to say anything in protest. The Pope had been raised and educated in a church theology steeped in anti-Semitism.48 Moreover, he had demonstrated he was no reformer when it came to relations between the church and Jews. Five years before the Reichskonkordat, Pius had rejected the efforts of a reformist Catholic movement, the Friends of Israel, to remove Holy Week references to the “perfidy of Jews” and “perfidious Jews.”49 He thought the protesting Jews were attempting to promote Zionism and create a homeland in Palestine.50 That was taboo. His predecessor, Pius X, had made that clear in a 1904 meeting with the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. The Pope told Herzl: “We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem, but [we] could never sanction it. . . . The Jews have not recognized our Lord. Therefore, we cannot recognize the Jewish people, and so, if you come to Palestine and settle your people there, we will be ready with churches and priests to baptize all of you.”51 In accord with that rhetoric, Pius XI disbanded the Friends of Israel.52
Church officials did not speak out against the November 1933 Nazi legislation that provided for the internment in concentration camps of the homeless, beggars, and the unemployed. Nor when the Third Reich enacted a law in June 1935 introducing compulsory abortions to prevent the passing of hereditary diseases. More silence ensued in September 1935 with the passage of two so-called Nuremberg Laws. The first, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, criminalized sexual relations and marriage between Jews and Aryans. The second, the Reich Citizenship Law, stripped Jews of their citizenship.
Germany was not the only Vatican concordat partner that gave the church discomfort with its policies. The same was true for Italy. In 1935 the Vatican had to choose between the moralities it preached and the hunt for profits that had become a part of Nogara’s investment strategy.
On October 3, 100,000 Italian soldiers swept over the border from Italian Somaliland and invaded Ethiopia. There was no declaration of war. In less than two weeks, Italy’s troops had routed Emperor Haile Selassie’s half-million-man army, many primitively armed with spears, bows, or in some cases outdated nineteenth-century rifles. The Italians swept through the holy capital of Axum (sending a sacred obelisk back to Rome as a trophy for capturing the city).III
The Ethiopian campaign was an essential part of Mussolini’s grand ambition to re-create an Italian empire that stretched without interruption from southern Europe through central and east Africa. Ethiopia—then Abyssinia—was a prime candidate for Il Duce’s expansionist policies. It was one of the few African nations not already a European colony. France and Britain had large empires and several other European countries boasted African colonies.54 Mineral-rich Ethiopia was a natural extension of Italy’s Eritrean colony to the northwest and Italian Somaliland on the east. And finally, Mussolini was in part avenging Italy’s defeat during the First Italian-Abyssinian War thirty-nine years earlier.
The invasion was brutal. Although Italy had signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol governing the acceptable conduct of war, Mussolini’s troops ignored those rules. In artillery and aerial bombardments, they used between four and five hundred tons of prohibited mustard gas, terrorized civilians by firebombing the city of Harar, and even used the gas on Red Cross ambulances and camps.55
The mostly ineffective League of Nations—the predecessor to the United Nations—condemned Italy as the aggressor, but member countries could not agree on what to do. Nogara monitored the League’s efforts since he hoped to derail any effort to pass sanctions that might damage Italy’s economy. The League moved so slowly it gave time to some of Nogara’s Italian friends to transfer their assets to Vatican holding companies. The Vatican would be untouched by anything the League did since the Holy See was an independent country not involved in the conflict.56 But all the worrying was unnecessary. The sanctions had no bite and Italy blithely ignored them.57
The war caused little anxiety inside the Vatican. In fact, the church had no reason to take on Mussolini. Most Italians supported the invasion. Pius had himself blessed some of the troops as they left for the fighting.58 And the Pope made no attempt to dampen the clerical enthusiasm evident from church pulpits. He was even silent when Milan’s Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster declared the war a crusade for Catholicism.59 Popular archbishops in Amalfi, Brindisi, and Sorrento rebuked the League of Nations as godless hypocrites.60 Mussolini bragged to Nazi officials, “Why they [the Vatican] even declared the Abyssinian war a Holy War!”61
Britain and France were upset with Pius’s tacit support of the Italian campaign and his refusal to speak out either against the aggression or about the plight of civilians. And the same criticism extended to Secretary of State Pacelli, who maintained a strict diplomatic silence about the invasion. Some observers thought that the Pontiff’s reluctance to wield his moral authority was because Ethiopia was mostly Muslim and had few Catholics.
But the Pope was motivated not so much by Ethiopian demographics as by what was best for business. The church had stakes in Breda, Reggiane, and Compagnia Nazionale Aeronautica, manufacturers of munitions and weapons.62 Nogara had made it clear to the Pontiff that the Vatican’s huge investments in Italian stocks and Mussolini’s state-issued bonds meant that the church’s interests were best served by a brief and successful campaign. With Nogara as middleman, the Vatican made a substantial wartime loan to the fascist government (it stayed secret for decades).63 In exchange, Mussolini gave the church “ecclesiastical dispensations” from special levies of corporate, real estate, and sales taxes that he imposed to raise money to fund the offensive.64
Nogara was concerned about intensifying British and American opposition to the invasion. He briefed the Pope, as well as Raffaele Guariglia, chief of Italy’s Bureau of Ethiopian Affairs and a strong advocate of colonial expansion.65 The message from Nogara to both was the same: a prolonged conflict would burden Italy’s resources and budget, create widespread pessimism among ordinary Italians, and potentially lead to an economic downturn that might spur the growth of extremist political parties.66
The Vatican shared Nogara’s concerns. Pius was delighted that the brutal combat ended on May 7, 1936, when Italy annexed the country and named the Italian King, Victor Emmanuel III, as Emperor. Mussolini merged the three contiguous colonies—Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somaliland—into Italian East Africa. Two thousand five hundred Italian troops had been killed during the brief war. But an estimated 275,000 Ethiopians—soldiers and civilians—had been massacred. Reports of the bloodbath got lost in Italy’s jubilation over its conquest. Even the Pope joined leading Italian dignitaries in celebrating the war’s end and offering Mussolini his heartfelt congratulations.
Exiled Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie gave a rousing speech in Geneva before the League of Nations the following month. He warned, “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.” The League passed another ineffective condemnation. Mussolini, emboldened by his victory, had withdrawn Italy from the League of Nations weeks earlier.
In the new colony, the fascists imposed anti-miscegenation laws, banning interracial marriage, cohabitation, and sexual relations. Residential segregation, in the formerly liberal country, was instituted and strictly enforced. The Vatican was silent.
There was money to be made from the conquered colony. Mussolini announced a new agency—Regia Azienda Monopolio Banane (the Royal Banana Monopoly Business)—to control the lucrative banana trade from all its African colonies. The agency doled out exclusive concessions to forty-eight businessmen, all of them ranking fascists or handpicked by the Vatican.67,IV
When Ethiopian insurgents failed in a 1937 assassination attempt on the colony’s military commander, Mussolini ordered mass executions as punishment. An estimated thirty thousand Ethiopians, including half of the younger educated class, were killed. Again, there was no public protest from Pius or any ranking cleric. In the British Foreign Office, a flurry of cables between officials reflected the now widespread Western view that the “Church has proved that it is purely Italian and far from ‘Catholic’ ” and that “the Church is in Mussolini’s pocket.”69
• • •
In 1937, Nogara accelerated the pace of the church’s investments beyond Europe.70 He traveled to America and stopped in the wealthy dioceses, including New York, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. He met influential businessmen in each city. In New York, he spent much of his time with Giovanni Fummi and his fellow investment bankers at the House of Morgan.71 Relying on their advice, he put $3.5 million into the stocks of manufacturing companies, some electrical utilities, and U.S. Treasury bonds.72 Under Nogara’s cautious guidance, the Vatican now had an economic toehold in the New World.
Nogara’s decision to diversify further was prompted by his concern over Hitler’s increasingly confrontational rhetoric about Germany’s claim to the Sudetenland, a portion of northern and western Czechoslovakia with mostly German-speaking residents. The Czech military, worried that Hitler might forcibly reclaim it, had begun building fortifications and moving troops to the border.
Nogara was not the only one inside the Vatican who thought that Germany was ratcheting up tensions. The Nazis were also flagrantly violating the Reichskonkordat. As part of a coordinated effort by the Third Reich to diminish the church’s moral sway over ordinary Germans, the Nazis had begun holding public “morality trials” at which priests and nuns were prosecuted for concocted financial corruptions or sexual crimes.73 Catholic weeklies were subjected to ever stricter censorship.74 Nazis even spread the rumor that the Pope’s grandmother was a “Dutch Jewess.”75 Pius wanted to confront the Nazis, but Pacelli counseled moderation. Drafts of an encyclical were passed around to senior prelates and its language was tempered during an intense internal debate.76 The compromise was Pius’s encyclical Mit brenndender Sorge (With Burning Sorrow).77 By the obtuse standards of encyclicals, it included some remarkably direct language, such as the Pope’s condemnation of how the Nazis had repeatedly broken the treaty. In other instances it more indirectly chastised the Third Reich for encouraging a growing worship of the German state to the exclusion of religion.78 Pius distanced the church from the “so-called myth of blood and race.”79 Jews were not mentioned, although the encyclical obliquely offered “consolation and strength” to those who had converted to Catholicism.80
Third Reich officials took little satisfaction that the encyclical did not mention the persecution of Jews or condemn Germany’s institutionalized anti-Semitism. They were instead furious with its overall theme that cast the church as indispensable as the state.81 The German companies that had printed it were shuttered and their employees jailed. The Foreign Office rebuked ranking German bishops for having read it from their pulpits.82 Some Nazi officials urged annulling the Reichskonkordat.83 But Hitler wanted to keep the agreement in place. Although he did not mind upsetting the church, he did not intend to move against it with the full power of the state until after the war.84 Moreover, notes from Germany’s ambassador to the Vatican, Diego von Bergen, reveal that in a meeting with Cardinal Pacelli, after the encyclical was released, Pacelli offered appeasement. He was solicitous, expressing his own sympathy for the plight of the German people. Pacelli even proposed meeting Field Marshal Göring if it would help temper any Third Reich indignation.85 Göring responded by accelerating the pace of the morality trials intended to humiliate German priests and nuns.86
By the following year (1938), the Pope was uneasy about the militant anti-Semitism in both the Third Reich and fascist Italy.87 In a turnabout, he even suggested that the Sacred Congregation for Seminaries and Universities find Italian theology professors who might challenge the Nazi racial pseudoscience.88
When the Führer visited Rome in May on a state visit, he did not stop by the Vatican. Pius went to Castel Gandolfo, the Papal summer residence. Both sides claimed they snubbed the other but there was little doubt that neither tried very hard to set up a meeting.89
In July, the Pope directed his frustration to Mussolini. Pius was furious when Il Duce issued his Manifesto of Race, signed by a hodgepodge of fascist academics. It concluded that Italians were a “pure Aryan race” and that “Jews do not belong to the Italian race.”90 Pius told his aides that the manifesto and the subsequent race laws were “contrary to Catholic doctrine.”91 But as was the Pope’s style, the Vatican said nothing publicly. Only in a private audience with the British Minister to the Vatican, Sir D’Arcy Godolphin Osborne, did Pius share his frank fear that Europe’s new fascists had replaced communism as the church’s most dangerous enemy.92
A couple of months later, at an audience with Belgian pilgrims, Pius turned teary-eyed after the visitors presented him with a gift of an ancient missal. The Pontiff flipped the pages to a section about Abraham. “We recognize that everyone has the right to self-defense and may take the necessary means for protecting legitimate interests,” he said. “But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”93
Pius had reached his breaking point. Only a few aides knew that in late June he had summoned John LaFarge, an American Jesuit, to Castel Gandolfo. The Pontiff asked LaFarge to draft an encyclical addressing anti-Semitism and racism. It signaled a momentous shift in the Vatican’s policy of silent observance. The choice of LaFarge meant Pius was serious. As an editor of the Jesuit magazine America, LaFarge had a well-deserved reputation as one of the strongest editorial voices against Southern segregation. The previous year, LaFarge had published a book, Interracial Justice as a Principle of Order, which was a well-received broadside against American racism.94 LaFarge, sworn to secrecy, picked two fellow Jesuits to help him, both of whom had collaborated on previous encyclicals.95 They worked steadily for three months in Paris.
The Third Reich had compromised the German church with double agents and informants, even obtaining a source—likely a German bishop—who provided inside information at the highest level.96 He warned the Nazis that Pius was at long last focusing on an encyclical that would assault the Germans for their war on the Jews.
That September, LaFarge submitted a draft titled Humani Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race). As required by church protocol, the trio turned in versions in English, Latin, French, and German, to Father Wladimir Ledochowski, the patrician Polish Father General of the Jesuits (a man called the “black pope,” after the color of his vestment and the power he wielded; American intelligence secretly concluded he was “a tireless supporter of Fascist political movements in every country including Italy”).97 Ledochowski passed it in turn for trimming to Father Enrico Rosa, editor of the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica. That was a seemingly odd choice for what Pius intended to be a groundbreaking encyclical. La Civiltà Cattolica had a storied history of virulent anti-Semitism. Father Rosa himself had written about Jews having “hidden power,” and charged they worked in partnership with Freemasons to “persecute the Catholic Church.”98
The eighty-one-year-old Pius was in poor health. Riddled with diabetes, heart disease, and ulcerated legs, he had been declining for a couple of years.99 Still, Ledochowski and Rosa did not seem in any rush. The three Jesuits who drafted Humani Generis Unitas feared that their Father General might be “bent on sabotaging the encyclical” by delaying it.100 Ledochowski would have recognized that it ventured far beyond the normal church boundaries for intervention and discourse. And the Father General of the Jesuits was a close friend of Cardinal Pacelli. The two had worked together on previous encyclicals. Both knew that as Secretary of State, Pacelli would be on any shortlist to replace Pius. Would such a bold proclamation hamper Pacelli if he became the next Pope? Ledochowski had no doubt that Humani Generis Unitas was far too audacious for the more cautious Pacelli. He also knew that some senior clerics were irked that the Pope had tapped an unproven American cleric to be the lead author on such a critical subject.
Events outside the Vatican should have given impetus to the encyclical. The same month that LaFarge submitted the first draft, Mussolini copied the Nazi race laws for Italy. The statutes purged Jews from the civil service, barred Jewish children from public schools, and gave all foreign Jews six months to leave the country.101 Pius was particularly incensed that the law banned marriages between Italians of the “Aryan race” and anyone “belonging to another race.” Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi had lobbied Mussolini in vain, contending it infringed on the rights of the church as set forth in the Lateran Pacts to be the final arbiter of all marriages.102
But Italy’s race laws did not hasten the review of the encyclical. The Jesuit hierarchy was still passing around the draft on November 9, 1938—Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass—when Nazis attacked Jews throughout Germany, killing dozens and destroying thousands of businesses and synagogues. Although Kristallnacht was condemned worldwide, the Vatican stayed silent.103 Several German bishops spoke out through sermons, but it was to incite further animus. They talked about the “murderous hatred” that Jews had toward Jesus.104 The provost of Berlin’s St. Hedwig’s cathedral, Bernhard Lichtenberg, was one of the few who condemned the frenzy of violence. The Nazis made an example of his public dissent, sentencing him to two years in prison (he later died while being transferred to Dachau).105
The start of 1939 marked a further deterioration in Pius’s health. He was well enough, however, on January 13, to welcome the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, for a state visit.106 During a formal luncheon packed with dignitaries, a frail Pius told Chamberlain that he prayed daily for “the many million Catholics in Germany, whose most grievous tribulations we follow and we share each day.” The Prime Minister reminded Pius that the abuses in Germany affected far more than just Catholics and that England “deplored the sufferings inflicted” on Protestants and Jews as well.107 Pius did not answer.
A few weeks after Chamberlain’s visit, in early February, the Pope fell seriously ill. He had prepared a condemnation of fascism—a condensed version of his encyclical—that he wanted to personally deliver on February 11, the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Lateran Pacts. But he was bedridden. Although a team of doctors and his closest clerics attended to him, he died of a heart attack on February 10.108,V
No one can say with certainty whether Humani Generis Unitas got to Pius before he died. After his death, Secretary of State Pacelli ensured that all drafts of the encyclical as well as all personal papers on Pius’s desk were sealed in the Vatican’s Secret Archives.110 No one who worked on the encyclical spoke about it again and the memory of it was soon lost in the great turmoil of World War II. It remained mostly forgotten until 1972, when the National Catholic Reporter related the story in a front-page article.111 By that time, the English and French drafts were missing. A German draft was tracked to the personal papers of one of the priests who had assisted LaFarge, but the Jesuits refused to release it. After much prodding the Vatican admitted it had the Latin draft—which some believe was the original prepared for Pius’s signature—but the church denied historians access. A former Jesuit finally passed along a French version on microfilm that had been entrusted to him by LaFarge.112
Considering that the encyclical was in the editing domain of Father Rosa and drafted during an era in which the church still referred to “perfidious Jews” in its liturgy, not all its language was friendly to Jews.113 It said “Jewish people . . . promote revolutionary movements [bolshevism] which aim to destroy society and to obliterate . . . the knowledge, reverence and love of God.”114 As a result of being “blinded by their dream of worldly gain and material success” they deserved the “worldly and spiritual ruin” that had befallen them.115 Some of LaFarge’s pioneering work against segregation in America was cited as an argument for the segregation of Jews and Christians.116
Yet all the antiquated prejudices seemed insignificant compared to the overriding theme that condemned any government that pursued racist and anti-Semitic policies. They were “totally at variance with the true spirit of the Catholic Church.” Anti-Semitism and racism were linked for the first time, since “the struggle for racial purity ends by being uniquely the struggle against the Jews.” Moreover, the encyclical castigated governments that treated “innocent persons . . . as outlaws by the very fact of their parentage.”117
Historians are split over whether the Holocaust might have been averted had the encyclical been released. Some consider it a tragic missed opportunity that would have forced Hitler to at least postpone the Final Solution until after the war. Others counter that it would not have slowed Hitler in his war against the Jews but would only have guaranteed that the Nazis sent every German bishop to the concentration camps.118
What is not in dispute is that Secretary of State Pacelli prevented the church from taking any public position condemning the Nazi reign of terror on the Jews. Not only did he keep the church from exercising its moral authority, he ensured that the remarkably direct language of Humani Generis Unitas was buried in the archives. That reaffirmed the Nazi confidence that Pacelli would insist at all costs the church maintain strict neutrality through the war.
I. While church officials remained quiet about forced sterilization, another controversy in Germany had them in a frenzy: Freikörperkultur Entwicklung, the nudism movement. Shedding clothes in public was a popular avant-garde trend at some bohemian camps during the 1920s and 1930s. Ranking clerics held dozens of meetings about how the church might best battle it. The Vatican condemned it as a “fetish of the flesh.” Pacelli considered nudity “perverse,” and judged it a contributing factor to the declining birth rate among “purely Catholic marriages.” He convinced Mussolini to confiscate and destroy all copies of a book by a Dutch author that encouraged nudity. Germany was the epicenter, said Pacelli, with some five million “mentally imbalanced” adherents. Cardinal Merry del Val called nudism one of the “most detestable and pernicious aberrations of our times. . . . An attack on Christian morality.” The church never issued such unequivocally condemnatory language to address Hitler’s and Mussolini’s anti-Semitic race policies.24
II. The Reichskonkordat never stopped some high-ranking Nazis from attacking the church. In a 1938 speech, Hitler’s military secretary, Martin Bormann, said, “We Germans are the first to be appointed by destiny to break with Christianity. It will be an honor for us.” Bormann reminded Nazi provincial governors in a confidential memo that the German church “must absolutely and finally be broken.” In his book—The Myth of the Twentieth Century—Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s philosopher and ideologue, attacked Jews and also launched an unmitigated assault on Christianity, particularly Catholicism. When the Vatican added Rosenberg’s book to its banned list, Hitler responded by promoting him as overseer of the Nazi Party’s “world view.”30
III. The Obelisk of Axum was placed in a central Roman square, in front of what would become the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Italy resisted returning it for decades, but finally did so in 2005.53
IV. When Pacelli visited the United States that November, he met with seventy-nine bishops in twelve of the sixteen American church’s Ecclesiastical Provinces. And the day after President Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection, Pacelli met the president at his Hyde Park home. There is no indication that the Ethiopian invasion was discussed. Instead, Roosevelt was concerned with the wildly popular but bigoted radio broadcasts of an American priest, Charles Coughlin. And Pacelli wanted to encourage the United States to reestablish relations with the Vatican (the last American diplomat was withdrawn in 1867). Although the substance of those talks was never disclosed, the results were evident. Two days after the meeting, Coughlin announced the last broadcast of his provocative show that reached thirty million listeners. And Roosevelt eventually bypassed resistance in Congress to restoring diplomatic relations with the Holy See by dispatching industrialist Myron Taylor as his personal envoy.68
V. That Pius was old and sick did not stop some inside the Vatican from embracing conspiracy theories about his passing. French Cardinal Eugène Tisserant believed that he had been murdered. According to Tisserant, one of Pius’s chief doctors—who happened to be the father of Mussolini’s film star mistress—had injected him with poison on orders from Il Duce. Tisserant even thought that Pacelli might be an accomplice. The motive was supposedly to prevent the bedridden Pius from releasing to all the bishops a Papal letter in which he savaged fascism. No such letter has ever been found.109