Hitler, Mussolini and two Popes Pius

HITLER, MUSSOLINI AND THE VATICAN: Pope Pius XI and the Speech That Was Never Made, by Emma Fattorini, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011. 220pp

Reviewed by Paddy Kearney

Archbishop Denis Hurley once described Pope Pius XI as the second most important pontiff of the 20th Century (the first, in his view, being Pope John XXIII). The archbishop had been a seminarian in Rome in the 1930s when Pius XI was on the throne. Like another famous seminarian of that time, Óscar Romero, who was also studying at the Gregorian University, Archbishop Hurley much admired Pius’s outspoken opposition to the “Great Dictators”: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, whom he castigated in successive encyclicals.

So opposed was Pius to Nazism that when Hitler came to Rome on a state visit in 1938, as Hurley recalled, Pius went to Castel Gandolfo so that he would not be able to receive the Nazi leader and gave instructions that the Vatican Museums be closed to any members of the dictator’s entourage.

Having heard about Emma Fattorini’s book when it first appeared in Italian four years ago, I was delighted to discover that it had been translated into English and most eager to read it. My high expectations were fully realised.

What makes this book particularly fascinating is that it is based on documentation newly made available by the Vatican’s Secret Archives. Now for the first time it is no longer simply rumour or legend that Pius XI’s opposition to fascism grew substantially in his last few years and that on his death bed he had composed his most trenchant indictment of Nazi tyranny, a message that would not see the light of day.

Fattorini carefully examines the Vatican’s newly released archival material and focuses in particular on Pius’s last year when he openly broke with Nazism and in many ways also with fascism, and experienced ever-increasing disillusionment even with Mussolini whom in earlier years he had described as the man “whom providence has sent us”.

Make no mistake, Pius XI was no lover of democracy. In the words of Richard Bosworth, an Australian reviewer of Fattorini’s book, he “was an authoritarian to his bootstraps”. Pius also believed that the Catholic Church was the only institution that could legitimately define itself as “totalitarian” going so far as to say, in 1938, “if there is a totalitarian regime – totalitarian in fact and by right – it is the regime of the Church, as man belongs wholly to the Church, must belong to it as man is the creation of the good Lord.”

As Hurley was quick to point out despite his great admiration for this pope, Pius XI’s opposition to the Great Dictators was generally not because they trampled on human rights, but because they spurned the rights of the Church. Nevertheless, it is highly significant that in Pius XI’s last few months he said with great emotion in a radio broadcast: “Anti-semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually we are all semites”, a statement which would clearly put him on a collision course with the Nazis.

Ever-present in the story of Fattorini’s account of Pius XI’s papacy is Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican’s secretary of state who would be his successor, Pius XII. Fattorini outlines the extraordinary relationship between these “two tragic individuals so different in character and so indissolubly linked together”, describing them as “ the prudent and diplomatic Pacelli and his impetuous pope”.

It is worth quoting Fattorini at length on this topic because her insights are the essence of good biography: “The make-up of their personalities, their family backgrounds, and their spiritual dimensions were almost diametrically opposed. And yet they were irresistibly attracted one to the other, perhaps because of those very differences and in keeping with the rule that opposites attract in search of complementarity, a complementarity for which both men felt a strong need. The sanguine Ratti  [Pius XI’s civil surname] would never have allowed himself to make such strong attacks had he not known that the diligent and faithful Pacelli was there to smooth things out and heal the diplomatic wounds.”

But Pius XI would not have realised just how diligent Pacelli would turn out to be – after his death on February 10, 1939. This was on the eve of the anniversary of the Lateran Pact, the agreement reached between the Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy. In his last days and hours, Pius was preparing his address for this occasion which was to be anything but a celebration of the Pact – rather it was to be the occasion for his strongest ever condemnation of fascism.

His message represented the views of an increasingly isolated and intransigent pope reaching an extraordinary clarity of thought about the evil political systems dominating Germany and Italy at that time. He had passed through an initial phase of surprise at fascism, followed by disappointment, now he was deeply angered.

Pacelli, who was elected camerlengo (a sort of caretaker/administrator) on Pius XI’s death, moved swiftly to remove the document that Pius had been writing on his deathbed. Effectively he made it disappear, giving instructions that no copies were to be made. This was probably not difficult to achieve because there seemed to be an air of relief in the Vatican about the pope’s death. His strongly anti-fascist views apparently made top Vatican officials fearful about the price that would have to be paid once Pius’s views became fully known.

Fattorini is careful not to use Pacelli’s deliberate suppression of Pius XI’s last message as further evidence of Pius XII’s controversial silence about the continuing Jewish holocaust. She sidesteps that issue, saying that more careful research is needed to determine the truth about that silence.

But she does allow herself this conclusion: “It is right and legitimate to regret that Ratti’s papacy was interrupted too suddenly by his death, just at that moment when, rather than coming to an end, it seemed about to begin anew. It was an end filled with hopes and expectations that rather than being taken up were instead and definitively cancelled out.”

Perhaps the reader can be forgiven for regretting that while Pius XI had Pacelli to temper his prophetic outspokenness, Pius XII did not have a Ratti to give more prophetic edge to his voice – except perhaps, to a limited extent, in his relationship with Archbishop Clemens von Galen of Münster. Von Galen was one of the few German bishops who took on the Nazi regime with any vigour, but it was a vigour that Pius XII thought inappropriate for a pope.

“During those terrible years of war, a saddened pope seemed to be asking that his combative archbishop maintain that hard opposition in which he, as pope, was unable to engage,” Fattorini observes. “A sense of complicity suffused their relationship as they [Pius XII and von Galen] played complementary roles reminiscent of those played by Pius XII and his predecessor.”