Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (57 page)

Nobody was ready for another Conclave in 1922, for Benedict XV was still in his sixties and died after only a short illness. No one could predict the outcome of the election, and the outcome in any case was astonishing. Achille Ratti, who took the name Pius XI, (1922–39) was a scholar who had spent almost all his working life as a librarian, first
at the Ambrosiana in his native Milan, and then at the Vatican, where he replaced a German as Prefect at the outbreak of the First World War. He was a distinguished scholar of medieval paleography, and had edited important texts on the early Milanese liturgy. He was also a keen mountaineer, and the author of a readable book on alpine climbing. He had been mysteriously whisked out of his library by Benedict XV in 1919, consecrated titular Archbishop of Lepanto, and sent as Nuncio to Poland, which had just emerged from Tsarist rule and where the Catholic Church was in process of reconstruction. Why Benedict of all people should have given this delicate mission to a man like Ratti, utterly without any relevant experience, is a mystery. He was a gifted linguist, and his German and French proved useful, but he had no Slav languages at all. His time in Poland was extremely eventful, for Polish bishops resented and cold-shouldered him as a spy for a pro-German pope. The Revolution in Russia raised the spectre of a Bolshevik takeover of the whole of Eastern Europe. The Nuncio, who refused to flee, was besieged in Warsaw in August 1920 by Bolshevik troops. The experience left him with a lasting conviction that Communism was the worst enemy Christian Europe had ever faced, a conviction which shaped much of his policy as pope.

He returned from Poland to appointment as Archbishop of Milan, and the cardinal’s hat, but he had been in office only six months when he was elected pope, on the fourteenth ballot in a Conclave deadlocked between Benedict XV’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, and the intransigent anti-Modernist Cardinal La Fontaine. Gasparri had been Ratti’s immediate superior when he was Nuncio in Poland, and when it became clear that his own candidacy could not succeed, he was instrumental in securing Ratti’s election. It was certain, then, that the new pope would continue Benedict XV’s (and Gasparri’s) policies. Despite the new pope’s choice of name, there would be no return to the Integralism of Pius X.

Benedict XV had been preparing the ground for a settlement of the Roman question, and Pius XI’s first act as pope made it clear that he intended to carry this through. Having announced his papal name, he told the cardinals that he would give the blessing
Urbi et Orbi
from the balcony in St Peter’s square, and a window closed against Italy for fifty-two years was opened.

The instant announcement that he would use the balcony into the square for his blessing was characteristic of the decisiveness of the new regime, a
decisiveness soon revealed as nothing short of dictatorial. The mild and obliging scholar-librarian from the moment of his election became pope to the utter degree. He remained genial, smiling and apparently approachable. The Vatican filled with visitors, especially from Milan, he spent hours in public audiences, he met and blessed thousands of newly-weds, he had expensive display-shelves built for the tacky gifts the simple faithful gave him. Nonetheless, an invisible wall had descended around him. He ruled from behind it, and he would brook no contradiction. He accepted advice, if at all, only when he had asked for it, and he soon became famous for towering rages which left his entourage weak and trembling. Even visiting diplomats noted that the key word in the Vatican had become ‘obedience’.

The obedience was directed towards a vigorous development of many of the initiatives of Benedict XV. These included the rapprochement with France signalled by the canonization of the Maid of Orléans. The way here, however, was blocked by the intransigent hostility of many Catholics to the French Republic. A key influence here was
Action Française
, an extreme anti-republican movement with its own eponymous newspaper, edited by Charles Maurras. Maurras, a cradle Catholic, had long since abandoned belief in God, but he admired the organization of the Church, and saw it as the chief and indispensable bastion of conservatism in society. Christianity, he thought, had fortunately smothered the ‘Hebrew Christ’ in the garments of the Roman Empire. Religion, he declared, ‘was not the mystery of the Incarnation, but the secret of social order’. Royalist, anti-Semitic, reactionary, Maurras had an immense following among Catholics, including some of the French episcopate. In 1926 the Catholic youth of Belgium voted him the most influential contemporary writer, ‘a giant in the realm of thought, a lighthouse to our youth’. Maurras’ views had long caused unease in the Vatican, but he championed the Church, and Pius X had protected him: he told Maurras’ mother ‘I bless his work’.
¹⁰

Pius XI was made of sterner stuff. Catholics excused Maurras’ work on the grounds that it was politics pressed into defence of the Church. Ratti believed that in fact Maurras exploited religion in the service of his politics, and that in any case all politics went rotten unless inspired by true religion. Maurras was a barrier in the way of the political realism in France which Pius, like Benedict XV and Leo XIII, thought essential for the well-being of the Church. Despite stonewalling by the Vatican staff (the crucial file went missing, till the pope threatened all concerned with instant
dismissal) in 1925 he moved against Maurras and his movement, first by instigating episcopal condemnation in France, then by placing
Action Française
and all Maurras’ writings on the Index, and finally, in 1927, by a formal excommunication of all supporters of the movement.

The suppression of
Action Française
was a measure of Pius XI’s strength of character and singleness of mind. He was accused of betrayal of the Church’s best friend, of siding with Jews, Freemasons and radicals. From the French clergy he met with a good deal of dumb resistance. The Jesuit Cardinal Billot, who had been a key figure in the anti-modernist purges and was the most influential theologian in Rome, sent
Action Française
a note of sympathy, which of course they published. Billot was summoned to explain himself to the pope, and was made to resign his Cardinalate. Pius was equally ruthless with all who resisted the suppression. Support for Maurras was strong among the French Holy Ghost Fathers, one of whom was the rector of the French Seminary in Rome where the students had a strong
Action Française
group. Pius sent for the ancient, bearded superior of the Order, and told him to sack the rector. The old man replied, ‘Yes, Holy Father, I’ll see what I can do’, upon which the pope grabbed his beard and shouted ‘I didn’t say, see what you can do, I said fire him’.
¹¹

Pius also extended Benedict XV’s concern with the renewal of Catholic missions. Benedict had published in 1919 an encyclical on missions,
Maximum illud
, in which he had identified three priorities for future Catholic missionary activity: the recruitment and promotion of a native clergy, the renunciation of nationalistic concerns among European missionaries, and the recognition of the dignity and worth of the cultures being evangelized. These anti-imperialist guidelines became the basis for Pius XI’s policy. He himself published an encyclical on missions in 1926, and in the same year put theory into practice by consecrating the first six indigenous Chinese bishops in St Peter’s, and a year later the first Japanese Bishop of Nagasaki. He was later to ordain native bishops and priests for India, Southeast Asia and China. Once again, this was a policy which met with widespread resistance, and once again Ratti doggedly persisted. At his accession, not a single missionary diocese in the Catholic Church was presided over by an indigenous bishop. By 1939 there were forty, the numbers of local-born mission priests had almost trebled to over 7,000, he had created 200 Apostolic Vicariates and prefectures in mission territories, and missiology was an established subject for study and research in the key Roman Colleges. It was a dramatic internationalization of the
Catholic Church in an age of growing nationalism, and it was only achieved by the maximum exertion of papal muscle.

In diplomacy too, Ratti followed in his predecessor’s footsteps. From his first year as pope a stream of new Concordats were concluded, to secure freedom of action for the Church in post-war Europe: Latvia in November 1922, Bavaria in March 1924, Poland in February 1925, Romania in May 1927, Lithuania in September 1927, Italy in February 1929, Prussia in June 1929, Baden in October 1932, Austria in June 1933, Nazi Germany in July 1933, Yugoslavia in July 1935. Behind them all, was a concern not merely to secure Catholic education, unhampered papal appointment of bishops, and free communication with Rome, but to halt as far as was possible the secularizing of European life which the popes had been resisting under the label ‘Liberalism’ for more than a century. So, his encyclical of 1925,
Quas Primas
, inaugurating the new Feast of Christ the King, denounced the ‘plague of secularism’, and asserted the rule of Christ not merely over the individual soul, but over societies, which precisely as societies, and not as aggregates of individuals, must revere and obey the law of God proclaimed by the Church.

From the Vatican’s point of view, incomparably the most important of these Concordats was that with Fascist Italy, the result of almost three years of hard bargaining with Mussolini, and finally signed in February 1929. The Concordat gave the pope independence in the form of his own tiny sovereign state, the Vatican City, (at 108.7 acres, just one-eighth of the size of New York’s Central Park) with a few extra-territorial dependencies like the Lateran and Castel Gondolfo. He had his own post office and radio station (a guarantee of freedom of communication with the world at large), the recognition of Canon Law alongside the law of the state, Church control of Catholic marriages, the teaching of Catholic doctrine in state schools (and the consequent placing of crucifixes in classrooms, a weighty symbolic gesture) and finally a massive financial compensation for the loss of the Papal States – 1,750,000,000 lire, a billion of it in Italian government stocks, but still a sum which in the hungry 1930s enabled Pius XI to spend like a Renaissance prince.

This Concordat did not deliver all that the pope had hoped, and it horrified those committed to
Catholic Action
and the anti-Fascist struggle. Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, was disgusted, and asked ‘was it worth sixty years of struggle to arrive at such a meagre result?’
¹²
Pius viewed it as a triumph, nonetheless, for it represented a decisive repudiation of the ‘Free Church in a Free State’ ideal of Liberalism. Moreover,
Mussolini had not merely resolved the Roman question; he had also suppressed the Church’s enemies, the Italian Communists and the Freemasons. In the first flush of enthusiasm, and against Gasparri’s advice, Pius spoke publicly of Mussolini as ‘a man sent by Providence’. In the elections of March 1929, most Italian clergy encouraged their congregations to vote Fascist. There is no such thing as a free Concordat however, and the major casualty of the agreement was the increasingly powerful Catholic
Partito Popolare.
In the run-up to the Concordat Mussolini made it clear that the dissolution of this rival political party was part of any deal, and the Vatican duly withdrew support for the
Popolare
, and secured the resignation of its priest-leader, Don Luigi Sturzo, and his self-exile in London. Pius XI thereby assisted at the deathbed of Italian democracy. It is unlikely that he shed many tears, for he was no democrat. He disapproved of radicalism, above all radicalism in priests, and though he was passionately committed to
Catholic Action
, and devoted his first encyclical to the subject, like Pius X he envisaged it as being confined to what he rather chillingly described as ‘the organized participation of the laity in the hierarchical apostolate of the Church, transcending party politics’.
¹³

Nevertheless, the defence of
Catholic Action
in this broader sense was to bring him rapidly into conflict with Mussolini. One of the lesser casualties of the Concordat was the Catholic scout movement, which Mussolini insisted must be merged with the state youth organizations. This went against the grain with Pius XI, who valued Catholic youth movements as a prime instrument of Christian formation. Mussolini was bullish on the issue, bragging that ‘in the sphere of education we remain intractable. Youth shall be ours’.
¹⁴
Fascist harrassment of Catholic organizations mounted, and in June 1931 the pope denounced the actions of the Fascist regime in the Italian encyclical,
Non abbiamo bisogno
.
¹⁵
This letter was primarily concerned to denounce the harrassment of Catholic organizations, and to vindicate
Catholic Action
from the Fascist claim that it was a front for the old
Partito Popolare
, Catholic political opposition under another name. But the pope broadened his condemnation to a general attack on Fascist idolatry, the ‘Pagan worship of the State’. He singled out the Fascist oath as intrinsically against the law of God.

Pius was not calling Italy to abandon Fascism. The encyclical was careful to insist that the Church respected the legitimate authority of the government, and was essentially a warning shot across Mussolini’s bows to lay off Church groups. In this, it was largely successful. It was an indication
nonetheless that the pope was aware of the need for a long spoon when dealing with totalitarian regimes, and that certainly applied to the Concordat with Hitler in 1933. That Concordat was negotiated by Eugenio Pacelli, Secretary of State from 1930. Pacelli had spent most of the 1920s in Munich as Nuncio, and was devoted to Germany and its culture. He had no illusions about Nazism, however, which he recognized as anti-Christian, and indeed from 1929 a number of the German bishops were vocal in denouncing its racial and religious teachings, insisting that no Catholic could be a Nazi. From Rome, however, Nazism looked like the strongest available bulwark against Communism, and the Vatican’s overriding priority was to secure a legal basis for the Church’s work, whatever form of government happened to prevail.