The Pope's Last Crusade (10 page)

He rose quickly, working his way up from a lower-ranking job at the Vatican Secretariat of State to subsecretary and then secretary of ecclesiastical affairs. He was immediately thrust into diplomat affairs when he was sent to England in 1901 to deliver Pope Leo XIII's condolences for the death of Queen Victoria. He met Winston Churchill on a second trip to London in 1908. At the time, Pacelli was thirty-two, and Churchill, who was thirty-four, had already been a Member of Parliament for eight years.

Pacelli was appointed the pope's official representative to Bavaria in 1917 and then for all of Germany. He remained as the apostolic delegate to Germany until 1929 when Pius XI recalled him to Rome, elevated him to cardinal, and eventually named him secretary of state. Pacelli's time away had given him a passion for all things German. He loved German automobiles, and according to Monsignor Joseph Hurley, who worked for him, “was a devotee of [Richard] Wagner's music—the sturdy, triumphal, surging kind . . . not the softer compositions.” He spent summer vacations in Switzerland where he could keep up his fluency in the language. He also had a rather bossy and controversial German housekeeper, Sister Pasqualina Lehnert, who served him for forty years.

Pius and Pacelli had strikingly different backgrounds. The pope came from the north, Pacelli was Roman; Pacelli was tall and gangly, the pope was short and stocky; perhaps most important, the pope was taken to making rash emotional decisions, while Pacelli, the deliberative diplomat, was slow and methodical in his decision-making process.

Pacelli was careful to submit humbly to the pope's wishes, yet he did not always follow those orders exactly. There had been times when he delayed or altered the pope's orders or public statements. Other times, he argued gently and directly with the pope to tone down some of his outbursts against Hitler and Mussolini. He thought it was prudent to not incite retaliation by Hitler or by Mussolini for rash statements.

Despite their contrasting personalities, Pius and Pacelli worked together well. Many at the Vatican said Pius himself realized he was a rash and impetuous leader, and he wanted a cerebral, cautious diplomat at his side, even if he might not heed the advice. The pope did not take much counsel from others, but Pacelli managed to inject his point of view, which most often tried to temper the rough edges of policy, all for what he saw as the good of the Vatican. Many in the church believed the relationship between Pacelli and the pope was based on mutual dependence—the pope recognized that he needed that form of counterbalance to his fiery approach.

At the time when Hitler was taking over Austria and Czechoslovakia and forming his alliance with Mussolini, Pope Pius found himself with few allies among the highest-ranking men surrounding him. His subordinates, especially Cardinal Pacelli, who happened to be a good friend of Ledóchowski, were constantly begging him to temper his anger. The pope's previous encyclical against Nazism in 1937,
With Deep Anxiety,
had provoked attacks on Catholic priests in Germany and almost caused a rupture in relations between the Vatican and the Nazis, much to the dismay of Pacelli and others around him. Every time the church spoke out, it faced a wave of reprisals.

Now Pius intended to go much further with this new encyclical. John LaFarge was to produce a strong statement that would make international headlines. Not only would he fervently reject anti-Semitism, he would challenge other Catholic leaders to speak out and pressure Hitler and Mussolini to curtail their measures against the Jews. Although the pope knew such a statement could bring on new, even stronger attacks against Catholics, which most church leaders feared were too risky, he was willing to go forward and fight Hitler on moral grounds.

As always, the pope was hemmed in by bureaucracy. He wanted LaFarge to work in secrecy, and he might even have placed him in seclusion if he had had the infrastructure to do so on his own. To use LaFarge, Pius was obliged to call in Wlodimir Ledóchowski, who, like Pacelli and most others at the Vatican, had no interest in inciting Hitler.

Pius had always withstood the pressures from the rest of the curia, but now his flagging health made it uncertain that he would have the time and the strength to control those around him. He had summoned LaFarge on his own without Pacelli's involvement even though the secretary of state was at Castel Gandolfo when LaFarge arrived. The pope had avoided telling Ledóchowski ahead of time because he knew how the Jesuit leader would react.

But on Sunday morning, June 26, Pius summoned Ledóchowski to Castel Gandolfo. Pius, who never conducted business on the telephone, was following up on what he promised LaFarge the day before by briefing the Jesuit superior general on the new encyclical. The pope most likely asked Ledóchowski to keep this a secret, even though he knew such a prospect was unlikely considering what a seedbed of gossip the Vatican was.

If Pacelli was the second-most-important person at the Vatican, Ledóchowski ran a close third. As leader of the worldwide Jesuit order—he was known as “the Black Pope,” or the superior general, or more commonly, the general—he was by no means a rival to the pontiff, but he was an all-powerful, forceful man in the lives of the Jesuits and all Catholics. Ledóchowski was not a cardinal, and no Jesuit had ever been elevated to the pontificate. He had been superior general since 1915 and had been in Rome almost without break since then, giving him more seniority at the Holy See, in terms of physical presence at least, than even Pope Pius XI.

Pacelli and Ledóchowski were confidants in constant contact with long tenures in the curia, and they were among the most proficient political operators at St. Peter's. While Pacelli was a member of the so-called black nobility of Rome—families that were unofficial courtiers at the Vatican—Ledóchowski was properly a Polish count. He was born in the Austrian Empire near Vienna in 1866 to Count Anton Ledóchowski, a noble of Polish origin. Count Anton served Emperor Franz Joseph as royal chamberlain, and one of his brothers, Mieczysław, rose to the prominent Vatican rank of cardinal prefect of the Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

Ledóchowski's influence on church doctrine was well known. He sometimes sought to change the pontiff's mind on key issues that mattered to him, but his efforts were usually futile. He had asked the pope on several occasions, for example, to be more forceful in condemning Communism when he was criticizing Fascism—as a way of balancing the scales. The pope no longer sought balance; he now believed that Nazism was a greater danger than Communism. This was a major change of perspective not shared by a majority at the Vatican, though it had been recognized for some time by others. As the journalist Dorothy Thompson had said, after being thrown out of Nazi Germany for speaking her mind: “National Socialism is more menacing to Catholicism than Communism. For whereas Communism is atheistic, National Socialism is Satanic.”

Ledóchowski had lobbied the pope more than once to link Jews with the spread of Communism. “Perhaps your Holiness would like to make known to the world this terrible danger, one that becomes every day more threatening,” he had said to the pope prior to the 1937 publication of the pope's encyclical
Divinis Redemptoris
, “The Promise of a Redeemer,” which attacked Communism. The encyclical was the pope's strongest statement opposing Marxism and was issued a few days after the more controversial anti-Nazi tract,
With Deep Anxiety,
which set the stage for future criticism of Nazism as well. The two encyclicals had a certain symmetry in dealing with the world's two totalitarian systems; issuing them so close together perhaps assuaged Vatican dissenters such as Ledóchowski who were more rabidly anti-Communist than concerned about the Nazis. But the pope had no intention of using the anti-Communist encyclical as Ledóchowski intended—as a groundless diatribe against Judaism.

Divinis Redemptoris
did criticize Communism on grounds that it “strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.” But Ledóchowski insisted on changes once more. Your Holiness, he told the pope, such a strong message on Communism should contain a mention of what he saw as the international conspiracy of Jews, Masons, and Bolsheviks. “Though the atheist propaganda from Moscow becomes ever more intense, nonetheless the world press, in the hands of the Jews, hardly makes a reference, just as it ignores the crimes committed in Russia.”

“For not only were all the intellectual fathers of Communism Jewish,” Ledóchowski said in his letter to the pope, “but the Communist movement in Russia was staged by Jews, and even now, if one digs deeply one finds that the primary authors of Communist propaganda, though perhaps not always openly, are Jews.”

These fraudulent charges had been circulated widely by anti-Semites inside and outside the Catholic Church. The pope challenged these written corrections and in several places penciled in the word “Verify!” Prove it, he was saying. Ledóchowski had no factual responses, and the pope rejected these attempts to change the text.

Similarly, the pope turned down Pacelli's requests that the Vatican be more supportive of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain. Pacelli saw Spain as a clear confrontation between good—the Nazi and Fascist-backed Nationalists—and bad—the Soviet-supported Spanish government. Pius did not see the dispute in such stark terms—he never accepted or trusted Franco and questioned Franco's ties to the Nazis.

The pope even considered a dialogue proposed by the leader of the French Communist Party about creating a united front against the Nazis and Fascists. The pope told a French bishop that it might be a good idea “to take up that invitation, not of course so that we might be drawn toward the Communists, but rather so that we can draw the Communist proffered hand toward us.” Not surprisingly, Cardinal Pacelli was against such a dialogue and worked behind the scenes to block it. Conservatives within the Vatican saw Pius's interest in this dialogue as evidence that the pope was losing his grip on reality.

DURING THE
June 26 meeting, Pius told Ledóchowski about his meeting with LaFarge and the new encyclical, and Ledóchowski immediately set out to devise a strategy for dealing with LaFarge. He said he would help LaFarge, and even appeared to be doing so, but he was certainly against issuing the document, and his strategy would be to manage the process. Ledóchowski had once told his friend Cardinal Edward Mooney about his methods for manipulating the Jesuits beneath him. “Jesuits obeyed as long as they got few orders; and none against their grain,” he told Mooney. A “wise superior can get obedience provided he does not violate a man's love of reasonable independence.”

Along the lines of that thinking, LaFarge would think he was acting as an independent agent. Ledóchowski would encourage LaFarge as he prepared the encyclical, but the superior general would eventually control the final product.

LaFarge would not be difficult to manage. All Jesuits had an ingrained sense of obedience, and Ledóchowski had already met LaFarge and lectured him about his responsibilities as a Jesuit journalist. Specifically he had discussed
America
magazine's mission. Ledóchowski directed the magazine's political commentary to focus on traditional church teachings and preaching. As a traditionalist, he expected and demanded adherence to the ancient precepts of the church.
America,
he felt, had the sacred responsibility to explain current events in terms of the church: “People look to us for the interpretation of what is going on,” he said, “what religion has to say concerning events.”
America
must not be a journal of individual opinion—rather it should express the viewpoint of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.

The message was that Jesuits in the United States owed their full fealty to the Jesuit Curia in Rome, to Ledóchowski himself, and thence to the Vatican. LaFarge was evidently cut in the classic Jesuit mold: an obedient, earnest fellow who would do what he was told.

Ledóchowski summoned LaFarge to meet with him the next morning, June 27. LaFarge was unaware of the political maelstroms and intrigues swirling around the Vatican. He was relieved that the pope had told Ledóchowski about the assignment. LaFarge was already starstruck and simply in awe that he was meeting with the Jesuit general. He was also intimidated and fearful. Ledóchowski had a reputation that extended all the way back to New York. Even from afar on West 108th Street in Manhattan, LaFarge had gotten word that the seventy-one-year-old Jesuit superior general could be moody and was not to be trifled with.

“It was fortunately one of his good days, and he was most lively and spoke most entertainingly and he has the wonderful gift of making you feel at ease at once,” LaFarge wrote after that first meeting. “Indeed, I had to pinch myself several times to realize I was actually talking to the [leader] himself.”

In this second meeting, as with the first, LaFarge was disarmed. Ledóchowski was quite good-humored when he greeted the American and said the pope had spoken with him about the encyclical. Once put at ease, LaFarge told the Jesuit superior that he felt overwhelmed by the assignment from the pope. If he had a hint of something of this magnitude was about to take place, LaFarge added, “nothing would have persuaded me to go to Rome, much less meet with the pope.” Ledóchowski told him not to worry: “nothing to do, but to go through with the whole thing.”

That said, LaFarge identified a number of concerns. First, he told the general he wanted to review background materials in the Vatican archives—prior declarations and positions taken by the Vatican on racism and the Nazis. Not a problem, Ledóchowski told him. He made sure LaFarge would have every facility open to him.

Next, LaFarge was worried about the intense heat of the Roman summers. He much preferred working in a mild climate, preferably Paris. A very good idea, Ledóchowski said, and accepted that proposition as well.