The Pope's Last Crusade (18 page)

Ledóchowski dealt with the encyclical by ignoring it for a while. He then further delayed the process by sending the encyclical to Enrico Rosa. Rosa was gravely ill and his inability to act helped Ledóchowski—whether or not he knew that Rosa was sick—in his effort to delay the process. Rosa died in late November with the encyclical still on his desk.

Killeen followed Gundlach's letter to LaFarge with one of his own and said that he himself had been ordered by Ledóchowski to send a copy of the encyclical to Enrico Rosa. “Father General [Ledóchowski] sent an accompanying note,” Killeen told LaFarge, “but did not advise me of its contents.”

Killeen also told LaFarge he was determined to preserve the portion of the text about anti-Semitism—and would do everything possible “in order to safeguard your wishes in the matter, in case Fr. Rosa did think of proposing any changes.” However, he added, “I have heard nothing further, and that is where things stand at present.” He promised to keep LaFarge posted.

The pope was worsening physically, but he was determined to continue his opposition to totalitarianism. This was becoming increasingly challenging as he kept having problems controlling the chess pieces around him. No one had told him that Rosa had received the encyclical and it was doubtful he would have accepted changes from such a source.

Pius considered the Nazi drive against the Jews such a pervasive issue he planned to make a blanket statement that would redirect the entire view of the Roman Catholic Church. And that was what Ledóchowski was acting to slow down, knowing the pope's days were numbered.

Three to four transatlantic passenger vessels carrying thousands of people arrived at New York Harbor every day. Then they quickly made the turnaround back to Europe. LaFarge's eight-day crossing had begun on October 1 with heavy rains that had been inundating the continent from England to Spain for several days. He complained of discomfort and rolling seas, but it could have been much worse. The
Statendam
was steaming westward in a lull between storms. The rain on the continent was the remnant of a hurricane that had raced across the Caribbean and up the Atlantic Coast a week earlier.

LaFarge hadn't heard about the severity of the storms, but he knew his stomach. “The steerage trip back to New York was anything but comfortable,” he recalled, “especially as I was not a good sailor.” His last-minute ticket was steerage class, but somehow he was listed in first class; his name must have been a late addition. Regardless the class of service, he did not mention ever having left his bunk to officiate at daily Mass. The passenger manifest showed that many people on board were likely fleeing the conflagration: Mr. and Mrs. Emanuel Feuermann and daughter; Dr. and Mrs. Julius Heilbrunn and their two young sons; the Oppenheimer family, the Rosenbaums and the Buchbinders and the Strausses and the Fursts—hundreds of what appeared to be Jewish surnames. There were other less likely names on the manifest, people named Franklin and Grant and Hoskins.

Unknown to LaFarge and most of the other passengers, European governments and banks fearing the outbreak of war had shipped millions of dollars in gold bullion on the
Statendam
for deposit in the United States. The
Statendam
and three other ships delivered $112 million in bullion that weekend—more than $5 billion at the 2012 value of gold.

The weather was clear and mild on Sunday afternoon, October 9, as the
Statendam
passed the Statue of Liberty on the Hudson River. Tugs guided the ship to a berth at the Holland-America Lines' Fifth Street pier with the new Empire State Building visible to the stern, gleaming in the glowing evening light across the harbor.

The scene onshore was bedlam. The dock area swarmed with passengers and longshoremen and motor coaches and taxis. Francis Talbot, John LaFarge's editor and friend, waited for him amid the chaos and, as a surprise, had brought along LaFarge's niece, Frances Childs, to greet her uncle. But when they looked at that same passenger manifest, they did not see the name LaFarge.

“Father Talbot and I met him on the wharf at his arrival,” Frances recalled. “Granted the nature of his passage, we were uncertain where to find him, but find him we did, under L in first class, carrying large bundles and looking like the proverbial immigrant!”

Frances saw that her uncle had suffered physically during the five months in Europe. He had lost more than thirty pounds and looked like a pale shadow. LaFarge said little about his trip home, other than complaining about the food, but he was relieved to be away from the constant threat of tyranny.

The next order of business was going to his eldest brother's bedside. Despite his rush to get home, LaFarge had again failed to be present for the death of a close family member, first his father, his brother Bancel, and now Grant. “Alas, just as I was about to leave I received the news of his death and had to content myself with the sad consolation of officiating at his funeral Mass in the Church of St. Joseph in Wickford, Rhode Island,” LaFarge wrote. “Generous to a fault, and deeply affectionate, Grant had suffered in silence the stings of disappointment. I could not help begrudging the days and weeks that I might, if not for that summer abroad, have spent near my oldest brother before it was too late.”

Adolf Hitler continued to dominate the headlines as LaFarge settled in at
America
's Jesuit headquarters just off West End Avenue in New York. The Wehrmacht was completing its occupation of Sudetenland and newspaper stories described a Europe that still was advancing toward war. For all practical purposes, events had developed as LaFarge perceived they would when he stood at Prague's Wenceslas Square less than five months earlier and realized he had been witnessing the last days of Czech independence.

When LaFarge came home, the United States was divided into camps—those who agreed with appeasement and those who saw war as inevitable. Some said “save the refugees and fight the Fascists on all fronts”; others praised Hitler for keeping the Communists at bay. LaFarge prayed that somehow peace would be preserved in Europe and that perhaps the Munich accord would achieve it. But he wavered. He had heard Hitler's frightful speech and had seen Ledóchowski's placid reaction. The memory of his meeting with Jan Masaryk resounded and made it more and more clear that one could not choose between Communism and Nazism; they were both authoritarian systems, but Nazism was about to swallow up Europe and beyond.

Meanwhile, he awaited word from Rome, perhaps with questions from the pope or from Ledóchowski, prior to publication of the encyclical.

A
S SOON AS
Mussolini returned to Rome from presiding over the Munich Agreement in September, he issued a new set of regulations that banned marriage between Jews and Catholics. The pope charged that the measure violated the 1929 Concordat between the Vatican and the Fascist government and demanded urgent negotiations with the government.

Despite his general reluctance to criticize Mussolini publicly, Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli agreed with the pope in this case, because he felt it was the Roman Catholic Church alone that should decide questions of union in matrimony. For Pacelli, this was a matter that went beyond politics; it cut to the core of Catholic theology. He discussed the resulting crisis openly at a dinner at the Irish embassy, seated next to Caroline Phillips, the U.S. ambassador's wife. It was a rare opportunity for Mrs. Phillips. “The cardinal is one of those fine ascetic-looking priests who are rare and I always feel it a privilege to talk with,” she wrote in her diary. “There was much talk of the Fascist laws against the Jews which they believe will prove to be contrary to the Concordat between the Vatican and the Fascist government. We may expect a new controversy.”

But while Pacelli made sure his remarks were diplomatic and modest, the pope was responding angrily and emotionally to the anti-Semitic marriage laws. “I am ashamed . . . ashamed to be Italian,” the pope told Domenico Tardini, Pacelli's deputy. “And tell that, Father, to Mussolini himself! I am ashamed not as pope but as an Italian! The Italian people have become a herd of stupid sheep. I will speak out, without fear . . . I have no fear!”

Whether or not that particular message was delivered, Foreign Minister Ciano reported in his diary that Il Duce “described the Vatican as a Catholic ghetto. And he said that all the Piuses had brought misfortune to the Church. He described the current Pope as ‘the Pontiff who will leave the greatest heap of debris behind him.'”

Vatican prelates visited Mussolini and counseled him to remain patient. Many representatives of the church described the pope as an increasingly solitary voice and implied that he would soon be dead.

A day after Mussolini's marriage decree, on October 9, Hitler stepped up his confrontation with the church when Nazi thugs in Vienna forced their way into the residence of Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, terrorized the cardinal and his staff, burned furniture, and trashed church offices. Innitzer was slightly injured by flying glass. The Nazis said Innitzer had been interfering in politics and had to be stopped. This was a turnaround in the fortunes of Innitzer, the same cardinal who had been considered a darling of the Nazi regime and had met with Hitler and congratulated him after the March occupation of Austria.

The Vatican quickly dispatched Joseph Hurley to Vienna to investigate; Hurley returned to Rome after a few days and filed a report with the Vatican secretary of state's office. Several days after that, on Saturday, October 15, he came to the U.S. embassy to brief Ambassador Phillips. “A mob of 1500 Nazi youths surrounded the palace, some entered the second story, smashed windows, threw into the street holy relics, threw one priest into the street causing both legs to be broken,” Hurley told Phillips. “The only police interference during the riot was by one officer who arrested one rioter and the latter was promptly released by his fellow rioters.”

The pope called Hitler a renegade and said the attack on Innitzer was sinister. The pope denied the charge against Innitzer. “It is a lie—we repeat, a lie, a lie, a lie” that the Vatican was involved in politics, Pius said, speaking in the third person. “The pope follows only one policy from which no force on earth can separate him: to give something to the common good.”

Following these events, Hurley told Phillips he had approval to use the Vatican newspaper and radio to publish and broadcast speeches and statements made by President Roosevelt and the U.S. government. That made the Vatican the only free conduit of information available in Italy, and that information would be broadcast in many languages, including German. The authorization might have come directly from Pope Pius, since Pacelli, as always, would have counseled restraint.

On the morning of October 28, the pope bundled up against the cold and rain for the trip back to Rome from Castel Gandolfo. He bade farewell to the villagers from the balcony during a break in the showers. The rain fell again when he arrived at St. Peter's, but people still stood in the square and cheered. He gave them his blessing and then retired to his private rooms. His energy was flagging. More than four months had passed since he had summoned LaFarge, and still there was no sign of the encyclical that could change history.

At another time, he might have taken strong steps to track down LaFarge and the encyclical, but he didn't. More and more, he was deputizing others to carry some of his burdens. He had even summoned Pacelli from his long vacation in Switzerland to help with the affairs of state back at the Vatican.

LaFarge reacted to Gundlach's scolding letter by drafting one of his own to the pope. There had to be a way to tell the pope gently and clearly that the encyclical had been waylaid. Gundlach had cautioned, though, that spies were everywhere. “Nowadays mail often has a curious fate,” he wrote. Gundlach suggested that LaFarge go through the apostolic delegate in Washington, Bishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, who was a confidant of the pope and who should be able to see that LaFarge's letter reached the pope's desk. But even that was not a certain route.

LaFarge wrote the letter in French in a flowery style and made sure to praise Ledóchowski, the Jesuit superior, in case he read a copy:

With the heavy responsibility that Your Holiness deigned to place on my poor shoulders, I am persuaded to recognize my obligation to inform Your Holiness of the . . . circumstances concerning my efforts. Obeying as well as I could the directions that Your Holiness on that occasion had graciously provided me, I worked intensively all summer, helped at the suggestion of our Most Reverend Father General by one of the professors of the Gregorian Pontifical University.

LaFarge wrote that he had returned “to Rome at the end of September and delivered the document to the hands of [Ledóchowski] who most benevolently had given me every facility in producing it.”

LaFarge apologized for not having seen the pope again. “Thank God,” he said, that “the physical exhaustion of my energy that affected me in August is now cured. For serious personal reasons, I was forced to leave [Rome] immediately for America. That saddens me deeply because I felt an ardent desire to deliver the document in person.”

He added that Ledóchowski had promised to deliver the text quickly. “So I console myself that it surely must already be in the hands of Your Holiness, although I lost the opportunity to present it in person.”

Of course, LaFarge knew by now that Ledóchowski had withheld the encyclical and that Gundlach saw Ledóchowski's role as part of a maneuver to block the encyclical.

While LaFarge could not be sure that the pope actually had received the letter after he wrote at the end of October, Gundlach told him that the pope, according to his sources in the Vatican, had made inquiries about the encyclical about two weeks after the letter should have arrived. At the same time, the sources said it might not make a difference. The inner circle told Gundlach the pontiff's heart condition had worsened and he was not expected to survive long. He has “become very frail,” Gundlach wrote to LaFarge on November 18. “People around him don't give him much time. It appears that the situation is such that only what other people permit reaching [him] does reach him. But he himself is supposed to be mentally alert but not to bring forth much initiative.”