The Pope's Last Crusade (31 page)

The Vatican archives revealed for the first time a copy of Ledóchowski's transmittal cover letter with the encyclical on January 21, 1939, which, along with the pope's hints during his meeting with anti-Fascist students a week later, provides circumstantial evidence that Pius XI had the encyclical in hand.

Stanton died of a heart attack while jogging on March 13, 1983, and the LaFarge material remained unseen among his own personal papers, which are housed at the Burns Library at Boston College. The original draft of the encyclical in this file, which includes handwritten corrections by LaFarge, is similar but not identical to previously published versions of the document.

Sources also include the unpublished diaries of William Phillips, housed at Houghton Library, Harvard University, and from his privately published memoir,
Ventures in Diplomacy. The Diary of Caroline Drayton Phillips
was examined at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Pope Pius XI's archives were opened to researchers in 2006. Material about the pope's relationship with other members of the curia and primary documents comes from the masterful scholarship of Professor Emma Fattorini of the University of Rome La Sapienza, who then began examining Pius XI's archives. Her efforts and the work of scholars, including David Kertzer, professor of history, Brown University; Robert Maryks, professor of history, City University of New York; Frank J. Coppa, professor of history, St. John's University; and Hubert Wolf, professor of history at the University of Munster, are based on dedicated years of research. I am indebted to them. The archives of the diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, house the papers of Bishop Joseph Hurley and were consulted as well.

It was evident in the course of assembling this book that some material has not yet been discovered. Hurley kept notebooks that amounted to diaries and random thoughts throughout his life. He made reference in a notation late in his life that he intended to gather up these notebooks with material to write a memoir. The notes are found in his papers at St. Augustine, but the Rome material appears to have been removed. Charles Gallagher, S. J., a former archivist at St. Augustine, and Professor Michael Gannon, a Florida-based historian and former priest who once was Hurley's assistant, said that Vatican authorities had been in contact with the St. Augustine diocese. Unspecified files of Hurley's papers were removed and apparently taken into Vatican custody some time after Hurley died. Gannon said that he had found the notebooks in Hurley's desk after the bishop died, but it was not clear where the Rome notes Hurley listed had ended up.

In the case of Cardinal Tisserant, there was no known follow-up to the 1972
New York Times
story that reported a legal case involving his files. No trace of his papers has been found. The Vatican Secret Archives reported in 2010 that it is indexing files covering the papacy of Pope Pius XII, millions of documents that may provide more information. That material is expected to be available by 2015.

POPE PIUS XI'S
attempt to use his words as a weapon remained a source of controversy seventy-five years after the fact. He has been overshadowed in history by his onetime secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. Pacelli has been the object of both adulation and condemnation for his role during World War II. That role has not been the subject of this book but is amply debated in dozens of books, treatises, articles, and plays. One side of the argument said that Pope Pacelli could have done more. That argument was summed up by Albert Camus in 1948: “For a long time I waited during those terrible years, for a voice to be lifted up in Rome,” he told a meeting of Dominicans. “It appears that this voice was raised, but I swear to you that millions of men, myself included, never heard it.”

Pius XII once hinted at his own perspective. Once the war began, a reporter for
Osservatore Romano,
Edoardo Senatro, asked him if he would consider criticizing Nazi atrocities. Pope Pacelli replied: “You must not forget, dear friend, that there are millions of Catholics in the German army. Would you like to place them in the middle of a conflict of conscience?”

Pacelli's pursuit of political impartiality did not stop him from sheltering Jews and other refugees at Castel Gandolfo and endorsing other individual acts to save possibly tens of thousands of Jews. I walked through the gardens of Castel Gandolfo one fall day in 2011 and stepped into the brick-arched rooms where Jews were safe from the Nazis, thanks to Pius XII.

Criticism has focused, however, on what the Vatican might have done to stop the systematic killing of Jews by the Nazi regime. The Vatican had reliable information at least by February 1942 about mass executions taking place in Nazi concentration camps. The archbishop of Krakow, Poland, Adam Stefan Sapieha, sent a message through couriers to the Vatican that “We live in terror, continually in danger of losing everything if we attempt to escape, thrown into camps from which few emerge alive.”

“To make the extent of the disaster clear,” he added, “there is no difference between Jews and Poles.”

After Pius XII died at the age of eighty-two on October 9, 1958, some criticism emerged. Domenico Tardini, the monsignor who at the direction of Pacelli helped destroy copies of Pius XI's final speech to bishops on February 11, 1939, said Pacelli “was, by natural temperament, meek and rather timid. He was not born with the temper of a fighter. In this he differed from his great predecessor, Pius XI, who rejoiced, at least visibly, in the contest. Pius XII visibly suffered.”

Seven popes were elected in the twentieth century. The first of those to be canonized as a saint was Pope Pius X, who served from 1903 to 1914. Five others have been considered for sainthood, including John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul I. John Paul II, who died in 2005, was beatified by Benedict XVI in 2011, a step before canonization. Pius XII is en route to beatification, which requires evidence of miracles having been ascribed to him. The priest in charge of that process, Peter Gumpel, a German Jesuit, has said that such miracles can be attributed to Pius XII. The process has been surrounded by controversy and charges from critics that Pius XII did not do enough to fight Nazism.

Only one pope of the twentieth century is not in the process of consideration for beatification: Achille Ratti—Pope Pius XI.

Some scholars speculate that Pius XI's speech, if delivered on February 11 and followed by LaFarge's encyclical, would have led to a break with the German and Italian treaties with the Vatican. If he had died even a week later, such analysis says, Eugene Pacelli would not have been the front-runner to succeed him. An appeaser of the Nazis and the Italians would no longer have been able to restore relations.

Other scholars say, as well, that once such a break took place, and once condemnation from the Vatican rose, the world might have been different. It was possible that continued pressure from a strong-speaking pope would have blocked or weakened what eventually became Hitler's Final Solution for the Jews.

After Kristallnacht, Hitler felt “he could go to any length with the Jews, without fear of attack from any church,” wrote Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Irish writer and politician, in 1989. “Had Pius XI been able to deliver the encyclical he planned, the green light would have changed to red. The Catholic Church in Germany would have been obliged to speak out against the persecution of the Jews. Many Protestants, inside and outside Germany, would have been likely to follow its example.”

One strong piece of evidence emerged decades later within the Church to show that Catholic leaders had an influence on the behavior of the Nazis. In 1996, then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, recalled that his village in Germany “experienced a sense of liberation” when Cardinal Clement von Galen of Munich “‘broke the silence and publicly defended the mentally ill' who were likewise earmarked for extermination by Hitler's Reich.”

Ratzinger, forced under law into the Nazi Hitler Youth organization at fourteen years old in 1941 and into a military antiaircraft unit when he was sixteen, saw a fourteen-year-old cousin with Down syndrome dragged away by the Nazi eugenics program and later killed.

“Only a boldly public outcry could have halted the atrocities,” Max Pribilla, a German Jesuit journalist, wrote in 1946. The implication was that a similar voice from the Vatican could have made a difference.

After its report on the encyclical in 1972, the editors of the
National Catholic Reporter
said this: “Considering that Hitler had only begun to move into full-scale persecution of the Jews, and had not yet begun planned extermination; considering that Italy had only begun to copy Germany's racial laws; considering the persecution of Jews throughout history; considering the difficulty, especially in Europe, of launching a similar wide-scale attack on Catholics; and considering the moral weight of the papacy, especially at that point in history—considering all this, we must conclude that the publication of the encyclical draft at the time it was written may have saved hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lives.”

That can never be known. It was only clear that Pope Pius XI took a stance in favor of absolute morality and defended to his last breath his principles of decency and humanity, nothing more, nothing less.

S
PECIAL THANKS TO
Charles Gallagher, S.J., assistant professor of history at Boston College, for his help, thoughtful analysis, and friendship in considering the issues surrounding the Vatican in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and for reviewing the manuscript. Thanks also to Robert Burruss for his maps and for reading early versions of the manuscript; Steve Christensen provided, as always, well-focused advice as did Henry Heilbrunn, Lynne Heilbrunn, and Madeleine Lundberg.

The Reverend Donald Conroy provided constant encouragement, insight, and historical and ecclesiastical context, and gave very helpful suggestions and impressions on an early version of the manuscript. My appreciation and gratitude to Ian Portnoy, who advised, encouraged, and followed me on this project all along.

I also thank Rector T. Frank Kennedy, S.J., at the Jesuit Community at Boston College, and the members of the community, who welcomed me and provided stimulating conversation, not to mention room and exquisite victuals during two visits.

Thanks to Miguel Pagliere, friend and photographer extraordinaire, and to Neal Levy for their encouragement. In Italy, I benefited from the insights of Professor Piero Melograni and am grateful for the help of my colleague in Rome, Sarah Delaney, for making things work so smoothly. We shared a wonderful welcome in the lovely town of Segni in Lazio by members of the archives at the Archivio Diocesano Innocenzo III; and thanks to the archive director, Alfredo Serangeli, for his time and expertise. During a long lunch in Segni, the archivists reminded me that memories endure of World War II and its consequences.

One highlight was a day trip to Castel Gandolfo where Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J., an American research astronomer and planetary scientist, took us on an extensive tour of the papal grounds. It included a rare visit to the marvelous Vatican Observatory, its Zeiss telescope and breathtaking museum and library—complete with a four-hundred-year-old copy of Copernicus's
Astronomia Instaurata
(published about seventy years after his death).

The current pope was not there during our visit in October 2011, yet one could imagine the presence of Pius XI, pacing the balconies and feeling the wind whipping across Lake Albano. I am grateful to Brother Guy for his kindness; and also to my niece, Natalie Hinkel, who made the connections for that visit.

Sister Catherine Bitzer, archivist at the Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, was of great help and my appreciation to her consideration; and to the members of her order, The Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Augustine, who hosted me for a week. My uncle and aunt Jerry and Joan Gropper and cousins Amy Gropper and David Futch provided the logistics. Thanks to David Futch for also helping review the archives of Bishop Joseph Hurley.

I enjoyed greatly my chats with The Honorable Guido Calabresi, Senior Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, following the revelation that his family had a direct connection to some of the events that took place in the book. Thanks as well to the Rev. Michael P. Morris, M.A., M.Div., archivist of the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York, who graciously provided advice and access to relevant files in the archdiocese's archives.

Among others, thanks to a number of historians, Richard Breitman, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Michael Gannon, David I. Kertzer, my colleague David Kahn, David Alvarez and Robert Maryks, and Michael R. Marrus; Thomas J. Reese, S.J; Thomas Brennan; and to Tomas Gergely, Martin Hosking, and Berle Cherney, for his photo expertise; Neal S. Levy; Matthew Budow helped connect me with an important archive at the University of Michigan through Adam Zarazinski, who tracked down a letter from Cardinal Tisserant there.

No one could have a better editor than Henry Ferris, whose logical choices and sensitivity are unparalleled and central to the book; my agent, Flip Brophy, is the dynamo that keeps things together. Many thanks to both.

None of this works without family support—my wife, Musha Salinas Eisner, partner, editor, and best critic; my daughters, Isabel and Marina, constant boosters; Maria Teresa Leturia, my aunt, and Amparo Maria Salinas are not only supporters, but are also assiduous copyeditors and critics. I always wish that Bernie, Lorraine Eisner, and Agricol Salinas Artagoitia could have stayed longer with us.
Sic transit gloria mundi.

The following excerpts from John LaFarge's draft encyclical are from the files of Edward Stanton, S.J., Burns Library, Boston College.

Humanis Generis Unitas

(The Ineditum)