The Pope's Last Crusade (19 page)

Gundlach's letter was one of the few open acknowledgments of a rift at the Vatican. As the pope weakened and was less able to function, Pacelli gained more power, not only as secretary of state, but also as the
camerlengo,
the man designated to govern the church when the pope is incapacitated—or when he dies. The result was a race for time to locate and publish the encyclical before Pope Pius XI died.

In the fall, the pope and President Roosevelt coordinated a visit to Rome of the church's most controversial leader in the United States, Cardinal George Mundelein. Mundelein, the archbishop of Chicago, would report on the results of a recent Catholic Eucharistic Congress in New Orleans, where Mundelein had been the pope's official representative. There was also the matter of the beatification of Mother Cabrini, the little Italian nun who had worked among the poor of New York and Washington, that would take place on November 13. But those were more excuses than answers about the real reason for the visit.

The mere mention of Mundelein's name was a jab at Hitler and the Nazis. Mundelein, one of the more liberal members of the College of Cardinals, had been more outspoken against the Nazis than almost anyone. In 1936, he had said the Catholic Church in Germany was being “slowly strangled. Religious leaders are in jail. We are being fed propaganda that they are guilty of criminal violations.”

And two months after the pope's first anti-Nazi encyclical in 1937, and with the pope's evident blessing, Mundelein had gone much further—he mocked Hitler and those around him. He asked in a speech in Chicago: “How is it that a nation of 60 million people will submit in fear and servitude to an alien, an Austrian paper-hanger, and a poor one at that, I am told, and a few associates like Goebbels and Göring, who dictate every move of the people's lives.” Hitler was enraged by Mundelein's speech, which provoked diplomatic protests in Washington and at the Vatican.

Mundelein's trip appeared to be a maneuver conducted by President Roosevelt with the pope's knowledge—perhaps with the help of Mundelein himself. A few days before Mundelein's scheduled arrival, U.S. ambassador William Phillips called Monsignor Joseph Hurley to the U.S. embassy to ask if he knew anything about the visit. Roosevelt wanted Phillips to receive Cardinal Mundelein as a major U.S. dignitary. “This is all most interesting and unusual and of course will cause a great deal of public comment since nothing of this nature has ever happened to an American Cardinal visiting Rome, but the President has good reasons, undoubtedly.”

Hurley agreed that the ambassador's official involvement “will be widely noted in the press because previously no visit to Rome by an American Cardinal has called for any notice by the Embassy.”

Phillips welcomed Mundelein ostentatiously dockside in Naples on November 5 and took him to lunch on an American warship, the
Omaha
. After the luncheon, Phillips had arranged for a special train to take the American cardinal directly to Rome.

The trip was a demonstration of U.S. solidarity with the pope in opposition to Hitler. The beauty of Mundelein's visit was that while he made no public declaration at all in Rome, the trip managed to anger the Nazis as intended.

Nazi newspapers reviled Mundelein and called him the American “Agitator Priest.” Joseph Goebbels's newspaper,
Angriff,
said it was a play by Roosevelt for Catholic votes in midterm elections on November 8 and a diversion from “American reality,” which “consists of a hungry farmer family leaving its home, strikers playing cards instead of working, tramping youths who never had jobs, breadlines containing parents with baby carriages, and shanty ‘depression homes.'”

The diplomatic offensive against Hitler during Mundelein's visit was dampened by the pope's health. He did preside on November 13 in Mundelein's presence at the beatification ceremony of Mother Cabrini; however, he had to be propped up on his specially designed platform chair. Mundelein emerged from a private meeting with the pope saying that Pius appeared vibrant and healthy. Nevertheless, the pontiff's energy was draining away.

Ambassador Phillips left Rome for his long-delayed consultations in Washington on November 12 while Mundelein was still in town, but after the diplomatic portion of his visit. Caroline Phillips stayed on and recorded details of the rest of Mundelein's visit. She described the following day in her diary the beatification ceremony at St. Peter's for Mother Cabrini and saw the pope was not well.

“It was truly a marvelous sight,” she wrote. She was seated behind

rows of Cardinals and Bishops in scarlet and violet robes, handsome Chamberlains of the pope in black Spanish costumes of the 16th century, white ruffs around their necks, gold chains across their black velvet breasts, short sword and knickerbockers, knights of Malta resplendent with gold cross and order on their black velvet and plumed hats. . . . we waited and finally flares of beautiful silver trumpets followed by wild cheers and waving of handkerchiefs announced the arrival of the pope.

He came seated in his red velvet . . . embroidered chair carried high by men in red cassocks and preceded by Cardinals and priests and acolytes. He was sitting there very wearily but with immense dignity and peace blessing the crowds on either side of him with his right hand. He had a fine, spiritual, intellectual face but looked very feeble.

Mundelein's visit ended with concern about the pope, and for a time he even delayed his departure for fear that the pontiff's illness might have been terminal. There was another underlying sadness and anxiety beneath events in Rome. Germany had fallen to a new level of terror in the Nazi campaign against Jews.

Early on the morning of October 28, 1938, Nazi storm troopers in Hanover, Germany, rousted an old Polish tailor, Zindel Grynszpan, and his wife, Rifka, from their bed and forced them onto a train out of the city bound for Poland. Along with an estimated twelve thousand other Jews, they were denied entry and huddled instead in a refugee camp on the German-Polish border. Grynszpan contacted his seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, saying they were trapped in the harsh, overcrowded camp with no prospects of escape; the family had been left penniless. The young man was outraged and distraught.

A week later, on November 7, he walked into the German embassy in Paris and asked to speak with a diplomat. When an undersecretary named Ernst vom Rath stepped forward, Grynszpan shot him at close range. Vom Rath, a member of the SA Nazi storm troopers, died two days later.

The incident gave the Nazis an excuse to carry out a coordinated attack on Jews that was more violent and widespread than anything before it. Joseph Goebbels reported that Hitler had decided “demonstrations should be allowed to continue. The police should be withdrawn. For once the Jews should get to feel the popular anger.”

The night of November 9 would be known as Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass. The marauding Nazis killed at least ninety-one people, raped and tortured many more, and burned at least 270 synagogues throughout greater Germany, which now also included Austria and the Czech Sudetenland. They smashed seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses and sent thirty thousand Jews to concentration camps. The organized bands were joined by others who looted merchandise and wrecked stores, carrying away clothing and shoes amid cries of “Perish Jewry” and “Kill the Jews.”

The terror was boundless. Liesel Kaufmann, a fifteen-year-old girl, could not escape the memory of that night, “the flames, the smoke, and the chants,” she recalled. “The next day, the synagogue was still burning and a crowd was still shouting. They said, ‘Burn them—kill the Jews.' I still hear those voices.”

Bystanders stood by silently and powerless, shocked as the plain-clothed marauders hunted down Jews and trashed and torched their synagogues and stores. The bands sometimes erroneously trashed non-Jewish establishments but tried to avoid that damage and to leave foreign businesses intact. There was looting; shoes were stolen from wrecked displays, and children wandered with their faces smeared with filched chocolate bars.

“‘Move on,'” a policeman warned Otto D. Tolischus of the
New York Times,
“‘there are young comrades of [our Aryan race] inside who have some work to do.'”

President Roosevelt condemned the attacks, expressed shock on behalf of all Americans, and said he could “scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization.” He then announced he was recalling the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

The ailing pope did not issue a statement on Kristallnacht; it was not clear if news about the attack reached him immediately or whether any statement he might have made could have gotten past Pacelli and the others surrounding him. The Vatican newspaper was also silent.

While Pius's voice was not heard, churchmen closest to him beyond Rome spoke out. Cardinal Alfred Schuster, the archbishop of Milan, the pope's home city, said the racism preached by Mussolini and Hitler was heresy. Despite the calls for “peace and avoiding international conflict at any cost,” Schuster said, the racist policies “constitute a forge upon which are formed the most murderous weapons for war to come.”

“A kind of heresy has been abroad,” Shuster said, “and is spreading elsewhere that not only attacks the supernatural basis of the Catholic Church but is materializing the spiritual concepts of individuals, the nation and the fatherland in human blood, denies to humanity every other spiritual value and thus constitutes an international danger no less than that of Bolshevism itself. It is so-called racism.”

There were echoes of Pius's words elsewhere as well, especially among American bishops and cardinals, many of whom repeated the pope's earlier attacks on the Nazis.

LaFarge's magazine,
America,
condemned Kristallnacht in a sharp editorial. “Germany, once counted among the civilized nations, has put herself beyond the pale. . . . We have no words to express our horror and detestation of the barbarous and un-Christian treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany. It forms one of history's blackest pages.”

American Catholic leaders repudiated the savagery of Kristallnacht. Catholic University organized a high-profile, prime-time coast-to-coast radio broadcast, featuring a live hookup with bishops from around the country, with the rector of the university and with Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. Rev. Maurice Sheehy, a professor at Catholic University, set the tone, saying that church leaders “raise their voice not in mad hysteria, but in firm indignation against the atrocities visited upon the Jews in Germany, because as Pope Pius XI has pointed out, we are all spiritual Semites.”

Despite the condemnation from religious leaders, one widely known American priest presented a different message. Father Charles Coughlin, a onetime New Deal Democrat, had a one-hour weekly national radio broadcast that was steeped in demagoguery, virulent criticism of Roosevelt, and underlying support for Adolf Hitler. A forty-seven-year-old parish priest at the National Shrine of the Little Flower Church in Royal Oaks, Michigan, Coughlin had been broadcasting the weekly program since 1926. His power and influence had begun to falter under persistent criticism from the church hierarchy, but he still reached a loyal audience estimated at as many as fifteen million.

Coughlin took to the microphone at 4
P.M.
on November 20 for his weekly Sunday address. That evening, he said his goal was to submit Kristallnacht to the lens of “scientific analysis.” The result was rhetorical tripe and lies. Why did the Nazis lash out at Jews? His answer: Jews are aggressive and wily and the atheists among them are responsible for a worldwide conspiracy that led to the Russian Revolution and the onset of Communism.

After the anti-Jewish rant, his flagship radio station, WMCA in New York, threw him off the air as did many other stations. The next week he continued in the same vein, saying he only asked “that an insane world will distinguish between the innocent Jews and the guilty Jews as much as I would ask the same insane world to distinguish between the innocent gentile and the guilty gentile.”

Prior to these broadcasts, Catholic officials and priests in the United States often had difficulty confronting Coughlin head-on. LaFarge, among others, was uncomfortable speaking about him in public because they feared his power. “He has tremendous influence among Catholics and non-Catholics,” LaFarge said in an interview shortly after he had arrived in England in May 1938. “This influence reaches the most inaccessible places, in fact wherever there is a radio. I think on the whole his influence is good, though I don't agree with a lot of what he says.”

Coughlin also had important friends, including the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi head of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, who was thought to be bankrolling the radio priest's political activities.

Unsurprisingly, Coughlin had become a darling of the Nazis and the Fascists. One of Mussolini's staunchest propagandists, Roberto Farinacci, called him an “apostle of Christianity.” Joseph Goebbels wondered sarcastically about what had happened to the touted U.S. media and their famed freedom of the press.

More than a year later, an FBI investigation determined that Coughlin had been in touch for some time with German agents in the United States. He was finally forced off the air in May 1940, a year and a half after his Kristallnacht anti-Semitic broadcasts; by April 1942, when his newspaper,
Social Justice,
was banned from distribution, Coughlin was effectively silenced.

Three weeks after Kristallnacht, LaFarge resumed speaking out against racism in the United States and more prominently compared it to what was happening to Jews in Europe. At a dinner on November 29 in LaFarge's honor after he returned from Europe, he proclaimed that U.S. racism is the “pale but venomous elder cousin” of Nazi racism. “Racism, like the other destructive ideologies, cannot be understood and interpreted merely in terms of fear and dislike for its victims. In Europe racism is so closely associated with anti Jewish propaganda that one is included to ask whether the whole racist idea has any other aim or object than that of expressing spite against the Jews.”