The Pope's Last Crusade (26 page)

Ratti's background as a famous mountain climber made him unusual among leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, and Tisserant also had an unorthodox past. He took leave from the priesthood in 1914 to enter the French Army as a cavalry officer and served in the Dardanelles and Palestine. He later served as a logistics and military intelligence officer until the end of World War I and in 1919 returned to the Vatican Library.

Tisserant said he and the future pope had corresponded frequently. Ratti “used to write me about every month,” Tisserant told a friend, “and I have still twenty of His letters [
sic
], one from Milan of 1913, three from Warsaw after the war, the others from Rome in wartime.” When Ratti became pope, they remained close. “When He became a Pontiff,” Tisserant said in a letter a month after the pope died, “I felt that His affection for me remained unchanged.”

By the time Tisserant had gotten ready to leave his apartment for the short walk to the Vatican, the bells of St. Peter's began to toll. Within moments, church bells resounded throughout Rome. The news was broadcast everywhere that Pope Pius XI had died.

When Tisserant arrived at the Vatican, he was told that the pope had died at 5:31
A.M.
Tisserant had looked at the clock when the phone woke him up. He did not understand how he could have received a message that the pope was alive forty-nine minutes after he had been pronounced dead? He did not think the call was a mistake; he thought he had been given false information. He did not know why.

AS WAS
customary after the death of a pope, Cardinal Pacelli as
camerlengo
ordered the pope's offices and files sealed. Most of the files would not be available to the public for at least seventy-five years, long after almost all witnesses to the pope's life and death had also died. Pacelli then withdrew to his own Vatican office and began communicating with cardinals and apostolic offices around the world.

He also sent Joseph Hurley on a special mission to inform U.S. ambassador William Phillips formally that Pope Pius XI was dead. When Hurley got to the embassy, he made it clear that this meeting was official, quite different from his normally informal chats with Phillips. He told Phillips he had come “by instruction of Cardinal Pacelli, the Secretary of State, who during the interim directs the affairs of the Vatican.” Hurley said that other nations had been contacted in writing, “but in the case of the United States, he was instructed to make an oral communication.”

Pacelli interrupted his work later in the day when he received word that Foreign Minister Ciano was on his way to the Vatican.

Ciano had already met with Mussolini and told him the pope had died. Il Duce was “completely indifferent,” Ciano said, and “mentioned the death only in order to inform me that this evening he will postpone the meeting of the Grand Council out of respect for the memory of the Pope, and also because the public is much too concerned with the mourning to be interested [in anything else].” Several days later Mussolini expressed his own view of the pope's death: “At last that stiff-necked man is dead.”

Since the pope was head of state and Italy had diplomatic relations with the Vatican, it was proper protocol for Ciano to express sympathy in person. As he crossed the Tiber in his car, then rode directly to St. Peter's, he saw that mourners were already gathering in the square.

Ciano walked with Pacelli to the Sistine Chapel, where the pope had been placed on a catafalque. “I conveyed the sympathy of the Italian government and of the Fascist people,” Ciano wrote, “and I said that the deceased pope had forever tied his name to history through the Lateran Treaty. They liked my expressions very much.”

This was the highest-level meeting between the Vatican and the Italian government in some time, and Ciano had not planned to bring up political issues. But Pacelli did and hinted at an agenda to come. Pacelli acknowledged that relations with the Fascist government had not been good but indicated that things were about to change. Pacelli “spoke to me about the relationship between State and Church with very agreeable and hopeful expressions,” Ciano wrote in his diary. He was encouraged but gave no details of what was said.

Pacelli and Ciano approached the catafalque in the chapel. “Of the Pope himself we could see nothing—only his enormous white sandals and the hem of his robe; but the atmosphere created was one of infinity.”

It was too early to make predictions about the pope's successor or how relations between church and state would change in that new regime. For the moment, whatever the pope had planned to do or say at the upcoming meeting with Italian bishops had been postponed.

Now the Italian government's focus was to make sure that the pope's plan for that day would never be carried out. Il Duce had been increasingly troubled about the bishops' meeting. Had Pius been preparing to excommunicate Il Duce or Hitler or both? Would there be further embarrassments or challenges by the church? Persistent rumors said that the content of the pope's speech might have been “devastating for Fascism.” The reports said the pope had worked fervently on the speech and had hoped to deliver it himself or to be present while it was read to the bishops. The rumors now were that the speech might be distributed as a tribute as his final statement to the world.

Mussolini wanted to know the status of the speech and what it said. Ciano had told him about the meeting with Pacelli and his hint that relations with the Vatican would improve. But what did that mean in practical terms? Pacelli, who was solely in charge of the church, might have a copy of the speech. Mussolini ordered his sources at the Vatican to either get a copy of the speech or information about it.

But Mussolini should not have been so concerned because Pacelli had already dealt with the issue when he impounded the pope's desk and its contents. Among the papers were three important pieces of business. One was the speech to the bishops, in printed form as well as the original version that was handwritten in pencil. The second document was Ledóchowski's cover letter to the pope, along with a third larger file, the one-hundred-page draft encyclical, with versions in French, German, and Latin—
Humanis Generis Unitas,
written in the pope's name by John LaFarge.

Pacelli might not have read the encyclical, but he knew all about the pope's planned speech to the bishops. The
camerlengo
told his deputy, Monsignor Montini, to make sure all versions of the pope's final speech were confiscated. The pope's assistants were to “hand over all the material he has regarding the discourse [and] that the printer destroy all he possesses relative to the same discourse,” according to notes taken by Monsignor Domenico Tardini.

Montini deputized Tardini to carry out Pacelli's orders, and Tardini then passed along word to the late pope's secretary, Confalonieri. Confalonieri did as he was told and then telephoned Tardini to say “that the vice-director of the print shop was himself taking care to destroy all the material that had been prepared so that there did not survive ‘not even a line.'” Mussolini received word through channels that Pope Pius XI's document would never appear in any form.

WHEN WRITING ABOUT
the pope's death, the Fascist press did not mention anything about the pope's protest against Fascism and Nazism and presented sanitized version of relations between Pius XI and the government. Newspapers reported that Mussolini and his government lamented the pope's passing and said the pontiff died a day before he was going to announce a full reconciliation between the church and the Italian government.

Some Vatican spokesmen participated in this deception and transmitted Mussolini's version to the foreign press. The
New York Times
reported four days after the pope died that Pope Pius “had reached a satisfactory solution of various controversial points on which the Church had differed with the Italian Government. It is presumed that a
modus vivendi
was reached also on the racist question, which has been the most important reason for dissent between the Italian government and the Vatican.”

The
Times
story also said: “It is reported in Vatican circles, in fact that the Pope intended to make a speech, of which peace was to have been the keynote. . . . The Pope was most anxious to deliver this speech and repeatedly begged his physicians to prolong his life at least until he could attend the meeting.”

Of course, a small group of people knew it was a lie, among them Confalonieri and Pacelli, who had each read the speech.

The speech was far from a reconciliation between the Vatican and the government; it was an angry warning to the bishops of Italy and criticized the government, words that might have led to a permanent rupture between church and state. Conflict and overt confrontation between Mussolini and the Vatican ended within hours of the pope's death. His final words were erased from the public record. However, at least one version of the pope's speech did survive and was found in the Vatican Secret Archives by Italian academic researchers more than half a century later.

He may have been sick and limited in his ability to reach the outside world, but a speech written and delivered by the pope would have broken through and had an impact.

The pope wrote in his speech to the bishops:

You know, dear and venerable brothers how the words of the pope are often construed. There are some, and not only in Italy, who take Our allocutions and Our audiences, and alter them in a false sense [and] have Us speak incredibly foolish and absurd things. There is a press capable of saying most anything that is opposed to Us and Our concerns, often twisting in a perverse way the recent and more distant history of the Church, arriving even at the persistent denial of any persecution in Germany and adding to that the false accusation of Our engagement in politics . . . They arrive at true irreverence; and these things are said while our press is forbidden to contradict or correct them.

He warned the bishops to be on guard against distortions about what they say. “Dear Brothers you must take care not only about the abuse of what you say in public but also about what you say in private, especially if you . . . speak with individuals holding a government or party office.”

Furthermore, he voiced aloud his concerns about treachery inside the Vatican, warning that there were spies on behalf of Italy and Germany around him. “Do not forget that often there are observers and informers (you would do well to call them spies) who, of their own initiative or because charged to do so, listen to you in order to condemn you.”

Beyond informants, governments were listening in to communications as well. “Do not ever speak on the telephone words that you do not want to be known,” the pope wrote. “You may believe that your words are traveling to your distant correspondent and yet at a certain point they may be noticed and intercepted.”

The pope referred one last time to the subject of racism. Humanity, he said, is “joined together and all of the same blood in the common link of the great human family.”

His final words saw the likelihood of war, but with a prayer: “peace, peace, peace for all the world that instead seems seized by a homicidal and suicidal folly of weapons. Peace demands that We implore the God of peace and hope to attain it. So be it!”

The pope had planned to follow his Saturday speech with what he called a “dialogue” with the bishops about the political situation. Since the pope was known for making emotional statements beyond the scripted word, his conversation with the bishops could have set off sparks that went beyond the text.

Twelve abreast, people filed past the bier that held the pope's body on Monday, February 13. All day they came, thousands and thousands every hour, perhaps two hundred thousand by the end of the day. So many crowded into St. Peter's Basilica that Cardinal Pacelli decided to leave the doors open so everyone could be accommodated. The Vatican had to ask the Italian government for help with crowd control. That morning the first of nine funeral Masses was celebrated.

Pius XI was buried on Tuesday, February 14, in a crypt at St. Peter's carved from marble that had been used to build the Milan Cathedral.

The Latin inscription on the tomb said: “The body of Pius XI, Supreme Pontiff. He lived eighty-one years, eight months and ten days and he was the head of the Universal Church for seventeen years and five days. He died February tenth of the Year of Our Lord 1939.”

He had died a day too early.

Funerals were held for nine days from February 12 to February 20. One day was reserved for diplomats, another for the Italian government. Ambassador William Phillips was among the mourners on February 16; the next day, Mussolini, Ciano, and the Italian cabinet were at the Vatican. The king of Italy and his wife also were present. Mussolini had declared a day of national mourning in keeping with the impression that he and his government were saddened that Pope Pius XI was gone.

Public reaction to the pope's death outside Italy focused on his political stance against Fascism and Nazism. No pope had ever been mourned in such a way, a testament to the times and his role as the leading voice against the fanaticism of Hitler and Mussolini. In Germany, the pope's death was treated with dismissal. As expected, the Nazi newspaper
Angriff
dismissed Pius as “a political pope” who did not understand the ability of Fascism and Nazism to protect the world from Communism.

In Washington, Congress convened an unprecedented joint session in memoriam and then adjourned for the day in the pope's honor. A declaration praised the pope “who exerted the most challenging and sincere efforts for world peace, who manifested the broadest tolerance toward all nations and creeds, and who pleaded for the protection of oppressed minorities.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull cabled Pacelli on behalf of President Roosevelt, expressing sorrow at the death of the pope whose “zeal for peace and tolerance won him a place in the hearts of all races and creeds.”