The Pope's Last Crusade (30 page)

Hurley had never been a favorite of Pacelli, and his outspoken role was visible. He continued to work closely with U.S. officials in Rome, especially with Myron Taylor, who had been appointed as President Roosevelt's personal envoy to the Vatican. Hurley's role as intermediary with U.S. ambassador Phillips was thereby curtailed, much to both men's disappointment.

Phillips stayed on in Italy for another eighteen months, cooperating with Taylor in unsuccessful efforts to dissuade Mussolini from fighting alongside Hitler. But Phillips quit his Italian post in October 1941 and became station chief of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in London. The OSS was the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Phillips continued to serve Roosevelt and President Truman in several diplomatic roles throughout the 1940s. He and his wife, Caroline, then retired to their home in Beverly, Massachusetts. Caroline maintained her diaries until her death at the age of eighty-four in 1965. Her husband, eighty-nine, died three years later.

Pope Pius XII's opportunity to oust Hurley came quickly. When word came on August 12 that Archbishop Patrick Barry of St. Augustine, Florida, had died, Hurley was unceremoniously assigned as his replacement four days later. The naming of a new bishop normally took months of deliberations. Hurley's elevation to bishop of St. Augustine was cast as a promotion and was carried out with praise and sweet words.

But the church hierarchy knew that Hurley was being banished. St. Augustine was considered a backwater assignment for such a high-ranking Vatican official. He was cast aside for daring to speak out against the Nazis in solitary tribute to his mentor, Pope Pius XI. One of the new pope's first acts had been to promote Francis Spellman, Hurley's predecessor, as the designated American at the Vatican; Spellman became archbishop of New York on April 15, 1939, en route to becoming a cardinal seven years later.

Even in Florida, Hurley drew attention in the United States as one of the most vocal church figures during World War II. He proudly spoke, for example, about U.S. war preparations on the CBS Radio Network on July 6, 1941, with the preface that his word did not carry “any mandate from the Vatican . . . only my own authority.” He repeated Pius XI's condemnation of the “the crooked cross of National Socialism,” a term Hurley had coined. The previous pope, he said, had warned that Nazi “intrigues had been laid bare which aim at nothing less than a war of extermination.”

He did not criticize Pius XII, but rather praised his attempt to negotiate for peace. He did say it was time to prepare for the inevitable conflagration. “Pope Pius XII has not ceased to raise His voice against the evils of totalitarianism . . .” and for peace. “It is history, of course, that we failed,” Hurley said. “We failed because one nation, confidently arrogant in its armored might, wanted war. This war is Germany's doing . . . We may not, we must not, wait for the start of hostilities . . . let us pray for peace but prepare for war.”

After the war, Hurley was occasionally summoned back to temporary diplomatic duty at the Vatican, but he remained as bishop of St. Augustine until he died in 1967, embittered, disillusioned, increasingly conservative and as autocratic in his Florida domain as his beloved mentor Pope Pius XI had been at the Vatican.

T
HE RECREATION ROOM
at America House had been silent except for John LaFarge's voice as he told the story of his summer in Europe in the days before the war began.

LaFarge was filling in the details of a story he had acknowledged in his 1954 memoir,
The Manner Is Ordinary
. At the time, he described his meeting with Pius XI as a discussion about racism and anti-Semitism. “He had read my book
Interracial Justice
and liked the title of it,” LaFarge said. “‘
Interracial Justice, c'est bon!
' the pope said, pronouncing the title as if it were French. He said he thought my book was the best thing written on the topic, comparing it with some European literature. Naturally, this was a big lift to me.”

LaFarge promoted human rights issues for the rest of his life through books and commentaries in
America
and in speeches around the country. Awards showered upon him—the 1955 Catholic International Peace Award; media awards; a social justice award from the Religions and Labor Council in 1957 shared with Martin Luther King; recognition in 1962 by the American Jewish Committee. He wrote a number of books, including
A Catholic Viewpoint on Racism
(1956) and
An American Amen
(1958)
.
“A priest's life,” he wrote in that book, “is not unlike that of a bridge between God and man.” A final book,
Reflections on Growing Old,
was published in 1963.

And yet, his meeting with Pope Pius XI pulled at his conscience. LaFarge wrote in
The Manner Is Ordinary
: “If I were in Rome again, he said in conclusion, I should be sure to drop in to see him. He might like to talk to me again on the question and might have some further ideas.” The pope had expected him to return that year in person with a finished encyclical.

Now, in 1963, he was revealing what really happened during his conversation with the pope.

LaFarge told his friends he had trusted Wlodimir Ledóchowski. His fellow Jesuits understood that his loyalty and deference to the Father Superior was tantamount. How could LaFarge have known that Ledóchowski was lying?

Ledóchowski had died at the age of seventy-six on December 13, 1942, midwar, about four years after the death of Pius XI. One Jesuit who worked with Ledóchowski said that the Jesuit superior general always covered his tracks and left no compromising documents.

Nevertheless, LaFarge knew he had failed. The pope had asked LaFarge to return personally and deliver the encyclical. But extenuating circumstances, sickness and death, and the pressure of Ledóchowski's personality had kept LaFarge from ever seeing the pope again.

Walter Abbott, one of LaFarge's longtime fellow Jesuits at America House, asked Uncle John one basic question about Ledóchowski's role.

“I asked him if he thought that the Father General sabotaged the encyclical,” Abbott said.

LaFarge said yes; he did think Ledóchowski had blocked the encyclical. “I could not fathom why” Ledóchowski would do such a thing, LaFarge said. In any case, he added, it probably didn't matter by that time. LaFarge told Abbott he thought “Pius XI was weakened and too far gone” to follow through with the encyclical's publication.

LaFarge, tugged by obedience to Ledóchowski and by the personal need to be with his family, had made a difficult and, in some ways, defensible decision. He now regretted the decision to go home; he could have given the pope the encyclical in person. “I made a mistake by doing the right thing,” LaFarge told the other Jesuits.

He then stood up and shuffled slowly off to his room for bed. After Uncle John had left, Abbott looked to the others. “He told us the whole story . . . JLF had us spellbound. I have lived with him for 20 years and this is the first time I'm hearing about this project.”

A few weeks later, President John F. Kennedy invited LaFarge to the White House for a meeting of religious leaders to discuss “certain issues of this nation's civil rights problem. This matter merits serious and immediate attention and I would be pleased to have you attend the meeting to be held in the East Room of the White House.”

The meeting was one step in the Kennedy administration's commitment to creating equal opportunity and job training for black Americans. In the ensuing months, never complaining about the pain in his legs or his weariness, LaFarge focused on the wave of civil rights legislation and preparations for Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. He was too frail to walk very far on the August day of the march, but he insisted on being present, so he was carried to the front of the line on the shoulders of other men. It was a fitting gesture; he knew that eventually King's dream would be accomplished by a new generation, where “children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.”

Interviewed by a
New York Times
reporter, LaFarge said civil rights were central to the future and promise of the United States: “It concerns the fundamental rights of all of us—not merely the Negroes but the entire population. We are all involved in this question of right and wrong.”

He joked with a niece about being carried that day, making light of the problem. “After all, the mechanism runs down after a while,” he wrote. “Wonderful it has worked as long as it has.”

THREE MONTHS LATER
, on November 9, 1963, LaFarge stood with Martin Luther King one last time and introduced the civil rights leader at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City. King was awarded the St. Francis Medal, citing his work for peace through nonviolence. That was a rare appearance for LaFarge, who had begun turning down meetings and speaking engagements.

On November 22, 1963, LaFarge chose to stay home at
America
headquarters rather than serve as tour guide to a visiting priest, something he usually loved to do. At around noon, he heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. LaFarge was devastated. The Jesuits at America House, along with everyone in the country, watched the television story as it developed: the death of the young president; the body borne back to Washington; grieving tributes to Kennedy who lay in state in the Capitol rotunda; and the first public statement by the new president, Lyndon Johnson.

On Sunday morning, November 24, 1963, John LaFarge ate breakfast and then returned to watching the television coverage. He retired to his room for a nap at midday, probably before the shocking televised murder of the president's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. The other Jesuits watched the drama throughout the day.

At around 4
P.M.
, one of younger Jesuits, C. J. McNaspy, went to look in on LaFarge. When he got no answer from his knocks on the door, McNaspy entered the room. LaFarge was fully dressed and lying motionless on his bed. He had taken off his glasses after having read the newspaper nearby. McNaspy realized what had happened and came running from the room.

“Uncle John is dead! Uncle John is dead!” he shouted to the others.

LaFarge had died quietly sometime during the afternoon.

The editor in chief of
America
at the time, Thurston N. Davis, said the grief among the Jesuits was so great that it seemed as if “the whole earth ached.”

“I can't escape the feeling that the Dallas tragedy had something to do with it,” Davis said. “One of the Fathers anointed him and called the police to get a doctor. When the police examined his person for ‘valuables'—a routine procedure—they found two worn rosaries.”

Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, who officiated at the funeral of President Kennedy two days earlier, said Mass on November 27, 1963, for John LaFarge of the Society of Jesus, who had chosen a path that would portray him to the world as an ordinary man. Cushing, a progressive force in Catholic-Jewish relations, had known LaFarge for at least forty years and focused on LaFarge's exhortation that Catholics join the civil rights movement.

“Let us cherish the memory of this great crusader for the truth. And we can do it best not only by our prayers but by perpetuating more and more the wonderful spirit of Catholic interracial work.”

POPE PIUS XI'S
last crusade against the Nazis was revealed after LaFarge's death. Priests reviewing LaFarge's papers found the draft encyclical against anti-Semitism and began speaking about it. The first major revelation was on December 15, 1972, with publication in the
National Catholic Reporter
of an extensive report about LaFarge and the encyclical by associate editor Jim Castelli.

“The encyclical, had it been published, would have broken the much criticized Vatican silence on the persecution of Jews in Europe, before and during the Second World War,” Castelli wrote.

Vatican officials rejected the notion that the document could even be called an encyclical, arguing it was not clear the pope would finally have issued it. An official, the Reverend Burkhart Schneider, described the text in 1973 as “speculative, theoretical, and [having a] laborious style that more resembled Gundlach's manner of thinking than LaFarge's.” Further, he said, the draft was submitted because Pius XI wanted “to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Concordat” with Italy. But the pope's death “caused the text prepared, along with many others on different themes, to end up in the silence of the archives.”

It is true that the pope would likely have edited and sharpened, even shortened the encyclical. He published thirty-two encyclicals during his pontificate, an average of two a year. Some of them were short, others as long as LaFarge's. The pope had reviewed and edited them all.

The
National Catholic Reporter
's report quoted extensively from the encyclical text, which was being published for the first time. It cited letters between LaFarge and Gundlach and their secret mission and some other documentation.

The
NCR
article was based on research by a young priest, Thomas Breslin, who discovered the encyclical and correspondence among LaFarge's personal papers. Breslin contacted
NCR
after reading about Tisserant's charge that Pius XI had been killed. In 1995, Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky wrote a book about the encyclical that was based in part on the material Breslin had found. The book, written in French, was translated into English in 1997, as
The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI
. The book includes an English text of the encyclical, retranslated from the French version.

A number of elements of the story were unavailable then: the files of Pope Pius XI, which were opened by the Secret Vatican Archives in 2006, and the complete files of Edward Stanton at Burns Library, Boston College, which include previously unreported memos and documents from LaFarge's papers. Stanton, a Canadian Jesuit, wrote about LaFarge and the encyclical for his doctoral thesis. He continued to work on the story when he began teaching at Boston College in the 1970s, gathering material and additional research for a book that would go beyond the doctoral thesis. Stanton's file included original copies of LaFarge's draft of the encyclical in English, and papers and notes not seen before. Those include LaFarge's original draft letter to the pope on October 28, 1938, in French; and an undated note to Stanton from the Reverend Walter Abbott, LaFarge's longtime friend who was present on the evening of May 19–20, 1963, when LaFarge told his story to his fellow Jesuits.