Altar of Resistance by Samuel Marquis

Author:Samuel Marquis [Marquis, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Mount Sopris Publishing
Published: 2017-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 34

VATICAN

DECEMBER 22, 1943

THE CHIEF SHOOK HIS HEAD IN DISMAY. Cardinal Maglione, the Vatican secretary of state, had just briefed him on last night’s raid at Seminario Lombardo and the other Vatican properties. The news was bad—very bad. Unable to believe what he had just heard, he sighed with resignation and placed his white-skullcapped head in his hands. He wondered how the Almighty Father could allow such Machiavellian ruthlessness to take place in his beloved city when its citizenry was already suffering beyond imagination.

“No place is safe anymore, Your Holiness. The German and Fascist police forces have no respect for the ecclesiastical institutions of Rome—it is as simple as that,” declared Maglione to wrap up his briefing.

Distraught at this latest flagrant abuse of power by the occupiers, Pius rubbed his temples to drive away the demon of a headache that was beginning to take root inside his head. How could the situation have deteriorated so quickly? In only three months, the Germans had taken over as the undisputed masters of Rome, seizing all power and authority through martial law and in the process making a laughingstock of the Curia. But the worst thing—as evidenced by the October roundup, last night’s raid, and all the other atrocities being committed on a smaller scale on a daily basis—was that he was powerless to stop them.

It ate away at him, like a festering wound that refuses to heal. The Holy Father of Rome—the defensor civitatis that the citizenry was counting on in this desperate time of war—had no more authority over the German occupiers than a peasant from the Trastevere. He felt not merely angry, but ashamed. Was he truly so impotent that he could not even help his own people?

Every day the Germans were becoming more powerful. Even before the raid, the Vatican had received information from a trustworthy source that the SS police force in Rome was about to be increased from four hundred to two thousand men. Moreover, according to the informant, a diabolical plan had been spawned to use the augmented police force to make a city-wide, house-to-house search to root out all able-bodied males for labor service at the Italian front or in Nazi Germany. Most disturbing was the revelation that convents, monasteries, and even treaty-protected Church properties would not be exempt from this latest planned Nazi roundup, which would be the fifth or sixth in only the past two months.

It was a tragic situation, made even more tragic by last night’s devastating raid. But even more shocking was the renewed possibility, revealed by another secret source, of an even more ambitious raid on Vatican City itself. Were Hitler and his Nazis again seriously considering kidnapping him and shipping him off to Lichtenstein in a cattle car?

“This war,” he lamented in his high-pitched voice, “is making old men out of all of us. Do kindness and generosity have no mercy in this land?”

“Hitler knows nothing of mercy, Your Holiness,” replied Maglione. “If there is one thing we have learned these last few years, it is that he cannot be trusted.

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