The Pope and Mussolini by David I. Kertzer

Author:David I. Kertzer [Kertzer, David I.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64553-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

Ambassador Bonifacio Pignatti (right), with Galeazzo Ciano, May 1939

(photograph credit 22.2)

“Collaboration was sometimes hard,” Pacelli would later tell Cardinal Verdier, the Paris archbishop, in explaining his relationship with Pius XI. The pope would listen to no one, not even his secretary of state, or so it seemed to him. “My affectionate nature suffered,” Pacelli confided, “but I knew that he loved me, and this thought consoled me.” Later, he offered Verdier another example of this sometimes-tense relationship. Once he had felt so overwhelmed that without realizing it, he “almost violently” banged his fists on the pope’s desk. He could not continue as secretary of state, he told the pontiff. “It does not fulfill me, and I am suffering.”

“The pope looked at me coldly and slowly said these words that I will never forget,” Pacelli recalled. “ ‘We have only one task, you and I, that is to do the politics of good!’ ” Pacelli was touched: “What a magnificent response! Humiliated by the weakness my nerves had caused me, I fell down on my knees at the pope’s feet and begged his pardon. The Holy Father lifted me up affectionately and hugged me.” “Quelle tableau!” observed Verdier, conjuring up the image, “What a picture!”38

Worried about the damage the pope could do to the anti-Semitic campaign, Pignatti turned to a man who could help. On August 4 he traveled south to the Sorrento peninsula, where Father Ledóchowski was staying in a Jesuit residence recovering from a recent illness. “I went to see the general of the Jesuits,” Pignatti later explained, “because in the past … he did not hide from me his implacable loathing for the Jews, whom he believes are the origin of all the ills that afflict Europe.”

The ambassador found Ledóchowski well informed about the problem and highly sympathetic to Pignatti’s cause. “Father Rosa,” he said, “told me that the pope did not understand.” His illness was robbing him of his mental abilities: “It is terrible, but that’s the way it is.” During the pope’s illness, Pius had prayed to God to take his soul to Him, but “the Lord did not grant the pope’s prayer, and as a result the Church today is going through a serious crisis.” Pius “does not reason and does not want to hear reason.” Cardinal Pacelli was at his wit’s end: “The pope no longer listens to him as he once did. He carefully hides his plans from him and does not tell him about the speeches he will give.”

Those around the pope, reported Ledóchowski, were terrified by what would happen if his condition deteriorated further.39 He urged the ambassador not to let the pope’s rants compromise the Church’s good relations with the Fascist regime.

Pignatti replied that they could not ignore the pope’s rants, for the foreign press—especially in France—was exploiting his words, and Catholics throughout the world were heeding them, “ignorant of the fact that the common Father of all the faithful was mentally debilitated.” The pope’s remarks “were causing a tide of hatred against Italy that was compromising it both morally and materially.

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