Abstract
Lucia Ceci, Il Papa non deve parlare. Chiesa, fascismo e Guerra d’Etiopia, Preface by Angelo Del Boca, Laterza: Rome and Bari, 2010; 273 pp., 15 illus.; 9788842092711, €20.00 (pbk)
Emma Fattorini, Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech that was Never Made, trans. Carl Ipsen, Polity Press: Cambridge and Malden MA, 2011; xvi + 260 pp.; 9780745644882, £20.00 (hbk) (first Italian edition, Pio XI, Hitler e Mussolini. Le solitudini di un papa, Einaudi: Turin, 2007)
Jacques Prévotat, ed., Pie XI et la France. L’Apport des archives du pontificat de Pie XI à la connaissance des rapports entre le Saint-Siège et la France, Ecole française de Rome: Rome, 2010, 533 pp.; 9782728309023, €63,00 (pbk)
Giovanni Sale, Fascismo e Vaticano prima della Conciliazione (Popolari, chierici e camerati, 2), Preface by Pietro Scoppola, Jaca Book: Milan, 2007; 509 pp.; 9788816407268, €29,00 (pbk)
Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, trans. Kenneth Kronenberg, Belknap Press: Cambridge MA and London, 2010, 325 pp.; 9780674050815, £22.95 (hbk) (first German edition, Papst und Teufel: Die Archive des Vatikan und das Dritte Reich, C. H. Beck: Munich 2008)
With much trumpeting, large sections of the Vatican archives for the period of Pius XI’s pontificate (1922–39) were, after a massive enterprise of cataloguing, opened to all qualified researchers in June 2009. Limited access had been possible in the previous three years, and, in the case of the distinguished Jesuit Angelo Martini, even as far back as the late 1950s. The Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV), that is the ‘reserved’ or ‘confidential’ archive, includes the deposit of the Secretariat of State. The latter department is more than the foreign office of the Vatican; since the papal nuncios are the channels between the Papacy and national Catholic churches, the Secretariat is also concerned with their internal life. The Secretaries of State during this pontificate were Cardinal Pietro Gasparri (1914–30), inherited from Benedict XV, and the former nuncio in Germany and future pope Pius XII, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (1930–39). Also opened-up is the archive (AES) of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, a consultative body composed of cardinals and bishops, linked to the Secretariat of State, and to which, with Gasparri and Pacelli, if only for the need for rapid decisions, it lost something of its power. Pacelli was in fact its president during his time as Secretary of State. The aforementioned two cardinals, alongside Pius XI, are indeed the protagonists of most of the works reviewed here. Pacelli’s personal notes of audiences with the Pope are conserved in ASV. Their contents tend to be cryptic and the surviving documentation misses out on some major crises, so that and these records are something less than a goldmine of information. 1 Also accessible in AES are the archives of documents coming from nunciatures; some, like that for Spain, long-established, some newly established in this period, including that of Germany, based in Berlin, which took over from the old Bavarian nunciature in 1920, together with those of France (re-established in 1921) and Italy (established in 1929). The archive of the closely-guarded ‘Supreme Sacred Congregation’, that for Doctrine of the Faith, successor to the Congregation of the Holy Office (or Inquisition) which had absorbed the Congregation of the Index in 1917, was made generally accessible to scholars in 1998 for the period up to 1903; evidently scholars have since had some access for the period up to and including Pius XI’s pontificate, at least.
Before 2007, the key general introduction to Pius XI’s pontificate was the volume of conference proceedings Achille Ratti Pape Pie XI published under the auspices of the Ecole française de Rome in 1996, which covered a wide variety of aspects. 2 A most valuable monograph in English was John F. Pollard’s The Vatican and Italian Fascism 1929–32: A Study in Conflict (Cambridge 1985). Publications since 2007 have, more than anything, elucidated consultative and decision-making processes at the highest level and have cast fuller light on the many individuals, both within the Curia and outside it, who entered into these processes. Examination of Pacelli’s modus operandi as cardinal casts light on his much criticized policies (and lack of policy) as pope.
Sale’s Fascismo e Vaticano covers the period 1922–26. The climactic part of the book deals with the discussions of the project, launched by the Fascist regime in 1925, for reform of Italian legislation on the Church, inherited, from the liberal era, in a direction more favourable to the Church. Ecclesiastics participated in the drafting committee with Vatican permission, but officially not as Vatican representatives, these monsignori being of relatively modest rank, so as not to compromise the Papacy. The position of the latter, gradually manifested, was that the State had no right to legislate in Church matters; bilateral accords were required – hence from 1926, the high-level negotiations which led to the Lateran Accords of 1929. It was because of the Pope’s personal insistence that the Treaty, recognizing the Vatican State, was accompanied by the Concordat governing the life of the Italian Church and its lay organizations, the latter being in grave need of legal protection. The negotiations on Italian ecclesiastical legislation had been an important preliminary to the Lateran Accords. This book reveals a very cautious Vatican, seeking to maintain equidistance between the regime, which it strongly mistrusted, and the Popular Party, about which it had reservations, partly on account of its officially non-confessional character, but which it acknowledged to be the party of Italian Catholics. Again it shows that it was under strong government pressure that the Vatican disbanded the Catholic scout movement and made Don Sturzo resign as leader of the Popular Party. This book casts interesting light on the Vatican’s consultative processes and its use of agents, most notably the Jesuit historian Pietro Tacchi Venturi, in relations with the regime. While, within the Vatican, there was a certain concentration of power in the Secretariat of State, the latter consulted widely outside the Vatican, with both the clergy and the laity. There was close liaison with Padre Enrico Rosa, editor of the Jesuit opinion journal La Civiltà Cattolica. Some of its articles were written on papal instructions and checked by the Secretariat of State. Here Sale, himself a Jesuit, has apparently been the first to exploit Rosa’s papers in the journal’s archives. The book contains a large appendix including recently released Vatican documents and ones from the Fondo Rosa. In the absence of more recent major studies on the Conciliation of 1929 and its immediate aftermath, Pollard’s book remains a key work.
Fattorini’s book is now the most comprehensive work on the Vatican’s relations with states and national churches in western and central Europe in the 1930s, synthesizing a large number of secondary sources, mostly articles, with recently available archive sources. Its English title under-sells it. An apt translation of the Italian sub-title might be: ‘the isolation of a pope’; one major theme is the ailing Pope’s increasing awareness of the need to stand up to both Nazi and Italian Fascist regimes, while his entourage was more cautious, and all printed copies of his undelivered speech attacking the Italian government’s treatment of the Church (reproduced here for the first time) were destroyed after his death on the orders of Pacelli. A parallel story is that of the ‘hidden encyclical’ condemning anti-Semitism. 3 But the term solitudine in the Italian title also has overtones of Ratti’s inner life; Fattorini links the growing hostility towards totalitarian regimes of this anti-democratic conservative to a process of deep spiritual maturation. Discussion of how Ratti’s mistrust of extreme nationalism may have resulted from his experiences as Nuncio in Poland appears here in English for the first time. Fattorini emphasizes the reluctance of the Pope, notwithstanding the urgings of Spanish bishops which found sympathetic ears more widely in the Vatican outside the Secretariat of State, to recognize the Burgos government of General Franco. In addition to humanitarian interventions, he sought to induce Franco towards a more conciliatory position in relation to the Basques and to distance himself from Nazi Germany. The Vatican was willing to negotiate with Soviet Russia, if it was prepared to reciprocate, and actually did so with the Nazi regime, about which it had few illusions. Something of a mystery surrounds the genesis in early 1937 of the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge condemning Nazi policies towards the Catholic Church, in a form that the bulk of German bishops would certainly not have desired. It was drafted by a committee composed of five hand-picked German cardinals and bishops, together with Pacelli. Originally conceived of as a cautious pastoral document, it became, perhaps under pressure from the Pope, more aggressive in the course of the drafting process, notwithstanding the objections and reservations of at least two of the German prelates and almost certainly the unease of the cautious but loyal Pacelli. Fattorini shows how the launch of the encyclical was a careful strategic operation under the supervision of Pacelli, conducted in great secrecy, and followed up by a well-orchestrated international campaign in support of the Pope. When, under Nazi pressure, the Austrian primate Cardinal Innitzer, together with other Austrian bishops, hailed the Anschluss, the Vatican publicly disassociated itself from their action and the cardinal was reprimanded. The Italian historiography has long indicated that the Vatican sought to dissuade Mussolini from allying with Nazi Germany, and documentation from the Secretariat of State now reinforces the picture.
The ‘isolation’ of Pius XI is also a major theme of Ceci’s book. Ratti was strongly criticized on the world stage for his ‘silence’ regarding the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The hesitations of the Pope are now fully documented from the archive of the Secretariat of State. He had in fact drafted a personal letter to Mussolini seeking to dissuade him from this act of aggression, but decided not to send it in order not to exacerbate relations with the regime. Again, in a speech to Catholic nurses, he expressed his horror at the prospect of conflict. However, on the advice of Pacelli, the speech, reports of which had enraged il Duce, was only issued to the press with the stronger wording excised. Ceci, together with Sale and Fattorini depicts a Papacy trying to strike a middle course between maintaining a detachment from the regime, in order to maintain its reputation as an international institution, and trying not to antagonize that regime. In the event, discreet silence with regard to the Ethiopian war was widely interpreted as tacit support. Ceci proceeds, on the basis of press entries and a significant body of Italian secondary material, to describe the substantial support for the war on the part of Italian Catholics, notably many bishops, with significant concern for the family dimension of the war effort. What in fact dominated in the more authoritative Catholic discourse was the issue of the sanctions imposed on Italy. These and the governments promoting them were widely attacked in the Catholic press, while bishops exhorted people to the positive values of self-discipline and self-denial in concomitance with tightening of belts. Ceci analyses the deployment of Catholic devotionality to boost the morale of and bring solace to soldiers and their families. She points to a fusion of Catholic and Fascist symbolism and rituals. The most notorious case in point was the Giornata della Fede, the ritualized consignment of gold wedding rings for the war effort in exchange for iron rings, the subject of an important study by Petra Terhoeven. 4
Wolf’s work does not attempt to give a general overview of the relationship between the Vatican of Pius XI and Nazism, but, rather, examines certain aspects from a Vatican perspective. The author’s main previous researches have been on Church censorship, using materials in the archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Directly stemming from these interests is his chapter on the condemnation in 1928 of the Friends of Israel and the related discussion of anti-Semitism in La Civiltà Cattolica. The aforementioned association was evidently condemned because of what was seen as the impertinence of its more active leadership in petitioning for the deletion of the reference to the ‘perfidious Jews’ from the Good Friday liturgy. 5 The condemnation is in fact notable for containing the first Vatican pronouncement against anti-Semitism. Wolf’s prior research interests are again reflected in his examination of the policy differences as between the Secretariat of State and the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. These reflected wider differences within the Curia between hard-line zelanti and the more tactical politicanti. Pacelli seems to have occupied a middle position. He had reservations about the Holy Office’s prohibition of Catholics participating in the Ecumenical movement. Again, he regarded the placing of Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century on the Index of Prohibited Books as inopportune, given the ongoing attempts to renegotiate the Reichskonkordat. Between 1935 and 1938 the Supreme Congregation engaged in the drafting of a new ‘syllabus of errors’, this time directed against totalitarian ideologies, Nazism and racism not least. There is no evidence of liaison with the Secretariat of State which had piloted Mit brennender Sorge. Pius XI, as de officio president of the congregation, initially pressed for the condemnations to go forward, but in June 1938 decided to defer publication, doubtless deterred by the harsh Nazi reaction to the coup de foudre of Mit brennender Sorge. After long debate in the Holy Office, Hitler’s Mein Kampf was not placed on the Index. Wolf generally downplays the influence of the Vatican on German Catholic affairs. It looked to the bishops to take the initiative in standing up to Nazism. These, however, as Fattorini has also emphasized, were divided on the issue; Pacelli regarded them as unsatisfactory in the main. The Vatican particularly mistrusted the chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference Adolf Bertram bishop of Breslau, regarded as an old-style Prussian ‘state-bishop’ and who was, moreover, criticized for publically advocating the annexation of Upper Silesia to Germany. The powerful aristocratic figures of Clemens August von Galen, archbishop of Munster, and Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, have been the prelates best known for their resistance to Nazism, and the Vatican certainly supported them. However it was von Galen’s cousin Adolf von Preysing, bishop of Berlin, an obedient son of the Papacy, who was the Vatican’s key link man in Germany and to whom Pius XI and Pacelli looked, with well placed trust, to make a stand against anti-Semitism. Wolf implicitly rejects John Cornwell’s thesis that Pacelli abandoned the Centre Party in order to achieve the Concordat with the German Reich. 6 Hitler’s proposal for a Concordat was eagerly seized on by the German bishops as the one way of avoiding the absorption of Catholic associations into Nazi ones under the policy of Gleichschaltung, a position with which the Vatican concurred. Pacelli did indeed envisage trading the dissolution of the Centre Party in return for the Concordat, but in fact the Centre party weakened his bargaining hand by abruptly dissolving itself. Again, there is no documentary evidence that the Vatican had earlier exerted pressure on that party to vote for the Enabling Law. Wolf’s general conclusion is that Vatican policy was marked by a ‘typically Roman compromise between dogma and diplomacy’.
Pie XI et la France is a far more specialized collection than that of 1996 also published under the auspices of the Ecole française de Rome. It is the work of a team of young scholars, who have worked in the Vatican archives under the direction of the editor Jacques Prévotat, and of more established academics. In several of the articles, the use of Vatican materials is in fact small, and in general the focus on the Vatican of Pius XI is limited. There is a large contribution of intellectual history. François Jankowiak, author of a monumental study on the Roman Curia, 7 demonstrates the effective working relationship between Church and State in the years immediately prior to and following the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Republic in 1921, notwithstanding the ‘separation’ of Church and State in 1905. Governments were anxious to sustain the spirit of the Union sacrée of the war years, while the episcopate professed willingness to contribute to the ‘pacification of spirits’. The focus of the study is on the ‘diocesan associations’, which, under the terms of the 1905 legislation, bishops were authorized to set up to manage the properties of places of public worship. The ever uncompromising Pius X had refused to allow bishops to do this until the 1905 law was abrogated. Under Pius XI, however, negotiations ended in 1924 with a compromise whereby the Vatican implicitly recognized the Republic’s legislation while receiving legal guarantees of respect for the authority of the Church hierarchy. Fabrice Robardeys’ article on the Catholic theological faculty of Strasbourg, and that of Laura Pettinaroli on Mons. D’Herbigny’s Russian mission, provide interesting evidence of the collaboration between the Republic and elements within the French Church. The Catholic theological faculty of Strasbourg had been founded in 1902 under the auspices of the Imperial German Government. It had been a centre of modernizing theology. Precisely because of this, the Vatican and traditionalist Alsatian clergy were opposed to its continuation when Alsace returned to France in 1919. The French government strongly supported the faculty in negotiations with the Vatican. It regarded the faculty as a potential instrument for winning the Alsatian clergy to French cultural and political values. Furthermore, the faculty recruited many foreign students, particularly from Poland and Czechslovakia. The government saw it as a means for promoting French influence abroad. Pettinaroli shows that the Vatican used the intermediacy of various states, Germany, Poland, Italy and France in the interests of Catholics in the USSR. The French role did much to improve Franco-Vatican relations. The French government had title to certain Catholic churches in Russia and declared itself the protector of Catholics in the USSR, being resentful of German involvement. The Jesuit Michel d’Herbigny sorted out the issue of the French churches and used the French embassy in Moscow as a base for establishing a semi-clandestine Catholic Church in Russia. The question of Action française, the royalist movement headed by the ‘pagan’ writers Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet but enjoying huge support among French Catholics, bishops included, was a bitterly divisive issue within French Catholicism, not least with regard to the ralliement initiated under Leo XIII. Adherents of the movement and social Catholics were at daggers drawn. The question was also a very delicate one in terms of relations between the Vatican and the French Catholic community. The condemnation by the Holy Office in 1914 of the periodical Action française and of certain works of Maurras was suspended by Pius X but finally activated in 1926, after the Vatican, given that the primate of France was a supporter of Action française, had engineered a condemnation by the Archbishop of Bordeaux Pierre Paulin Andrieu and then openly intervened in his support – yet another example of it using a bishop as a cat’s paw. Further, it encouraged Jacques Maritan and the philosopher Maurice Blondel to write in support of the papal action. The intervention was largely in reaction to the dominant influence of the royalist movement in the sphere of organized Catholic youth. The major study of the papal condemnations has been that of Jacques Prévotat. 8 The author utilized Vatican documents in his account of the antecedents of the suspended 1914 condemnation, but not for those of the 1926 crack-down. The result was an imbalance in the book which, for the 1920s, became largely a study of polemic and intellectual debate. In his article in the present volume, now on the basis of Vatican documents, Prévotat reveals how the nuncio Bonaventura Cerretti and his deputy Valerio Valeri set up ‘operation Andrieu’ and how the successive nuncio Luigi Maglione ‘managed’ an episcopate which was mostly hostile to the papal action. Frédéric le Moigne examines how Maglione guided the process of appointments to vacant sees in order to secure a more cooperative episcopate and one sympathetic to social Catholicism. The condemnation provoked a crisis in French Catholicism. However, the women’s movement of the Ligue patriotique des Françaises, as Magali Della Sudda indicates, fell into line with the papal directives through the operation of internal networks.
The wave of publications following the opening up of the Vatican archives for Pius XI’s pontificate largely serves to substantiate a pre-existing historiographical picture: for a long time the Vatican did not regard Fascism and Nazism as movements of the same ilk; it had always mistrusted Fascism and protested against its violence, but it deeply feared Nazism; the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis dispelled previous optimistic expectations of Italian Fascism. Pius XI emerges as a figure more prescient than most Italian churchmen, but who was kept from full confrontation with the dictators by the advice of his entourage, his own hesitations, and ultimately his final illness and death. While Ratti was inclined to go for dramatic confrontations, Pacelli, ever the diplomat, mistrusted confrontation as a way of doing business, as became even more evident after the death of his master. Pius XI sought to project a supremely pastoral image of the Papacy, and in confrontations with states he maintained the line that his objectives were purely spiritual and pastoral. The works of Prévotat and Wolf reveal a Vatican reluctant to intervene openly on issues touching the political sphere until at least one bishop on the ground had made a move. What recent studies have contributed above all is a picture of divisions on policy both within the Vatican, within the German and French Catholic communities, and even within the Society of Jesus. There have previously been excellent studies of factional divisions within the Vatican in the pontificates of Pius IX and Leo XIII. Pius X’s reign brought a new regime of relative pontifical autocracy, backed by a reign of terror. This probably tended to mask divisions. The autocratic regime of Pius XI, with very powerful Secretaries of State, was in many respects the heir to that of Pius X, and probably divisions in the Curia tended to be muted, but they are nonetheless now evident. The Vatican remained a ponderous consultative organ to which the pope referred major issues for discussion which did not require immediate action, and these in turn were subsequently referred back to the pope. Pius XI, for all his impulsiveness and ill temper was not a bad listener. All too often the Vatican’s decision-making processes ended in lack of decision in the face of the carrot-and-stick tactics of the dictators.