[6.1] I THE AGE OF INTRANSIGENCE

At the end of the nineteenth century, the fortunes of the papacy seemed at an all time low. The Pope was beleaguered and landless, the Prisoner of the Vatican. But, as if in compensation, his spiritual role and symbolic power had grown to dizzying heights. The Pope was infallible, the unquestioned head and heart of the greatest of the Christian Churches, spiritual father of millions of human beings, revered from Asia to the Americas as the oracle of God.

In the nineteenth century, the popes had used their oracular powers to denounce secular thought, to present a siege-mentality Catholicism which opposed the revelation of God to the godless philosophy of the modern world. In the new century, the modern world would test this new papacy as it had never before been tested. New currents of thought in philosophy, in the physical sciences, in the study of history, in biblical criticism, would challenge ancient certainties, not from outside the Church, but from its own seminaries, universities and pulpits. How would an infallible papacy respond to these new currents in thought?

And in place of the hostile liberal governments of Italy, France and Bismarckian Germany, the Church and the world would witness the rise of dictatorships more savage than any in human history. The nineteenth-century popes had first condemned and then struggled to come to terms with the industrial revolution. Now, all the resources of modern industry would be put to unimaginably terrible use, as the Nazi gas-chambers and the camps of Stalin’s Gulag harnessed modern technology, communications and bureaucracy in the service of death. Pope after pope had denounced the anti-clerical activities of nineteenth-century governments. What would the oracle of God have to say to evil on this scale?

The twentieth-century papacy began, as was appropriate in this century of the common man, with a peasant pope, the first for three centuries. Giuseppe Sarto, who took the name Pius X (1903-14), was the son of a village postman and a devout seamstress from northern Italy. He was chosen in deliberate contrast to the style of his predecessor, the remote and regal diplomat Leo XIII. The French curial Cardinal Mathieu later declared, ‘We wanted a pope who had never engaged in politics, whose name would signify peace and concord, who had grown old in the care of souls, who would concern himself with the government of the Church in detail, who would be above all a father and shepherd.’1

This feeling was not universal: there had in fact been strong support for a continuation of Leo’s policies, and the old Pope’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, was a strong contender throughout the Conclave. He was, however, vetoed by Austria, the last occasion on which one of the Catholic monarchies exercised a veto, and in any case he would probably not have won. After Leo’s long and political reign, Mathieu’s views were widely shared, and the new Pope could hardly have been less like his predecessor.Where Leo was cool, austere, detached, Sarto had a gusty humanity, a strong emotional piety and an eager sense of the priority of pastoral issues which had made him an extraordinarily effective diocesan bishop. Not one of his nineteenth century predecessors had been a parish priest. Sarto, even as bishop of Mantua and patriarch of Venice, had never really been anything else. The positive reform measures of his pontificate sprang directly out of his own experience as parish priest and diocesan bishop, and he never lost the urge to function as a parish priest. One of his most startling innovations as pope was to conduct catechism classes himself every Sunday afternoon in the Vatican courtyard of San Damaso.

His pontificate was therefore to be distinguished both by a personal approachability and warmth which contrasted absolutely with his predecessor, and by a series of important practical reforms. These included

These pastoral reforms, and especially the reform of the liturgy, modest in scope as they were, were to be picked up and extended in the mid-century by Pius XII, and would bear their full fruit at the Second Vatican Council.

All this, combined with his anti-intellectualism, his plump, handsome face and warm, open-hearted manner, won an immense popular following for the Pope, a devotion which was to culminate in his canonisation in 1950. He was in many ways the first ‘Pope of the people’, a type which would become more familiar in the television age in the person of John XXIII, and the short-lived John Paul I. But if Sarto’s pontificate looked forward to a new populism, it also looked backwards to a nineteenth-century agenda.

For the choice of the name Pius X was no accident. The new Pope saw himself as a fighter against the modern world like Pio Nono, ready to suffer as he had suffered for the rights of the Church. He too was preoccupied with the Italian question, the confiscation of the Papal States and the temporal sovereignty of the Holy See, the issue which had made of Pius IX the voluntary ‘Prisoner of the Vatican’. As patriarch of Venice, Pius X had co-operated pragmatically and tacitly with moderate liberal politicians, but this was mainly for fear of a growing socialism in Italy. He detested the Italian state, and distrusted even the modest advances towards other liberal regimes made by his diplomat predecessor. His first pastoral letter as patriarch of Venice had emphasised this almost apocalyptic distrust of modern society: ‘God has been driven out of public life by the separation of Church and state; he has been driven out of science now that doubt has been raised to a system ... He has even been driven out of the family which is no longer considered sacred in its origins and is shorn of the grace of the sacraments.’ His remedy for these ills was an undeviating devotion to papal directives, an absolute Ultramontanism: ‘When we speak of theVicar of Christ, we must not quibble, we must obey: we must not ... evaluate his judgements, criticise his directions, lest we do injury to Jesus Christ himself. Society is sick ... the one hope, the one remedy, is the Pope’2

That exalted view of papal authority was directed, in the first place, to the renewal of the life of the Church, and the first five years of his pontificate saw the inauguration of a series of far-reaching reforms. Reacting to the interference of Austria during the Conclave which had elected him, he abolished once and for all the right of any lay power to a voice in the electoral process. Though he had never worked in the Curia, he had served for eighteen years as chancellor of Treviso, and he was an effective administrator. He restructured the Roman Curia, streamlining its thirty-seven different agencies and dicasteries (departments) to eleven congregations, three tribunals and five offices, and redistributing its responsibilities on a more rational and efficient basis. His work at Treviso had also convinced him of the urgent need for a revision of the Code of Canon Law. He commissioned Monsignor Pietro Gasparri, former professor of canon law at the Institut Catholique, to co-ordinate this project, assisted by the young Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII.

The revised code was not finally approved till 1917, three years after Pius’ death, but it was a project very close to his own heart, and he personally drove it forward. It drew on a wide circle of expertise outside Rome, and its sections were sent out to the world’s bishops for comment and approval. Its overall effect, however, was a massive increase of centralisation. It owed more to the spirit of the Napoleonic Code than to scripture or patristic tradition (scripture is rarely quoted in it), and it canonised as permanent features of Church life aspects of the papal office which were very recent developments. Of these, the most momentous was the new canon 329, which declared that all bishops were to be nominated by the Roman Pontiff, setting the seal of legal timelessness on a radical extension of papal responsibility which had taken place virtually in living memory.

These administrative and legal reforms were undertaken in the interests of greater pastoral effectiveness.That pastoral motive was evident in Papa Sarto’s campaign for greater frequency of communion. The eucharistic congresses of the late nineteenth century had been designed as international demonstrations of Catholic fervour, and rallying-points of Catholic identity. They had not been designed to encourage the laity to receive communion more frequently, but this had been a prime objective of Pius X as diocesan bishop, and he now made it a priority of his pontificate. Many lay people received communion only a few times a year. Pius X believed that weekly and even daily communion was the key to a fully Catholic life. Between May 1905 and July 1907 he issued a stream of initiatives, a dozen in all, to encourage more frequent communion, easing the fasting regulations for the sick, emphasising that communion was a remedy for shortcomings, not the reward of perfection. In 1910 he took these measures to unprecedented lengths, in reducing the age of First Communion, conventionally administered at twelve or fourteen, to seven, laying it down that a child need only be able to distinguish the difference ‘between the eucharistic bread and common bread’ to be eligible to receive it. The admission of children to communion was one of those relatively minor-seeming changes which profoundly transformed the religious and social experience of millions of Christians. Round these child-communions grew up a celebration of innocence and family — little girls dressed and veiled in white, little boys in sashes and rosettes, the gathering of kindred to celebrate, community processions and parades of first-communicants — which rapidly entered Catholic folk-culture: Pius’ own popularity as a pope of the people grew as a direct result.

He also pushed on a series of reforms within the structure of the liturgy itself. Nineteenth-century church music, especially in Italy, had been colonised by the opera-house, and musical settings for Mass and Office often featured bravura solo and ensemble performances, and the use of orchestral instruments, which were often aggressively secular in character. In November 1903 the new Pope denounced this decadent musical tradition, and called for a return to the ancient tradition of plainsong, and the classical polyphony of the Counter-Reformation.The liturgical work of the Benedictine monks of Solesmes, who had pioneered the restoration of Gregorian chant, was given papal backing, and the result was the production of a new ‘Kyriale’, ‘Graduale’ and ‘Antiphonary’, providing revised plainchant for all the solemn services of the Church.

He also set about the reform of the breviary, the daily prayer of the clergy. Over the centuries the ancient structure of the Divine Office, following the pattern of the liturgical year and drawing on most of the psalter, had been overlaid by the multiplication of saints’ days and special observances. Pius commissioned an extensive revision of the breviary, simplifying its structure, reducing the numbers of psalms priests were expected to recite (from eighteen at Sunday matins to nine short psalms or sections of psalms), increasing the readings from scripture included in it, and giving the ordinary Sunday liturgy priority over saints’ days. There were critics of all these measures, but they were clearly and explicitly designed to encourage greater participation in the liturgy, and they were the first official stirrings of interest in the nascent liturgical movement.

Pius’ other reform measures all show the same practical orientation — the improvement of seminary syllabuses to produce a better-qualified pastoral clergy, the production of a new catechism which he hoped to see used throughout the world, and the closer scrutiny of the pastoral work of bishops through stricter enforcement of ad limina visits every five years. He cared passionately about the parish ministry, kept a statue of the patron saint of parish priests, the Curé d’Ars, on his desk, and on the fiftieth anniversary of his own ordination published an apostolic exhortation on the priesthood which is a classic of its kind. He was equally committed to raising episcopal standards, and devoted one encyclical, Conununium Rerum (1909), to the qualities required in a good bishop.The increased emphasis on ad limina visits was designed to further this end. At them, bishops had to submit circumstantial accounts of the condition of their dioceses, based on a detailed questionnaire. The same growth of central supervision by the papacy was evident in Pius’ measures to secure better episcopal appointments by personal scrutiny of the files of every candidate for promotion to the episcopate, papal absolutism in the service of Tridentine-style reform.

The dilemmas of a pastoral papacy in an age of intransigence are revealed in the relations of Pius X with the movement known as Catholic Action. The vigour of nineteenth-century Catholicism had produced a wave of Catholic activism and organisations devoted to good works, from charitable confraternities distributing old clothes, to Catholic trades unions and youth organisations. Successive popes had encouraged such groups, but had also displayed a marked nervousness about the dangers of uncontrolled lay initiative within them. The popes were also anxious that the strictly confessional character of Catholic organisations be preserved, and Pius X was particularly emphatic about this. Catholic Action in Italy therefore had a strong ‘ghetto mentality’, aggressive towards the Italian state, strident and militant in tone. Since the 1870s Catholic voluntary organisations had been grouped together under the umbrella of the Opera dei Congressi, whose leader was appointed by the Pope.

Here, as in so much else, Leo XIII, without radical intention, had caused a shift in ethos. The relatively open atmosphere of Leo’s pontificate had encouraged the emergence of a Social Catholicism which engaged with the problems of modern society and sought solutions in social policies which had something in common even with socialism, and which did not flinch from calling itself Christian Democracy. In this more hopeful and upbeat atmosphere, and despite the condemnation of ‘Americanism’, Christian Democratic groups had emerged in France and Italy which aimed to promote a new and more optimistic assessment of the relationship between the ancient faith and the new political order. These stirrings were reflected within even the traditionally hard-line Opera dei Congressi, some of whose members now sought more direct political involvement in the Italian state, and greater freedom from clerical control. Tensions flared within the movement within a year of Pius X’s election.

Pius X himself passionately believed in an active laity as the key to the success of the Church’s mission in society, but he was deeply suspicious of all ‘Christian Democratic’ movements which were even remotely political. As patriarch ofVenice he had insisted that Christian Democracy ‘must never mix itself up in politics’, and that Catholics writing about the conditions of the working classes and the poor must never encourage class animosity by speaking ‘of rights and justice, when it is purely a question of charity’.3 This was a definite retreat from the position mapped out in Rerum Novarum. He was equally clear that all lay action must be unquestioningly obedient to clerical direction. In July 1904 he dissolved the Opera dei Congressi, and in the following year issued an encyclical, Il Fermo Proposito, setting out the principles of Catholic Action. He encouraged Catholic organisations to pool their energies ‘in an effort to restore Jesus Christ to his place in the family, in the school, in the community’, but insisted that all such associations must submit themselves ‘to the advice and superior direction of ecclesiastical authority’. As he wrote elsewhere, ‘The Church is by its very nature an unequal society: it comprises two categories of person, the pastors and the flocks. The hierarchy alone moves and controls ... The duty of the multitude is to suffer itself to be governed and to carry out in a submissive spirit the orders of those in control.’4

 [6.] II. THE ATTACK on MODERNISM

Encouraged by the freer atmosphere of Leo XIII’s pontificate, Catholic theologians and philosophers in Germany, England, France and Italy had tried to adapt Catholic thought to a new age. Official theology seemed to many to have become locked into a rigid formalism, dependent on a biblical fundamentalism which had long since been discredited, insisting that the truths of Christianity were externally ‘provable’ by miracles and prophecies, suspicious of the whole movement of ‘romantic’ theology and philosophy which pointed to human experience, feeling and ethical intuition as sources of religious certainty. In the last years of the nineteenth century Catholic biblical scholars and historians began to explore the early origins of Christianity with a new freedom, Catholic philosophers to engage creatively instead of defensively with the currents of thought which stemmed from Kant and Hegel, and Catholic systematic theologians to explore the nature of the Church not as a timeless and rigidly disciplined military structure centring on the Pope, but as a complex living organism subject to growth and change.

But the reign of Pius X was to see all these movements ruthlessly crushed. Deeply hostile to intellectualism of every kind, Pius X and the advisers he gathered round him detected in every attempt at the liberalisation of Catholic theology and social thought nothing but heresy and betrayal. In his first pastoral as patriarch of Venice he had declared that ‘Liberal catholics are wolves in sheep’s clothing: and therefore the true priest is bound to unmask them ... Men will accuse you of clericalism, and you will be called papists, retrogrades, intransigents ... Be proud of it!’5 As pope, he acted on this obligation to ‘unmask’ the rot of liberalism which he saw everywhere in Catholic intellectual life.

Confrontation came over the work of the French priest and biblical scholar Father Alfred Loisy, Professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Loisy’s book The Gospel and the Church was designed to defend the Catholic faith by demonstrating that the findings of radical biblical criticism dissolved traditional Protestant reliance on scripture alone, over against the tradition of the Church, and made impossible any naive biblical literalism. In the New Testament, Loisy argued, we have a picture of Christ not as he actually was, as many Protestants imagined, but as he was understood within the early Church’s tradition. There was therefore no getting behind the tradition of the Church to an unmediated Christ. We know him and can relate to him only through the developing life of the Church. Christ had proclaimed the Kingdom of Heaven, and what came was the Catholic Church.

Loisy’s book was a sensational success. Many Catholics saw in it conclusive proof that modernity, in the shape of the latest theological scholarship, worked for and not against the Church. Even the Pope himself remarked that here at any rate was a theological book that wasn’t boring. But the remark implied no approval. He and his conservative advisers believed that Loisy’s argument was based on a corrosive scepticism about biblical facts which would erode all religious truth and certainty. This subjectivism must be stamped on. Loisy was silenced, and in 1907 Pius issued a decree against the Modernist heresy, Lamentabili, and, two months later, the ninety-three-page encyclical Pascendi, lumping a miscellaneous assortment of new ideas together under the blanket term ‘Modernism’ and characterising these new ways of thinking as a ‘compendium of all the heresies’.6 Pascendi had been drafted by Joseph Lemius, a curial theologian who had spent years obsessively collecting doctrinal propositions from the works of contemporary Catholic theologians, and assembling them into the elaborate anti-doctrinal system which he believed underlay all their works. There was more than a hint of fantasy and conspiracy theory behind all this, and the encyclical itself was characterised by extreme violence of language. The Modernists were denounced as not only mistaken, but as vicious, deceitful and disloyal: ‘enemies of the Church they are indeed: to say they are her worst enemies is not far from the truth ... their blows are the more sure because they know where to strike her’. All Modernists are motivated by a mixture of curiosity and pride.

No one ever subscribed to all the views condemned by Lamentabili and Pascendi: at one level the Modernist heresy was a figment of the Pope’s imagination (or that of his ghost-writer).Yet it cannot reasonably be doubted that the Pope was responding to a genuine crisis within Catholic theology, as a host of thinkers wrestled, sometimes unsuccessfully, to appropriate for Catholicism new methods and discoveries in the natural sciences, in history and archaeology, in biblical studies. To some extent, however, the crisis was of the papacy’s own making. The increasingly narrow orthodoxy of the nineteenth-century Roman Schools left Catholic philosophers and theologians little room for manoeuvre, and the enforced secrecy and isolation of much of the work being done meant that new thinking could not be properly integrated into the tradition. Despite the liberalising trends of Leo XIII’s pontificate, many of the best theologians of the period felt themselves to be working as outcasts, against the grain of official Catholic theology. Inevitably there were casualties, and there were those whose work took them well beyond the limits of any recognisably Catholic or even Christian framework of thought. By the time he published L’Evangile et L’Eglise, for example, Loisy himself had long since ceased to believe in the divine character of the Church, or in any supernatural revelation.

In condemning Modernism, therefore, Pius X not unreasonably saw himself as exercising the papacy’s traditional responsibility of vigilance on behalf of the Church, sounding a warning against the disastrous false direction in which he believed many theologians were leading the faithful. The trouble lay in the undiscriminating character of the condemnation, its unfocused severity and paranoia. If the Pope had a duty to warn against error, he also had a duty to care for the erring, and to discriminate real error from legitimate freedom of reflection and investigation. No such discriminations were made, and little quarter was shown to those suspected of straying beyond the allowed limits. The encyclical was simply the opening shot in what rapidly became nothing less than a reign of terror. The Pope’s denunciation not merely of ideas but of motives unleashed a flood of suspicion and reprisal. Liberal Catholic newspapers and periodicals were suppressed, seminary teachers and academics suspected of flirting with new ideas were disgraced and dismissed from their posts. A secret organisation designed to winkle out theological deviants, the Sodalitiuin Pianum (‘The Society of St Pius V’), led by Monsignor Umberto Benigni, was personally encouraged by the Pope. It lied to, spied on and harassed suspect theologians. Private letters were opened and photographed, clerical agents provocateurs lured unwary liberals into incriminating themselves and, ludicrously, over-zealous seminary professors even denounced their students for heresy, on the basis of essays written in class. The blamelessly orthodox Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, taught Church history in the obscure seminary at Bergamo. He was secretly denounced for encouraging his students to read a suspect book, the Vatican’s informant even checking out the records of the local bookshop to see who was buying what (the book was Louis Duchesne’s masterly Early History of the Christian Church). Roncalli, on a routine visit to the Vatican, was duly frightened out of his wits by a heavy warning from one of the most senior curial cardinals. Great scholars were sacked, compliant nonentities promoted. No one was safe, and distinguished bishops, even curial cardinals, found their every action and word watched and reported. Merry DelVal, the Cardinal Secretary of State, an uncompromising opponent of the new heresy often blamed for the campaign of repression, himself became alarmed by the extremism of these measures. He tried unsuccessfully to restrain Benigni, who in turn accused him of spineless over-caution.

The Sodalitium Pianum never had more than fifty members, but its influence and spirit was far more widespread than its mere numerical strength.A new intransigence became the required mark of the ‘good’ Catholic. ‘Real’ Catholics were ‘integralists’, accepting as a package-deal everything the Pope taught, not picking and choosing in the ‘pride and curiosity’ of their intellect. In September 1910 the general atmosphere of suspicion was institutionalised when a lengthy and ferocious oath was devised to impose a straitjacket of orthodoxy on suspects, and subscription to this oath became a routine and repeated part of the progress of every cleric’s career, from the lowliest priest to the most exalted cardinal. The ‘Anti-Modernist Oath’ shattered public confidence in the integrity and freedom of Catholic academic standards. Only in Germany did the bishops succeed in having university professors exempted from subscription to the oath.

The worst features of the anti-Modernist purge were suspended at the death of Pius X in 1914. It was rumoured that one of the first documents across the desk of his successor, Benedict XV, was a secret denunciation of himself as a Modernist, which had been intended for Pius X’s eyes. However that may be, the new Pope’s first encyclical formally renewed the condemnation of Modernism, but in fact dismantled the witch-hunt against it. He insisted on freedom of discussion where the Church had not formally pronounced on an issue, and called for an end to namecalling by the integralists. When, a generation later, the cause of Pius X’s canonisation was put forward, detailed evidence of the Pope’s personal involvement in this witch-hunt was published. It revealed his own passionate commitment to the campaign, shocking many Catholics who had admired Sarto’s warmth and humanity. Some people, he had declared, want the Modernists ‘treated with oil, soap and caresses: but they should be beaten with fists’.7

The canonisation went ahead. But the impact of the Modernist crisis on Catholic intellectual life was catastrophic, and persisted almost to the present. The Anti-Modernist Oath remained in force into the 1960s, a feature of the intellectual formation of every single Catholic priest, creating a stifling ethos of unjust and suspicious hyper-orthodoxxy, and discouraging all originality Catholic biblical studies withered, shackled to absurd and demonstrably false claims like the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch or the unity of authorship of the whole book of Isaiah. Catholic philosophers and theologians were forced into silence or into token parroting of the party line. Obedience, not enquiry, became the badge of Catholic thought. It was to be a generation before anything approaching an open and honest intellectual life was possible for Catholic theologians.

The confrontational attitudes which underlay the Modernist purges also informed Pius X’s political actions. He had announced the motto of his pontificate as being ‘To restore all things in Christ’. For him, though he denied he was a politician, that motto had an inescapably political meaning, for what he sought was a society which reflected Catholic values. The Pope, he declared in his first papal allocution to the cardinals, ‘is absolutely unable to separate the things of faith from politics’. The Pope is ‘head and first magistrate of the Christian Society’, and as such he must ‘confute and reject such principles of modern philosophy and civil law as may urge the course of human affairs in a direction not permitted by the restrictions of eternal law’.8

Within a few years, in pursuit of this mission to ‘confute and reject’ secular laws that conflicted with Church teaching, Pius had demolished the diplomatic achievement of Leo XIII. In contrast to his predecessor, Pius saw papal diplomatic activity not in terms of the art of the possible, of compromise, but in confrontational — or perhaps he would have said prophetic — terms. Professional papal diplomats were replaced as legates and nuncios by bishops and heads of religious orders, who would act as mouthpieces for the Pope’s fiery and apocalyptic views of the modern world. The problems of this policy of confrontation were laid bare in the collapse of relations between Church and state in France in 1905, and the subsequent confiscation by the Republican government of all Church property in 1907.

This disaster was not, to begin with at least, the Pope’s fault. Relations between the Church and the French state had been rocky for twenty years, growing anti-clericalism expressing itself in a succession of government measures of a depressingly familiar kind — the suppression of religious instruction in schools, and attacks on and eventual expulsion of religious orders from France. Matters came to a head with the accession as prime minister in 1902 of Emile Combes, a rabid anti-clerical who had once been a seminarian, and was all the more bitter against the Church that had refused him ordination. Even the expert diplomacy of Leo XIII and his Secretary of State Cardinal Rampolla could do nothing to restrain Combes, who flouted the informal arrangements which had made the Concordat workable for a century, and he nominated unsuitable bishops without any consultation with Rome. By the time Pius X became pope, France and theVatican were eyeball to eyeball over these bishops. The problem deepened when the Pope demanded the resignation of two bishops accused of immorality and Freemasonry. Combes refused to accept their resignations, on the ground that the Pope’s action constituted an infringement of government rights.

This situation would have been hard for any pope to handle, but the political inexperience and clumsiness of Pius and his Secretary of State now proved fatal. When the French President paid a state visit to Rome in May 1904 and called on the King, Merry Del Val issued a routine diplomatic protest against this recognition of the Italian state in papal Rome. Foolishly and offensively, however, the Secretary of State circulated a copy of this protest to all governments, and these copies contained a sentence claiming that the papacy was maintaining relations with France only because the fall of the Combes ministry was imminent. Here was a blatantly public political act by the papacy, apparently designed to bring about or at any rate speed up the fall of the French government. French public opinion was at frenzy pitch, the French Ambassador was withdrawn from the Vatican, and, though Combes’ Government did indeed eventually fall, in December 1905 a law abrogating the Concordat of 1801 and separating Church and state was promulgated. The state would cease to pay clerical stipends, and Church buildings and property passed to the state and would be managed for the use of the Church by religious associations of lay people, known as Associations Cultuelles.

The Law of Separation was unjust and arbitrary, and it unilaterally revoked an international treaty, the Concordat. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of French bishops believed that the Church had no choice but to accept it, if she was to continue her work in France. The Pope took a different view. To accept the separation of Church and state anywhere was to acquiesce in robbing Christ of his crown rights over society, ‘a grave insult to God, the Creator of man and the Founder of human society’. Moreover, the whole principle of the Associations Cultuelles was anti-Christian, for they challenged the hierarchical structure of the Church. Lay people, he considered, had no business ‘managing’ the Church’s property or affairs. On 11 February he issued the encyclical Vehementer, denouncing the Law of Separation as a violation of natural and human law, contrary to the divine constitution of the Church and her rights and liberty. A fortnight later he reiterated his rejection of the Law when he consecrated fourteen new bishops in St Peter’s, chosen by himself, for the church of France.

This condemnation left the French bishops almost no room for manoeuvre. They tried to modify it along the lines laid down in 1864 by Dupanloup in his pamphlet on the Syllabus, accepting the condemnation of the separation in principle, but devising practical working arrangements so that Church life could go on, the clergy paid, the churches kept open.The Associations Cultuelles might be renamed Associations Canoniques et Légales, and put under the tacit supervision of clergy. Rome would have none of this. In August 1906 the Pope issued another encyclical, Gravissimo, in which he seized on the bishops’ dutiful endorsement of the papal condemnation of the Law, and under the pretence of supporting ‘the practically unanimous decision of your assembly’, ordered them to have no truck or compromise with the Law. When the plight of the French bishops was explained to the Pope as part of a plea for political realism, he was unsympathetic and unyielding: ‘They will starve, and go to heaven,’ he declared.9 ^[p.253]

 As his canonisation in 1950 demonstrated, Pius X set a pattern of papal behaviour that went on influencing his successors. Since the definition of papal infallibility, the mystique of the papacy had intensified, though it manifested itself in different ways — in the regal detachment of Leo XIII, in the startling authoritarianism of Pius X’s personal style. At the very beginning of Pius’ pontificate, the Swiss Guard, as was customary, went on strike for gratuities to mark the new reign: the new Pope listened, and then abruptly announced the dissolution of the Guard, a decision from which he was dissuaded only with much pleading. His successors would emulate him, keeping their advisers and court standing round them while they sat, acting without consultation or consulting only an inner circle. Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pius XII in 1939 and a much gentler figure than either Pius X or Pius XI, declared, ‘I do not want collaborators, but people who will carry out orders.’ Now with the growing papal monopoly of episcopal appointments, the system of papal nuncios, sent to Catholic countries all over the world, directing policy, overriding local decisions, decisively influencing the choice of bishops, became an ever more powerful instrument of centralisation within the Church. In an age in which monarchies were tumbling everywhere, the popes had become the last absolute monarchs.

[6.] III THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS

THE election of Giacoma della Chiesa as Benedict XV (1914-22) to succeed Pius X was as explicit a reaction against the preceding regime as it was possible to get. Della Chiesa was a wisp of a man with one shoulder higher than another — his nickname in the seminary had been ‘Piccoletto’^-(‘Tiny’) — and none of the papal robes kept in readiness for the election was small enough to fit him. He was a Genoese aristocrat trained as a papal diplomat, who had served Cardinal Rampolla as under-secretary of state to Leo XIII. He had initially been retained in post under Merry Del Val and Pius X, but the Pope distrusted him as a protégé of Rampolla’s, and in 1907 he had been kicked upstairs as archbishop of Bologna. The Pope made clear the nature of this ‘promotion’ by withholding till 1914 the cardinal’s hat that went automatically with the job, and Della Chiesa became a cardinal only three months before the Conclave that made him pope. Della Chiesa was to have his revenge, for immediately after his election as pope Merry Del Val was sent packing from his post as secretary of state without so much as time to sort his papers. The Conclave took place one month into the First World War, and the choice of Della Chiesa was a recognition that blundering if saintly intransigence would not do in wartime.

War was to dominate and to blight Benedict’s pontificate. He was a compassionate and sensitive priest, horrified by the realities of modern warfare, passionately committed to diplomatic solutions of international conflicts.

He bent all his efforts to persuading the combatants to seek a negotiated peace.

He refused to take sides, judging that the Holy See would be listened to only if it preserved a strict neutrality. In a war where public opinion was stoked by stories of atrocities of the ‘babies-on-bayonets’ type, he refused to condemn even documented outrages.

The result was that each side accused him of favouring the other. Hurt but undeterred, he went on condemning the ‘senseless massacre’ and ‘hideous butchery’ being perpetrated by both sides.

In 1917 he proposed a peace plan which involved all concerned agreeing to waive compensation for war damage. Most of this damage had been done by Germany in victim countries like France and Belgium, and they not unnaturally saw the Pope’s plan as favouring Germany. They also drew their own conclusions from the fact that Germany favoured the scheme, and had offered to help the Pope recover Rome in the wake of the defeat of Italy. In France even the clergy spoke of him as ‘the Boche Pope’.

The continuing confrontation with Italy over the Roman question further paralysed Benedict’s efforts for peace. By a secret agreement in 1915 Italy persuaded its allies, including England, not to negotiate with the Pope, for fear he would attempt to bring international pressure on Italy to recover Rome — as indeed he had hoped to do. To his bitter disappointment, he was excluded altogether from the peace negotiations of 1919, and he was highly critical of what he took to be the ‘vengeful’ character of the Versailles settlement. In hard terms, therefore, his contribution to the amelioration of war was confined to the money he lavished on relief work for the wounded, refugees and displaced people — 82,000,000 lire, leaving the Vatican safes empty.

In the aftermath of war, however, his diplomatic skills came into their own. He recognised that the war had thrown much of the political structure of Europe into the melting-pot, and that the position of the Church everywhere from France to the Balkans, from Spain to Soviet Russia, needed to be secured. He threw himself and his hand-picked helpers into a flurry of negotiation to secure new concordats, sending the Vatican Librarian Achille Ratti, destined to be his successor as Pius XI, to the newly resurrected Poland and Lithuania, and sending Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, to Germany.

Benedict XV was as conciliatory as his predecessor had been confrontational, and in many ways his policies can be seen as a resumption of the course laid down for the papacy by Leo XIII. As we have seen, he dismantled the machinery of integralist reaction, dissolving the Sodalitium Pianum and calling a halt to the anti-Modernist witch-hunt. He prepared the way for reconciliation with the state of Italy by lifting in 1920 the Vatican ban on visits by Catholic heads of state to the Quirinal. He tacitly lifted the Non Expedit ban on involvement in Italian electoral politics for Catholics by giving his blessing to the new Partito Popolare, the Catholic political party led by the radical priest Don Luigi Sturzo. And in another reversal of Pius X’s policy, he encouraged Catholics to join the trade union movement. Most spectacularly, he inaugurated a reconciliation with France. Ironically, he was helped here by the war he had hated so much. The abrogation of the Concordat had meant that French clergy and seminarians lost their immunity from military service. Twenty-five thousand French priests, seminarians and religious were called up and went to the trenches, and their participation in the national suffering — in sharp contrast to the non‑ combatant status of chaplains in the British army — did a great deal to dissolve inherited antagonisms between Church and nation. The Pope signalled the new spirit of reconciliation by canonising Joan of Arc in 1920, a highly imaginative symbolic gesture: eighty French deputies attended the ceremony, and the French government sent official representatives. By the time of his death in 1922 Benedict had greatly increased the papacy’s diplomatic standing, and twenty-seven countries had ambassadors or similar representatives accredited to the Vatican.

Pius XI

Nobody was ready for another conclave in 1922, for Benedict XV was still in his sixties and died after only a short illness. No one could predict the outcome of the election, and the outcome in any case was astonishing. Achille Ratti, who took the name Pius XI (1922-39) was a scholar who had spent almost all his working life as a librarian, first at the Ambrosiano in his native Milan, and then at the Vatican, where he replaced a German as prefect at the outbreak of the First World War. He was a distinguished scholar of medieval palaeography, and had edited important texts on the early Milanese liturgy. He was also a keen mountaineer, and the author of readable book essays on alpine climbing. He had been mysteriously whisked out of his library by Benedict XV in 1919, consecrated titular archbishop of Lepanto, and sent as nuncio to Poland, which had just emerged from Tsarist rule and where the Catholic Church was in process of reconstruction.Why Benedict of all peo‑ple should have given this delicate mission to a man like Ratti, utterly without any relevant experience, is a mystery. He was a gifted linguist, and his German and French proved useful, but he had no Slav languages at all. His time in Poland was extremely eventful, for Polish bishops resented and cold-shouldered him as a spy for a pro-German pope. The Revolution in Russia raised the spectre of a Bolshevik takeover of the whole of eastern Europe. The Nuncio, who refused to flee, was besieged in Warsaw in August 1920 by Bolshevik troops. The experience left him with a lasting conviction that communism was the worst enemy Christian Europe had ever faced, a conviction which shaped much of his policy as pope.

He returned from Poland to appointment as archbishop of Milan, and the cardinal’s hat, but he had been in office only six months when he was elected pope, on the fourteenth ballot in a conclave deadlocked between Benedict XV’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, and the intransigent anti-Modernist Cardinal La Fontaine. Gasparri had been Ratti’s immediate superior when he was nuncio in Poland, and when it became clear that his own candidacy could not succeed he was instrumental in securing Ratti’s election. It was certain, then, that the new Pope would continue Benedict XV’s (and Gasparri’s) policies. Despite the new Pope’s choice of name, there would be no return to the integralism of Pius X.

Benedict XV had been preparing the ground for a settlement of the Roman question, and Pius XI’s first act as pope made it clear that he intended to carry this through. Having announced his papal name, he told the cardinals that he would give the blessing ‘Urbi et Orbi’ from the balcony in St Peter’s Square, and a window closed against Italy for fifty-two years was opened.

The instant announcement that he would use the balcony in the square for his blessing was characteristic of the decisiveness of the new regime, a decisiveness soon revealed as nothing short of dictatorial. The mild and obliging scholar—librarian from the moment of his election became pope to the utter degree. He remained genial, smiling, apparently approachable. The Vatican filled with visitors, especially from Milan, he spent hours in public audiences, he met and blessed thousands of newly-weds, he had expensive display-shelves built for the tacky gifts the simple faithful gave him. Nonetheless, an invisible wall had descended around him. He ruled from behind it, and he would brook no contradiction. He accepted advice, if at all, only when he had asked for it, and he soon became famous for towering rages which left his entourage weak and trembling. Even visiting diplomats noted that the key word in the Vatican had become obedience.

The obedience was directed towards a vigorous development of many of the initiatives of Benedict XV. These included the rapprochement with France signalled by the canonisation of the Maid of Orleans. The way here, however, was blocked by the intransigent hostility of many Catholics to the French Republic. A vital influence here was Action Française, an extreme anti-republican movement with its own eponymous newspaper, edited by Charles Maurras. Maurras, a cradle Catholic, had long since abandoned belief in God, but he admired the organisation of the Church, and saw it as the chief and indispensable bastion of conservatism in society. Christianity, he thought, had fortunately smothered the ‘Hebrew Christ’ in the garments of the Roman empire. Religion, he declared, ‘was not the mystery of the Incarnation, but the secret of social order’. Royalist, anti-Semitic, reactionary, Maurras had an immense following among Catholics, including some of the French episcopate. In 1926 the Catholic youth of Belgium voted him the most influential contemporary writer, ‘a giant in the realm of thought, a lighthouse to our youth’. Maurras’ views had long caused unease in the Vatican, but he championed the Church, and Pius X had protected him: he told Maurras’ mother, ‘I bless his work’10

Pius XI was made of sterner stuff. Catholics excused Maurras’ work on the ground that it was politics pressed into defence of the Church. Ratti believed that in fact Maurras exploited religion in the service of his politics, and that in any case all politics went rotten unless inspired by true religion. Maurras was a barrier in the way of the political realism in France which Pius, like Benedict XV and Leo XIII, thought essential for the well-being of the Church. Despite stonewalling by the Vatican staff (the crucial file went missing, till the Pope threatened all concerned with instant dismissal), in 1925 he moved against Maurras and his movement, first by instigating episcopal condemnation in France, then by placing Action Française and all Maurras’ writings on the Index, and finally, in 1927, by a formal excommunication of all supporters of the movement.

The suppression of Action Française was a measure of Pius XI’s strength of character and singleness of mind. He was accused of betrayal of the Church’s best friend, of siding with Jews, Freemasons, radicals. From the French clergy he met with a good deal of dumb resistance. The Jesuit Cardinal Billot, who had been a key figure in the anti-Modernist purges and was the most influential theologian in Rome, sent Action Française a note of sympathy, which of course it published. Billot was summoned to explain himself to the Pope, and was made to resign his cardinalate. Pius was equally ruthless with all who resisted the suppression. Support for Maurras was strong among the French Holy Ghost Fathers, one of whom was the Rector of the French Seminary in Rome where the students had a strong Action Française group. Pius sent for the ancient, bearded superior of the order, and told him to sack the Rector. The old man replied, ‘Yes, Holy Father, I’ll see what I can do,’ upon which the Pope grabbed his beard and shouted, ‘I didn’t say, see what you can do, I said fire him.’11

Pius also extended Benedict XV’s concern with the renewal of Catholic missions. Benedict had published in 1919 an encyclical on missions, Maximum Illud, in which he had identified three priorities for future Catholic missionary activity: the recruitment and promotion of a native clergy, the renunciation of nationalistic concerns among European missionaries, and the recognition of the dignity and worth of the cultures being evangelised. These anti-imperialist guidelines became the basis for Pius XI’s policy. He himself published an encyclical on missions in 1926, and in the same year put theory into practice by consecrating the first six indigenous Chinese bishops in St Peter’s, and a year later the first Japanese Bishop of Nagasaki. He was later to ordain native bishops and priests for India, south-east Asia and China. Once again, this was a policy which met with widespread resistance, and once again Ratti doggedly persisted. At his accession, not a single missionary diocese in the Catholic Church was presided over by an indigenous bishop. By 1939 there were forty, the numbers of local-born mission priests had almost trebled to over 7,000, he had created 200 apostolic vicariates and prefectures in mission territories, and missiology was an established subject for study and research in the key Roman colleges. It was a dramatic internationalisation of the Catholic Church in an age of growing nationalism, and it was achieved only by the maximum exertion of papal muscle.

In diplomacy too, Ratti followed in his predecessor’s footsteps. From his first year as pope a stream of new concordats were concluded, to secure freedom of action for the Church in post-war Europe: Latvia in November 1922, Bavaria in March 1924, Poland in February 1925, Rumania in May 1927, Lithuania in September 1927, Italy in February 1929, Prussia in June 1929, Baden in October 1932, Austria in June 1933, Nazi Germany in July 1933, Yugoslavia in July 1935. Behind them all was a concern not merely to secure Catholic education, unhampered papal appointment of bishops and free communication with Rome, but to halt as far as was possible the secularising of European life which the popes had been resisting under the label ‘liberalism’ for more than a century. So his encyclical of 1925, Quas Primas, inaugurating the new Feast of Christ the King, denounced the ‘plague of secularism’, and asserted the rule of Christ not merely over the individual soul, but over societies, which precisely as societies, and not as aggregates of individuals, must reverence and obey the law of God proclaimed by the Church.

From the Vatican’s point of view, incomparably the most important of these concordats was that with Fascist Italy, the result of almost three years of hard bargaining with Mussolini, and finally signed in February 1929. The Concordat gave the Pope independence in the form of his own tiny sovereign state, the Vatican City (at 108.7 acres, just one-eighth of the size of NewYork’s Central Park), with a few extra-territorial dependencies like the Lateran and Castel Gandolfo. He had his own post office and radio station (a guarantee of freedom of communication with the world at large), the recognition of canon law alongside the law of the state, Church control of Catholic marriages, the teaching of Catholic doctrine in state schools (and the consequent placing of crucifixes in classrooms, a weighty symbolic gesture) and finally a massive financial compensation for the loss of the Papal States — 1,750,000,000 lire, a billion of it in Italian government stocks, but still a sum which in the hungry 1930s enabled Pius XI to spend like a Renaissance prince.

This Concordat did not deliver all that the Pope had hoped, and it horrified those committed to Catholic Action and the anti-Fascist struggle. Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, was disgusted, and asked, ‘Was it worth sixty years of struggle to arrive at such a meagre result?’12 Pius viewed it as a triumph, nonetheless, for it represented a decisive repudiation of the ‘Free Church in a Free State’ ideal of liberalism. Moreover, Mussolini had not merely resolved the Roman question, he had also suppressed the Church’s enemies, the Italian communists and the Freemasons. In the first flush of enthusiasm, and against Gasparri’s advice, Pius spoke publicly of Mussolini as ‘a man sent by Providence’. In the elections of March 1929, most Italian clergy encouraged their congregations to vote Fascist. There is no such thing as a free concordat, however, and the major casualty of the agreement was the increasingly powerful Catholic Partito Popolare. In the run-up to the Concordat Mussolini made it clear that the dissolution of this rival political party was part of any deal, and the Vatican duly withdrew support for the Popolare, and secured the resignation of its priest—leader, Don Luigi Sturzo, and his self-exile in London. Pius XI thereby assisted at the deathbed of Italian democracy. It is unlikely that he shed many tears, for he was no democrat. He disapproved of radicalism, above all radicalism in priests, and though he was passionately committed to Catholic Action, and devoted his first encyclical to the subject, like Pius X he envisaged it as being confined to what he rather chillingly described as ‘the organised participation of the laity in the hierarchical apostolate of the Church, transcending party politics’.13

Nevertheless, the defence of Catholic Action in this broader sense was to bring him rapidly into conflict with Mussolini. One of the lesser casualties of the Concordat was the Catholic scout movement, which Mussolini insisted must be merged with the state youth organisations. This went against the grain with Pius XI, who valued Catholic youth movements as a prime instrument of Christian formation. Mussolini was bullish on the issue, bragging that ‘in the sphere of education we remain intractable.Youth shall be ours’14 Fascist harassment of Catholic organisations mounted, and in June 1931 the Pope denounced the actions of the Fascist regime in the Italian encyclical, Non Abbiamo Bisogno.’15 This letter was primarily concerned to denounce the harassment of Catholic organisations, and to vindicate Catholic Action from the Fascist claim that it was a front for the old Partito Popolare, Catholic political opposition under another name. But the Pope broadened his condemnation to a general attack on Fascist idolatry, the ‘pagan worship of the state’. He singled out the Fascist oath as intrinsically against the law of God.

Pius was not calling on Italy to abandon Fascism. The encyclical was careful to insist that the Church respected the legitimate authority of the government, and was essentially a warning shot across Mussolini’s bows to lay off Church groups. In this, it was largely successful. It was an indication nonetheless that the Pope was aware of the need for a long spoon when dealing with totalitarian regimes, a need which certainly applied to the Concordat with Hitler in 1933. That Concordat was negotiated by Eugenio Pacelli, Secretary of State from 1930. Pacelli had spent most of the 1920s in Munich as nuncio, and was devoted to Germany and its culture. He had no illusions about Nazism, however, which he recognised as anti-Christian, and indeed from 1929 a number of the German bishops were vocal in denouncing its racial and religious teachings, insisting that no Catholic could be a Nazi. From Rome, however, Nazism looked like the strongest available bulwark against communism, and the Vatican’s overriding priority was to secure a legal basis for the Church’s ^[p.259] work, whatever form of government happened to prevail.

Pacelli in fact later claimed that he and the Pope were primarily concerned to establish a basis for legal protest against Nazi abuses, and that they entertained no high hopes of establishing peaceful coexistence with what they both had rapidly come to feel was a gangster regime. Between 1933 and 1936 Pius XI directed three dozen such notes of protest about infringements of the Concordat to Berlin. They were mostly drafted by Pacelli, and their tone is anything but cordial.

Once again, the price of this Concordat was the death of a Catholic political party. The Centre Party had been the major instrument of Catholic political advance in Germany since 1870, and it too was led by a priest, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas.The Centre Party helped vote Hitler in, but Hitler had no intention of tolerating a democratic rival; Cardinal Pacelli made it clear that the Vatican had no interest in the Centre’s survival, and it did not survive. Kaas was summoned to Rome, where he became keeper of the building works at St Peter’s: it was to be Kaas’ activities in reordering the crypt of St Peter’s to make space for Pius XI’s coffin which would lead to the discovery of the ancient shrine of St Peter. There was widespread dismay in Europe at the political castration of Catholicism in Hitler’s Germany, and the removal of yet another buffer between the German citizen and the Nazi state, but article 31 of the Concordat protected Catholic Action, ‘the apple of the Pope’s eye’, and Pius XI was content.

Pius at first backed away from direct political involvement, and staked the well-being of Catholicism in Italy and Germany on the development of a vigorous religious life, fostered not merely by the Church’s liturgy and sacramental life, but through Catholic social organisations from boy scouts to trade unions and newspapers: hence his enthusiasm for Catholic Action. He was aware also that in the age of the totalitarian state such organisations needed political protection if they were to survive. Unlike Benedict XV, however, he imagined that the papacy alone could provide that political protection. He failed to grasp that freedom could not be guaranteed merely by international treaties — which is what concordats were. By sacrificing the Catholic political parties Pius assisted in the destruction of mediating institutions capable of acting as restraints and protections against totalitarianism.

This is all the more striking because in 1931 he published a major encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Rerun Novarum. In it he extended Leo’s critique of unrestrained capitalism while emphasizing the incompatability of Catholicism and socialism.  In the most remarkable section of the letter, however,

he argued the need for a reconstruction of society, which was in danger of becoming stripped down to an all-powerful state on the one hand, and the mere aggregate of individuals on the other.

What was needed were intermediate structures, ‘corporations’ like guilds or unions, without which the social life lost its natural ‘organic form’.

He sketched out the principles of ‘subsidiarity’, by which such groups would handle many social tasks which were currently left to the state.

These suggestions seemed to many to have strong similarities with the Facist ‘corporations’ established for trade by Mussolinii.  The pope, however, emphasized the need for free and and voluntary social organizations, in contrast to the Facist corporations, in which ‘the State is substituting itself in the place of private initiative’, and so imposing’an excessively beurocratic and political character’ on what ought to be free social cooperation.16

In the late 1920s and early 1930s his fears seemed amply justified.  To the murder of clergy and persecution of the Church in Russia, against which he openly protested in 1930, was added the savagely anti-Catholic regime in Mexico, which from 1924 set about eradicating Christianity.  From 1931 the new Republican  regime in Spain was increasingly hostile to the Church.  With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 hostility turned to active persecution, and refugees flooded into Rome with accounts of Communist atrocities, the massacres of priests, and seminarians (7000 murdered within months), the rape of nuns.  The Nationalist opposition, by contrast, although also guilty of atrocity, was not originally noted for their piety, increasingly saw the Church as integral to their vision of Spain.  They received the endorsement of all but one of the Spanish bishops in a joint pastoral in 1937, and despite General Franco’s murderous act of repression, the papacy backed him.

There was no disguising, then, Pius XI’s softness towards the right.  An authoritarian himself, he saw no particular evil in strong leadership, and he valued Facism’s emphasis on the family and social discipline.  When Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935 the Pope did not condemn, and delivered speeches couched in such bewildering and lofty generalities that it was impossible to say what he thought – it seems likely they were written by Cardnial Pacelli.

Yet there were limits to this papal tendency to the right.  Pius XI viewed with horror the claims of the dictatorships to the absolute submission of their subjects, and he detested the racial doctrine which underlay Nazism.  With the Concordat safely achieved, Hitler discarded the mask of cordiality towards the Church and the Nazi press began a smear campaign.  The Archbishop of Baden, it was claimed, had a Jewish mistress, the Vatican was financed by Jews, the Catholic Church was profiteering on inflation.  Press attacks gave way to physical intimidation.  By 1936 the Vatican had accumulated a vast dossier of Nazi attacks on the Church’s freedom in Germany, which, it was rumored, it intended to publish Cardinal Pacelli, on a visit to America, declared that ‘everything is lost’ in Germany.17  The pope was now a sick man, his energy ebbing fast, prone to doze off in audiences, uncharacteristically leaving more and more to his subordinates.  But he was increasingly agitated by what was happening, and had come to feel that Nazism was little better than the Bolshevism he had hoped it would counteract.  Always irritable, he horrified Cardinal Pacelli by shouting at the German ambassador that if it came to another Kulturkampf, this time for the survival of Christianity itself, the Church would win again.  Mussolini comforted the German – he had had this trouble himself, there was no point arguing with the ‘old man’.

In January 1937 key figures from the German hierarchy came to Rome on their ad limina visit.  They told the Pope that the time for caution had passed, and Pius XI decided to act.  Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, was commissioned to produce a draft encyclical, which was tidied up by Pacelli and signed by the Pope.  In a triumphant security operation, the encyclical was smuggled into Germany, locally printed and read from Catholic pulpits on Palm Sunday 1937.  Mit Brennender Sorge  (‘With Burning Anxiety’)

The impact of this encyclical was immense, and it dispelled at once all suspicion of a Fascist pope.  While the world was still reacting, however. Pius issued five days later another encyclical, Divini Redemptoris, denouncing Communism, declaring its principles ‘intrinsically hostile to religion in any form whatever’, detailing the attacks on the Church whish had followed the establishment of Communist regimes in Russia, Mexico and Spain, and calling for the implementation of Catholic social teaching to offset both Communism and ‘anmoral liberalism’.19

The language of Divini Redemptoris was stronger than that of Mit Brennender Sorge, its condemnation of Communism even more than the attack on Nazism.  The difference in tone undoubtedly reflected the Pope’s own loathing of Communism as the ultimate enemy.  The last years of his life, however, left no one in any doubt of his total repudiation of the right-wing tyrranies in Germany and, despite his instinctive sympathy with some aspects of Facism, increasingly in Italy also.  His speeches and conversatins were blunt, filled with phrases like ‘stupid racialism’, ‘barbaric Hitlerism’.  In May 1938 hitler visited Rome.  The Pope left for Castel Gondolfo, and explained to pilgrims there that he could not bear ‘to see raised in Rome another cross which is not the cross of Christ’.  In September he told another group that the Canon of the Mass spoke of Abraham as ‘our father in faith’.  No Christian, therefore, could be anti-Semitic, for ‘spiritually, we are all Semites.’

In the summer of 1938 an American Jesuit, John LeFarge, the author of a recent study of American racial discrimination, against black Americans entitled Interracial Justice, was summoned to a secret audience with the pope.  Papa Ratti asked him to draft an encyclical against Nazi racial theories and their Italian imitations.  The resulting draft, Humani Generis Unitas, was a product of its time whose primary focus was the well-being and work of the Church rather than any abstract philosophy, and whose text grates again and again on a modern sensibility, for it reiterated centuries of Christian suspicion of the Jews, ‘this unhappy people … doomed to wander perpetually over the face of the earth’ because of their rejection of Christ.  The encyclical stressed the dangers to Christian faith of excessive contact between Jews and Christians.  Yet it also unequivocally asserted the unity of the whole human race, and denounced all racialism, and anti-semitism in particular.  Humani Generis Unitas was never to see the light of day, however, its progress through the Roman machinery slowed by shocked conservative resistance and by the pope’s failing health.  This ‘lost encyclical’ epitomises the contradictions of Papa Ratti’s pontificate, showing everywhere a mindset which was the outcome of centuries of papal suspicion of the direction of modern religious, political, and social evelopments, yet reacing out towards a larger and more inclusive understanding of humanity, and, for all its imitations, offering an absolute opposition to the root ideology of Nazism.  That opposition became the all-absorbing preoccupation of the dying pope.  In the last weeks of his life he drafted a blistering denunciation of Facism and its collaboration with Nazi lies, which he hoped to deliver to the assembled bishops of Italy: he begged his doctors to keep him alive long enough to make the speech, but he died, on 10 February, with just days to go. ‘At last’, declared Mussolini, ‘that stubborn old man is dead.’

He had not a liberal bone in his body.  He distrusted democratic politics as too weak to defend the relgious truth which underlay all true human community.  He thought the British Prime Minister Chamberlain feeble and smug, and no match for the tyrannies he confronted.  He loathed the greed of capitalist society, ‘the unquenchable thirst for temporal possessions’, and he thought that liberal capitalism shared with communism a ‘satanic optimism’ about human progress.

He had even less time for other forms of Christianity.  He hoped for reunion with the East, but envisaged it as the return of the prodigal to the Roman father. In 1928, in what is perhaps his least attractive encyclical, Mortalium Annos, he rubbished the infant ecumenical movement, sneering at ‘pan-Christians consumed by zeal to unite Churches’ and asking, in a characteristically tough-minded phrase, ‘Can we endure ... that the truth revealed by God be made the object of negotiations?’ The encyclical made it clear that the ecumenical message of the Vatican for the other Churches was simple and uncompromising: ‘Come in slowly with your hands above your head.’

Yet that is not all there is to be said. Always a strong man and an energetic pope, in the last years of his pontificate he rose to greatness.The Pope of eighteen concordats ceased to be a diplomat, and achieved the stature of a prophet. British diplomats and French communist newspapers commented that the Pope, of all people, had become a champion of freedom. When he died, the British government’s man in Rome, D’Arcy Osborne, not always an admirer, reported to the Foreign Office that Pius’ courage at the end of his life had ensured that he became ‘one of the outstanding figures of the world’, and that ‘he may be said to have died at his post’.20

PIUS XII

This was the inheritance of Eugenio Pacelli, when he was elected pope as Pius XII on the first day of the Conclave on 2 March 1939. He was the inevitable choice. Immensely able, an exquisitely skilled political tactician, he had been groomed for the succession by Pius XI, who had sent him all over the world as nuncio. Pius XI told one of Pacelli’s assistants in the Secretariat of State that he made him travel ‘so that he may get to know the world and the world may get to know him’. The remark meant more than at first appeared. Pius XI’s authoritarian regime had marginalised the cardinals as a body, and he had not held consistories. As a result, none of the non-Italian cardinals knew more than a handful of their colleagues. Most of them knew Pacelli, however, and that fact had a major bearing on the outcome of the Conclave.

But he seemed born to be pope. Austere, intensely devout, looking like a figure in an El Greco painting, Pacelli was everyone’s idea of a Catholic saint. As nuncio in Germany he had struck Kaiser Wilhelm II as the ‘perfect model’ of a high-ranking Roman prelate. As a young man he stammered slightly. The deliberate and emphatic speech he adopted to cope with this gave his words a special solemnity, which he himself came to believe in. He was fond of dramatic devotions and expansive gestures, raising his eyes to heaven, throwing his arms wide, his great and beautiful eyes shining through round spectacles. Despite the austere persona and the hieratic poise, he responded to people’s emotion, smiled and wept in sympathy with his interlocutor. As pope, he had a mystical, overwhelming sense of the weight and responsibility of his own office, going down into the crypt of the Vatican by night to pray among the graves of his predecessors. In every photograph he seems poised in prayer, preoccupied with another world. Vatican staff were expected to kneel when they answered the phone from his apartments.

The Allies therefore would be suspicious of his pro-German as well as his pro-Italian sympathies. Deeply committed to the papacy’s role as spiritual leader of all nations, he spent his first months as pope in a hopeless effort to prevent the war. As he declared in an impassioned speech in August 1939, ‘Nothing is lost by peace: everything may be lost by war.’ Once it began, he would struggle to avoid taking sides, to promote peace at every opportunity, to seek to prevent atrocities and inhumanity, yet to avoid sprinkling holy water on the arms of either side. In a war which came increasingly to be seen as a crusade against tyranny, that balanced stance became daily more difficult, and came to seem less and less tolerable in the leader of Catholic Christendom. Pacelli himself was not entirely consistent. Longing for a negotiated peace, and recognising that this was impossible while Hitler was alive, in 1940 he personally acted as intermediary between the Allies and a group of army plotters in Germany who were planning to murder Hitler. He anguished over the morality of this, and concealed his actions from even his closest advisers. And at the heart of all his actions was an increasingly timid indecisiveness, a diplomatic sophistication in which the weighing of every contingency seemed to paralyse action.

His difficulties came to focus on the question of Nazi genocide against the Jews. The Catholic Church had a bad record on the Jews, particularly in central and eastern Europe. Many Catholics thought of the Jews as the murderers of Christ, and Hitler had learned a good deal about the political appeal of anti-Semitism from early-twentieth-century right-wing Catholic parties in Austria and Germany. But official Church teaching ruled out the racial theories which underlay Nazi policy, and as the war progressed the Vatican built up an appalling file on Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Pressure mounted on the Pope to speak out, not only from the Allies, who wanted a papal denunciation as propaganda for the war effort, but from his own advisers. He was operating Benedict XV’s policy, but in a different war, and a different world. To many of those around him, the moral circumstances seemed qualitatively different, and Pacelli himself sometimes felt it. It took, he told the Archbishop of Cologne, ‘almost superhuman exertions’ to keep the Holy See ‘above the strife of parties’.21

It is clear from Maglione’s intervention that Papa Pacelli cared about and sought to avert the deportation of the Roman Jews. But he did not denounce: a denunciation, the pope believed, would do nothing to help the Jews, and would only extend Nazi persecution to yet more Catholics. It was the Church as well as the Jews in Germany, Poland and the rest of occupied Europe who would pay the price for any papal gesture. There was some weight in this argument: when the Dutch Catholic. hierarchy denounced measures against Jews there, the German authorities retaliated by extending the persecution to baptized Jews who had formerly been protected by their Catholicism. Pacelli, moreover, was anxious to ensure a role for the papacy as peacemaker by maintaining papal neutrality. Given his horror of Communism, he was not prepared to denounce Nazi atrocities while remaining silent about Stalinist atrocities. Yet how could the oracle of God remain dumb in the face of sins so terrible, so much at odds with the Gospel of the Incarnate? The American representative to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, told Mgr. Tardini, one of the Pacelli’s two principal Vatican aides, ‘I’m not asking the Pope to speak out against Hitler, just about the atrocities.’ Tardini confided to his diary ‘I could not but agree’.24

For many people, the moral credibility of the papacy and the Catholic Church had been radically compromised. Pius XII’s actions were vigorously defended by those closest to him, including Cardinal Montini, who had been his closest adviser on such matters during the war, and the integrity and humanity of whose own role in the matter was accepted by everyone. But clearly the accusations of moral failure cut deep, and in the wake of Hochhuth’s play the Vatican took the unprecedented step of appointing a team of Jesuit historians to publish everything in the archives that bore on Vatican involvement with the war and especially with the Jewish question. The resulting eleven volumes of documents decisively established the falsehood of Hochhuth’s specific allegations, but did not entirely exorcise the sense that the troubling silence and tortuous diplomacy of the Vatican had more to do with Pius XII’s oblique and timid sensibility than with rational prudence. 26

Controversy revived in the 1980s with suggestions that the ‘Ratline’ from Rome to Latin America, down which Nazi war-criminals like Klaus Barbie and possibly even the Gestapo chiefs Martin Bormann and Heinrich Müller had escaped, was aVatican network.There can be no doubt that pro-Nazi Austrian and Croatian clerics in Rome, and right-wing Catholic circles in France, actively concealed war criminals and assisted in such escapes. Everything we now know about Vatican policy towards Nazism and Fascism, however, about the Pope’s own attitudes, and above all about the anti-Fascist convictions and impeccable integrity of Monsignor Montini, who would have had to know about any such network, make such accusations unlikely in the extreme.

Even while Europe was plunged in total war, however, theological renewal had begun within the Catholic Church. Despite the stifling intellectual atmosphere inherited from the anti-Modernist era, there had emerged in Germany and France, particularly in the intellectual orders of Dominicans and Jesuits, a movement away from the rigidly hierarchical understanding of the Church which had prevailed since the First Vatican Council. These new movements emphasised the spiritual character of the Church, rather than its institutional structure, and pointed to the liturgy of the Mass and breviary as a rich source of understanding of the nature of Christianity. There was a renewal of interest in the writings of the early Christian Fathers, with a consequent downplaying of the ‘timeless’ authority of the more recent theological orthodoxies dominant in seminaries and textbooks.The French Jesuit Henri de Lubac pointed the Church back to the writings of the Greek Fathers in particular, while his fellow countryman the DominicanYves Congar urged the importance of the corporate dimension of the Church, and the active role of every Christian within it, not simply as obedient footsoldiers under the military rule of the hierarchy.

These currents of thought began to appear in papal utterances. Between 1943 and 1947 Pius XII published three theological encyclicals, each of them in different ways opening up new and hopeful avenues for Catholic theology In Mystici Corporis the Pope proposed an organic and mystical model of the Church as the Body of Christ, supplementing the political model of the ‘perfect’ (meaning ‘complete and self-contained’) society in which the Pope was general or chief magistrate, which had dominated Catholic thinking for three centuries. In Divini Afflante the Pope reversed the suspicion of biblical scholarship which had stifled Catholic theology since 1910, recognising the presence in the Bible of a variety of literary forms which made any straightforward ‘fundamentalist’ reading of scripture inadequate. And in Mediator Dei, published in 1947, the Pope placed the renewal of a more participatory liturgy at the heart of the renewal of Catholicism.

These documents had their limitations. Mystici Corporis, despite its emphasis on the organic nature of the Church, identified the Church of Christ absolutely with the visible Roman Catholic Church (to the implicit exclusion of all other Christian bodies) and remained disproportionately preoccupied with the hierarchical dimension and the centrality of the papacy. Mediator Dei warned against over-eager liturgisers’, and showed how long Roman memories could be by including an attack on the ‘pseudo-synod’ of Pistoia of 1786, and its liturgical reforms. Nevertheless, their cumulative effect as the world emerged from total war was an almost miraculous liberation for theology within the Church. The intellectual and imaginative freeze which had set in in the wake of the campaign against Modernism began to thaw. Pius himself followed up these initiatives in the early 1950s by practical reforms like permission for evening Masses, the relaxing of the need to fast from midnight before receiving communion, and above all by reforming and restoring the heart of the ancient liturgy, the moving and powerful ceremonies of Holy Week, which for centuries had been in abeyance.

But this was a false dawn. Pius at heart was deeply conservative, increasingly fearful of the genie he had let out of the lamp. His early papal utterances had often called for audacia, daring, in action. In the last ten years of his life that word virtually disappears from his vocabulary. In August 1950 he published another encyclical, Humani Generis, in which he warned against the dangerous tendencies of the new theology, attacking the historical contextualising of dogma as leading to relativism, and warning also against a ‘false eirenicism’ towards other Christian traditions which would lead to compromise over fundamentals of the faith. He called on bishops and the superiors of religious orders to prevent the spread of these new and dangerous opinions. No one was named, but that made the impact of the condemnation all the worse, widening the net of suspicion to anyone whose views were considered unconventional. A new attack on theologians began, and many of the most distinguished of them, like the great French Dominicans Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu, were silenced and forbidden to teach or publish.

The last years of Pius XII increasingly resembled the regime of Pius X, as new initiatives in theology and pastoral work were suppressed, and right-wing Catholics like Senator Joe McCarthy threw themselves into the struggle with the universal enemy, communism. Catholics in the Soviet Union, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania lived under communist rule, and papal denunciations could make life harder for them. But this struggle had a particular urgency in post-war Italy, where communists were reaping the benefits of having led the anti-Fascist resistance. In Emilia between 1944 and 1946 fifty-two priests had been murdered by communists.

The Vatican did not forget. The Pope believed that the freedom of the Church would be at an end in an Italy ruled by communists, he talked gloomily about being ready to die in Rome, and he did everything he could to ensure that communists would not win elections. The Vatican pumped funds into the Christian Democratic Party, and promoted links between Italy and America. In 1949 Pius excommunicated anyone who joined the Communist Party or supported communism in any way. The ruling unleashed a flood of anti-Catholic measures in eastern Europe. Monsignor Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office (the Inquisition), boasted that people could say anything they liked about the divinity of Christ and get away with it, but that ‘if, in the remotest village in Sicily, you vote communist, your excommunication will arrive the next day’.27 In 1952, the Vatican encouraged an anti-communist political alliance between Italian Christian Democrats and neo-Fascist and other extreme right-wing groups. Catholic politicians unhappy about this ‘opening to the right’ were elbowed aside. All over Soviet-dominated Europe, Christian people suffered for their alligiance to Rome. Church schools were closed, all Christian teaching outside church services forbidden, seminaries starved of funds or students, or closed altogether, key clergy targeted as anti-social or treacherous. There was a series of spectacular show-trials. Pius watched in anguish the arrest, torture and show-trial of Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty by the communist regime in Hungary in 1948-9. The ‘Uniate’ or Eastern-rite Catholics were the most vulnerable. In the Ukraine, in Czechoslovakia, in Romania, tens of thousands of them were forcibly ‘reconciled’ to the Orthodox church, their clergy compelled to renounce the pope or face ejection, imprisonment or worse, their churches or seminaries confiscated.

All this damaged Christianity, but it also strengthened it. The church became an emblem of freedom and national identity, of resistance to tyranny. When Mindszenty emerged from prison in 1956, protestant peasants flocked to kiss his robes. Loyalty to Rome was a burden, but more than a burden, a glory and a life-line to the free world, and the Pope responded. When the Russians sent in the tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 he published three encyclicals of denunciation in ten days. ‘If we were silent,’ he insisted in his Christmas message for 1956, ‘we would have to fear God’s judgement much more.’28 The contrast with the silences of the war years was striking.

In France the most exciting Catholic experiment for generations, the Worker Priest movement, fell victim to this growing hatred and fear of communism. The movement had begun from the wartime recognition by clergy like Cardinal Suhard, archbishop of Paris, that huge tracts of urban France were effectively deChristianised, mission territory as much in need of evangelisation as anywhere in Africa or the Far East. Suhard and other bishops authorised a small group of priests to shed clerical garments and lifestyle, to take jobs as factory workers or dockers, and to explore a new type of ministry. The French Dominican order was closely associated with this movement, and provided its theological rationale. Many of the priests became involved in union activities, many developed communist sympathies. A few were unable to sustain their vocation to celibacy. In 1953, the year in which it signed a new concordat with Franco’s Spain, the Vatican ordered the suppression of the Worker Priest experiment.

In the Vatican an atmosphere of suspicion and denunciation of the modern world flourished, feeding off the inflated rhetoric of a century of papal condemnation of modernity. Under the prompting of Monsignor Alfredo Ottaviani at the Holy Office and Cardinal Ruffini of Palermo, the Pope toyed with the idea of calling a general council, which would denounce modern errors like existentialism and polygenism (the view that the human race evolved from more than a single pair), and define the doctrine of the Virgin Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven. The Conciliar plan was abandoned, but its condemnations reappeared in 1950 in Humani Generis, and in the same year the Pope, for the first time since the definition of papal infallibility in 1870, exercised the ‘infallible magisterium’ and defined the doctrine of the Assumption in his own right. The definition embarrassed many Catholic theologians, since it was unsupported in scripture and was unknown to the Early Church, and it was a disaster for relations with other churches, even those which , like the Orthodox churches, believed the doctrine, but rejected the unilateral right of the pope to define articles of faith.  In 1950 Pacelli also canonized the anti-modernist Pope Pius X, whose embalmed body, enshrined in glass, was sent on a sacred tour of Italy.

The pope himself retired into ever more remote isolation.  Giovanni Batista Montini, one of his two closest assistants during the war, and widely tipped as the next pope, fell under danger of holding dangerously-liberal sympathies.  A sensitive, warm, and highly intelligent man, Montini, though himself impeccably loyal and sharing something of Pius XII’s mystically exalted view of the papacy, sympathized with the new theology and disliked the reactionary ethos which Pius had let loose.  In an age when the Vatican attitudes to other churches were characterized by hostility or dismissiveness, he was an ecumenist, cultivating friends among Anglicans and Protestants, seeking to make and maintain contacts in other churches.  He did what he could to protect victims of the new ultra-orthodoxy, and even rescued stocks of condemned books by the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac.  He had especially close links with the Church in France, and sympathized with the Worker-Priest experiment.  He strongly disapproved of the Vatican-backed political alliance between Christian Democracy and neo-Fascists.

In 1954 the inevitable happened.  The pope’s mind was poisoned against Montini by a whispering campaign, and he was dismissed from his Vatican post, and kicked upstairs to be Archbishop of Milan.  This post invariably carried with it a cardinal’s hat, but Pius XII, who had last held a consistory to name new Cardnals in 1953 never held another.  Whether or not the withholding of the Red Hat was a deliberate rebuke, Montini, who would increasingly be seen as the inevitable choice as next pope, was in fact excluded from the succession.

Surrounded now by ultra-conservative advisors, his privacy jealously guarded by his German nun-housekeeper, the dragon-like Sister Pasqualina, Pius XII retreated into a suffocating atmosphere of exalted piety exacerbated by hypochondria.  His health, always a subject of acute anxiety to himself, visibly deteriorated.  A quack remedy designed to prevent softening of his gums tanned and hardened his soft palate and gullet: he developed a permanent uncontrollable hiccup.  As he weakened, his doctor tried to keep him alive with injections of pulverized tissue taken from slaughtered lambs.  Rumors of visions of the Virgin and participations in the sufferings of Christ granted to him circulated.  He cultivated his role as Vatican oracle.  Teaching gushed from him, unstoppable,a speech a day.  Since the pope was the Church’s hotline to God, everything he had to say must be of interest.  Pius himself came to believe that he had something valuable to contribute on every subject, no matter how specialized.  He lived surrounded by encyclopedias and monographs, swotting up for the next utterance.  Midwives would get an update on the latests gynecological techniques, astronomers were lectured on sunspots.  One of his staff recalled finding him surrounded by a new mountain of books in the summer of 1958.  ‘All those books are about gas,’ Pius told him – he was due to address a congress of the gas industry in September.  The notion of pope as universal teacher was getting out of hand.

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