Part 1: Hitler's Pope...The Pacellis....Hidden Life...Papal Power Games

Hitlers Pope

the Secret History of Pius xii

by John Cornwell

Praise for Hitler’s Pope “A devastating indictment of Pius as guilty of moral treachery so grave that it defames his papacy and should deny his elevation to sainthood. . . . Cornwell, a Cambridge University scholar and prominent British journalist, gives us an account that is unsparing, though temperate and largely dispassionate. He has fresh sources, including the records of Archbishop Pacelli during his long tenure from 1917 to 1929 as Pope Pius XI’s ambassador to Germany; correspondence from the British envoy to the Vatican; and key Jesuit archives.” 

—The Philadelphia Inquirer 

“As Cornwell brilliantly demonstrates, Pius XII brought the authoritarianism and the centralization of his predecessors to their most extreme stage . . . Nowadays we may not know what a saint should be, but we do know what a saint should not be—a man of narrow spirit and heart, a man who could not find at the very least a ‘candid word’ when millions of human beings from all corners of Europe, some of them from under his own windows, were led to their systematic extermination.” 

—Saul Friedlander, Los Angeles Times 

“Scathing . . . It illuminates the previously neglected episodes in the life of this prospective saint, and it alerts us to flaws in the received version.” 

—Time 

“A groundbreaking narrative . . . it is hard to imagine a more timely book, in light of Pope John Paul II’s reaching out to the Jewish community . . . The author exposes a moral myopia in Pacelli that permeated his blundering diplomacy with Hitler . . . The chapter on the roundup and deportation of the Jews of Rome is particularly heart-rending.” 

—Jason Berry, Chicago Tribune 

“Hitler’s Pope reads like a thriller as it takes us through the high-powered negotiations and international crises from an unusual perspective . . . Given the campaign to beatify Pius XII, this meticulous, persuasive and impassioned book is disturbing in its presentation of a profoundly flawed man obsessed with absolute papal authority no matter what the consequences for others.” 

—Detroit Free Press  

“[Writing] with academic excellence and literary clarity, Cornwell does more than provide evidence of how Pius cooperated with Hitler. He reveals the internal political machinations of one of the most powerful religious organizations on the planet, as well as depicting Hitler’s ‘brilliance’ in understanding the dynamics of power.” 

—Jewish Herald Voice 

“A devastating refutation of the claim that this Pope’s diplomacy can in any way be characterized as wisdom. Instead of a portrait of a man worthy of sainthood, Cornwell lays out the story of a narcissistic, power-hungry manipulator who was prepared to lie, to appease, and to collaborate in order to accomplish his ecclesiastical purpose—which was not to save lives or even to protect the Catholic Church but, more narrowly, to protect and advance the power of the papacy.” 

—James Carroll, Atlantic Monthly 

“A brilliant and serious work of major historical weight. It is certain to cause shock and outrage, rationalization and denial.” 

—New York Post 

“Scathing . . . Is the indictment persuasive? Sadly, it is, coming not in the form of a court record but rather as a skilled biography. . . . The book’s middle chapters are a superb lesson in Catholic Church politics . . . Pacelli’s subsequent election as pope and the disastrous aftermath for European Jews are thoroughly documented and smoothly written. As Catholic and Jewish leaders work to build better understanding, knowledge about how and why Pope Pius XII acted as he did may ease their dialogue.” 

—San Francisco Chronicle 

“Hitler’s Pope accurately reflects the decline, inside and outside the Catholic Church, of the reputation of Eugenio Pacelli . . . Cornwell’s arguments, his detailed grasp of Roman Catholic history and politics and his lucid prose will persuade many readers of the merits of his indictment of Pius XII.” 

—Houston Chronicle

Hitler’s Pope

The Secret History of Pius XII 

By John Cornwell

Preface 

Several years ago I was at a dinner with a group of postgraduate students, some of whom were Catholics. The topic of the papacy was broached, and the party got contentious. A young woman asserted that she found it difficult to understand how any right-minded person today could be a Catholic, since the Church had sided with the most pernicious right-wing leaders of the century—Franco, Salazar, Mussolini, Hitler. Her father was Catalan; her paternal grandparents had suffered greatly at the hands of Franco during the civil war. Then the topic of Eugenio Pacelli—Pius XII, the wartime Pope—was raised, and how he had not done enough to save the Jews from the death camps. 

In common with many Catholics of my generation, I was only too familiar with that allegation. It had started with Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy (1963), which depicted Pacelli—implausibly, most Catholics thought—as a ruthless cynic more interested in the Vatican’s stockholdings than in the fate of the Jews. But Hochhuth’s play sparked a controversy about the culpability of the papacy and the Catholic Church in the Final Solution, each contribution to the debate prompting a riposte from its opposite extreme. The leading participants, whose work I discuss at the end of this book, mainly focused on Pacelli’s wartime years. Yet Pacelli’s influence in the Vatican began during the first decade of the twentieth century and increased over a period of nearly forty years until he was elected Pope in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. 

It seemed to me that a fair appraisal of Pacelli, his deeds and omissions, required a more extensive chronicle than any attempted so far. Such a study would expand not only on Pacelli’s earlier diplomatic activities but on the whole life, including the growth of his evident spirituality from childhood. I was convinced that if his full story were told, Pius XII’s pontificate would be vindicated. Hence I decided to write a book that would satisfy a broad spectrum of readers, old and young, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who continue to raise questions about the role of the papacy in the history of the twentieth century. The project, I realized, would be no conventional biography, since the impact of an individual pope on global affairs blurs the usual distinctions between biography and history. A pope, after all, believes, along with many hundreds of millions of the faithful, that he is God’s representative on earth. 

I applied for access to crucial material in Rome, reassuring those who had charge of the appropriate archives that I was on the side of my subject. Acting in good faith, two key archivists gave me generous access to unseen material: depositions under oath gathered thirty years ago for Pacelli’s beatification, and also documents in the office of the Vatican Secretariat of State. At the same time, I started to draw together, critically, the huge circuit of scholarship relating to Pacelli’s activities during the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, works published during the past twenty years but mainly inaccessible to a general readership. 

By the middle of 1997, nearing the end of my research, I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli’s life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment. Spanning Pacelli’s career from the beginning of the century, my research told the story of a bid for unprecedented papal power that by 1933 had drawn the Catholic Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era. I found evidence, moreover, that from an early stage in his career Pacelli betrayed an undeniable antipathy toward the Jews, and that his diplomacy in Germany in the 1930s had resulted in the betrayal of Catholic political associations that might have challenged Hitler’s regime and thwarted the Final Solution. 

Eugenio Pacelli was no monster; his case is far more complex, more tragic, than that. The interest of his story depends on a fatal combination of high spiritual aspirations in conflict with soaring ambition for power and control. His is not a portrait of evil but of fatal moral dislocation—a separation of authority from Christian love. The consequences of that rupture were collusion with tyranny and, ultimately, violence. 

At the culmination of the First Vatican Council in 1870, Archbishop Henry Manning of Westminster welcomed the doctrine of papal infallibility and primacy as a “triumph of dogma over history.” In 1997, Pope John Paul II, in his “Remembrance” document on the Final Solution, talked of Christ as the “Lord of History.” The time is surely ripe for acknowledgment of the lessons of recent papal history. 

Jesus College, 

Cambridge April 1999.

Prologue 

During the “Holy Year” of 1950, a year in which many millions of pilgrims descended on Rome to show their allegiance to the papacy, Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, was seventy-four years of age and still vigorous. Six feet tall, stick-thin at 125 pounds,1 light on his feet, regular in his habits, he had hardly altered physically from the day of his coronation eleven years earlier. It was his extreme pallor that first struck those who met him. “The skin, tightly drawn over the strong features, almost ash-grey, unhealthy, looked like old parchment,” wrote one observer, “but at the same time it had a surprisingly transparent effect, as if reflecting from the inside a cold, white flame.”2 The effect he had on otherwise unsentimental men of the world was often stunning. “His presence radiated a benignity, calm and sanctity that I have certainly never before sensed in any human being,” wrote James Lees-Milne. “All the while he smiled in the sweetest, kindliest way so that I immediately fell head over heels in love with him. I was so affected I could scarcely speak without tears and was conscious that my legs were trembling.”3 

The Holy Year saw a host of papal initiatives—canonizations, encyclicals (public letters to the Catholic faithful of the world), even the declaration of an infallible dogma (the Assumption of the Virgin Mary)—and Pius XII seemed deeply settled in his pontificate, as if he had always been Pope and always would be. For the half-billion Catholic faithful in the world, he embodied the papal ideal: holiness, dedication, divinely ordained supreme authority, and, in certain circumstances, infallibility in his statements about faith and morals. To this day, elderly Italians refer to him as “l’ultimo papa,” the last Pope. 

A man of monklike inclinations of solitude and prayer, he nevertheless met in audience a prodigious number of politicians, writers, scientists, soldiers, actors, sports personalities, leaders of nations, and royalty. Few failed to be charmed and impressed by him. He had beautiful tapering hands, which he used to great effect in his constant blessings. His eyes were large and dark, almost feverish behind gold-rimmed spectacles. His voice was high-pitched, a trifle querulous, with a tendency to over meticulous enunciation. When he performed church services, his face was impassive, his gestures and movements controlled and elegant. Toward his visitors he was strikingly affable, putting them at ease, all assentation and eagerness, with not the slightest impression of pomposity or affectation. He had a ready and simple humor and would give a big silent laugh, mouth agape. His teeth, one observer noted, were like “old ivory.” 

Some spoke of a “feline” sensibility, others of an occasional tendency to “feminine” vanity. Before a camera there was a hint of narcissism. And yet he impressed most who met him with a sense of chaste, youthful innocence, like an eternal seminarian or monastic novice. He was at home with children, and they felt drawn to him. He was never known to gossip or speak ill of others. His eyes froze, harelike, when he felt assailed by overfamiliarity or a coarse phrase. He was alone—in a quite extraordinary and exalted sense. 

How can one capture a sense of that unique solitude, that papal egotistical sublime, in which modern popes have chosen to live and have their being? 

Overwhelmed by the solitude of his pontifical role, Paul VI, Pope in the 1960s and 1970s, confided a private note to himself that might just as well have been penned by Pacelli, whom Paul VI had served (as Giovanni Battista Montini) for fifteen years: I was solitary before, but now my solitariness becomes complete and awesome. Hence the dizziness, the vertigo. Like a statue on a plinth—that is how I live now. Jesus was also alone on the cross. I should not seek outside help to absolve me from my duty; my duty is too plain: decide, assume every responsibility for guiding others, even when it seems illogical and perhaps absurd. And to suffer alone. . . . Me and God. The colloquy must be full and endless.4 

This vertiginous papal consciousness surely alters the man who shoulders the papal burden. It is a solitude attended by certain dangers—not least the perils of increasing egotism and despotism. The longer the papacy, the more entrenched the papal consciousness. The theologian John Henry Newman, Britain’s most famous convert to Catholicism in the nineteenth century, delivered a devastating verdict during a previous drawn-out pontificate: “It is not good for a Pope to live twenty years. It is anomaly and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”5 Within ten years of becoming Pope, Pacelli had elevated the papacy to heights of unprecedented exaltation; there was certainly no one to contradict him, and he adopted the manner of one destined for canonization. 

There is a striking picture of Pacelli at the zenith of his power, published in 1950. Photographed from above and behind his head and shoulders, high over St. Peter’s Square, he greets the seething multitudes below like a colossus holding the entire human race in his embrace. The picture is entirely apt for a bold initial assertion: The ideology of papal primacy, as we have known it within living memory, is an invention of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In other words, there was a time, before modern means of communication, when the pyramidal model of Catholic authority—whereby a single man in a white robe rules the Church in a vastly unequal power relationship—did not exist. There was a time when the Catholic Church’s authority was widely distributed through the great historic councils and countless webs of local discretion. As in a medieval cathedral, there were many thrusting spires of authority. Certainly the tallest of these was the papacy, but Roman primacy for much of two millennia was more a final court of appeal than a uniquely initiating autocracy. 

That characteristic image of Pius XII—the supreme, albeit loving, authoritarian floating above St. Peter’s Square—suggests several contrasts that distinguish the modern popes from their predecessors. The more  elevated the Pontiff, the smaller and less significant the faithful. The more responsible and authoritative the Pontiff, the less enfranchised the people of God, including bishops, the successors to the apostles. The more holy and removed the Pontiff, the more profane and secular the entire world. 

This book tells the story of the career of Eugenio Pacelli, the man who was Pius XII, the world’s most influential churchman from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. Pacelli, more than almost any other Vatican official of his day, helped to enhance the ideology of papal power— the power that he himself assumed in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War and held until his death in October 1958. But the story begins three decades before he became Pope. Among the many initiatives in his long diplomatic career, Pacelli was responsible for a treaty with Serbia which contributed to the tensions that led to the First World War. Twenty years later he struck an accord with Hitler which helped sweep the Führer to legal dictatorship while neutralizing the potential of Germany’s 23 million Catholics (34 million after the Anschluss) to protest and resist. 

Pacelli’s goals and his influence as diplomat and Pope cannot be separated from the auspices and pressures of the office that gave impetus to his remarkable ambition. That ambition was no simple lust for power for its own sake; the popes of the twentieth century have not been self seeking men of worldly pride, hubris, and greed. They have been, without exception, men of prayer and meticulous conscience, burdened by the checkered history of the ancient institution they embodied. Pacelli was no exception. That he nevertheless exerted a fatal and culpable influence on the history of this century is the theme of this book. 

Pacelli was born in Rome in 1876 into a family of Church lawyers in the service of a papacy disgruntled by the sequestration of the papal states by the new nation-state of Italy. That loss of sovereignty had left the papacy in crisis. How could the popes regard themselves as independent of the political status quo of Italy, now that they were mere citizens of this upstart kingdom? How could they continue to lead and protect a Church in conflict with the modern world? 

Ever since the Reformation, the papacy had been reluctantly readjusting to the realities of a fragmented Christendom amid the challenge of Enlightenment ideas and new ways of looking at the world. In response to the political and social changes that gathered pace in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the papacy had struggled to survive and exert an influence in a climate of liberalism, secularism, science, industrialization, an the evolving nation-state. The popes had been obliged to fight on two fronts—as primates of an embattled Church and as monarchs of a tottering papal kingdom. Caught in a bewildering series of confrontations with the new masters of Europe, the papacy had been attempting to protect the Church universal while defending the integrity of its collapsing temporal power. 

Most of the modernizing states of Europe were inclined to separate Church from State (or, in the more complex reality of oppositions, throne from altar, papacy from empire, clergy from laity, sacred from secular). The Catholic Church became an object of oppression in Europe through much of the nineteenth century: its property and wealth systematically plundered; religious orders and clergy deprived of their scope for action; schools taken over by the state or shut down. The papacy itself was repeatedly humiliated (Pius VII and Pius VIII were held prisoner by Napoleon), and the papal territories had been in constant danger of dismemberment and annexation as the forces for Italian unity and modernization gathered strength. 

Through the vicissitudes of this era, the Church had been riven internally by an issue fraught with consequences for the modern papacy. Broadly, the struggle was between those who urged an absolutist papal primacy from the Roman center and those who argued for a greater distribution of authority among the bishops (indeed, those who even argued for the formation of national churches independent of Rome). Both these tendencies found expression in France from the seventeenth century onward, although the antecedents of papal autocracy had an ancient lineage dating back to the eleventh century and the foundations of papal monarchism. Papal autocracy undoubtedly had been a principal cause of the Reformation itself. 

The triumph of the modern centrists, or “ultramontanists” (a phrase coined in France indicating papal power from “beyond the mountains,” or the Alps), was sealed at the First Vatican Council of 1870 against the background of the Pope’s loss of his dominions. At that Council, the Pope was declared infallible in matters of faith and morals as well as undisputed primate—supreme spiritual and administrative head of the Church. In some respects, this definition satisfied even those who had felt it inopportune: it was, after all, as much a statement of the limits as of the scope of infallibility and primacy. 

In the first three decades after the Vatican Council, during the reign of Leo XIII, the ultramontanist Church waxed and grew strong. There was an impression of restoration; ecclesiastical Rome flourished with new academic and administrative institutions; Catholic missions penetrated to the farthest corners of the earth. There was a bracing sense of loyalty, obedience, fervor. The revival of the Christian philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, or at least a version of it, provided the perception of a bastion against modern ideas and a defense of papal authority. By the first decade of the twentieth century, however, the concept of the limits of papal inerrancy and primacy was becoming blurred. A legal and bureaucratic instrument had transformed the dogma into an ideology of papal power unprecedented in the long history of the Church of Rome. 

At the turn of the century, Pacelli, then a brilliant young Vatican lawyer, collaborated in redrafting the Church’s laws in such a way as to grant future popes unchallenged domination from the Roman center. These laws, separated from their ancient historical and social background, were packaged in a manual known as the Code of Canon Law, published and brought into force in 1917. The code, distributed to Catholic clergy throughout the world, created the means of establishing, imposing, and sustaining a remarkable new “top-down” power relationship. 

As papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin during the 1920's, Pacelli sought to impose the new code, state by state, on Germany—one of the largest, best-educated, and richest Catholic populations in the world. At the same time, he was pursuing a Reich Concordat, a Church-State treaty between the papacy and Germany as a whole. Pacelli’s aspirations for that accord with the Reich were frequently resisted, not only by indignant Protestant leaders but also by Catholics who believed that his vision for the German Church was unacceptably authoritarian. 

In 1933 Pacelli found a successful negotiating partner for his Reich Concordat in the person of Adolf Hitler. Their treaty authorized the papacy to impose the new Church law on German Catholics and granted  generous privileges to Catholic schools and the clergy. 

In exchange, the Catholic Church in Germany, its parliamentary political party, and its many hundreds of associations and newspapers “voluntarily” withdrew, following Pacelli’s initiative, from social and political action. The abdication of German political Catholicism in 1933, negotiated and imposed from the Vatican by Pacelli with the agreement of Pope Pius XI, ensured that Nazism could rise unopposed by the most powerful Catholic community in the world—a reverse of the situation sixty years earlier, when German Catholics combated and defeated Bismarck’s Kulturkampf persecutions from the grass roots. As Hitler himself boasted in a cabinet meeting on July 14, 1933, Pacelli’s guarantee of nonintervention left the regime free to resolve the Jewish question. According to the cabinet minutes, “[Hitler] expressed the opinion that one should only consider it as a great achievement. The concordat gave Germany an opportunity and created an area of trust that was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry.”6 The perception of papal endorsement of Nazism, in Germany and abroad, helped seal the fate of Europe. 

The story told in this book, then, spans Pacelli’s youth, the years of his education, and his formidable early career before he became Pope. The narrative, moreover, finds a new center of gravity in Pacelli’s fateful negotiations with Hitler in the early 1930s. Those negotiations, in turn, cannot be seen in isolation from the development of the ideology of papal power through the century, nor from his wartime conduct and his attitude toward the Jews. The postwar period of Pacelli’s pontificate, through the 1950s, was the apotheosis of that power, as Pacelli presided over a monolithic, triumphalist Catholic Church in antagonistic confrontation with Communism both in Italy and beyond the Iron Curtain. 

But it could not hold. The internal structures and morale of the Catholic Church began to show signs of fragmentation and decay in the final years of Pius XII, leading to a yearning for reassessment and renewal. The Second Vatican Council was called in 1962 by John XXIII, who succeeded Pacelli in 1958, precisely to reject the monolithic, centralized Church model of his predecessors, in preference for a collegial, decentralized, human community on the move. In two key documents, The Church (Lumen gentium) and The Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes), there was a new emphasis on history, accessible liturgy, community, the Holy Spirit, and love. The guiding metaphor of the Church of the future was of a “pilgrim people of God.” Expectations ran high, and there was no lack of contention and anxiety—old habits and disciplines died hard. There were indications from the very outset that papal and Vatican centrism would not acquiesce easily. 

At the outset of Christianity’s third millennium it is clear that the Church of Pius XII is reasserting itself in countless ways, some of them obvious, some clandestine, but above all in confirmation of a pyramidal Church model—faith in the primacy of the man in the white robe dictating in solitude from the pinnacle. In the twilight years of John Paul II’s long reign, the Catholic Church gives a pervasive impression of dysfunction despite John Paul II’s historic influence in the collapse of Communist tyranny in Poland and the Vatican’s enthusiasm for entering the third millennium with a cleansed conscience. 

In the latter half of John Paul II’s reign, the policies of Pius XII have reemerged to challenge the resolutions of Vatican II and to create tensions within the Catholic Church that are likely to culminate in a future titanic struggle. As the British theologian Adrian Hastings comments: “The great tide powered by Vatican II has, at least institutionally, spent its force. The old landscape has once more emerged and Vatican II is now being read in Rome far more in the spirit of Vatican I and within the context of Pius XII’s model of Catholicism.” 

Pacelli, whose canonization process is now well advanced, has become the icon, forty years after his death, of those who read and revise the provisions of the Second Vatican Council from the viewpoint of an ideology of papal power that has already proved disastrous in the century’s history.24s

1 

The Pacellis 

Eugenio Pacelli was described routinely, during his pontificate and after his death, as a member of the Black Nobility. The Black Nobles were a small group of aristocratic families of Rome who had stood by the popes following the seizure of their dominions in the bitter struggle for the creation of the nation-state of Italy. The Pacellis, intensely loyal as they were to the papacy, were hardly aristocrats. Eugenio Pacelli’s family background was respectable but modest, rooted on his father’s side in a rural backwater close to Viterbo, a sizable town fifty miles north of Rome. At the time of Pacelli’s birth in 1876, a relative, Pietro Caterini (referred to as “the Count” by members of Eugenio’s own generation), still owned a farmhouse and a little land in the village of Onano. But Pacelli’s father and grandfather before him, as well as his elder brother, Francesco, owed their distinction not to noble links or wealth but to membership of the caste of lay Vatican lawyers in the service of the papacy.1 Nevertheless, from the 1930s onward, Pacelli’s brother and three nephews were ennobled in recompense for legal and business services to Italy and the Holy See. 

Pacelli’s immediate family association with the Holy See dates from 1819, when his grandfather, Marcantonio Pacelli, arrived in the Eternal City to study canon, or Church, law as a protégé of a clerical uncle, Monsignor Prospero Caterini. By 1834 Marcantonio had become an advocate in the Tribunal of the Sacred Rota, an ecclesiastical court involved in such activities as marriage annulments. While raising ten children (his second child being Eugenio’s father, Filippo, born in 1837), Marcantonio became a key official in the service of Pius IX, popularly known as Pio Nono. 

The quick-tempered, charismatic, and epileptic Pio Nono (Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti), crowned in 1846, was convinced, as had been his predecessors from time immemorial, that the papal territories forming the midriff of the Italian peninsula ensured the independence of the successors to St. Peter. If the Supreme Pontiff were a mere inhabitant of a “foreign” country, how could he claim to be free of local influence? Three years after his coronation, it looked as if Pio Nono had ignominiously lost his sovereignty over the Eternal City to a republican mob. On November 15, 1849, Count Pelligrino Rossi, a lay government minister of the papal states, famous for his biting sarcasm, approached the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome and greeted a sullen waiting crowd with a contemptuous smile. As he was about to enter the building, a man leapt forward and stabbed him fatally in the neck. The next day, the Pope’s Quirinal summer palace above the city was sacked, and Pio Nono, disguised in a priest’s simple cassock and a pair of large spectacles, fled to the seaside fortress of Gaeta within the safety of the neighboring kingdom of Naples. He took with him Marcantonio Pacelli as his legal and political adviser. From this fastness, Pio Nono hurled denunciations against the “outrageous treason of democracy” and threatened prospective voters with excommunication. Only with the help of French bayonets, and a loan from Rothschild’s, did Pio Nono contrive to return to the Vatican a year later to resume a despised reign over the city of Rome and what was left of the papal territories. 

Given the reactionary tendencies of Pio Nono, at least from this period onward, we can assume that Marcantonio Pacelli shared his Pontiff ’s repudiation of liberalism and democracy. After the return to Rome, Marcantonio was appointed a member of the “Council of Censorship,” a body charged with investigating those implicated in the republican “plot.” In 1852 he was appointed secretary of the interior. The papal regime during this final phase of its existence was not beneficent. Writing to William Gladstone that same year, an English traveler characterized Rome as a prison house: “There is not a breath of liberty, not a hope of tranquil life; two foreign armies; a permanent state of siege,  atrocious acts of revenge, factions raging, universal discontent; such is the papal government of the present day.”2 

The Jews were made a target of post-republican reprisal. At the beginning of his reign, Pio Nono had begun to promote tolerance, abolishing the ancient Jewish ghetto, the practice of conversionist sermons for Roman Jews, and the enforced catechizing of Jews baptized “by chance.” But although Pio Nono’s return had been paid for by a Jewish loan, the Roman Jews were now forced back into the ghetto and made to pay, literally, for having supported the revolution. Then Pio Nono became involved in a scandal that shocked the world. In 1858, a six-year old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, was kidnapped by papal police in Bologna on the pretext that he had been baptized in extremis by a servant girl six years earlier.3 Placed in the reopened House of Catechumens, the child was forcibly instructed in the Catholic faith. Despite the pleas of Edgardo’s parents, Pio Nono adopted the child and liked to play with him, hiding him under his soutane and calling out, “Where’s the boy?” The world was outraged; no less than twenty editorials on the subject were published in The New York Times, and both Emperor Franz Josef of Austria and Napoleon III of France begged the Pope to return the child to his rightful parents, all in vain. Pio Nono kept Edgardo cloistered in a monastery, where he was eventually ordained as a priest. 

The juggernaut of Italian nationalism, however, was unstoppable; and Marcantonio Pacelli, close to his Pope, was present at events of great consequence for the modern papacy. By 1860 the new Italian state under the leadership of the Piedmontese king, Vittorio Emanuele II, had seized nearly all the papal dominions. In his notorious Syllabus of Errors (1864), Pio Nono denounced eighty “modern” propositions, including socialism, freemasonry, and rationalism. In the eightieth proposition, a cover-all denunciation, he declared it a grave error to assert that the “Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” 

Pio Nono had erected about himself the protective battlements of God’s citadel; within, he raised the standard of the Catholic faith, based on the word of God as endorsed by himself, the Supreme Pontiff, Christ’s Vicar upon earth. Outside were the standards of the Antichrist, man-centered ideologies that had been sowing error ever since the French Revolution. And the poisonous fruit, he declared, had even affected the  Church itself: movements seeking to reduce the power of the popes by urging national Churches independent of Rome. Yet just as influential was a long-established tendency from the opposite extreme: ultramontanism, a call for unchallenged papal power that would shine out across the world, transcending all national and geographical boundaries. Pio Nono now began to prepare for the dogmatic declaration of just such an awe-inspiring primacy. The world would know how supreme he was by a dogma, a fiat, to be held by all under pain of excommunication. The setting for the deliberations that preceded the proclamation was a great council of the Church, a meeting of all the bishops under the presidency of the Pope. The First Vatican Council was convened by Pio Nono late in 1869 and lasted until October 20 of the following year. 

At the outset, only half of the bishops attending the Council were disposed to support a dogma of papal infallibility. But Pius IX and his close supporters went to work on them. When Cardinal Guido of Bologna protested that only the assembled bishops of the Church could claim to be witnesses to the tradition of doctrine, Pio Nono replied: “Witnesses of tradition? I am the tradition.”4 

The historic decree of papal infallibility passed on July 18, 1870, by 433 bishops, with only two against, reads as follows: 

The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, exercising the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, he defines . . . a doctrine concerning faith and morals to be held by the whole Church, through the divine assistance promised to him in St. Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer wished His Church to be endowed . . . and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.5 

An additional decree proclaimed that the Pope had supreme jurisdiction over his bishops, individually and collectively. The Pope, in effect, was ultimately and unprecedentedly in charge. During the hour of these great decisions, a storm broke over St. Peter’s dome and a thunderclap, amplified within the basilica’s cavernous interior, shattered a pane of glass in the tall windows. According to The Times (London), the anti infallibility saw in the event a portent of divine disapproval. Cardinal Henry Manning, the archbishop of Westminster and an enthusiastic lobbyist for Pio Nono, responded disdainfully: “They forgot Sinai and the Ten Commandments.”6 

Before the Council could turn to other matters, the last French troops pulled out of the Eternal City to defend Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. In came the soldiers of the Italian state, and Rome was lost to the papacy, this time forever. All that remained to Pio Nono and his Curia, the cardinals who ran the erstwhile papal states, were the 108.7 acres of the present-day Vatican City, and that on the sufferance of the new Italian nation-state. Shutting himself inside the apostolic palace overlooking St. Peter’s, Pio refused to come to an accord with the new state of Italy. He had already, in 1868, forbidden Italian Catholics to take part in democratic politics. 

Marcantonio Pacelli might have been out of a job had he not helped found a new Vatican daily newspaper in 1861. L’Osservatore Romano became the “moral and political” voice of the Vatican, and the paper, now published in seven languages, thrives to this day. Meanwhile, following in Marcantonio’s footsteps, Eugenio’s father, Filippo, had also trained as a canon lawyer and was similarly appointed to the Tribunal of the Sacred Rota, eventually becoming dean of the consistorial advocates, lawyers to the Holy See. 

Pacelli’s parents were married in 1871. His mother, Virginia Graziosi, was a Roman and, as the phrase went, a pious daughter of the Church. She was one of thirteen brothers and sisters. Two of her brothers became priests and two sisters took the veil. Filippo Pacelli performed pastoral work in the parishes of Rome, distributing spiritual reading matter to the poor. He is chiefly remembered for his attachment to a book entitled Massime eterne (Eternal Principles), a meditation on death by Alfonso Liguori, the eighteenth-century Catholic moralist and saint. Filippo handed out many hundreds of copies throughout Rome, and each year led a procession to a Roman cemetery, where the pilgrims under his guidance pondered their inevitable destiny. 

The remuneration of Vatican lay lawyers was meager, and the Pacellis were not prosperous. After 1870, there is an impression of family hardship. In later years Pacelli recollected that there was no heating in the family apartment, even in the depths of winter, save for a small brazier around which the family members warmed their hands.7 Whereas after 1870 many of their lay contemporaries entered the well-paid bureaucracies of the new Italy, the Pacellis remained faithful to their indignant rejection of Vittorio Emanuele’s usurpation. It was the practice of the loyal papal bourgeoisie to wear one glove, to place a chair facing the wall in the principal room, to keep the shutters permanently closed, and to maintain the palazzo door half shut, in token of the Pope’s confiscated patrimony. The Pacellis, although lacking an entire palazzo of their own, were of this staunch constituency. Eugenio Pacelli was thus raised in an ambiance of intense Catholic piety, penurious respectability, and an enduring sense of injured papal merit. Above all, the family was steeped in a wide scope of legal knowledge and efficacy—civil, international, and ecclesiastical. As the Pacellis saw it, their papacy and their Church, threatened on all sides by the destructive forces of the modern world, would survive and in time overcome through shrewd and universal application of the law. 

The Church Oppressed 

In the years following the First Vatican Council, Pio Nono surveyed a dismal scene of oppression from the upper stories of the apostolic palace, with its global perspective on the Catholic Church in the world. In Italy, processions and outdoor services were banned, communities of religious dispersed, Church property confiscated, priests conscripted into the army. A catalogue of measures, understandably deemed anti-Catholic by the Holy See, streamed from the new capital: divorce legislation, secularization of the schools, the dissolution of numerous holy days. 

In Germany, partly in response to the “divisive” dogma of infallibility, Bismarck began his Kulturkampf (“culture struggle”), a policy of persecution against Catholicism. Religious instruction came under state control and religious orders were forbidden to teach; the Jesuits were banished; seminaries were subjected to state interference; Church property came under the control of lay committees; civil marriage was introduced in Prussia. Bishops and clergy resisting Kulturkampf legislation were fined, imprisoned, exiled. In many parts of Europe, it was the same: in Belgium, Catholics were ousted from the teaching profession; in Switzerland, religious orders were banned; in Austria, traditionally a Catholic country, the state took over schools and passed legislation to secularize marriage; in France, there was a new wave of anticlericalism. The conviction had been widely and confidently expressed by writers, thinkers, and politicians across Europe—Bovio in Italy, Balzac in France, Bismarck in Germany, Gladstone in England—that the papacy, and Catholicism with it, had had its day. 

Even Pio Nono’s firmest supporters were beginning to suspect that the great longevity of this papacy lay at the root of all the problems. Reflecting on the matter in 1876, Westminster’s Archbishop Manning dwelt gloomily on the Holy See’s “darkness, confusion, depression . . . inactivity and illness.” Yet were things quite so universally and irredeemably bad? Had the obscurantism of the aging Pio Nono, in conflict with the unstoppable sweep of modernity, rendered the papacy, the longest surviving human institution on earth, moribund? Perhaps, on the contrary, the final passing of the Pontiff ’s temporal possessions, combined with the benefits of modern communications, had laid the ground for new power prospects as yet undreamt of. If such an idea occurred to him, Pio Nono betrayed no clear declaration of intent, save for his dying admission: “Everything has changed; my system and my policies have had their day, but I am too old to change my course; that will be the task of my successor.”8 After the death of Pio Nono on February 7, 1878, his corpse was eventually taken from its provisional resting place in St. Peter’s to a permanent tomb at San Lorenzo. When the cortege approached the Tiber, a gang of anticlerical Romans threatened to throw the coffin into the river. Only the arrival of a contingent of militia saved Pio Nono’s body from final insult.9 

Thus ended the longest and one of the most turbulent pontificates in the history of the papacy. 

Childhood and Youth in the “New” Rome 

Against the background of the troubled end to Pio Nono’s embattled papacy, Eugenio Pacelli was born in Rome on March 2, 1876, in an apartment shared by his parents and his grandfather Marcantonio on the  third floor of Via Monte Giordano 3 (now known as Via degli Orsini). The building was a few steps from the Chiesa Nuova, with its ornate and gilded baroque interior; approaching the west end of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, one sees the portico set back a little from the street. From the door of the apartment building, it took just five minutes on foot to reach the Tiber at the Sant’Angelo bridge; fifteen minutes to arrive at St. Peter’s Square. Eugenio was one of four children: his elder sister, Giuseppina, was four years old at his birth; his elder brother, Francesco, was two. A second sister, Elisabetta, was born four years later. 

The Rome in which Pacelli was born and baptized had scarcely altered physically in two hundred years. More than half the area bounded by the Aurelian walls was resplendent with churches, oratories, and convents. Christian Rome stood alongside the ruins of classical antiquity and moldering villas shaded by evergreen oaks, orange trees, and splendid umbrella pines. Much of the city gave the impression of an ancient market town. Herds of goats and sheep assembled by the fountains and shared the streets and piazzas with pedestrians and carriages. All this was to change during Pacelli’s childhood, as the city in the 1880s became the administrative capital of a new nation, and a modern world of technology, communications, and transport transformed its ancient languor. 

The men from the north had arrived and they were building the new nation’s capital in a hurry, cheaply and with scant regard for style or planning. Some of the new architectural and artistic innovations were designed to send hostile signals in the direction of the Vatican. The braggadocio “wedding cake” Emanuele monument was started in 1885 to glorify the unification of the country under its first king. A martial statue of Garibaldi seated upon his horse was raised on the highest point of the Janiculum hill, as if to dominate both the new capital and the Vatican City. 

Aged five, Pacelli was enrolled in a kindergarten run by two nuns in what is now known as Via Zanardelli. By then the family had moved to a larger apartment in the Via della Vetrina, not far from where he was born. He graduated to a private Catholic elementary school in two rooms of a building in the Piazza Santa Lucia dei Ginnasi, close to the Piazza Venezia. This establishment was subject to the whims of its founder and headmaster, Signore Giuseppe Marchi, who was in the habit of making speeches from his high desk about the “hard-heartedness of  the Jews.”10 One of Pacelli’s contemporary biographers comments on this without irony: “There was a good deal to be said in favor of Signore Marchi; he knew that the impressions gained by small children are never lost.”11 

By the age of ten Pacelli was a pupil at the Liceo Quirino Visconti, a state school with a generally anti-Catholic and anticlerical bias. It was situated in the Collegio Romano, the former site of the renowned Jesuit university in Rome. Eugenio’s brother, Francesco, was already two years ahead of him at the school. Filippo Pacelli evidently believed that his sons would benefit from gaining firsthand acquaintance with their secularist “enemies” while receiving the best classical education available in Rome. 

Eugenio, according to the siblings who survived him, was headstrong. Spindly, constitutionally delicate, he showed impressive intelligence and powers of memory from an early age. He was capable of remembering at will whole pages of material and could recall entire lessons word for word after leaving the classroom. He had a flair for the classics and modern languages. His handwriting, in youth as in adulthood, was a painstaking, elegant italic script. He played the violin and the piano, and often accompanied his sisters, who sang and played the mandolin. He liked swimming, and during vacations rode at his cousin’s farm at Onano. 

Little has survived, anecdotally or in available literary remains, to give a sense of the personalities of Eugenio Pacelli’s parents, except a testament to their “great rectitude” according to the younger daughter, Elisabetta. “Anything less than delicate expressions,” she claimed, “never passed their lips.” Virginia Pacelli led her children several times a day to pray before a shrine to the Virgin in their apartment, and the whole family said the Rosary each evening before supper. There is no evidence of childhood trauma or deprivation; with only three siblings, Eugenio clearly had much parental attention. 

The beatification testimonies naturally focus on evidence of Eugenio’s early piety. On his way home from school he regularly visited the picture of the Virgin, known as Madonna della Strada, close to the tomb of Ignatius Loyola in the Gesù Church. Here, sometimes twice daily, he poured out his heart to the Madonna, “telling her everything”. Even as a child, he was said to have displayed an unusual sense of modesty. His younger sister remembered that he never entered a room unless fully dressed. He was independent and solitary; invariably appearing at meals with a book, he would solicit the permission of his parents and siblings and then lose himself in his reading. In adolescence he went eagerly to concerts and plays, keeping a notebook at the ready so as to write up critiques of the performances during the intermissions. Elisabetta recollected that he would compose spiritual bouquets (prayers decoratively recorded on a card), for the missions or the souls in purgatory. She also remembered that he imposed upon her his own self-denials (for example, forgoing treats such as fruit juices). While yet a child, he undertook to catechize the five-year-old son of the palazzo’s janitor. 

He was an altar boy at the Chiesa Nuova, assisting at the Mass of a priest cousin, and, like many boys destined for the priesthood, his preferred play was to dress up and act out the celebration of the Mass in his bedroom. His mother encouraged him in this, giving him a piece of damask which he could imagine a Church robe; she helped him set up an altar complete with candles set in tinfoil. One year he played out the entire Holy Week ceremonies. When a sick aunt could not go to Mass, the young Eugenio provided a substitute celebration, including a homily. 

An important figure in Eugenio’s life from the age of eight was an Oratorian priest, Father Giuseppe Lais. According to Elisabetta, their father asked Father Lais to care for Eugenio’s spiritual welfare. Lais became a frequent visitor in the Pacelli household, where he made regular reports to the parents on Eugenio’s religious progress. There are indications in this relationship of the sort of special friendship that frequently existed between a priestly role model and a pious youth who is considering a religious vocation. 

Eugenio carried the influence of his parents and Father Lais with him into his secularized liceo. For an essay assignment on a “favorite” historical figure, Pacelli is said to have chosen Augustine of Hippo, prompting sneers from his classmates. When he attempted to expand a little on the history of Christian civilization, a theme absent in the curriculum, his teacher chided him, informing him that he was not employed to take the lesson. 

Among Pacelli’s scarce literary remains are a score or so of his school essays. A trifle priggish, they are nevertheless well structured and fluent. One entitled “The sign that what is imprinted in the heart appears in the face” dwells on the “evil of cowardly silence,” relating the story of a  venerable old man who, unlike other courtiers, refuses to flatter a tyrannical king.12 

In another essay, entitled “My Portrait,” the thirteen-year-old Pacelli writes a self-appraisal that manages to be both earnest and self-mocking. “I am of average height,” he begins. “My figure is slender, my face rather pale, my hair chestnut and soft, my eyes black, my nose rather aquiline. I will not say much of my chest, which, to be honest, is not robust. Finally, I have a pair of legs that are long and thin, with feet that are hardly small.” From this, he tells the reader, it is easy to grasp that “physically I am a fairly mediocre youth.” Focusing on his moral nature, he concedes that his “character is rather impatient and violent.” He hopes that “with education” he will “attain the wherewithal to control it.” He ends by acknowledging his “instinctive generosity of spirit,” and consoles himself with the reflection that “whereas I do not suffer contradiction, I easily forgive those who offend me.”13 A close school friend of Pacelli’s, later to become a cardinal, said that the boy Pacelli had “a sense of control over himself that was truly rare in the young.”14 

Among his youthful essays, only one, written when he was fifteen, reveals that Eugenio Pacelli might have experienced an adolescent setback. Written in the third person, it describes one who is “blind with vain and erroneous ideas and doubts.” Who, he asks himself, “will give him wings” so that he can “rise from this miserable earth to the highest sphere and tear apart this evil veil that surrounds him always and everywhere?” In the conclusion, he talks of this person “tearing at his hair” and wishing that he had “never been born.” He ends with a prayer: “My Lord, enlighten him!”15 Was this evidence of an emotional crisis prompted by an excess of study and youthful asceticism? The dark episode passed, never, as far as we know, to return. 

He developed a love of music, especially Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and he was interested in the history of music. Even as a boy he read the classics for pleasure and started his own classical library, which he kept all his life. He read Augustine, Dante, and Manzoni, and liked Cicero best of all.16 His favorite spiritual reading was the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, the fifteenth-century monk. The Imitation, which was to enjoy widespread popularity among religious and even devout diocesan priests until the 1960s, was suited to the ascetic aspirations of enclosed monasticism: it encouraged an interiority that was funneled directly to God without social mediation, seeing human ties as imperfections and distractions. It nevertheless counseled cheerfulness, humility, and charity toward all—with special regard for those we like least. In time Pacelli knew the entire book by heart. Among other favorite religious authors was Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the seventeenth century French bishop whose lofty and compelling eloquence Pacelli strived to emulate in years to come. Bossuet sat on his bedside table all the years of his life.

After Pacelli’s death, his personal assistant of forty years, Father Robert Leiber, S.J., wrote that the Pope’s spirituality remained essentially youthful. “In his own religious life he remained the pious boy of those days. . . . [He] had a genuine respect for any unpretentious, humble piety. He preserved a child-like love for the Mother of God from his youth.”17 

In the summer of 1894, having completed his education at the liceo at the age of eighteen with a diploma or licenza “ad honorem,” Pacelli went into retreat for ten days at the church of St. Agnes in Via Nomentana. For the first time (but not the last) he was guided through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, a manual of spiritual meditation. The Ignatian exercises see life as a battle between Satan and Christ. Retreatants are called to make clear choices about their future: to follow the standard of Christ or the standard of the Prince of Darkness. Returning home, Pacelli informed his parents that he wanted to become a priest. According to Elisabetta, “The decision did not come as a surprise. As far as we were concerned, he had been born a priest.” 

Seminarian 

The Almo Collegio Capranica, known simply as the Capranica, is a forbidding building situated in a quiet square in the heart of old Rome close to the Pantheon and no more than twenty minutes’ walk from where the Pacellis lived. The Capranica, founded in 1457, was and still is famous as a nursery for Vatican highflyers. Eugenio Pacelli was installed there in November of 1894 and registered to take a philosophy course at Rome’s nearby Jesuit university, the Gregorian. 

Pacelli commenced his studies for the priesthood during the height of the papacy of Leo XIII, Pio Nono’s successor, elected in 1878. Leo XIII was a conservative (he had collaborated in the writing of Pio Nono’s Syllabus of Errors) and he was already sixty-eight years old when he was elected, but he nevertheless made strenuous efforts to come to terms with the modern world. The early years of his reign had been marked by a series of remarkable academic initiatives: the founding in Rome of a new institute for philosophy and theology, of scriptural study centers, and of a center for astronomy. The Vatican archives were opened to Catholic and non-Catholic scholars alike. Under Leo XIII, historical perspectives almost entirely neglected by Catholic scholarship in the past were actively encouraged. 

As a nuncio Leo had traveled throughout Europe and witnessed the working and living conditions in the expanding industrial centers. In the 1880s Catholic labor groups, looking for guidance from the Church, descended on Rome in ever greater numbers. In 1891 Leo published the encyclical Rerum novarum (Of New Things), the papacy’s response, half a century on, to The Communist Manifesto and Marx’s Das Kapital. While deploring the oppression and virtual slavery of the teeming poor by the instruments of “usury” in the hands of a “small number of very rich men,” and while advocating just wages and the right to organize unions (preferably Catholic) and in certain circumstances to strike, the encyclical rejected socialism and was lukewarm on democracy. Class and inequality, Leo proclaimed, are unalterable features of the human condition, as are the rights of property ownership and especially those rights that foster and protect family life. Socialism he condemned as illusory and synonymous with class hatred and atheism. The authority of society, he taught, comes not from man but from God. 

In 1880 he had written to the archbishop of Cologne that “the pest of socialism . . . which so deeply perverts the sense of our populations, derives all its power from the darkness it causes in the intellect by hiding the light of eternal truths and corrupting the rule of life laid down by Christian morality.”18 Leo believed that the answer to socialism, this great evil of the modern world, was a Christian intellectual renaissance based on faith and reason. That renaissance, he declared, was to be rooted in the thought of the medieval philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. 

Thomism, or neo-Thomism as it came to be called following Leo’s 1879 encyclical on the revival of Aquinas studies,19 is an all encompassing intellectual synthesis, bringing together the truths of Revelation and the realms of the supernatural, the physical universe,  nature, society, family, and the individual. 

After a period of more than a century in which secular schools of philosophy throughout Europe and the United States had become ever more subjective or materialist, Leo’s decision to rediscover the secure and abiding absolutes of Thomistic philosophy—rising, as the Pontiff thought, above the fogs of modern skepticism like a shining medieval cathedral—seemed inspired. Yet, much as Leo had energized Catholic academia after generations of intellectual aridity, the neo-Thomist revival, at the level of the average candidate for the priesthood, signaled an ominous swing toward conformity and a narrowing of the clerical mind. Neo-Thomism, at least as it came to be taught in seminaries in the 1890s, rejected much that was good and true in modern ideas. 

In 1892, two years before Pacelli arrived at the Gregorian University, Leo had decreed that St. Thomas’s system was to be regarded as “definitive” in all seminaries and Catholic universities. And where Thomas had neglected to expound on a topic, teachers were urged to reach conclusions that were reconcilable with his thinking. Under the next papacy, of Pius X, neo-Thomism would acquire an orthodoxy tantamount to dogma. 

Formed in Isolation 

As Pacelli began his studies in the confident intellectual climate in ecclesiastical Rome, the arrangements for his priestly education took a strange turn in the summer of 1895. At the end of his first academic year, he dropped out of both the Capranica and the Gregorian University. According to Elisabetta, the food at the Capranica was to blame; his “fastidious” stomach would plague him for the rest of his life, suggesting a nervous, high-strung constitution. The whole family, she told the canonization tribunal, would troop along to the college every Sunday bearing special provisions to sustain him.20 

She goes on to state briefly that their father eventually managed to get Eugenio permission to live at home while continuing his academic studies. The effect of the new arrangement was that Pacelli returned to motherly protection, escaping the peer-group rough-and-tumble, the rigorous disciplines of seminary training as well as the fellowship of community life. An inability to cope with the hardship of the seminary would have spelled an abrupt end to  the clerical ambitions of most candidates for the priesthood. The Pacellis, however, had powerful friends at court. 

With the exception of a friendship with a younger cousin, as will be seen, his mother remained at the center of his emotional life. The mutual devotion between mother and son is everywhere apparent in the beatification testimonies. When he became Pope, he was to decorate his pectoral cross with her simple jewels. 

In the autumn of 1895 he was registered for the new academic year to study theology and Scripture at the St. Apollinaris Institute, not far from his home, and simultaneously for languages at the secular university, the Sapienza, also close by. His association with these institutions, however, was merely academic. At home, Elisabetta said, he wore his soutane and Roman collar throughout the day and continued to “benefit from the influence of Father Lais,” the figure who had hovered over his childhood spiritual progress. In the summer of 1896, at the age of twenty, he traveled to Paris with Lais to attend a “Congress of Astronomy.” 

There are no telling anecdotes to describe the course of his priestly education through the next four years. All that is known for certain is that he passed the necessary exams that qualified him to proceed to Holy Orders. On April 2, 1899, at the age of just twenty-three, he was ordained alone in the private chapel of an auxiliary bishop of Rome, rather than with the rest of the candidates of the Rome diocese in St. John Lateran. Once again he had eschewed his contemporaries. The following day he said his first Mass at the altar of the Virgin in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, assisted by Father Lais. 

Pacelli had completed his education in “Sacred Theology” with a doctoral degree (by today’s standards, the degree was more accurately a licentiate) awarded on the basis of a short dissertation, now lost to posterity, and an oral examination in Latin. In the autumn he registered again at the St. Apollinaris Institute to study canon law. This marked the beginning of serious postgraduate research, during which he probably came under the influence of the Jesuit canonist Franz Xavier Wernz, an expert on questions of ecclesiastical authority in canon law. 

But the influence of Rome’s Jesuits, whom Pacelli regarded as his special mentors while he was a seminarian and throughout his life, is notable for other reasons. In 1898, as Pacelli was completing his studies for the priesthood, Civiltà Cattolica, the Rome-based Jesuit journal, was arguing the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer accused of treason in France. The journal continued to proclaim his guilt the following year, even after he had been pardoned. The editor, Father Raffaele Ballerini, charged that the Jews “had bought all the newspapers and consciences in Europe” in order to acquit Dreyfus. In a chilling conclusion, he asserted that “wherever Jews had been granted citizenship” the outcome had been the “ruination” of Christians or the massacre of the “alien race.”21 

How Pacelli was affected by these opinions, published in a highly influential periodical in Rome, we do not know. But Catholic ordinands at the end of the nineteenth century were bound to be influenced by the long history of Christian attitudes toward Judaism. 

Catholicism and Anti-Semitism 

There were significant differences between nineteenth-century racism, inspired by perverted social Darwinism, and traditional Christian anti Judaism that had persisted from early Christianity. Racist anti-Semitism, of the kind that was to give rise to the Nazi Final Solution, was based on the idea that Jewish genetic stock was biologically inferior in nature; hence the evil logic that their extermination would yield advantages on the path to national greatness. In the late Middle Ages, Spanish Jews were excluded from the “pure” community of Christian blood, and questions were raised during the period of European discovery of the Americas about the status of the indigenous “natural slaves” in the New World; but racist notions had never formed part of orthodox Christianity. Christians, on the whole, ignored racial and national origin in the pursuit of converts. 

Christian antipathy toward the Jews was born out of the belief, dating from the early Christian Church, that the Jews had murdered Christ— indeed, that they had murdered God. The Early Fathers of the Church, the great Christian writers of the first six centuries of Christianity, showed striking evidence of anti-Judaism. “The blood of Jesus,” wrote Origen, “falls not only on the Jews of that time, but on all generations of Jews up to the end of the world.” St. John Chrysostom wrote, “The Synagogue is a brothel, a hiding place for unclean beasts. . . . Never has any Jew prayed to God. . . . They are possessed by demons.” 

At the First Council of Nicaea in 325, the Emperor Constantine ordained that Easter should not compete with the Jewish Passover: “It is unbecoming,” he declared, “that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people.” An accumulation of imperial measures against Jews ensued: special taxes, a ban on new synagogues, the outlawing of intermarriage between Jews and Christians. Persecution flourished in successive imperial reigns. By the fifth century, Jews were routinely attacked during Holy Week and were excluded from public office, and synagogues were burned. 

It may well be asked why the Christians did not exterminate all Jews in this early period of Christian empire. According to Christian belief, the Jews were to survive and continue their wandering Diaspora as a sign of the curse they had brought upon their own people. From time to time, popes of the first millennium called for restraint, but never for an end to persecution or to a change of heart. Pope Innocent III in the early thirteenth century epitomized the papal view of the first millennium: “Their words—‘May his blood be on us and our children’—have brought inherited guilt upon the entire nation, which follows them as a curse where they live and work, when they are born and when they die.” The Fourth Lateran Council, convened under Innocent III in 1215, laid down the requirement that Jews should wear distinguishing headgear. 

Denied social equality, banned from owning land, excluded from public office and most forms of trade, the Jews had few alternatives to moneylending, which was forbidden to Christians under Church law. Licensed to lend at strictly defined interest rates, the Jews became cursed as “bloodsuckers” and “usurers” living off the debts of Christians. 

The Middle Ages was an era of unprecedented persecution of the Jews, punctuated by occasional calls for restraint on the part of enlightened popes. The Crusaders made it part of their mission to torment and kill Jews on their way to and from the Holy Land; the practice of enforced conversions and baptisms, especially of Jewish boys, became widespread. One of the chief objectives of the new orders of preaching friars was to convert the Jews. A dispute flared between the Franciscans and the Dominicans over the right of princes to forcibly baptize Jewish  children as an extension of their lordship over slaves within their domains. According to the Franciscans following the theologian Duns Scotus, Jews were slaves by divine decree; Thomas Aquinas the Dominican argued that, by the natural law pertaining to parenthood, the Jews had a right to educate their children in the faith they chose for them.22 

But the Middle Ages were also marked by the insidious development that was later to be known as the “blood libel.” Starting in England in the twelfth century, the belief spread rapidly that Jews tortured and sacrificed Christian children. There was an associated myth that Jews stole consecrated Hosts, the Communion bread that had become the “body and blood” of Christ in the Mass, in order to perform abominable rites. At the same time, allegations of ritual murder, human sacrifice, and Host desecration gave impetus to a belief that Judaism involved the performance of magic aimed at undermining and ultimately destroying Christendom.23 

Executions of Jews accused of ritual murder were accompanied by the destruction of entire Jewish communities accused of employing magic arts to cause the Black Death and other calamities great and small. 

The advent of the Reformation saw a reduction in such ritual-magic trials, as Jewish blood-libel myths gave way to the conviction that child murder victims had been practiced upon by witches. But just as soon, a Pope of the sixteenth century, Paul IV, instituted the ghetto and the wearing of the yellow badge. 

Through the eighteenth century, Jews gradually acquired freedom in regions farthest from the Roman center of Catholicism—Holland, England, the Protestant enclaves of North America—but the papal states persisted in repressive measures against Jews well into the nineteenth century. In the brief flush of liberalism on his election, Pio Nono, as we have seen, disestablished the ghetto, but he soon reestablished it after his return from exile in Gaeta. It took the formation of the nation-state of Italy to bring Rome’s ghetto to an end, although the “ghetto area” survived as a residential district for the poorer Jews of the city until the Second World War. Meanwhile, anti-Judaism smoldered and occasionally flared in Rome long into the reign of Leo XIII, when Pacelli was a schoolboy. The most enduring form of antipathy focused on the “obstinacy” of the Jews, the theme of Pacelli’s ranting schoolmaster, Signore Marchi

There was, in fact, a curious coincidence between Pacelli’s birthplace and this myth of hard-heartedness, showing the importance of custom in the persistence of prejudice. On Via Monte Giordano, the street in which Pacelli was born, it had been the custom over many centuries for new popes to perform an anti-Jewish ceremony on their way to the basilica of St. John Lateran. Here the Pontiff would halt his procession to receive a copy of the Pentateuch from the hand of Rome’s rabbi, with his people in attendance. The Pope then returned the text upside down with twenty pieces of gold, proclaiming that, while he respected the Law of Moses, he disapproved of the hard hearts of the Jewish race. For it was an ancient and firmly held view of Catholic theologians that if the Jews would only listen with open hearts to the arguments for the Christian faith, they would instantly see the error of their ways and convert. 

The notion of Jewish obstinacy was a crucial element in the case of Edgardo Mortara. When the parents of the kidnapped Edgardo pleaded in person with the Pope for the return of their son, Pio Nono told them that they could have their son back at once if only they converted to Catholicism—which, of course, they would do instantly if they opened their hearts to Christian Revelation. But they would not, and did not. The Mortaras, in the view of Pio Nono, had brought all their sufferings upon their own heads as a result of their obduracy. 

Jewish “hard-heartedness” was parallel and at points overlapped with the notion of Jewish “blindness,” exemplified in the Good Friday liturgy of the Roman Missal, when the celebrant prayed for the “perfidious Jews” and asked that “our God and Lord would withdraw the veil from their hearts: that they also may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.”24 This prayer, at which the celebrant and people disdained to kneel, continued until it was abolished by Pope John XXIII. 

Raised in a family of canon lawyers (Marcantonio Pacelli was probably consulted on the Mortara case), Pacelli in all likelihood knew the Mortara story and the arguments defending the Pontiff ’s actions, just as he was surely influenced in the classroom by Signore Marchi’s remarks about Jewish obstinacy. The importance of the allegation of Jewish blind obstinacy was its potential to reinforce the conviction, widely held by Catholics otherwise innocent of anti-Judaism, let alone anti-Semitism, that the Jews were responsible for their own misfortunes—  a view that was to encourage Catholic Church officials in the 1930s to look the other way as Nazi anti-Semitism raged in Germany. 

And yet more extreme forms of anti-Judaism also erupted among Catholic intellectual clerics in Rome during the reign of Leo XIII, no doubt with an influence on ordinands in the pontifical universities. Allegations of blood libel were raised once more in a series of articles published between February 1881 and December 1882 in Civiltà Cattolica. Written by Giuseppe Oreglia de San Stefano, S.J., the articles claimed that the killing of children for the Paschal Feast was “all too common” in the East, and that making use of the blood of a Christian child was a general law “binding on the conscience of all Hebrews.” Every year the Jews “crucify a child,” and in order that the blood be effective, “the child must die in torment.”25 

In 1890 Civiltà Cattolica again turned its attention to the Jews in a series of articles republished in pamphlet form as Della questione ebraica in Europa (Rome, 1891), aimed at exposing the activity of the Jews in the formation of the modern liberal nation-state. The author charged that “by their cunning,” the Jews instigated the French Revolution in order to gain civic equality, and thence they insinuated themselves into key positions in most state economies with the aim of controlling them and establishing their “virulent campaigns against Christianity.” The Jews were “the race that nauseates”; they were “an idle people who neither work nor produce anything; who live on the sweat of others.” The pamphlet concluded by calling for the abolition of “civic equality” and for the segregation of Jews from the rest of the population. 

While there is an arguable distinction between racist anti-Semitism and religious anti-Judaism, this material, published in Rome during Pacelli’s school days, exemplifies a groundswell of vicious antipathy. That views such as these were promoted by the leading Jesuit journal, enjoying papal auspices, indicates their potential outreach and semblance of authority. Such prejudices were hardly inimical to the racist theories that would culminate in the Nazis’ furious assault upon European Jewry in the Second World War. It is plausible indeed that these Catholic prejudices actually bolstered aspects of Nazi anti-Semitism.

2 

Hidden Life 

There is a photograph in the papal archives depicting Leo XIII, Pope from 1878 to 1903, seated on a throne placed upon a dais in the Vatican gardens. He appears languid, emaciated (he was known by the American bishops as “bag of bones”), settled in his sense of absolute, monarchical authority. He is surrounded by close aides, but only one of them is seated—the stout figure of Mariano Rampolla del Tinaro, Cardinal Secretary of State and chief architect of Leo’s international diplomacy. Rampolla sits on a simple chair, as if well satisfied with his lowly relegation, placed askew from the camera as if to avoid sharing the same viewpoint as his Pope. 

There is a photographic portrait of Pacelli too at this time, as an appealing, gentle-eyed young priest. In 1901, two years before Leo XIII’s death, he was recruited into the ambit of this powerful, intimate court to learn the ropes of Vatican bureaucracy and to become an instant and outstanding favorite. Was he, after five years’ pontifical education and sheltered mothering a casa, a malleable factotum plucked for his pliancy from the hundreds of candidates in the great Roman seminaries? Or was he a strong and resolute personality who had arrived by longlaid strategy in his proper element? Events would soon reveal Pacelli’s strengths, his potential to play a role in an administration in transition to the apotheosis of modern papal power. 

For all his social compassion, Leo XIII was an authoritarian who established many of the twentieth-century standards of papal exaltation observed until the election of John XXIII. Catholic visitors were required to kneel at his feet during audiences, and throughout his reign he never spoke so much as a word to menial servants. He encouraged the cult of his own personality, cooperating in the creation of mass produced full-color pictures of his personage and encouraging large pilgrim groups to the Eternal City. Yet, despite his propensity to personal absolutism, he strived to exert a direct and practical influence on the outside world from his Roman sanctuary. Through frequent encyclicals couched in flowery language, he established the modern practice of routine papal teaching from a lofty vantage point. 

Papal influence was amplified by modern communications as missionary endeavors expanded, Catholic populations multiplied in industrial regions, and Catholic emigration to the New World increased apace. Leo recognized the need to keep abreast of a rapidly changing world and took measures to achieve outreach, to make a difference by strengthening lines of access and intelligence from the Roman center to the farthest reaches of the earth. Trained in diplomacy, Leo believed that the papal diplomatic service had a crucial role to play in both the implementation of internal Church discipline and the conduct of Church-State relations. In 1885, Spain and Germany appealed to him to mediate a dispute over the possession of the Caroline Islands in the Pacific. And in 1899 Czar Nicholas II of Russia and Queen Wilhelmina of Holland used his good offices in their attempts to establish a peace conference of European nations. Leo was eager to be seen as an independent arbiter, indeed a supreme judge, in world affairs. Pondering Vatican diplomacy with the aid of the works of Thomas Aquinas, he came to expound anew, in the encyclical Immortale Dei (1886), the relationship between the Holy See and nation-states. According to international law, secular states recognize mutual sovereignty not merely by treaties but in the exchange of accredited representatives. The papal nuncio, in Leo’s view, was the representative of papal spiritual sovereignty as the ambassador is the representative of his nation’s political sovereignty. Leo XIII saw the power of the stateless, otherworldly Holy See as a “perfect society”—perfect in its integrity and autonomy. Due to Leo’s enthusiasm for the potential of papal diplomacy and a vigorous recruitment and training policy under the leadership of Rampolla, the permanent missions accredited to the Holy See were to increase from eighteen to twenty-seven. 

Meanwhile, as a recently ordained priest, Eugenio Pacelli cared for the souls of pupils at the Cenacle Convent in Rome, and he was a frequent visitor at the Convent of the Assumption near the Villa Borghese, where he acted as celebrant for the chapel liturgies. No doubt under the influence of his grandfather, his father, and his brother Francesco, Pacelli was hard at work studying canon law in the expectation that he would receive a call to begin his “ecclesiastical career,” as his father had termed it when he sought a place for Eugenio at the Capranica. 

Details of how a high-level emissary headhunted the young priest have become legend.1 Late one evening in early 1901, Pacelli was at home playing the violin, accompanied by his sister Elisabetta on the mandolin. There was an insistent rap at the door, and there stood Monsignor Pietro Gasparri, recently appointed undersecretary in the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, the equivalent of the Foreign Office within the Secretariat of State. Pacelli, according to his sister, could not disguise his amazement. A short, portly man of peasant stock, Gasparri, then fifty-one, was already famous in international circles for his brilliance as a canon lawyer, having held the chair in that discipline at the Institut Catholique in Paris for eighteen years. When the prelate invited Pacelli to join him in the Secretariat of State, the young priest at first protested that it had always been his ambition to work “as a pastor of souls.” But after hearing out the monsignor on the importance of defending the Church from the onslaught of secularism and liberalism throughout Europe, he relented. 

For the next thirty years, Gasparri and Pacelli, physically and socially at odds, were to work in tandem during a period in which canon law, and concordat law—the Holy See’s scope of international relations— were to shape the growth of twentieth-century papal power. By 1930 Pacelli would succeed Gasparri as Cardinal Secretary of State, a post he would retain until he became Pontiff. 

A few days after Gasparri’s visit, Pacelli was appointed an apprendista, an apprentice in Gasparri’s department. Not many weeks later (an indication of the favoritism he excited within the Vatican), Pacelli was chosen by Leo XIII himself, according to the official account,2 to carry a letter of condolence to London for presentation at the Court of St. James’s to King Edward VII on the occasion of the death of Queen Victoria. He was just twenty-five years old and already singled out for the fast track of promotion. 

In 1902, in addition to his Vatican post, he was appointed part-time lecturer in canon law at the St. Apollinaris. This was followed by a part-time post at the Academy for Nobles and Ecclesiastics, a college for young diplomats, where he taught civil and canon law. By 1904 he received his doctorate. The theme of his thesis 3 was the nature of concordats (special treaties between the Holy See and nation-states, monarchies, or empires) and the function of canon law when a concordat, for whatever reason, falls into abeyance. The importance of this research will become apparent later in this narrative, when we witness Pacelli embarking on a series of concordat renegotiations in order to bring Church-State treaties in line with the new Code of Canon Law. 47s

He was soon promoted to the post of minutante, entrusted with writing digests of reports that were dispatched to the Secretariat from all over the world. In the same year, he was made papal chamberlain with the title monsignor, and he was promoted again during the following year when he received the title domestic prelate. Two years later, he was again favored with a trip to London, this time accompanying Rafael Merry del Val, the Spanish-Irish Cardinal Secretary of State, to a Eucharistic congress in London—an outdoor rally of religious and laity, where, resplendent in magenta, Pacelli processed through the streets of Westminster. 

The beatification testimonies speak of his enormous appetite for work, his extreme love of order and discipline. His only recreation was a daily postprandial constitutional, breviary in hand, in the Villa Borghese. Just one story, however, suggests that Don Eugenio might have digressed a little from his well-regulated existence to court emotional danger during these early years of his priesthood. 

Pacelli had a cousin, Maria Teresa Pacelli, the daughter of his cousin Ernesto, another Pacelli layman with “a certain influence within the Holy See.” Maria Teresa’s parents had separated (why, we are not told) and she was accordingly lodged with the nuns of the Convent of the Assumption from the age of five. In 1901 or thereabouts, Maria Teresa, then thirteen, was plunged into a “silenzio sepolcrale”—a sepulchral silence, or depression, as the result of a quarrel between her mother and one of the nuns, who had apparently made insulting remarks about the king of Italy during a lesson. 

Ernesto Pacelli, without telling Maria Teresa, implored Don Eugenio to “draw her out of her psychological refuge,” and thus began a relationship that appears to have persisted for five years. Every Tuesday the young priest and his cousin walked and talked alone in the vestibule of the convent chapel for at least two hours. They spoke of matters, she said, that were protected by the seal of the confessional. “He opened me up,” she told the beatification tribunal, “and I confided in him.” But much more than this: according to Maria Teresa, “our two souls came together, bound by God.”4 She found in him, she believed, “another Christ.” Despite what she described as “their discretion and secrecy,” her father became suspicious of the relationship during her eighteenth year and put an end to it. “My father,” she recorded, “did not comprehend this discretion and secrecy, nor did he understand the noble integrity of Don Eugenio.” Don Eugenio, Maria Teresa tells us, “mournfully accepted this humiliation, and I lost a unique support and moral and spiritual guidance.” The next time she saw him, she says, was several years later at a special papal audience, when “he passed by me: his demeanor open, modest, humble, reserved but cheerful, and marked by simplicity as always. He had the purity of one who lives in the presence of God. And all the convent girls used to say—‘Who could look at him and not love him!’ ”5 

Apart from such glimpses, there are insufficient details to provide a narrative of the growth of his character. But a clearer account has emerged in recent years of a series of ecclesiastical shock waves that Pacelli witnessed silently from the Vatican epicenter. The fact that he remained an exceptional favorite through this crisis—known as the anti-Modernist campaign—and continued to be promoted while others were cast aside, tells us much about his discretion, his resilience, and his survival skills. That he was indelibly affected by the affair cannot be doubted. 

Pope Pius X 

In the first days of July 1903, Leo XIII, now in his ninety-third year, had finally admitted that he was dying. Over the next two weeks, flocks of prelates and Vatican hangers-on swarmed in the papal apartments, while multitudes gathered outside in St. Peter’s Square. Still Leo clung to life, this skinny ancient with a palsied left hand who had been appointed a mere caretaker a quarter of a century earlier. Eventually, incredibly, the rumor spread that he had rallied and would soon go back to work. On the morning of July 20, he called for pens and paper and set about composing Latin verses in honor of St. Anselm. At four in the afternoon, however, he expired in a suffocating fit. 

The body was not embalmed until the next day, and so, due to the heat, the ceremony of kissing the bare papal feet was on this occasion neglected. After the customary funeral the undertakers were obliged to give the casket a kick to shove it into place. The incident was observed by a horrified Giuseppe Sarto, Patriarch of Venice, who subsequently remarked to a colleague: “See. That’s how popes end up.”6 

The cardinals went into the conclave the following month, from the first to the fourth of August, and it was widely expected that Rampolla, the man to have continued the policies of Leo XIII, would emerge as Pope. In the course of the conclave, the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, who had a power of veto, expressed his displeasure with the erstwhile Cardinal Secretary of State. Support for Rampolla at first increased, in apparent reaction to this interference, but then it ebbed away. In the end, the triple crown went to Giuseppe Sarto, who had no insider experience of the Vatican and the Curia. He took the name Pius X. The secular world had intervened for the last time in modern papal elections, and the new Pope saw to it that outside influence would never again be countenanced. From one perspective, the Church as a sovereign society had at last attained the “perfection” for which Leo XIII had so devoutly strived. From another, the last taint of secular pluralism was removed from the election of popes. 

Sarto, then sixty-eight, was the antithesis of his aloof and aristocratic predecessor. He was the son of a postman and a seamstress from Venetia. In choosing him, the conclave of cardinals had opted for a pastoral Pope, a man of prayer and singular piety who had spent much of his working life as a curate, a parish priest, a seminary spiritual director, and a diocesan bishop. 

Sarto’s ambition was to renew the spiritual life of the Catholic Church, to inspire genuine personal devotion rather than a mere outward show of piety, and to inculcate a sense of religious experience in the young. His motto was “to restore all things in Christ.” In the course of his pontificate, from 1903 to 1914, he was to encourage the teaching of  the catechism and regular attendance at Holy Communion as routine features of parish life. He lowered the age at which children can receive the Eucharist from eleven to seven, which led to the popular celebration of First Communion with white dresses, sashes, presents, and family feasting. It also led to the practice of early regular confession. 

Pius X had the aura of a pious, dedicated pastor, but he was suspicious of things intellectual and modern. His piety, so evident to all who came in contact with him, was matched by a holy anger. Where Leo XIII had seemed to engage and appease the modern world, Sarto set his face against it, promoting a reign of fearful conformity that would affect seminarians, theologians, priests, bishops, and even cardinals. 

The Modernist Crisis 

A few weeks after the coronation of Pius X, the academic year of 1903 had been marked in Milan’s principal diocesan seminary with an inaugural address preached by a Father Antonio Fumagalli to the assembled ordinands and professors in the presence of the metropolitan cardinal archbishop.7 All present, Fumagalli told them, must be on their guard against an intellectual poison that had erupted in France and was spreading throughout Italy. He was referring to a set of ideas, widely known as “Modernism,” linked with certain Catholic French scholars who, in contradiction to Thomas Aquinas, argued that there was an unbridgeable gap between natural and supernatural knowledge. The attempt, as Fumagalli described it, was to undermine Catholic orthodoxy and the beliefs of devout Catholics. Its evil effects were relativism and skepticism. 

Revisiting the controversy after a century, it is fairer to describe the Modernist culprits less as progressives, liberals, modernizers than as writers and thinkers who were attempting “to re-engage Catholic life, thought and spirituality with the forces shaping contemporary culture.”8 Fear of modern influences in the Church had focused on a similarly disparate modernizing group in North America during the reign of Leo XIII. Known by its critics as Americanism, the transatlantic “modernists” had sought to bring Catholicism in line with democracy. Traditionalists in the United States, and the Curia in Rome, saw a danger of calls for democratization of the Church itself. Leo had stamped firmly on it in an apostolic letter in January 1899. “Religious Americanism,” the Pope wrote, “involves a greater danger and is more hostile to Catholic doctrine and discipline, inasmuch as the followers of these novelties judge that a certain liberty ought to be introduced into the Church.”9 Americanism died a sudden death in the first cold blast of papal disapproval. 

The “poison” of European Modernism had been identified, for example, in the teaching and works of Louis Duchesne, a Catholic professor in the 1870s at the Institut Catholique in Paris who questioned the notion that God acts in a direct way in the affairs of humankind. In the early 1890s Duchesne’s pupil, the Catholic priest and scholar Alfred Loisy, went further by denying that every line of Scripture was literally rather than perhaps metaphorically true. In his book The Gospel and the Church, published in 1902, Loisy urged the importance of studying the Church from social, symbolic, and “organic” perspectives, precisely in order to counteract prevailing liberal Protestant ideas. But whatever his intentions, Loisy’s work, like that of Duchesne, provoked the wrath of the Curia, which interpreted all such ideas, even in defense of the Church, as a dangerous challenge to Catholic orthodoxy and Roman authority. The book was nevertheless greeted with enthusiasm by a number of French seminarians and teachers who thus became tarred by the Modernist brush. It was also welcomed in Britain by the theologian Baron Friedrich von Hügel and the Jesuit George Tyrrell. Tyrrell attracted sufficient opprobrium from Rome to be denied a Christian burial. Five of Loisy’s books were eventually put on the Index of Forbidden Books. Meanwhile, the “poison” that was deemed to be spreading throughout the Church had to be eradicated. 

The man who ran Pius X’s campaign to expunge Modernism, Umberto Benigni, worked in the very heart of the Vatican, in the same office as Pacelli: the Department of Extraordinary Affairs in the Secretariat of State. Benigni was a monsignor of enormous energy and charm who had won the confidence of his Pontiff and several highly placed cardinals. He was to hunt down suspect Modernists with fanatical zeal. Although he had studied Church history and had even held a part-time post in the subject at one of the Roman seminaries, he once condemned a group of world-class historians as men for whom “history is nothing but a continual desperate attempt to vomit. For this sort of human being there is only one remedy: the Inquisition.”10 

Benigni led a double life. In the mornings he worked in the Vatican department; during the afternoons and weekends he operated, from his private apartment, the secret service known as the Sodalitium Pianum (“Sodality of Pius”). Having managed a Catholic news service and newspaper, Benigni employed the most up-to-date media skills to run his espionage service, distributing anti-Modernist propaganda and gathering information on “culprits” through a network of stringers and correspondents. All this was done with the aid of modern copying machines and typewriters and the assistance of four staff members, two of them nuns. Benigni had his own secret code: Pius X, for example, was known as “Mama.” 

Countless seminarians, seminary teachers, curates, parish priests, and bishops were “delated,” or reported, for doctrinal unorthodoxy, the details recorded in Benigni’s bulging files. Even princes of the Church were not immune. The cardinal archbishops of Vienna and Paris were delated, as was the entire Dominican community at Fribourg University in Switzerland. The “offenses” ranged from favorable mentioning of “Christian democracy,” to carrying a newspaper of liberal hue, to casting doubt on the truth of the translation by angels of the Holy House of Nazareth to the town of Loreto. A chance word in the refectory or in the seminary common room, being seen in the company of a suspected modernist, no less than preaching a sermon of unorthodox tendency, could lead to a denunciation followed by removal from a post of academic responsibility and banishment to a distant village curacy. And who could be trusted, when students and even old friends were known to cooperate with Benigni’s espionage, perhaps out of righteous conscience, perhaps in hope of preferment? 

In the absence of evidence, we can only speculate how Pacelli was affected by the anti-Modernist campaign that rocked the Church to its foundations and encouraged an intellectual narrowness and circumspection that would last for more than half a century. As the depositions for his canonization show, Pius X was ultimately responsible for this intellectual persecution. Pius X’s attitude toward the Modernists in time became patently intemperate. “They want them to be treated with oil, soap, and caresses,” he once said, referring to those who counseled compassion toward the alleged perpetrators. “But they should be beaten with fists. In a duel, you don’t count or measure the blows, you strike as you  can. War is not made with charity: it is a struggle, a duel.”11 Small wonder that he was prepared to endorse Benigni’s remarkable measures to seek out and destroy the perceived enemy. 

In his deposition for the canonization process of Pius X, Pietro Gasparri, Pacelli’s boss and close confidant during these years, gave a condemnatory account of Pius X’s personal initiatives in the campaign. “Pope Pius X,” Gasparri told the tribunal, “approved, blessed, and encouraged a secret espionage association outside and above the hierarchy, which spied on members of the hierarchy itself, even on their Eminences the Cardinals; in short, he approved, blessed and encouraged a sort of Freemasonry in the Church, something unheard of in ecclesiastical history.”12 

As the persecution gathered pace, Pius X issued repeated warnings and banned more and more “Modernist” works. At length, on April 17, 1907, he delivered an allocution against these “rebels” who were attempting, he declared, to throw out Catholic theology and the decrees of the Church Councils, and to “adapt to the times.” Their errors, he proclaimed in a catchall definition of Modernism, constituted “not a heresy, but the compendium and poison of all the heresies.”13 On July 3, 1907, he published the decree Lamentabili, condemning sixty-five Modernist propositions. One proposition to be especially lamented was the belief that “the Christ shown by history is much inferior to the Christ who is the object of Faith.” Another was the belief that Catholicism can be reconciled with true science only if it is transformed into non-dogmatic Christianity, that is to say, into a broad and liberal Protestantism. Two months later, Pius X issued Pascendi, his encyclical on Modernism. 

Pascendi 14 is of crucial importance in the history of the twentieth century Catholic Church, for it establishes much of the dogmatic and centrist tone of papal teaching until the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. At the same time, it further defines the power relations, the defining ideology of primacy, between the papacy and the entire Church, making it clear, and for all time, that intellectual questions within the Catholic Church are not a matter for scholarly peer-group discussion but a moral matter to be resolved by papal authority. As the saying went at the time, quoting Alfonso Liguori: “The Pope’s will: God’s will.” 

Meanwhile, Pius X had harsh words for the alleged errors of Americanism, which he believed to be still alive in the United States. Insinuating that Americanism had been a precursor of Modernism, the Pontiff declared that “with regard to morals, [the Modernists] adopt the principle of the Americanists, that the active virtues are more important than the passive, both in the estimation in which they must be held and in the exercise of them.”15 In their attempts to distance themselves from all taints of Modernism, the members of the American hierarchy now encouraged the Church in the United States to lapse into a “passive” intellectual torpor, from which it did not rouse itself for another thirty years. 

Three years later, in an ultimate act of coercion, Pius X published a directive on September 1, 1910,16 obliging ordinands, and priests in teaching and administrative posts, to swear an oath denouncing Modernism and supporting Lamentabili and Pascendi. Known as the Anti-Modernist Oath, sworn to this day in modified form by Catholic ordinands, it required acceptance of all papal teaching, and acquiescence at all times to the meaning and sense of such teaching as dictated by the Pope. As a recent commentator on papal authority, Father Paul Collins, puts it: “There was no possibility of any form of dissent, even interior. The conscience of the person taking the oath was forced to accept not only what Rome proposed, but even the sense in which Rome interpreted it. Not only was this contrary to the traditional Catholic understanding of the role of conscience, but it was a form of thought control that was unrivalled even under fascist and communist regimes.”17 This ambience of assumed mistrust was the predicament in which Pacelli found himself as he climbed the slippery ladder of Vatican bureaucracy. 

The full extent of the detailed itemization of the Modernist conspiracy, as described by the Curia, was largely imaginary. What was not imaginary was the Pontiff ’s fear of the modern world, the terror of centrifugal breakup, that had driven Pius X into a posture of profound opposition to even the more moderate aspects of social and political modernity at the beginning of the new century, including the benefits of democracy. 

It is impossible to say how the campaign affected Pacelli personally— whether he resisted suspicion by discretion or became a silent party to persecution. It is plausible, however, that the atmosphere of mistrust sharpened his skills in veiled language and circumlocution. Defenders of Pacelli’s record on anti-Modernism point out that, many years later as Pope, he found it in his heart to forgive Romolo Murri, an excommunicated Modernist.18 The fact, however, is that unlike his senior colleague Gasparri who evidently deplored Pius X’s behavior, Pacelli supported it. It was Pacelli, as Pius XII, who canonized Pius X a great saint of the Church on May 29, 1954, describing him as “a glowing flame of charity and shining splendor of sanctity.”19

3 

Papal Power Games 

Revered for his pastoral solicitude, deplored by liberals to this day for the anti-Modernist campaign, Pius X is less remembered for a project that constitutes arguably the most important event in the history of the Catholic Church in the modern era—the writing, promulgation, and publication of a Catholic legal manual known as the 1917 Code of Canon Law. Begun in strictest secrecy in 1904, the text, together with the Anti-Modernist Oath, became the means by which the Holy See was to establish and sustain the new, unequal, and unprecedented power relationship that had arisen between the papacy and the Church. Gasparri and Pacelli were its principal architects, with the support of two thousand scholars and the world’s seven hundred bishops. The task was to absorb Pacelli for thirteen years. 

Canon law, the body of internal laws of the Catholic Church, had been gathering over many centuries in a jungle of decrees, rules, and regulations. Principally organized (or disorganized) by date rather than by theme or topic, it was rich in local diversity. The idea of bringing order to this legal chaos was first suggested to the Curia by Pio Nono in 1864, but further decisions were postponed until the planned First Vatican Council six years later. As a result of the outbreak of the Franco/Prussian War and the suspension of the Council on October 20, 1870, a decision on the canon law project was neglected for another thirty years.1 

The decision to create a code, rather than a mere compilation or collection of laws or canons in force, was critical. Codification involves abstraction, fitting laws to succinct formulae divorced from historical and social origins. Ever since the Napoleonic Code of 1804 (which played such an evident part in “modernizing” French society), codification had become fashionable—notably in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Ironic as it seems, Pius X, the anti-Modernist, employed the Code of Canon Law as a modernizing act: to create conformity, centralization, discipline.2 The code was to be applied universally without local discretion or favor. It described lines of authority, and laid down rules, and penalties. It transformed the power of the papacy and thus the consciousness of what it meant to be a pope, and a Catholic. Via the most modern means of printing and distribution, it reached every Catholic priest in the world, across all cultural frontiers, its timelessness and universality lending eternity to a novel and unprecedented notion of supreme papal authority. 

According to Ulrich Stutz, a distinguished Protestant canon lawyer of the period, the ideological significance loomed enormous for the future of the Catholic Church. “Now that infallibility in the areas of faith and morals has been attributed to the papacy,” he wrote in 1917 with a frankness denied his Catholic counterparts, “it has completed the work in the legal sphere and given the [Catholic] Church a comprehensive lawbook that exhaustively regulates conditions within the Church, a unicus et authenticus fons [a unique and authentic source] for administration, jurisdiction, and legal instruction—unlike anything the Church has previously possessed in its two-thousand-year existence.”3 

At the apex of the pyramidal model of authority was the Pope, whose supremacy was described in Canon 218: “the supreme and most complete jurisdiction throughout the Church, both in matters of faith and morals and in those that affect discipline and Church government throughout the world.” Under the auspices of this single head of authority, the code regulated and coordinated the entire life of the Church and its relations with the papacy and the Curia, which Pius X was simultaneously overhauling.4 

In theory, the pontifical Commission on Canon Law had no powers to issue new legislation. But, as we shall see, there were to be significant nuances and new emphases as a result of the abstraction process. And  while it was clear that Rome had declared unilateral independence from all secular influence, it was obvious that a transfer of authority from the local dioceses to Rome was also in progress. 

Among the crucial new emphases was a blurring in Canon 1323 of the distinction between the ordinary and the solemn teaching authority of the Pope, confusion that the fathers of the First Vatican Council had strived to avoid.5 It meant that there was now scope, in practice if not in theory, for papal encyclicals to be regarded with virtually the same authority as an ex cathedra dogma—“creeping infallibility,” as it came to be called. At the same time, heresy and error were conflated in the terms of Canon 1324: “It is not enough to avoid heresy, but one must also carefully shun all errors that more or less approach it; hence all must observe the constitutions and decrees by which the Holy See has proscribed and forbidden opinions of that sort.” In a standard edition used in seminaries until 1983, we find the following clarification: “Such are all doctrinal decrees of the Holy See, even though they be not infallibly proposed, and even though they come from the Sacred Congregations with the approval of the Holy Father, or from the Biblical Commission. . . . Such decrees do not receive the assent of faith; they are not de fide catholica. But they merit genuine internal and intellectual assent and loyal obedience.”6 Thus the Anti-Modernist Oath was absorbed into the code. 

While tightening up assent to centralized Roman authority, the code also curbed peer-group ecumenical discussion in Canon 1325: “Catholics are to avoid disputations or conferences about matters of faith with non-Catholics, especially in public, unless the Holy See, or in case of emergency the [bishop of the] place, has given permission.”7 And under Canon 246, all judgments of theological orthodoxy were entrusted to the Holy Office (formerly the Roman Inquisition). Parallel with these disciplines were new regulations enforcing censorship. Under Canon 1386.1, no priest was allowed to publish a book, or edit or contribute to a newspaper, journal, magazine, or review, without permission of the local bishop. Every diocese would have its own censor (Canon 1393.1). Censors were obliged to make a special profession of faith (Canon 1406.1), and they were required to make sure that all work awarded the diocesan imprimatur should be in full accord with general Councils of the Church, “or in the constitution and prescriptions of the Apostolic See” (Canon 1393.2). The name of the censor, moreover, was not to be divulged until the bishop had given a favorable judgment on the work (Canon 1393.5). 

Above all, there was Canon 329.2, which endowed the Pope with the sole right to nominate bishops. The development of modern nationstates throughout the nineteenth century had seen the gradual and voluntary relinquishing of secular involvement in the nomination of bishops and the assumption of that right by the Holy See. Throughout much of the Church’s history, popes had inherited the right to nominate bishops mainly within the papal states and areas in the East where dioceses owed direct allegiance to the Pope. Popes, in other words, exercised only an exceptional right to nominate bishops. Canon 329.2 took the recent historical circumstances and transformed them into a universal, absolute, and timeless law, supported neither by history nor by tradition. The late Garrett Sweeney, in his study on the question, has a powerful image to illustrate the effects of the regulation, which remains valid to this day. “If ‘The Church’ is conceptualized as a single machine, with divine assistance concentrated at the top, and nothing more is required of bishops than that they should operate the machine efficiently, it is entirely appropriate that they should be appointed from Rome.”8 

The nomination of bishops, moreover, was to have important implications for the exercise of infallible or definitive teaching by all the Catholic bishops when they teach in union with one another and the Pope. Clarified six decades later in a revised version of the Code of Canon Law, this idea of infallibility currently assumes collegial pluralism. And yet, as critics of the system point out, collegiality is a difficult ideal to attain when the Pope selects every bishop in the college after his own views and prejudices.9 

In practice, the new ruling on the nomination of bishops was subject to challenge. There were in existence many concordats negotiated over the centuries between the Holy See and various governments and monarchies throughout the world, laying down local rules for the nomination of new bishops. The concordats typically allowed for secular involvement, as a well as measure of collegiality—for example, the wishes of the canons of the cathedral. It became clear to Gasparri and Pacelli that some major concordats would require renegotiation or rescinding if the code was to acquire due force.”10 

The complex task of tidying up concordat law was to prove more difficult than Vatican specialists had envisaged. In May 1917, when the full code was published, it was to be Pacelli’s principal task to eradicate obstacles to its full implementation in the largest and most powerful Catholic population in the world: Germany. 

Pacelli and French Church-State Relations 

While facing the prodigious task of codifying canon law, Pacelli had also been entrusted with key projects in the field of international relations. The most important involved Church-State affairs in France, where anticlericalism was rampant. The issues and the history of the relationship between the Third Republic and the Holy See were to shape Pacelli’s attitudes and policies on Church and State in years to come. 

In view of the French government’s antagonism toward the Catholic hierarchy and clergy because of their royalist tendencies, Leo XIII in the 1880s had attempted a gentle retrenchment from his own monarchist position. The French hierarchy, however, had no intention of swallowing republicanism, even if encouragement came from the Pope himself. Matters took a turn for the worse when the Catholic newspaper La Croix backed the wrong side in the notorious Dreyfus case. Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, had been sentenced to hard labor on Devil’s Island after he was accused of selling national secrets, an allegation the French bishops were disposed to believe in the light of their anti-socialist prejudices. One Catholic cleric, Abbé Cros, proclaimed that Dreyfus should be “trampled on morning and night . . . and should have his nose bashed in.”11 The Jesuit monthly Civiltà Cattolica proclaimed infamously: “The Jew was created by God to act the traitor everywhere,” adding that France must now regret the 1791 Act that extended French nationality to the Jews, since the Jews were even now collecting funds for an appeal on behalf of Dreyfus within Germany. When Dreyfus was exonerated on June 20, 1899, the Catholic clergy came under attack from the socialists. 

Taking advantage of yet another wave of anticlericalism across France, the ailing Waldeck-Rousseau government passed an act in 1901 forbidding the religious orders to teach. The Jesuits closed their schools and turned to other activities; whole communities of religious emigrated to England, Belgium, Holland, and the United States. In the following years the persecution was driven home by Waldeck-Rousseau’s successor, Émile Combes, who boasted in September 1904 that he had closed 13,904 Catholic schools.12 

Elected at the height of the French anticlerical persecution, Pius X made it clear that he wanted no appeasement of the French republic. Pius refused to approve certain candidates for dioceses proposed by the Combes government, and made an official protest to King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy when President Émile-François Loubet of France announced a state visit to the Eternal City in 1904. The French government responded by cutting off diplomatic relations with the Vatican, then passed an act officially separating Church and State in France. A minor result of that split, but of great importance to Eugenio Pacelli, was the decision of Cardinal Secretary of State Merry del Val to commission from Gasparri a libro bianco (white book), an official report on the recent history of relations between the Holy See and France. Gasparri delegated the task to Pacelli, “one of my trusty staff in the Secretariat of State, in whom I had particular confidence.”13 Pacelli’s report accused the French government of rabid sectarianism and alleged that government ministers were implicated in ordering a break-in of the Holy See’s nunciature, or embassy, in Paris to steal the secret cipher for communicating with the Vatican.

Meanwhile, the crisis deepened. The French government attempted to control Church property by setting up joint lay-clerical administrative bodies (originally, these were to have included non-Catholic laity). In order to free the Church of any such secular influence, Pius X voluntarily handed over all Church property to the State in France, putting the good of the Church, as he expressed it, before her goods. The French responded by evicting the clergy and religious from their houses and monasteries. The government was determined to exert jurisdictional control over the Church it had set adrift from the State; Pius X was determined to exert untrammeled primacy over the Church as a spiritual, doctrinal, legal, and administrative entity. This was the clear-eyed papal vision of total separation of sovereignties: the Church with the Pope unquestioningly at its head, and the world mediated through the papal diplomatic service and the bishops.

The idea carried over into Pius X’s attitude toward Catholic political parties in France, Italy, and Germany. He did not care for them because he could not control them. This anticipated Pacelli’s future dealings with Catholic party politics in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Pius X once said of the German Catholic Center Party, the Zentrumspartei, “I do not like it, because it is a Catholic party.”14 The statement is all the more remarkable since Pius X was of an age to have remembered the role played by the Center Party in combating the persecution of the Catholic Church in Bismarck’s Germany during the 1870s. The lessons learned during the Kulturkampf had certainly been absorbed within the Secretariat of State. 

“Let the French Catholics,” said Cardinal Merry del Val, “follow the example of the persecuted Catholics in Bismarck’s Germany. By uniting in their own defense, those German Catholics defeated the Kulturkampf.” Yet Pius X preferred the demise of a Catholic political party precisely because he could see no role for lay-clerical pluralism within the pyramidal structure of papal power. Commenting on Pius X’s view of political Catholicism, historian and journalist Carlo Falconi writes: “First, he believed the mixture of politics and religion to be the most hybrid and dangerous possible for the Church; secondly, because in general, and especially at that time, they [Catholic parties] fostered the participation of priests in politics; and lastly, because he thought them useless, for Catholics could always seek support for their religious claims from the lay parties favourable to the Church or at least not hostile to it.”15 The view was to be echoed, as we shall see, by Pacelli twenty years later, when as Cardinal Secretary of State he favored a quiescent, docile Church and collaboration with the Nazi Party over the continued existence of the Catholic Center Party, which represented the final obstacle on Hitler’s path to dictatorship. 

Pacelli had come of age as a specialist in Vatican foreign relations during the clash with the Combes government, while engaged on the lengthy toil of codifying canon law and occupied with the day-to-day tasks of the Department of Extraordinary Affairs. At the same time, hidden from the world, he busied himself year after year gaining the trust of his superiors, until in 1911 he rose to the level of undersecretary in the Department of Extraordinary Affairs,16 replacing Umberto Benigni, who had resigned for reasons of health (possibly not unconnected with his exhausting double life as Vatican bureaucrat and spymaster). 

The following year, in another sign of special favor, Pacelli was asked to travel to England yet again, in the company of Cardinal Gennaro Granito Pignatelli di Belmonte, to attend the coronation of King George V. It was on this visit that he attended the Spithead Review of the Royal Navy, an experience he often recollected in private audiences with English pilgrims after he became Pope. In the autumn of 1912 he was also appointed consultore, or adviser, to the Holy Office, indicating that not a scintilla of anti-Modernist suspicion had ever attached to his orthodoxy. 

In his capacity as highly favored undersecretary, and as a coming figure in the world of international diplomacy and law, he now became involved in a series of negotiations that contributed significantly to the extreme tensions between Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the period preceding the outbreak of the First World War. 

The details of the story, anticipating his strategy in Germany a decade later, are contained in a quantity of files in the Vatican. The archive, known as Section for Reports with States, is divided according to Vatican activities with different nation-states. Within the boxes labeled “Austria-Ungheria 1913—Serbia—Belgrado 1913–1915” is a collection headed “Concordato tra la Santa Sede e la Serbia” [“Concordat between the Holy See and Serbia”], containing letters, deciphered top-secret memoranda, minutes of meetings between cardinals, drafts of treaties—all of them once in the keeping of Eugenio Pacelli and annotated in his scrupulous italic script. 

The archival introduction states that the Serbian negotiator was a Signore Luigi Bakotic, assigned by the foreign minister of Serbia; that Serbia’s special agent to the Holy See was a French-Italian priest, Denis Cardon; and that the negotiations were instigated in 1913 “at the invitation of Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, undersecretary of the Sacred Congregation for Extraordinary Affairs.” 

The Serbian Concordat and the Great War 

At precisely 11:30 on the morning of June 24, 1914, just four days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated at Sarajevo, representatives of the Holy See and the government of Serbia sat down  in the salone of the Secretariat of State to put their signatures to a treaty known as the Serbian Concordat. Present at the meeting were the principal Serbian negotiators, led by Milenko Vesnitch, Serbian ambassador in Paris, and Luigi Bakotic of the Serbian foreign ministry. For the Vatican was Cardinal Merry del Val and next to him the tall, sleek figure of the thirty-eight-year-old Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli. Pacelli had negotiated and drafted the document over the previous eighteen months. 

Within the terms of the treaty, Serbia guaranteed that the Holy See had the right to impose the new Code of Canon Law on its country’s Catholic clergy and subjects; that Catholics would have freedom of religion, worship, and education within its territories. Serbia also committed itself to paying stipends to the archbishop of Belgrade, the bishop of Üsküb (now Skopje), and clergy serving the Catholic communities. At the same time, the treaty implied the abrogation of the ancient protectorate rights of the Austro-Hungarian Empire over the Catholic enclaves in Serbia’s territories. 

The idea of the Vatican sanctioning a Catholic European country to act as protector of Catholics within another, non-Catholic nation-state was a familiar feature of the colonial era.17 France in particular had exploited its protector status in the Far East and the Middle East until its break with the Vatican in 1905; Germany, Austria, Spain, and Belgium had at different times and in different parts of the world sought to exert the status for more or less political and commercial advantages. In the meantime, there had never been a question of a concordat with Serbia, since the numbers of Catholics there had been small—that is, until Serbia’s success in the First Balkan War against Turkey in 1912 and its expansion into Macedonia, Epirus, and northern Albania. With these added territories, the number of Catholics within greater Serbia increased from about seven thousand to forty thousand, and Serbia, mostly Orthodox in religion, saw an advantage in making friends with them. 

Austria-Hungary’s protectorate rights, jealously guarded for more than a century, had been largely symbolic. But they carried the authority to nominate bishops and to educate Balkan priests of the Latin Rite in seminaries in Austria and Hungary, and even assumed a moral right on the part of the empire to invade the region if Catholic communities were deemed to be under threat. These symbolic rights were not negligible to the Austro-Hungarians. At a time when Serbia, encouraged by Russia, was challenging Austria-Hungary’s sphere of influence throughout the Balkans, Franz Josef was keen to use every means to maintain ties of loyalty to the empire. The Serbian Concordat signed in the Vatican that day in 1914 destroyed those links and the influence that went with them. 

Serbia, for its part, had everything to gain by the concordat, for it removed doubts about its fierce sectarian partisanship of Orthodox Christianity and enhanced its imperialistic ambitions to be a focus for unity among the patchwork of Slavic peoples of both Latin and Orthodox background in the region. The Vatican also had much to gain, for the concordat proclaimed the end of centuries of antagonism between Rome and the Orthodox “schism,” opening up the prospect of Catholic Latin and Eastern Rite evangelization toward Russia and Greece. Above all—and the documents reveal that this was Pacelli’s motivating impulse— the concordat endowed the papacy with important features of authority, including appointment of bishops and prelates, later to be enshrined in the 1917 code, but up to this point enjoyed by the Austrian emperor under ancient usage. Only Austria-Hungary stood to lose, for the treaty threatened to increase the Serbian, pan-Slavic influence along its southern borders and to subject the empire to diplomatic humiliation. 

The Serbian Concordat negotiations were conducted in a series of top-secret exchanges in a triangle between Vienna, Belgrade, and the Vatican. The Austrians, for their part, attempted to wreck the negotiations, but the Vatican, in the person of Eugenio Pacelli, had pressed the project to a conclusion despite all cautionary counsels, including solemn warnings from the papal nuncio in Vienna. 

Vienna reacted to news of the concordat with outrage. “The Austrian press and people,” wrote the Italian ambassador from Vienna on June 25, “consider the Serbian Concordat a major diplomatic defeat for their Government.”18 Under the headline “new defeat,” Die Zeit, the Viennese paper, proclaimed: “Now Serbian prestige will be inflated, and its bishops and priests will become an important factor in pan-Slav agitation. . . . Why in heaven’s name should Austria have made such a vast financial outlay in these Balkan lands on behalf of our protectorate, which is not so much religious as political, only to throw it away in a matter of weeks, and without a struggle?” In an even more heated piece in the Arbeiterzeitung on the day after the signing, the editorialist asked: “After this humiliation, will the voice of Austria ever be listened to again?” The government had dealt with the Serbs in a craven and incompetent fashion, proclaimed the press. The result was a sharp increase in anti-Serbian rhetoric and calls for action. When the archduke was murdered in Sarajevo only days later, emotions were already volatile. The Serbian Concordat undoubtedly contributed to the uncompromising terms that the Austro-Hungarian Empire pressed on Serbia, making war inevitable. 

Pacelli’s Secret Diplomacy 

The starting point of the strange tale of the Serbian Concordat was a journey to Belgrade made by a country priest in the summer of 1912. Father Denis Cardon planned to “acquaint himself with the Balkan countries before returning to Vienna to attend a Eucharistic congress.”19 Cardon was a corpulent, bustling, meddlesome cleric, skilled in several languages, including Serbo-Croatian, who ran a small parish in a place called Taggia in the Alpes-Maritimes above Ventimiglia on the Mediterranean. 

In his Belgrade hotel one evening, Father Cardon found himself in conversation with a Serbian government minister (unidentified in the Vatican documents). The priest suggested that a concordat might be of interest to both the Church and the Serbs. The minister said that he doubted whether the Serbian government could approach the Vatican directly because of the fierce opposition of Austria. Many people in high office, he told the priest, had tried and failed. 

But Cardon spoke with such conviction on the merits of a concordat that the minister forthwith appointed this humble and apparently manipulable priest as Serbia’s special agent to the Holy See. The next day Cardon was briefed by the ministre des cultes in the offices of the Serbian government, and in consequence the cleric eventually made contact with the Secretariat of State in the Vatican. “One wonders,” wrote the editorialist of L’Éclaireur de Nice, the newspaper that told Cardon’s story for the first time on June 26, 1914, “in fact, one demands to know, who really was the central negotiator of this crucial event!” It is clear from the files that it was none other than the undersecretary in the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, Eugenio Pacelli, reporting directly to the Cardinal Secretary of State, Merry del Val. All dealings—with Cardon, with diplomats in Vienna and Belgrade, and with the Austrian ambassador to the Holy See in Rome—went through Pacelli. Pacelli drafted all the terms of the concordat, replied to every query, invariably writing in his own hand on behalf of Merry del Val and even redrafting his letters before encipherment, organizing and writing the minutes of curial meetings in which the final decisions were made. 

For a whole year the Serbian negotiations did not include the Viennese diplomats in Rome, the papal nuncio in Vienna, or the appropriate Austrian government ministers. In a handwritten memorandum in French to Pacelli, dated January 10, 1913,20 the Austrian ambassador to the Holy See complained that he was conscious of rumors—starting with a newspaper article in Belgrade the previous November—about the efforts of Serbia to reform the protection of Catholics within its territories. He warned the Vatican that the Austrian government regarded its Balkan protectorate, which it had held “since time immemorial,” to be a matter “not of rights but of duties.” The note poured scorn on the notion that Serbia was seeking to “emancipate the Catholics living in its territories, releasing them from the yoke of Austria, and replacing foreign priests with indigenous ones.” He ended by seeking confirmation that the Holy See would see eye-to-eye with the Austrian government on the need to keep the protectorate in place. 

A second note from the Austrian ambassador followed on February 4,21 declaring that the parish priest of Üsküb had been approached by a civil servant in the Serbian ministry of religion, asking for numbers of Catholics in the diocese, reports on revenues and properties, and details of the archbishop’s establishment. “Our consul in Üsküb has asked the parish priest to refuse these requests for information,” wrote the ambassador, and he ended by reminding Pacelli that he had already asked for clarification, and was seeking it again. 

Finally, in an aide-mémoire dated February 17, 1914,22 the ambassador set out his government’s determined response to the developments by stating the conditions under which Austria would countenance an alteration in the protectorate understanding. The conditions included prayers by name for Emperor Franz Josef and his family during every Mass; a seat of honor to be maintained for the emperor in every church; a special place for the emperor’s representative during religious processions, “such representatives to be accorded special precedences during the ceremonial of incense, the kiss of peace, the agnus dei, reception of communion, etc.”; the presence of the emperor’s coat of arms; and the celebration of his birthday. All of seemingly trivial significance at this distance, but crucial symbolic matters in relation to cultural loyalty. 

Another baffled and uninformed recipient of rumors was the Holy See’s own nuncio in Vienna. In a letter dated February 15, 1913,23 Archbishop Rafaele Scapinelli reported to Pacelli his recent encounters with Serbian diplomats. The nuncio had evidently not been briefed on the developments, but, guessing what was afoot, he took it upon himself to set out the advantages and disadvantages of such a treaty. On balance, he conceded, a concordat would open up new prospects for Catholic influence in the Balkans (“where Catholics are considered foreigners with no impact on the political and cultural life of the country”), but he concluded with a chillingly prophetic observation: 

Austria, however, appears determined to deal harshly with Serbia, and it is widely believed that there could be a war with that country in the spring, further complicating matters in the extreme. Would it not be better to leave [the concordat negotiations] for now rather than take risks in an uncertain and perilous set of circumstances that can only end with military humiliation for Serbia; for Serbia is a focus of attraction for the ambitions of the South Balkan states—all of which seems destined to threaten the integrity of the Austro/Hungarian Empire? 24 

Throughout the following twelve months, the Secretariat of State files show Father Cardon busily running between Rome and Belgrade, while Pacelli continued to play cat-and-mouse with the Austrian diplomats and the papal nuncio in Vienna. From the distressed notes of the Austrians, it emerges that Pacelli was determined, whatever the pleadings of Vienna, to end the protectorate status in the interests of centrist papal politics rather than the local benefit of Serbian Catholics. In the meantime, as a sop to the Austrians, he was promoting the idea of patronatus rights, “purely honorific rights as are compatible with canon law.” The canonist Pacelli, it is evident, intended diverting the Austrians  into the chaotic thickets of Rome’s canon law, knowing full well, as the Austrians could not possibly have known, that the forthcoming 1917 code would grant them absolutely nothing in the way of “honorific rights.” The Austrians were not to be assuaged, and yet there was nothing they could do to stop the Holy See, except to beg for clearly expressed rights of patronage in the concordat or at least a postponement. 

Two curial meetings stood between the final negotiations and the signing of the proposed concordat. The first was called at 10:30 a.m. on May 3, 1914, a Sunday, reflecting the growing sense of crisis over the treaty. Cardinals Vannutelli, De Lai, Gotti, Ferrata, Gasparri, and Merry del Val were present. Pacelli was the meeting’s secretary, taking the minutes in his own hand.25 Serbia had threatened to withdraw from the negotiations in the event of the Vatican’s conceding too much to Austria, or in the event, indeed, of further delay. The Curia was being rushed into a corner. Were Serbia to withdraw, the Curia believed, the plight of the Catholics in the region might now be worse than before the concordat was mooted. The cardinals were aware that the time had come to make up their minds, yet there is an impression in the meeting’s minutes of their sleepwalking toward the inevitable. 

Vannutelli started by urging his colleagues to sign, for he was convinced that the concordat would promote the interests of the Catholic Church in the East. He was aware, he said, of Austrian sensitivities, “But let’s try to make them see the advantages rather than the disadvantages.” He talked of keeping the Austrians happy with honorific entitlements, but had nothing definite to propose.

De Lai then spoke briefly, seconding everything Vannutelli had said, and asserting that they should proceed to a concordat because “it is the best concordat we have ever drafted,” a flattering reference to Pacelli’s efforts. Gotti followed, arguing that they should accept because it was not in their power to refuse any request for a treaty. He warned nevertheless that they should be “very careful about how we treat Austria,” although he, too, had nothing positive to recommend. Then, engaging in a little casuistry, he raised the possibility of assuring Austria of its purely honorary status as “patron,” adding that “there is no need to underpin this with a special agreement.” In other words, the promise of honorary status need not be mentioned in the concordat. 

Ferrata now came in, offering a note of caution: “Serbia,” he asserted,  “is not a country that inspires trust, and it is clear that it is seeking a concordat in order simply to eliminate the influence of Austria.” Again, he suggested that the way forward was to keep Austria happy; but like the others he had nothing positive to suggest. 

Gasparri, Pacelli’s guide and mentor, was then credited with supporting the concordat, like all the rest. As Pacelli wrote: “E anch’egli, tutto considerato, per l’affirmativa” [“He, too, all considered, was in the affirmative”]. But the rest of Gasparri’s recorded comments are altogether sparse and noncommittal. “Austria now has no right to a protectorate status following the withdrawal of Turkey from the region,” Gasparri said. 

Now Cardinal Secretary of State Merry del Val spoke, marshaling the strongest arguments in support of the concordat. “To refuse,” he began, “would be to give a pretext for the Slavs to hold the Catholics hostage even more. And we have to remember that the Serbs have come to us.... They are interested, therefore, in regularizing the situation. Such an opportunity might never come again. In any case, the Austrian protectorate is no longer working or workable.” 

Making a point that Pacelli might well have remembered some twenty years later when dealing with Hitler, Merry del Val declared: “If we say that we cannot trust these Serbs, all the more reason for pinning them down with a concordat.” 

A final meeting of the cardinals in the Secretariat of State was called on June 7, 1914, at 10:30 a.m. 26 The cardinals discussed once again the issue of patronatus rights—now the Austrians’ minimum conditions if they were to give the concordat their reluctant blessing. But, as the cardinals acknowledged, speaking one by one, the Serbian negotiators would certainly withdraw rather than grant any such rights in the treaty. 

Toward the end of the meeting, Merry del Val offered the almost despairing reflection: “There will be grave consequences if we now break off negotiations. The Serbs will come down harshly on the Church, proclaiming that we never did want a proper legal basis for what they were offering. At the same time, if the Catholic communities are then obliged to look to the Austrians for their defense, they will be doubly despised.” 

It was left to Gasparri, however, to echo the cautious observation made by Archbishop Scapinelli, the nuncio in Vienna, eighteen months earlier: 

The principal reason Serbia had sought this concordat is to make overtures to those Slavic communities who owed allegiance to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to eliminate any obstacles that might arise from religious or cultural considerations. What they are trying to do is show that the kingdom of Serbia has cordial relationships with the Holy See and to offer Catholics guarantees of liberty and welfare. 

It was the last word spoken on the matter by the Curia before going to Pius X for signature, and the single substantial objection in the final meeting among a chorus of yea-sayers. Gasparri, at least, had come to understand that the Vatican had been led into a trap, drawn by the Curia’s desire to exert direct papal rule over Catholics in the Balkans and by the prospects of missionary success in the East. Serbia had drawn the Vatican into the legendary complexities of Balkan politics, and the Vatican had failed to consider the contribution the concordat would make to tensions in the region. 

There is no evidence that Pacelli, who choreographed the entire process, questioned the wisdom of his conduct of these affairs, either at the time or subsequently. Nor is there any evidence that Gasparri grasped the extent of his protégé’s initiatives in the matter. 

The concordat, comprising twenty-two articles, was signed on June 24, bearing the hallmarks of Pacelli’s future policy: the expansion of papal power over the Catholic Church at the local level, and, in particular, control of appointment of bishops. The virtual elimination of local discretion in the choice of bishops was to become a crucial issue within the Church to the end of the century. 

Article 1 stated simply that “the Catholic and Apostolic Roman religion will be exercised freely and publicly in the kingdom of Serbia.” Article 3 stated that the archbishop of Belgrade and the bishop of Üsküb would be “directly answerable to the Holy See for its ecclesiastical affairs,” and Article 4 emphasized that “His Holiness would nominate the candidates for bishoprics,” notifying the Serbian government lest any should be politically objectionable. Six other articles stressed the free exercise of the Catholic religion in harmony with the provisions of canon law, including the catchall Article 20: “If any difficulties arise in the interpretation of these articles . . . the Holy See and the royal government will proceed, with common accord, to a solution that agrees with canon law.” 

The concordat contained generous government funding for the bishops, clergy, and teachers of the Catholic religion. Seminaries would be established within Serbia, and ordinands and catechists would be encouraged to teach the doctrines of the Catholic faith in the local language. Prayers would be said at Mass for the king of Serbia. There was no mention of Austria-Hungary, not a line to suggest that its ancient links with Catholicism in the region deserved residual consideration, no mention even of patronatus rights. 

Austria’s Die Zeit newspaper led with its “new defeat” article the following day. Its expanded arguments set out the political dimensions of the concordat that Pacelli had ignored through eighteen months of negotiations. The Catholic hierarchy in the region, said the newspaper, now owed its allegiance to Serbia, as did the clergy, who would now be instructed in a seminary within Serbia. “This is a great loss of influence to which Austria must be acutely sensitive.” It went on, “Austria has made tremendous sacrifices, all for nothing, down the centuries on behalf of the Balkan Catholics, including Albania—where we also stand to lose our protectorate status. This is a terrible blow to our prestige.” 

A third, most telling argument made by the paper that morning, and reprinted in newspapers across the world, was the most ominous. “The concordat is the very best propaganda instrument in favor of a Greater Serbia, for the only obstacle to a union of the Serbs and the Croats is the split between the Orthodox and Catholic religions. If in addition to military success [against Turkey] the Serbs can add a diplomatic success over Austria, Serbia must then become a focus for Slavs south of the Austrian borders. The pan-Serbian agitators regard the help of the bishops and clergy quite crucial in this struggle.” 

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were gunned down by a pan-Serbian agitator in Sarajevo on June 28, the emotions prompted by the Serbian Concordat became part of the general groundswell of anti-Serbian anger. The concordat nevertheless represented a contribution to the tensions that led the Austrian government to overplay its hand by delivering a humiliating ultimatum to Serbia. There is no indication that Pope Pius X grasped the role of the Holy See in adding to the pressures that brought the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia to the brink. The declaration of war, it is said, threw him into a profound depression from which he never recovered. He died on August 20, 1914—of a broken heart, it was said. 

What is clear from the episode is the potentially negative impact of Vatican diplomacy on cultural and political relations, its power to provoke dismay and insecurity, its scope to further complicate and disrupt mounting tensions between countries. The Holy See, it is apparent, was no mere spiritual onlooker concerned exclusively with the spiritual welfare of Catholics in Serbia, but a player on the world scene with its own long-term ambitions and goals. In years to come, Pacelli’s initiatives in international relations focused on the renegotiation of concordats that contradicted the new Code of Canon Law. There is no indication that Pacelli questioned the dangerous implications of the Serbian negotiations after the event. From this point of view, the episode marks the ominous beginnings of Pacelli’s pattern of aloofness from the far reaching political consequences of his diplomatic actions on behalf of the Pope.

next

To Germany

source and footnotes

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/hitler-pope.pdf