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CHAPTER XII. PRO-GERMANISM OF POPE PIUS XII

IT IS NOT generally known that the reasons which led the Allies to exclude the pope from the Peace Conference after the First World War were connected with the activities of Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII.

HIS TWELVE YEARS IN GERMANY

Monsignor Pacelli’s life has been divided between his native Italy and Germany where he spent twelve crucial years. Nuncio in Munich in 1917, he has dealt with the Kaiser and with the Republic, with revolutionary committees and Nazi conspirators. He was a friend of Friedrich Ebert, first president of the German Republic, and an intimate of Germany’s monumental Hindenburg under whose presidency he concluded a concordat with Prussia. He witnessed Hitler’s tempestuous beginnings in Munich and the machinations of his agents in Berlin. Viscount d’Abernon, Britain’s first ambassador to the Weimar Republic, in his Memoirs calls Pacelli “the best informed man in the Reich.”

His mission in Munich in 1917 was not the starting point of his German career. Even before the first world war, Monsignor Pacelli had been Papal State Secretary Gasparri’s most trusted expert on German affairs. It was no mere chance that in the very first months of the war he was stationed in Switzerland where he started with great devotion, tact and zeal, a truly Christian and humanitarian movement—the exchange of prisoners of “war. Yet, while there he had frequent contacts with the Kaiser’s propaganda chief, his old acquaintance Matthias Erzberger, for years a leading member of the Reichstag’s Catholic Center Party. It was with Matthias Erzberger in Switzerland that Pacelli engaged in the negotiations which deeply shocked Italy’s liberal Government, and which accounted largely for its opposition to the Vatican’s participation in the peace settlement.

* This article was published in The Converted Catholic Magazine for April 1943. The author, Pierre L’Ourson, was for many years connected with the League of Nanons in a responsible diplomatic capacity.

All his life Eugenio Pacelli has taken an active part in one of the most secret and complex intrigues of our time: the patient struggle of the papacy to regain and extend its temporal power. In this struggle, for the last seventy years, whenever a major issue of international politics was at stake, the Vatican has hitched its star to the Germanic juggernaut.

HIS TIE-UP WITH FASCISM

The Lateran Treaty in 1929 between the Vatican and Mussolini restored the sovereignty of the pope and allied the Vatican to the Italian Fascist Government. It also brought about a world-wide coordination of authoritarian powers of the corporative and nationalistic type, and the eventual entrance of Italy into the camp of Nazi Germany. Thus in 1940, after the fall of France and the proclamation of Marshal Petain’s Fascist French State, it looked as if in the present World War Vatican policy had gained substantial progress where it had failed in the previous one.

At the end of this war, when delegates of all countries will gather in an international peace conference, the pope, for the first time in more than a hundred years, will again be represented as a ruling monarch—provided that his miniature State is still intact. He expects to exercise considerable authority, although as a temporal ruler his influence will be less than that of Pope Pius VII at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Today, as Chief of State of Vatican City he possesses only a formal, juridical status. But he will have real power because of his self-assumed status as “Chief of Christendom,” a notion cleverly introduced, for more than ten years, into public international discussions and, after centuries of obliteration, re-admitted even in non-Catholic countries. As “Chief of Christendom,” the pope would take rank above all other Chiefs of State—just as the papal nuncio on the continent of Europe as well as in Latin America automatically becomes “dean” of the diplomatic corps.

“CHIEF OF CHRISTENDOM”

The idea of a Chief of Christendom, himself also a Chief of State, presiding over an assembly of Chiefs of State, is a medieval conception which has no place in our twentieth-century democratic world. It has been revived for political reasons, and unless denounced, will prove a dangerous challenge to freedom and progress. For just as the equality of individuals, the equality of nations is a fundamental principle of democracy.

To recognize one Chief of State as senior and permanent hierarchical chief of all other States would be to set up an authoritarian world monarchy, even though the term ‘monarchy’ may not be used. Caesar Augustus in ancient Rome refused the unpopular title of king and preferred to be called “Imperator,” a dignity which the Roman Republic used to bestow temporarily upon a Supreme Commander appointed in a national emergency. Hitler played the same trick in Germany. It would have been easy for him to have had himself crowned Emperor. Instead, he found it more expedient to leave the Constitution of the Weimar Republic legally in force and to assume the less conspicuous name of Fuehrer or Leader—the “Mein Fuehrer” standing for the old-fashioned “Your Majesty” or “Sire.”

Protestant nations, it is to be hoped, will not accept this new international slogan of a “Chief of Christendom” which the Holy See is trying to smuggle into general acceptance. Whatever the illusions of clerical politicians who believe in the re-establishment of the supra-national rule of the papacy, their schemes are bound to work to the advantage of imperialist Germany.

Recent statements by Mr. Elmer Davis as well as Vatican diplomatic activity seem to indicate that the Axis Powers are seeking the mediation of the Holy See. If the Government of the Protestant Kaiser tried to enlist the support of the Vatican, there is no reason why Hitler’s predominantly Catholic Greater Germany should refrain from appealing to the pope, now that even the most fanatical Nazis can no longer hope to conclude the war by a crushing Axis victory. The last time the pope’s collaboration in post-war arrangements was made impossible by Article 15 of the Secret Treaty of London between Italy and the Allies. This explicit exclusion of the pope from the Peace Conference has ever since been branded by Catholic politicians as a villainous maneuver of international Freemasonry. They still point to the absence of a delegate of the Holy See at Versailles and Neuilly in 1919 as the deeper cause for the failure of the Peace Treaties and of the League of Nations.

TREATY OF LONDON

The real history of Article 15 of the Treaty of London and the reasons for the exclusion of the pope from the Peace Conference have never been fully understood in this country. The American public does not know that Italy demanded and that the Allies agreed upon the exclusion of the pope from the future peace settlement because they had evidence that some of the most prominent clericals at the Holy See were favoring the Central Powers, and had for months discussed and planned a secret German proposal to reconstitute in Rome a Papal State with internationally guaranteed access to the sea.

Only in face of the irrefutable fact that, in the midst of a terrible war, Vatican politicans were abusing the Christian peace apostolate of the Supreme Pontiff to further their temporal interests and to extend their power, even at the expense of their native land— these papal politicians were all Italians—did the Allies agree to Italy’s demand. Although from the beginning of the war it was obvious that the sympathies of the Vatican could not be with Protestant England, anti-clerical France and Orthodox Russia, Allied statesmen—some of them devout Catholics—found it hard to believe that papal diplomacy would place its political interests before those of millions of French and Belgian Catholics who had become victims of German aggression.

MATTHIAS ERZBERGER

The story of Germany’s collaboration with the Vatican in the last war has been told, as so often before, by a devout Roman Catholic who had himself been on the inside of the intrigue and who, vain by nature and bitter from disappointment, spoke out when he felt that he had been abandoned by his former associates. Our witness is none other than Matthias Erzberger, leading member of the Catholic Center Party, militant German imperialist in 1914, Germany’s foreign propaganda chief until 1917 when he promoted the Reichstag’s famous peace resolution, Imperial Under-Secretary of State, leader of the German armistice delegation, Minister of Finance and one of the Fathers of the Weimar Republic. He was assassinated in 1921 by young German nationalists, a few months after the publication of his outspoken book, My Experiences in the World War.1

SECRET VATICAN TREATY WITH GERMANY

One of Erzberger’s chief objectives was to secure diplomatic immunity and extra-territorial rights for the Holy See. As early as October, 1914, a few weeks after his appointment as chief of foreign propaganda, he suggested the establishment of a small neutral Papal State in that part of Rome which lies on the left bank of the Tiber, with a corridor to the sea and a port. His negotiations finally led to a draft treaty “regarding the recognition of the temporal power of the Pope.” This treaty, he says, had the approval of “competent personalities of the German Foreign Office.” The first version was submitted by Erzberger and his friends in Vatican circles in the beginning of 1915. It was formulated with characteristic thoroughness.

1 Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, von Reichsfinanzminister A. D. Matthias Erzberger, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart & Berlin, 1920.

The following extracts of this secret treaty are from Erzberger’s book (pages 127ff.):

The temporal power of the Pope is recognized by the High Contracting Powers as extending over a territory including Vatican Hill and a strip of land connecting it with the Tiber and with the railroad to Viterbo and to be designated as Church State . . .

The church State is permanently independent and neutral. Its independence and neutrality are guaranteed by the High Contracting Powers.

Sovereign of the Church State to the Pope. During the vacancy of the Apostolic Chair the sovereignty is exercised by the College of Cardinals.

Citizens of the Church State are: Papal legates, nunzios and internunzios, members of the Papal Court, officials of the administrations and palaces of the Church State, members of the Palace guards as well as ecclesiastics permanently residing in the Church State . . .

The Kingdom of Italy pledges to render the Tiber navigable for oceangoing ships with draught of five meters, along the border of the Church State and thence to the sea, within two years from the ratification of the present treaty.

Papal ships can at all times navigate on the Tiber to and from the sea without being subject to the authority of the Italian State. Should Italy be at war or should it, for other reasons, deem necessary to close the Tiber waterway to general traffic, a channel is to be kept open for Papal ships, and river pilots are to be placed at their disposal. Papal ships shall be treated by the High Contracting Powers as extraterritorial in peace and in war and not subject to interference by a foreign power . . .

The Kingdom of Italy will pay to the Holy See within six months after the ratification of the present Treaty the sum of 500,000,000 Lire, to cover the cost of the Papal Court and of the administration of he Church State.

The sovereignty of the Church State includes finances and jurisdiction.

Diplomatic representatives of foreign powers accredited to the Holy See enjoy within the territory of the Kingdom of Italy the same privileges and exemptions as diplomatic representatives of the same rank accredited to the Kingdom of Italy … In case of a state of war or a break in diplomatic relations between the Power they represent and the Kingdom of Italy, they have to take residence in the Church State . . .

The High Contracting Powers, after the ratification of the present Treaty, will invite all those powers which are not signatories of this treaty to recognize the temporal power of the Pope over the territories designated in Article I as well as the extra-territorial status af Papal ships as provided in Article V.

This Treaty shall be ratified as soon as possible. Ratification documents will be deposited with the Holy See. The Treaty enters into force on the day on which ratification documents have been deposited.

It is not astonishing that the liberal Government of Italy should have resented this planned infringement of their country’s sovereignty by Germany and the Vatican. Nor was this all. Germany has never given without receiving. Only indirectly does Herr Erzberger inform his readers of the assistance which Germany had received and was to receive from the Holy See.

INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC COMMITTEE

After Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies, Erzberger, as the Kaiser’s chief of propaganda, organized in collaboration with an emissary of the Papal Secretary of State, an International Catholic Committee in which each country was represented by five or seven delegates. Its object was to urge upon all belligerents that the territorial independence and the political freedom of the Holy See should be guaranteed in the future peace. This International Catholic Committee and several of its sub-committees met repeatedly in Switzerland and Holland. Its chief purpose was to explain the German viewpoint to the world. Erzberger tells us that the high official of the Roman Curia with whom he negotiated in Switzerland was in charge of the exchange of prisoners of war. He was Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, the present Pope Pius XII.

PAPAL PEACE OFFENSIVE

Negotiations between Erzberger and Pacelli continued throughout 1916. In June of that year Erzberger was “asked by the German Secretary of State to inform the Vatican that the German Government was willing to accept the good services of the Pope in the matter of peace and would appreciate them.” He at once consulted with his “friend, the representative of the Papal Secretary of State in Switzerland” [Pacelli], who believed that the time had come for “winning the peace.” But after the Vatican peace move had produced its first results, it was checked by a parallel intervention of the German Foreign Office through Spain. The results which Berlin wished to obtain in 1916 were only of a diplomatic and psychological nature. Germany was in fact merely trying to disintegrate the home front of the Allies and to obtain a clear picture of the political situation in the Allied camp. The Papal peace move thus suited the Kaiser’s purpose.

In 1917, after Eugenio Pacelli had been appointed nuncio in Munich, Wilhelm II became more outspoken in his demands. According to Pope Pius XII’s official biography by Kees van Hoek (published in London in 1939 by Burns, Oates & Washburn, Ltd., publishers to the Holy See), the Kaiser told Monsignor Pacelli “that the Pope should mobilize the Episcopate all over the world in a moral peace offensive and begin by using his special influence on Catholic States by promoting [a separate] peace between Italy and Austria.”

JESUIT PROPAGANDA AMONG PROTESTANTS

Erzberger’s propaganda mission ended shortly after Pacelli had taken up residence in Germany. With laudable frankness Erzberger tells us (page 7) that he had been assisted by “a number of Jesuit priests who rendered us extremely valuable services in enlightening foreign countries.” Nor were these propaganda activities limited to Catholic circles. It should be of interest to Protestants in America to discover that this prominent Roman Catholic politician, working hand in glove with the highest dignitaries of the pope, also organized what was known as “Weekly Evangelical Letters.” These letters were edited by Dr. Deissmann, Professor of Protestant theology at the University of Berlin and were addressed especially to American Protestants. “Professor Deissmann,” says Erzberger, “was very skillful in drawing up his mailing lists . . . We adapted the contents of these letters deliberately to American interests . . . Professor Deissmann had reason to be satisfied with the response. The Secretary General of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, representing thirty evangelical church organizations with 125,000 communities, maintained close relations with him.” This gentleman might not have done so, had he known that these “Weekly Evangelical Letters” were financed and—in the last instance— directed by propaganda chief Erzberger and his Jesuit assistants.

Erzberger’s assassination in 1921 had been planned for some time. The young fanatics who killed him were only the instruments of others who wished to eliminate this man who knew too much, who already had said too much and who had been too closely connected with events in which the promoters of the present World War saw Germany’s humiliation.

PACELLI’S POST-WAR ACTIVITIES

Monsignor Pacelli’s stay in Germany lasted in all more than twelve years. He was in Munich under the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic which he fought, and at the time of Hitler’s first putsch in 1923. When France occupied the industrial Ruhr Valley because Germany refused to continue reparations payments, the Nunzio, though not accredited to Prussia, ostentatiously flew from the Bavarian capital to Duesseldorf in the Prussian Rhineland, and induced his friend Achille Ratti, then Pope Pius XI, to publish an open condemnation of the “Ruhr adventure.” In 1925 he obtained a concordat with Bavaria, a concordat with Prussia in 1929, after his appointment as nuncio in Berlin, and in 1933 the famous concordat with the whole of Hitler’s Germany.

“Cardinal Pacelli,” wrote Kees van Hoek, his official Catholic biographer, in 1939, “has always been known for his strong German leanings.”

Thus it is that Germans and Italians now have good reasons for looking forward hopefully to Pius XII’s mediation on their behalf. For his past history shows that, instead of condemning Hitler whom he knew well during the seven years of his stay in Munich, he negotiated a concordat with the Nazis just as he tried to negotiate one with the Kaiser’s Germany during the last war. He fears German radicals as much as his predecessor feared the bolsheviks. Like Pius XI, he is connected with the Fascist bourgeoisie through his family. His uncle, a famous banker, was the founder and guiding spirit of the Banco di Roma, one of Italy’s greatest banks and investment houses. His brother, Francesco Pacelli, who drafted the Lateran Treaty with Fascism, had more than a hundred secret conferences with Mussolini before the treaty was signed.

The Papacy undoubtedly can and will survive the present Fascist set-up in Italy, but in the lifetime of Eugenio Pacelli it will continue to support Italy’s vested interests and will continue to remain pro- German under any kind of a regime, provided it is not anti- Catholic.

Today, Papal diplomacy is again busy behind the scenes. Judging by its record in the last war and by the personal leanings of the present Pope and his Jesuit advisers, the Curia is not the disinterested and elevated tribunal which it is made to appear to Americans. The Pope, too, has a political axe to grind.

By propagating the idea that the Pope as “Chief of Christendom” is to be dean and arbiter in the future peace conference, clerical politicians, however, may render disservice to their cause. Protestants as well as Orthodox Catholics, who do not believe in any “Chief of Christendom,” might come to learn that the Allies in London in 1915, after all, were not so ill-advised.