16th July 1935
Pope Pius XI

Pope Puis XI (1857 - 1939)

Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti (1857-1939), was the Bishop of Rome and supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church from 6th February 1922 to 10th February 1939. He also became the first sovereign of the Vatican City State upon its creation as an independent state on 11th February 1929. He remained head of the Catholic Church until his death in February 1939. His papal motto was 'Pax Christi in Regno Christi', translated as 'The Peace of Christ in the Reign of Christ'.

The pontificate of Pius XI coincided with the early aftermath of the First World War. Many of the old European monarchies had been swept away and a new and precarious order formed across the continent. In the East, the Soviet Union arose. In Italy, the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini took power, while in Germany, the fragile Weimar Republic collapsed with the Nazi seizure of power. His reign was one of busy diplomatic activity for the Vatican. The Church made advances on several fronts in the 1920s, improving relations with France and, most spectacularly, settling the Roman question with Italy and gaining recognition of an independent Vatican state.

From 1933 to 1936 Pius wrote several protests against the Nazi regime, while his attitude to Mussolini's Italy changed dramatically in 1938, after Nazi racial policies were adopted in Italy. Pius XI watched the rising tide of totalitarianism with alarm and delivered three papal encyclicals challenging the new creeds: against Italian Fascism Non abbiamo bisogno (1931; 'We Do Not Need [to Acquaint You]'); against Nazism Mit brennender Sorge (1937; 'With Deep Concern'), and against atheist Communism Divini redemptoris (1937; 'Divine Redeemer'). He also challenged the extremist nationalism of the Action Française movement and antisemitism in the United States.

The Nazis, like the Pope, were unalterably opposed to Communism. In the years leading up to the 1933 election, the German bishops opposed the Nazi Party by proscribing German Catholics from joining and participating in it. This changed by the end of March after Cardinal Michael Von Faulhaber of Munich met with the Pope. One author claims that Pius expressed support for the regime soon after Hitler's rise to power, with the author asserting that he said, 'I have changed my mind about Hitler, it is for the first time that such a government voice has been raised to denounce Bolshevism in such categorical terms, joining with the voice of the pope.'

A threatening, though initially sporadic persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany followed the 1933 Nazi takeover in Germany. In the dying days of the Weimar Republic, the newly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler moved quickly to eliminate political Catholicism. Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen was dispatched to Rome to negotiate a Reich concordat with the Holy See. Ian Kershaw wrote that the Vatican was anxious to reach an agreement with the new government, despite 'continuing molestation of Catholic clergy, and other outrages committed by Nazi radicals against the Church and its organisations". Negotiations were conducted by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). The Reichskonkordat was signed by Pacelli and by the German government in June 1933, and included guarantees of liberty for the Church, independence for Catholic organisations and youth groups, and religious teaching in schools. The treaty was an extension of existing concordats already signed with Prussia and Bavaria, but wrote Hebblethwaite, it seemed 'more like a surrender than anything else: it involved the suicide of the [Catholic] Centre Party... '.

'The agreement', wrote William Shirer, 'was hardly put to paper before it was being broken by the Nazi Government'. On 25th July, the Nazis promulgated their sterilisation law, an offensive policy in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Five days later, moves began to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. Clergy, nuns and lay leaders began to be targeted, leading to thousands of arrests over the ensuing years, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or 'immorality'.

In February 1936, Hitler sent Pius a telegram congratulating the Pope on the anniversary of his coronation, but Pius responded with criticisms of what was happening in Germany, so forcefully that the German foreign secretary Konstantin von Neurath wanted to suppress the response, but Pius insisted it be forwarded to Hitler.

The pope supported the Christian Socialists in Austria, a country with an overwhelmingly Catholic population but a powerful secular element. He especially supported the regime of Engelbert Dollfuss (1932–1934), who wanted to remould society based on papal encyclicals. Dollfuss suppressed the anti-clerical factions and the socialists, but was assassinated by Austrian Nazis in 1934. His successor Kurt von Schuschnigg (1934–1938) was also pro-Catholic and received Vatican support. The Anschluss saw the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in early 1938.

At the direction of Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, the churches of Vienna pealed their bells and flew swastikas for Hitler's arrival in the city on 14th March. However, wrote Mark Mazower, such gestures of accommodation were 'not enough to assuage the Austrian Nazi radicals, foremost among them the young Gauleiter Globocnik'. Globocnik launched a campaign against the Church, confiscating property, closing Catholic organisations, and sending many priests to Dachau.

Anger at the treatment of the Church in Austria grew quickly and October 1938, wrote Mazower, saw the 'very first act of overt mass resistance to the new regime', when a rally of thousands left Mass in Vienna chanting 'Christ is our Fuehrer', before being dispersed by police. A Nazi mob ransacked Cardinal Innitzer's residence, after he denounced Nazi persecution of the Church. The American National Catholic Welfare Conference wrote that Pope Pius, 'again protested against the violence of the Nazis, in language recalling Nero and Judas the Betrayer, comparing Hitler with Julian the Apostate.'

The Nazis claimed jurisdiction over all collective and social activity and interfered with Catholic schooling, youth groups, workers' clubs and cultural societies. By early 1937, the church hierarchy in Germany, which had initially attempted to co-operate with the new government, had become highly disillusioned. In March, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge accusing the Nazi Government of violations of the 1933 Concordat, and of sowing the 'tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church'. The Pope noted on the horizon the 'threatening storm clouds' of religious wars of extermination over Germany.

Copies had to be smuggled into Germany so they could be read from church pulpits. The encyclical, the only one ever written in German, was addressed to German bishops and was read in all parishes of Germany. The text is credited to Munich Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber and to Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII.

There was no advance announcement of the encyclical, and its distribution was kept secret in an attempt to ensure the unhindered public reading of its contents in all the Catholic churches of Germany. The encyclical condemned particularly the paganism of Nazism, the myth of race and blood, and fallacies in the Nazi conception of God:

'Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.'

The Nazis responded with an intensification of their campaign against the churches, beginning around April. There were mass arrests of clergy and church presses were expropriated.

While numerous German Catholics, including those who participated in the secret printing and distribution of the encyclical, went to jail and concentration camps, the Western democracies remained silent, which Pius XI labeled bitterly a 'conspiracy of silence'.

As the extreme nature of Nazi racial anti-Semitism became obvious, and as Mussolini in the late 1930s began imitating Hitler's anti-Jewish race laws in Italy, Pius XI continued to make his position clear. After Fascist Italy's Manifesto of Race was published, the pope said in a public address in the Vatican to Belgian pilgrims in 1938: 'Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we [Christians] are all Semites'. These comments were reported by neither Osservatore Romano nor Vatican Radio. They were reported in Belgium on 14th September 1938 issue of La Libre Belgique and on 17th September 1938 issue of French Catholic daily La Croix. They were then published worldwide but had little resonance at the time in the secular media.

The 'conspiracy of silence' included not only the silence of secular powers against the horrors of Nazism but also their silence on the persecution of the Church in Mexico, the Soviet Union and Spain. Despite these public comments, Pius was reported to have suggested privately that the Church's problems in those three countries were 'reinforced by the anti-Christian spirit of Judaism'.

In 1933, when the new Nazi government began to instigate its program of anti-Semitism, Pius XI ordered the papal nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, to 'look into whether and how it may be possible to become involved' in aiding Jews. Orsenigo proved ineffective in this, concerned more with anti-church Nazi policies, and how these might affect German Catholics.

On 11th November 1938, following the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom, Pius XI joined Western leaders in condemning the pogrom. In response, the Nazis organised mass demonstrations against Catholics and Jews in Munich, and the Bavarian Gauleiter Adolf Wagner declared before 5,000 protesters: 'Every utterance the Pope makes in Rome is an incitement of the Jews throughout the world to agitate against Germany'. On 21st November, in an address to the world's Catholics, the Pope rejected the Nazi claim of racial superiority, and insisted instead that there is only a single human race. Robert Ley, the Nazi Minister of Labour declared the following day in Vienna: 'No compassion will be tolerated for the Jews. We deny the Pope's statement that there is but one human race. The Jews are parasites.' Catholic leaders, including Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster of Milan, Cardinal Jozef-Ernest van Roey in Belgium and Cardinal Jean Verdier in Paris, backed the Pope's strong condemnation of Kristallnacht.

Pius XI died at 5:31 a.m. (Rome time) of a third heart attack on 10th February 1939, at the age of 81. His last words to those near him at the time of his death were spoken with clarity and firmness: 'My soul parts from you all in peace.'

Some believe he was murdered, based on the fact that his primary physician was Dr. Francesco Petacci, father of Claretta Petacci, Mussolini's mistress. Cardinal Eugène Tisserant wrote in his diary that the pope had been murdered, which was a statement that Carlo Confalonieri later strongly denied.

Source: Wikipedia

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