The Pope's Last Crusade (21 page)

Monsignor Joseph P. Hurley, right, next to Bishop Edward Mooney in Japan, 1931, with an unidentified cleric. In 1934, Hurley was appointed to the Vatican Secretariat of State, replacing Francis Spellman as the ranking American at the Vatican. He became the pope's English interpreter and unofficial go-between with the United States.
(Courtesy of the Archives of the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida.)

Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the pope's diplomatic representative in Germany, leaving a meeting, circa 1929. Pacelli served the Vatican in Germany for twelve years. Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, became the Vatican Secretary of State in 1930. Many thought that the pope used Pacelli as a sober counterpoint to his own impetuous style of leadership.

The pope and Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, left, inaugurated Vatican Radio on February 12, 1931. Pius used the immediacy of his broadcasts to speak to a world audience for the first time. Marconi said, “This is the first time in history that the living voice of the Pope will have been heard simultaneously in all parts of the globe.”
(Courtesy of AP Images.)

The pope at the microphone in 1932. His frequent broadcasts ranged increasingly into politics and pleas for peace. The pope embraced technology, expanded the Vatican observatory, substituted cars for horse-drawn carriages, and installed elevators, an automatic phone system, and a new printing plant at the Vatican.

Ambassador William Phillips and his wife, Caroline Drayton Phillips, in Europe. Friends of President and Mrs. Roosevelt (Mrs. Phillips was a relative), they served in Rome from 1936 to 1941. FDR wanted Phillips to weaken chances of an alliance between Mussolini and Hitler. Caroline Phillips's diary provided frank insights about fascism and anti-Semitism in Italy.
(Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.)

Wlodimir Ledóchowski, the superior general of the Jesuit order from 1915 to 1942. Jesuit leaders are also referred to as “the Black Pope,” and Ledóchowski was considered the third most powerful person at the Vatican after the pope and Cardinal Pacelli. Known as a strict force among the Jesuits, he espoused anti-Semitic positions, though he pledged to work with John LaFarge and the pope on the 1938 encyclical.

The pope, 1932; he suffered a heart attack in late 1936 and was not expected to survive. He recovered in early 1937 and began issuing declarations, including an encyclical that harshly condemned Hitler and the Nazis. In 1938, Hitler and Mussolini considered him a major opponent and were concerned that his popular appeal would damage their ability to sway public opinion.

Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, the pope's longtime friend and ally, was the only French cardinal working directly at the Vatican. Tisserant had served in the French army in World War I in the field and as an intelligence officer. He was mentioned as a possible future pope and was considered a rival of Cardinal Pacelli.

Mussolini and Hitler in Germany, 1937. Hitler traveled to Rome in May 1938 to cement ties with Italy to form the Axis. Privately, the German and Italian leaders despised one another. Pope Pius XI left for his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo to avoid being at the Vatican during Hitler's visit. He did not want to see “the crooked cross of neo-paganism” flying over Rome.

President Roosevelt and Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago, undated. Mundelein became one of the church's strongest critics of Nazism. In a 1937 speech, he derided Hitler as an “Austrian paper-hanger, and a poor one at that.” Both Roosevelt and the pope supported Mundelein, who traveled to Rome as Roosevelt's official emissary in November 1938.

Jan Masaryk, undated. John LaFarge met with Masaryk, the Czech ambassador to Britain, in May 1938, as Britain sought to appease Hitler by ceding the majority-German region of Czech Sudetenland to German control. Meeting with LaFarge, Masaryk, son of the late Czech president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, predicted an alliance between Hitler and Stalin.