Pro-Prefect of the Biblioteca Vaticana - Pius X's Representative at Oxford - Death of Pius X - Monsignor Ratti Is Appointed Prefect - The Vatican in War-Time
Judged by ordinary standards, Achilla Ratti’s real career begins late in life. But in the Church promotions come tardily, and advanced age is not of itself a deterrent to fame. There is no compulsory retirement list that forbids or inhibits an older ecclesiastic from achieving renown. True, he is free to lay down his tasks if he finds them too heavy. He may retire to a monastery if he feels that his usefulness is at an end. Thus, Cardinal Rampolla, faithful old secretary and watch-dog of Leo XIII, retired from active service to end his days in cloistered retirement when, after the death of his Papal Chief, Franz Josef’s interference with the conclave proceedings directed the cardinals’ choice away from him. Rampolla had been the logical popular candidate and had been leading in the scrutinies. The necessary two-thirds vote was, however, diverted thus to a “safe” man, Cardinal Sarto. This interference from the outside can fortunately never occur again, due to the stringent requirements of ecclesiastical privacy which the successful candidate himself (Pius X) proclaimed should henceforth govern all conclave proceedings.
The lives of priests, freed from economic necessity, made secure by the solicitude of the Church for her sons, are noteworthy for longevity and prolonged youthfulness. So, in Monsignor Ratti’s case, it proved no exception that the conditioning of his fame as a world figure came in his fifty-fourth year, when he was called to Rome by Pius X to act as Pro-Prefect of the Vatican Library. Just as, twenty-three years earlier, Father Ratti had gone to Milan to assist Ceriani at the Ambrosiana, so now he was called to the Vaticana to assist Father Ehrle under its brilliant Prefect, Cardinal Gasquet, who indeed had recommended Canon Ratti to His Holiness. This promotion proved to be the first real rung of the ladder to world fame, for it brought the learned Monsignor directly to the attention of the Papacy.
There can be no doubt that it was a wrench from the smooth routine of life in Milan, where associations of more than twenty years’ growth had created numerous pleasant ties, and the strong bond of filial affection had been nurtured by daily visits to his mother’s home on the Via Nerone, to be suddenly summoned to Rome. He was leaving his beloved library, revitalized by his very life’s blood, his “dear metropolis,” the Lombard Plain that had bred and hardened him, his connections with the Lombard Church and his “Ambrosians,” the social life of the Milanese elite that had brought him many delightful hours of congenial relaxation; and most of all, his beloved mother who with the advancing years was becoming always dearer and “rarer.”
The story is told of his farewell visit to Desio, the scene of his childhood dreams and adventures; and of his casual encounter with an old school companion who, like himself, had now become a middle-aged man. They stopped on the roadside and exchanged reminiscent anecdotes of experiences shared forty years before. Ratti’s old friend of his boyhood days delivered himself of prophecy, declaring, “Achille, you are going away with the black hat and will return with the red hat. In time, you will wear the white hat!”
The startled scholar’s grave features were lit up with one of his fleeting smiles. “That would be a tremendous prophecy,” he answered quietly, as he turned to bid a hasty good-by in answer to the church bell’s call to vespers.
Arriving at Rome, we can see the carefully-dressed, quiet priest, self-possessed and thoughtful, looking searchingly through his spectacles into the eyes of his new chief, Cardinal Gasquet, the courteous dignitary who welcomed him at the Prefect’s office.
Monsignor Ratti knew that his new appointment would in the course of time lead to the Prefecture. But in the meantime he recognized fully all the numerous duties and responsibilities that devolved upon himself; that to justify the faith of Cardinal Gasquet and of the Holy Father, Pius X, he must, on a grander scale, augment the reputation he had made for himself as librarian of the Ambrosiana. Having worked at the Biblioteca Vaticana while he was librarian in Milan, he was perfectly aware of the chaos he must wrestle with and out of which he must bring order and efficiency. Thus began a task, a quarter of a century ago, which he has never quite relinquished, not even during the burdened years of the Papacy’s tremendous claims.
Not all Popes have been librarians, and so it is perfectly natural that the precious treasures housed in the most famous library in the world should have presented to Monsignor Ratti’s orderly mind a challenge worthy of his administrative achievements. The priceless manuscripts and rare books must have seemed to cry out to him in their neglect to be decently placed in well-ordered arrangement. For not since the seventeenth century had the ever-accumulating wealth of books and manuscripts been properly classified and catalogued.
With that adaptability and forthrightness that have always been so characteristic of him, he went to work with determination and vigor. Carloads of the world’s literary masterpieces were daily transferred under his supervision by a corps of workmen, and then carefully arranged in new congenial habitats. All this enormous responsibility of selection and arrangement was Dr. Ratti’s. It is extremely doubtful if any other living man could have undertaken this tremendous task with the success and calm assurance of the middle-aged Pro-Prefect. Wherever he worked in silent thoughtfulness, out of confusion came ordered beauty.
Two hundred years older than the Ambrosian, the Vatican Library was founded in the fifteenth century by Pope Nicholas V out of his own private collection of the rarest manuscripts from all over the known literary world. Pope Nicholas intended that the Biblioteca Vaticana should be to pilgrims of learning what the basilica of Saint Peter’s was to the religious devotees of Christendom. With great wisdom and foresight Pope Nicholas added to the nucleus of his manuscripts all the earliest editions which were pouring from the newly invented printing presses of Europe. After the scholarly Pontiff’s death, books were constantly being bought to augment the library, and a librarian-historian was put in charge of these inestimable treasures. This ever-increasing inflow of books has never ceased to pour into the Vatican Library and the task of rearrangement is naturally ceaseless.
Tourists are familiar with the Sala Sistina and the Borgia Gallery, with the museum rooms, the picture galleries and the Hall of the Belvedere; but few visitors who have not serious research to perform have ever seen the room where Dr. Ratti’s desk was placed, the desk over which he was bent for hours at the solution of some baffling problem. The Leonine Library where all the printed books are kept, and the many rooms which house the reference books and manuscripts are known only to scholars and visiting clerics. Here may be found such priceless papers as some letters from Henry VIII of England, “Defender of the Faith”! and from one Martin Luther, priest of the Church, who was to shake Catholicism to its foundations. For it was in the conviction that “the Church has nothing to fear” that Leo XIII, famed scholar and classicist, threw open the library to all scholars who might seek out its long hidden secrets.
What was Monsignor Achille Rattis life during the three years of his tenure of office under Father Ehrle, before the Great War created a complete turnover within Vatican circles? Gradually he achieved within the library walls an evolving order that became self-regulatory and established a routine not unlike the old familiar cycle of the hours at the Ambrosiana. Yet how unlike the old life in Milan were the Roman days, in spite of the similarity of pursuits for definite hours! Though the library opened between eight and nine o’clock, there were many hours when the librarian was free to lift his eyes beyond his books and papers, to gaze from his windows down into the Gardens, to reflect upon the imposing history of the Church’s glorious past Largely because of the dreams of the meditating librarian the restored prestige of the Papacy has in our own day become a reality.
Always strongly self-reliant and mentally alive, the Vatican librarian studied the ruined monuments of ancient pre-Christian archaeology as he took his daily walks abroad in the late afternoons. Unable to appease his longing for more robust exercise the mountaineer-priest had to satisfy the demands of his vigorous constitution with such restricted exercise as his exacting position permitted.
Because of Father Ehrle’s indisposition, Pius X, shortly before his sudden death due to the outbreak of the War, sent Dr. Ratti to Oxford to represent the Vatican Library at the celebration of the seventh centenary of the birth of Roger Bacon, held under the auspices of the London Royal Society. On the evening of June 10th a dinner was given the delegates. During the dinner hour, the Monsignor, who was seated as guest of honor at the right of Lord Curzon, the President of the Society, responded to the toast to the representative of the Pope with a brief address in Latin to the assembled distinguished savants, announcing the discovery by Doctors Nogara and Pelzer, of two manuscripts of Roger Bacon in the Vatican Library. The cordial and deferential reply of Lord Curzon was a tribute to one of those scholarly triumphs that must have created a glow of gratitude in the breast of the modest learned librarian.
The three years of librarianship under the Prefect, as Father Ehrle had become, were germinating years that have since fructified with astonishing richness. Living modestly amid the external luxury of faded pomp and circumstance, surrounded by the treasures of countless ages and nations, the Pro-Prefect allowed himself no richer appointments than were the monkish quarters of his cell in Milan. The future held for him the Prefecture possibly the Cardinal’s Hat though that was conjecture. So the days passed in patient activity and smooth monotony each tomorrow loomed placid and secure – but by no means startling.
Then came the War! Within three weeks Pius X was dead the first war victim. Only one act, an act eloquent of his saintly character and noble nature, has immortalized those brief days before he passed on to his predecessors an act pointing out to his successors what must ever be the Vatican’s attitude toward future wars. When poor old Franz Josef, whom the muse of tragedy seemed always to single out for her own, requested the aged peace-loving Pontiff to bless the Austrian armies, the sorrowful old Pope refused, replying in heart-sick accents: “My blessing is for peace and not for war.”
Upon the accession of the Cardinal-Archbishop, della Chiesa of Bologna, to the Papal throne as Benedict XV, events in Vatican circles followed each other in rapid succession. Although the new Pontiff was as unlike his predecessor as possible in his antecedents and temperament, being an aristocrat by birth and a diplomat by calling, both pontiffs shared a firm conviction regarding the European cataclysm. Both were pacifists, and earnestly desired that Italy maintain a neutral position between the Allied and Central Powers.
One of Benedict’s first acts was to weed out of the personnel of the Vatican all foreigners. In the general housecleaning Father Francis Ehrle was forced to resign. Monsignor Ratti stepped into the Prefecture by this turn of events. For the Holy Father felt an Italian would be a safer man in charge of the important library in war-time. His choice of Monsignor Ratti was also influenced by the fact that he was a fluent linguist as well as an exceptional librarian and profound scholar.
From the very beginning of the Great War, Benedict XV, taking up the bitter task laid down by his saintly predecessor, exerted his every effort to halt die headlong plunge of the nations toward self-destruction. On September 8th he asked all Catholics to join him in offering up prayers for peace. An Encyclical followed this invitation on 1 November 1914, exhorting all the nations to desist from their madness and return to the ways of peace. This inaugural Encyclical, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum Principis, was the first of a long series of appeals to the governments involved in mutual slaughter. In it the Head of the Church summed up the causes of the War as an absence of good-will and charity, distrust of authority and hatred of the ruling class; the unbridled cupidity for perishable things. He recalled men’s minds to the forgotten principles of the Gospel.
After the rape of Belgium when the Archbishop of Malines, Cardinal Mercier, protested against the outrages his heroic country was suffering, the Pontiff wrote him on December 8, 1914, a letter of sympathetic consolation. In consistory the next month Benedict denounced to the Sacred College violations against the rights of nations. Although no names were mentioned, Cardinal Gasparri made it clear two days later in a letter to the Belgian minister, that the Holy Father referred in his address to the violation of Belgian neutrality.
An appeal to President Wilson followed in April, 1915, in which the Holy Father begged that America do everything in her power to avoid any action that might prolong the war, and back every effort for a hasty peace. The next month Benedict protested in a letter to the Cardinal Dean against the barbarous conduct of the warfare which he stigmatized as contrary to law and humanity. On September of the same year he sadly rebuked Catholics for condemning their brothers of other nations.
As an Italian, as well as Supreme Pontiff, Benedict deplored Italy’s entry into the war. In a letter to the Cardinal Dean, dated the day after Italy’s declaration on the side of the Allies, His Holiness wrote: “The terrible outbreak which has reached even our own beloved Italy causes us to fear even for her that train of woes and disasters which usually accompanies every war, even when it is a successful one.”
The danger which he dreaded for Italy caused the Pope to redouble his efforts for what he considered his supreme duty: to call the belligerents to peace. His new appeal was given on July 28, 1915. The war had seen a year of fluctuating fortune without decisive result. Words of sublime significance were uttered, couched in the noblest terms.
The Holy Father recites the litany of woes suffered, the useless bloodshed, the many tortures inflicted upon his children. He calls the rulers to task for their slaughter of his sons. He reminds them that for them also there is a God.
In the holy name of God [he cries out] in the name of our Heavenly Father and Lord, through the precious blood of Jesus, the price of redeemed humanity, we adjure you whom divine Providence has set over the belligerent nations to put an end at last to the horrible carnage which has dishonored Europe for a year … It is you who, in the sight of God and man, bear the terrible responsibility of peace and war. Hearken to our prayer, hearken to the fatherly voice of the Vicar of the Supreme and Eternal Judge, to whom you must render account for your public, as for your private acts . . . The manifold riches which God the Creator has lavished upon the lands subject to you enable you to prolong the contest, but at what a price! What of the thousands of young lives which are lost on the battlefields every day? What of the ruin of so many towns and villages, of so many monuments raised by the piety and genius of your ancestors? What of those bitter tears shed day by day in hundreds of homes or at the foot of the altar? Do not all these repeat that the cost of the continued struggle is too great?
The wholesale destruction was incalculable and the greatest obstacle to peace. And what must be the consequences?
Remember [warns the Holy Father] nations do not die; in humiliation and oppression they chafe under the yoke imposed upon them; they prepare for revenge, and pass on from generation to generation the sorrowful heritage of hatred and retaliation.
Benedict besought that the rights and just aspirations of the peoples should be taken into consideration. This he held was the “sole condition of a stable equilibrium in the world and of the prosperous and assured tranquillity of nations.” He advised an immediate exchange of views on this matter.
Although the French and Italian radical press pretended they scented a pro-German intention in these noble words (for at the moment it was issued the Germans seemed to have the advantage), yet, on the whole, there was agreement that it was a high-minded appeal. But among the belligerents no move was made to take advantage of this message. Even the plea for a truce of God on Christmas day fell on deaf ears. The fury of the War was unabated.
Italy, hoping to see her national ambitions realized in three months, found herself drawn into a conflict whose end was unpredictable.
After the destruction of the Lusitania, another Papal protest was vigorously voiced; but the systematic destruction by submarines continued to take its awful toll.
Since all his efforts to stop the war seemed to bear no fruit, Benedict sought to mitigate its horrors as far as was in his power. The Provisional Office for Prisoners of War had been functioning for months before Italy declared war. The exchange of hostages, the notifying of relatives concerning the fate of their beloved ones were undertaken through this office. Without distinction of religion prisoners of war were the objects of the Pope’s care. Swiss priests were the agents the Pope used to visit the prison camps in France and Germany.
The government of Italy had from the time of her entrance into the War been suspicious of the Vatican’s loyalty. As early as April, 1915, there had been injected into the Pact of London (by Signor Sonnino in collaboration with Signor Salandra) an article defining the conditions of Italy’s participation on the side of the Allies. In Article 15 the Allies, as a friendly gesture to the Italian government, pledged themselves not to allow the Pope a hearing if he worked for a negotiated peace.
This unjust and belittling act did not win the applause of Italian Catholics, and even some Liberals felt affronted and expressed their displeasure. It was recognized not only as unfair to the Holy See, but as jeopardizing in advance the cause of a just peace settlement. The one voice that was above national and sectarian interests was throttled. The tragic results of this suicidal policy have been felt in Europe and the world ever since. The wise calm deliberation that was so essential to create a sane social order out of the chaos of the War was absent at Versailles.
Yet, in spite of this affront (due in part to Sonnino’s fear of the Roman Question) Benedict continued to work for peace. On 1 August 1917, the Pope issued his famous note to the heads of the warring nations. This note was a peace plan, a seven-point program, which was later embodied in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The concrete propositions were:
1. Freedom of the seas.
2. Disarmament (gradual reduction).
3. International court of justice (acceptance of the principle of arbitration).
4. Complete restoration of Belgium (guaranteed by Germany, France and England).
5. Regulation of economic counterclaims; reciprocal surrender of claims for costs and damage of the war.
6. Settlement of frontier disputes (especially Austria-Italy and France-Germany).
7. Settlement of Polish, Serbian and other frontier claims, taking into consideration the aspirations of the populations and the good of humanity.
Although Benedict had included in the pontifical note the recognition of Italy’s right to claim her natural boundaries, the Italian government ignored the Papal message which the King of England had forwarded to the King of Italy. The obdurate Sonnino in a speech compared the Pope’s note to the peace proposals emanating from the German side and even hinted it was inspired by Germany(!).
The Italian government blamed the Vatican for the terrible defeat of Caporetto, for it was known that the disillusioned troops left the trenches shouting “Down with War! Long live the Pope!”
When finally the hideous nightmare came to an end and the exhausted nations met at the Peace Conference, the Vatican was, due to Article 15 of the Pact of London, excluded from the table, though many efforts were made to have a Papal representative present. Cardinal Dubois of Rouen wrote Gasparri expressing his regret that no Papal envoy was acceptable to the powers. Lord Stanmore replied in the House of Lords:
The Pope is in the same position as a ruler of a neutral state, of which in no case can a representative be permitted into the peace conference except with the consent of all the belligerents.
Never, officially, was the Pope permitted to say a word during the negotiations.
Before the evil results of the Versailles Treaty began to be glaringly manifest to the slow minds of selfish interests, the Holy Father in an Encyclical, Pacem Dei Mundus, in 1920, declared:
The joy which has been brought to us by the conclusion of peace is mixed with numerous and very bitter inquietudes . . . Because if the hostilities have almost ceased everywhere, if indeed certain conventions of peace have been signed, the germs of inveterate hatred still exist.
To those who, like the former Kaiser of Germany (with his tongue in his cheek) defended their own sins by asserting that the Holy See should have condemned the war, ex cathedra, at its inception, it must be remembered that in 1914 no such Papal order would have received publicity in any of the belligerent countries; and if it might, by a miracle, leak through the censorship of the controlled press, such an order would have been held up to ridicule as the work of an enemy and a defeatist.
For the future of Christianity, in order to save the civilization of the western world from ruin, the policy of the Holy See with new instruments of power at its disposal (the temporal independence of the Vatican, the radio and the airplane) will, it is hoped and believed by many, be exercised in the strong furtherance of international peace.
It came as a surprise to many when it was learned that the quiet scholar Ratti was about to undertake a difficult diplomatic mission to Poland. Subsequent events proved the wisdom of the Holy Father’s choice; for, while not actively participating in the policies of Benedict XV, the future Pope, Monsignor Ratti, had been observing, from the vantage ground of the Vatican Household, all that was transpiring, and was thoroughly conversant with His Holiness’ aims and purposes. Afterwards it was recalled that the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, had kept a close watch over the able librarian and had frequently shared with him matters of moment.
So it came about that when the Polish bishops begged the Pope to send a representative to Poland to reorganize the religious life of the country, that keen judge of able lieutenants turned to the Prefect of the Vatican Library. Monsignor Ratti’s objection of unworthiness was quickly over-ridden by Benedict with the command: “How soon can you be ready?”