Chapter X - Peace and the Papacy

The Challenge of the Times - The Pope as Peacemaker - A Truce of God

From the outset of his reign Pius XI began the task of reorganizing the Church for the fulfilling of her mission in a modern world. Rome, as we have said before, is the world’s most sensitive barometer, the best equipped spiritual observatory on earth. Here, on Vatican Hill, Pius saw the trends of the times. He witnessed the disaffected elements, betrayed by a “war to end war” and a shameful “peace” increasing and spreading their doctrines of class warfare. That triangolo doloroso – Mexico, Russia, Spain – afflicted his soul, for here he saw the doctrines of Karl Marx bearing their logical harvest of thistles, tares and brambles. The Church denounced these new saviors of society who hoped to bring about a new order by destroying the fruits of Christian culture painstakingly planted over a period of twenty centuries. Through an international network of propaganda they were seeking to destroy the Christian Church, that great agency of organized religion without which we cannot conceive of European civilization. In the name of humanity they were shooting or starving millions of human beings.

But Pius saw also the yearning of the peoples, of those inarticulate masses of the common folk to whom Leo had turned, for the human right to live peaceably, to sow, to reap, to love and propagate their kind in security and decency; and with unerring insight he began to prepare the Church to answer this awakening desire, to guide it back to the Catholic ideal of Unity, Authority, Peace. In this labor and dedication he signed thirteen new concordats. Even the staid Encyclopaedia Britannica, which surely cannot be charged with prejudice in favor of Catholicism, declares that “it is now apparent that the world has, in Pius XI, a great force making for righteousness – a new factor has entered into the relations of the nations.”

After the settlement of the Roman Question, Pius knew that there still remained the world-wide state of revolt which he characterized as the lineal descendant of the moral anarchy brought about by the nationalistic aspirations of European powers and aggravated by the sectarian spirit of Protestantism. The ideal of a united Christendom which was so closely approximated in the thirteenth century, had been superseded by the ambitions of the princes of Europe and their inevitable series of dynastic wars. The War of the Spanish Succession in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries split Europe into fragments. Pius II (1458-1464) had foreseen the logical consequences, and called the Princes of Europe to Apcona. Their refusal to heed his call spelled the end of Papal leadership and resulted in the further dismemberment of the continent into the sorry picture of the checkered map the Versailles Treaty completed. The Protestant Reformation exaggerated the denial of all authority when it proclaimed the individual judgment supreme. The splitting up of Protestantism into numerous petty sects has been the scandal of Christendom. The complete lack of moral authority which exists today gives grave concern no less to serious-minded Protestants than to Catholics themselves – although they may not trace its pedigree with the same uncompromising logic.

Religion, instead of being a unifying principle among mankind, became a disruptive force in society, and disputes and nationalistic rivalries have continued ever since, culminating in the Great War and overshadowing our contemporary world with ominous clouds of black despair. The cleavage between the spiritual and the material life has become more and more marked. The decay of religion was the inevitable result of the denial of a central spiritual authority. The guidance of the Church had given way to skepticism, to an exaggerated intellectuality, to a one-sided education of the mind to the neglect of the character and the spirit of man. Revolution was in the air and a mad kind of intoxication that rationalized itself in slogans such as Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Concepts began to be lost in a new jargon of meaningless phrases. Such was the world need as Pius XI saw it.

At Monza where Achille Ratti attended school for two years at San Pietro Martire’s, there is a Duomo which he must have often entered to pray. His eager young eyes must have been fascinated by a treasure there, enclosed in a glass case like a monstrance, in which is enshrined the iron crown of his Lombardy. He doubtless knew its history, how Gregory the Great bestowed it upon Theodalinda, the beautiful queen of the Lombards, how it had rested upon the mighty head of Charlemagne, how Frederick Barbarossa wore it and Charles V, how the great Napoleon crowned himself Emperor with it. Precious and holy the relic is, because within the iron crown is an inner crown of iron, beaten, it is said, out of one of the nails of the cross. Did Pius XI’s thoughts, which we know reverted to his native home on the plains of Lombardy when the shouts of Viva Pio, il Papa-Re arose from the throats of hundreds of thousands in the great Piazza di San Pietro, dwell upon the ancient iron crown in the Duomo of Monza? If, by placing this emblem on the head of a future ruler of a united Europe, peace might ensue once more and art might flourish and men might be permitted to live free from the hell of war, then may the vision of another pope placing the crown on another Charlemagne live again for the pacification and sanity of the world!

However quixotic the vision of a reunited Europe may seem, it is surely the acme of sanity to work for a modus vivendi among the nations of the world. To do this some authority must be recognized as conclusive. The League is dead: The seizure of Manchuria by Japan gave it its first fetal stroke. The reoccupation of the Ruhr by Germany dealt it the second blow which reduced it to the pitiable state of incurable invalidism. The Ethiopian adventure by Italy finished the League. Its death throes were heard in all the chancelleries of the world. Its burial is long overdue. Some impartial arbitrator with clean hands must be invoked, whose decisions will not be suspect, whose interests are universal, and whose deliberations can be trusted to be carried on in the spirit of fairness, because they are founded on justice and humanity.

The glamour has been stripped from war. Victors and vanquished alike pay the hideous toll of modern warfare, which strikes down the defenseless, the aged, the little ones, with ruthless fiendishness. There are no longer any rules in the devil’s game. International law has become a mockery. Innocent non-combatants are crushed beneath the juggernaut with pitiless unconcern. The harvest of corpses, after an air raid, are thrown into a cart for common burial like carcasses of cattle from the stock yards. In Shanghai such unspeakable scenes were enacted only yesterday and the science of motion-picture photography brought the sickening story to the news reels of New York and Chicago. They tell the tale of the cheapness of human life in this boasted year of our Lord, 1937! Callous beyond description are these scenes of carnage.

All the amenities of international intercourse are suspended in modern warfare. The loss to humanity in manpower, in disease, in maimed public charges, in poverty and economic chaos, in depression and revolution, is incalculable. All that two thousand years of Christian civilization has built up in the joyous expression of creative power, in blood and tears, in courage and laughter, in heroic effort and patient travail of spirit, is threatened with destruction unless the war-god is chained.

Who in all the world is better fitted to grapple in a just and impartial manner with the international tangle than the Pope? There must be an arbiter some authority whose moral position cannot be gainsaid, whose motives are not under suspicion, whose love and compassion reach out to all mankind as to a common family someone in whom there is confidence that a just judgment will be a foregone conclusion. There must be a Truce of God. Who is so well qualified as the Pope to exercise moral suasion in place of a resort to force? This does not mean that the world must become universally Catholic. Pius XI has invited all men of good will to join him in a crusade against anarchy and war, and he would be the first to welcome a modus vivendi and a modus operandi for the accomplishment of so worthy and necessary a collaboration for the achievement of peace on earth.

Nationalism, in its logical apotheosis of the totalitarian state, is the root of the evil threat of war and of all wars whether declared or actual. It arose in its extreme expression because the Have-Nations have been unwilling to relinquish their hold on their ill-gotten gains, and the Have-Not-Nations – Japan, Italy and Germany – (for the self-preservation of their citizens whom they must feed and to assuage their humiliation) have resorted to force to take what has been withheld from them by greed.

Class warfare is the second enemy of peace. Humanity must rise or fall together. One class cannot annihilate another. Individuals can be “liquidated,” but classes have a way of persisting – or exchanging places. A classless society cannot even be approximated except through the practice of Christian principles and Christian brotherhood.

The Papacy, possessing neither army nor navy nor territorial ambitions, wanting nothing for itself other than the salvation of men and of society, is the one organized force that exists in the world today under a moral and spiritual compulsion, ably equipped as an ideal agency to act for the promotion of international collaboration. Because it is freed from selfish national interests that clash and fight for advantage, because it has accepted the dual role of Church and State in society, because with the signing of the Lateran Accord the long conflict is at an end and the Church’s function is clearly defined, the Papacy is free to exercise its influence in its true and proper mission of religious and moral leadership. This leadership is imperative, not only for the survival of Christianity itself, but also for the peace of the world, and for the preservation of western civilization.

The idea of invoking a Truce of God to call a halt to the destruction that flares up today in the civil war of Spain and in the streets of Shanghai, and tomorrow in some other theatre where the flames of hatred and injustice threaten a terrorized populace, is not new nor fantastic. In the Middle Ages such a truce was invoked. It dated from the eleventh century and arose amid the anarchy of feudalism as a bulwark to supersede the helplessness of the civil authorities and to enforce respect for the public peace. There was prevalent all over Europe an epidemic of petty private wars which converted the continent into an armed camp of bristling fortresses. Indeed every man’s castle was a fortress and the countrysides were overrun with armed bandits who held nothing sacred and whose depredations extended even to the sanctuaries of religion.

At first the Truce of God was very restricted in its scope but later it was enlarged to embrace ever wider areas. The Council of Elne in 1027 forced a truce from Saturday night until Monday morning – thus sanctifying and rendering inviolable the Sabbath. This modest beginning was the germ of the Truce of God. The prohibition was later extended to apply to all the holy days consecrated to the Mysteries of Christianity. A further extension included Advent and the forty days of Lent. Thus the scourge of war was at least limited in its potential destructive force. This curtailment of the ruthless power of armed conflicts to create anarchy and the determination to insure some immunity from the hazards of warfare was enforced by the Church’s powerful weapon of excommunication.

The Trace of God spread from France to Italy and Germany and the ecumenical council of 1179 still further extended the scope of its influence to the whole Church. In this manner the problem of the public peace which was the goal and craving of the Church in the Middle Ages was given the force of an authority that was acceptable to all. Such was the vast influence of the authority of the Holy See that the Landfrieden and the communes followed the impetus given by the Church until war was finally restricted to international conflicts.

The idea of the Pope acting as mediator is also not new nor untried. Even Bismarck, as late as 1885, after the failure of the Kulturkampf, gave concrete expression to his new policy of co-operation with the Church by recognizing where impartial and just decisions might be expected to reside when he called upon Leo XIII to settle the dispute between Germany and Spain over the Caroline Islands. This dispute was amicably settled to the mutual satisfaction of both countries until Germany finally paid a handsome price for the Islands which she had developed with her own capital.

In his book, The Papacy and World Affairs, Dr. Carl Conrad Eckhardt, Professor of History of the University of Chicago, cites two modern Americans to whom the idea of Papal arbitration has appealed. Mr. Victor J. Dowling, former presiding Justice of the appellate division of the Supreme Court of New York, in a baccalaureate address in June 1931, declared: “What the world needs today is respect for some central authority which would be free from suspicion. The Pope might be the Arbitrator between nations.” The Rev. John M. Phillips of Hartford, Conecticut, made a statement even more startling when he said that “all Christians and Jews should appeal to Pope Pius XI to lead a world movement against war, to end war through a religious truce similar to those of mediaeval times.”

Beginning with the reign of Leo XIII and continuing through the pontificates of Pius X, Benedict XV and up through the sixteen years of Pius XI’s astonishing activity, the Catholic Church has entered upon a renaissance whose full fruition is not yet consummated. The Holy See is the sole remaining hope for bringing peace and tranquillity to a distracted world where the diplomat’s futile, half-hearted measures leave the real causes of war untouched as they flutter about in an aimless endeavor to delay the deluge that threatens.

When Czar Nicholas II invited Leo XIII to send a representative to the Hague Conference in 1889, along with invitations sent to all the governments of the world, the good intention was frustrated and rendered still-born by the Italian government through its minister of foreign affairs, Admiral Canevero. Queen Wilhelmina, who was to act as hostess to the conference, and the Czar were jointly notified that the participation of the Holy See in the forthcoming negotiations would be regarded as an affront to the Italian government since it would seem to imply an acknowledgment of the temporal authority of the Papacy. Hence the omission of an invitation to the Holy See by the Dutch government.

Pius XI, who as usual was not invited to the Genoa Conference, wrote an open letter to the Archbishop of Genoa in which he suggested that the victors and vanquished should come together to settle their differences. Germany and Russia were both represented at Genoa and it was rumored that Tchitcherin would visit the Vatican after the Conference to thank the Holy See for the generous help given to the starving population of Russia. This rumor proved groundless and the contact that the Holy Father craved with Russia was not effected. In another letter to Cardinal Gasparri, Pius again extended an invitation to Russia. In fact, three separate overtures were made to contact the U. S. S. R. Remembering Pius’ own personal experiences as Papal Nuncio in Poland and what he saw there when the Bolsheviks were at the gates, the attempts he made to enter Russia and his efforts to save the lives of his own religious Faithful and the Eastern Orthodox followers, it is not surprising that all these rebuffs should have resulted in his determination to exert every effort to first come to terms with Italy and then meet each problem in the foreign field within the framework of the Lateran Accord, never surrendering his prerogatives as spiritual leader to call political leaders to their responsibility to walk in the ways of God and to promote the peaceful collaboration of men of good-will.

Many – even Catholics in some quarters – have criticized Pius for surrendering too much authority when he signed the Accord with Italy and claim that he has made himself a vassal of the Italian Fascist State. No doubt he himself has had some searchings of heart. For we repeat what we said at the beginning of this biographical study that, although the Pope is infallible in regard to matters of dogma, when he speaks ex cathedra; he is not, nor does he claim to be, infallible in matters of policy and of judgment of mundane considerations. That he does not believe himself impervious to error in worldly matters is evidenced by the fact that he has revised his own earlier judgment on more than one occasion. It is also evident in the spirit of humility and caution breathing through all his writings. Nor do we base our thesis of the practical good that would ensue in the international field if the spiritual leadership of the Papacy were invoked on the belief that his leadership would be a fool-proof barricade against the greed and wickedness of men; but because, if men of good will have a vital passionate desire for world peace, they should ally themselves with spiritual forces. For the healing of the nations this reservoir of spiritual power should be tapped.

All the efforts of the last four Popes of the Catholic Church have been directed toward the religious pacification of the world. But the world has turned a deaf ear. The rulers of states have been more interested in the aggrandizement of their own power than in bringing about the peace and security and happiness of mankind. There is a formidable tradition of Christian experience behind the Holy See that admirably fits it to cope with problems that baffle the best lay minds. The fact that the Pope is the recognized head of four hundred million souls scattered all over the world invests him with a responsibility that could never betray their faith. Now that the temporal power of the Papacy is clearly defined and limited, the old bogey of Papal interference in the purely civic concerns of states is dispelled; and all men and women of good will whose ardent love of peace is more precious than their moth-eaten prejudices (the out-moded survivals of a society that believed in witchcraft) should welcome and, indeed, commandeer the intervention of this untried powerful agent for world peace. No puerile apprehensions should cloud the minds of men and women dedicated to the cause of peace. They might gladly join together to invoke the spiritual offices of such an experienced and well-equipped organization for dealing with international problems, and support the Holy See in its destined mission of world pacification.

To those who glibly blame Pope Pius XI for not castigating – even to the extent of excommunicating Mussolini – for the Ethiopian adventure; first, in justice let us remind ourselves of the impassioned plea for peace addressed to the soldiers in San Paolo fuori le Mura prior to the embarkation of the troops for Africa. In words of sublime consecration, declaring he would be unworthy of his high responsibility as their Father and as Supreme Pontiff, if he did not renew his consecration to the cause of peace, he recapitulated all the fervor and logic of his pastoral encyclicals. This address was suppressed by the press of Italy. On another occasion he warned and exhorted against wars of aggression and even against “wars of unjust defense.” He never blessed the Italian army, although he did permit the chaplains to follow the soldiers as was his and their obvious duty, That he did not join in the chorus of condemnation of Italy and back the fifty-four states of the League in their attempt to invoke “sanctions”or in other words, a blockade to starve out his own countrymen, does not indicate that he gave his approval to the campaign. We find no inconsistency here in the avowed champion of peace, and reserve the right to question this method as the wisest and most Christian for promoting conditions conducive to mutual understanding to bring about an early settlement of the conflict. To join in with such a campaign against the people of a great nation for the sake of an appearance of consistency would never be the Papal attitude. Such slavish conformity to the appearance of consistency would be a vice, common enough to governments which indulge in “face saving” to hide a betrayal of principle.

We know now that Mussolini had this African venture in mind as far back as 1933, provided the League did not hearken to Italy’s “just demands” and give her satisfaction without a resort to arms.

The Holy See did not create any of the conditions that led up to the Great War and had no part in the framing of the infamous Versailles Treaty. On the contrary, all the overtures of the pontiffs from the time of Pius IX were rejected by jealous nationalistic powers. Without exception they turned a deaf ear to the Vatican’s appeals for peace a peace founded upon justice and the mutual rights of the contending parties, in the spirit of that charity and mercy which Christ Himself proclaimed. Yet, in spite of this consistent stupidly monotonous policy of ignoring the Papal appeals, there are those who innocently – or maliciously – ask: “Why didn’t the Pope stop the Great War? He had the power.” Why didn’t Pius XI stop the Ethiopian campaign? He had the weapon.” Yes, he had the weapon – the weapon of excommunication. But, just as a labor leader has no moral right to call a strike unless he is sure that the cause is just and the outcome is reasonably certain, so the Pope would not be justified in wielding the weapon of excommunication unless, weighing the consequences of its application, he were assured that the good results would overbalance the evil. If Pius XI had resorted to the exercise of his undoubted prerogative, what should we have seen? In Italy, confusion worse confounded. All the blessings that have accrued because of a united people would have been jeopardized in civil war. And in the world – what? Who can say? We suspect the critics of Pius’ “lack of action” of ungenerous motives to justify their own lack of honesty.

When we consider what obstacles have been placed in the way of every attempt to make a dent in the locked minds of the diplomats, and to contact responsible statesmen, what impassable barriers have been erected by selfish interests, we think it a marvel that so much has been begun in creating “a way of peace.” Confronted with such obdurate stubbornness, it is amazing that the voice of the Pontiff of Rome continues to ring out in clarion tones to challenge and soften the hard hearts of men. It is a tribute to his sublime faith in ultimate goodness and his constancy of purpose in a holy cause.

We are still too close to Pius XI to do full justice to his remarkable pontificate. For sixteen years, if we view the labors of the Pope with impartial eyes, we see how persistent and very practical his efforts have been in the erection of an edifice for future pontiffs to enlarge and develop for the furtherance of his dream of Pax Christi in Regno Christi. Future, and we trust happier, generations will garner the fruits of his labors where another pontiff will reap what Pius XI has sown and watered; while a Voice will be heard echoing down the centuries: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”