Reflections

The Crusader Spirit

One of the most remarkable aspects of the invasion and occupation of Ethiopia was that heresy—essentially a thought crime—should be used by Catholic prelates in the 20th century as justification for a holy war. And equally surprising was their success in sanctifying what had originated as purely secular violence with geopolitical objectives, thus rallying the citizens of Italy to support the invasion, inculcating a powerful sense of divine mission among the regular soldiers, and spurring the recruitment of tens of thousands of Blackshirt volunteers. The conviction that they were doing God’s work almost certainly accounted for much of the sense of impunity with which young men, who had never before killed anyone, posed for photographs while performing the most shocking atrocities.

What is less easy to explain is the extent to which the Italians adopted medieval crusader practices: notably the customary three-day slaughter, pillage and burning of an invaded city (Addis Ababa) following attempted resistance by the inhabitants; decapitation, which was rife throughout the invasion and occupation; and the burning alive of captives.

The sack of Addis Ababa has already been briefly discussed, and the invading troops’ obsession with the public display of the severed heads of their victims has also been noted as having been widespread and much photographed. The burning alive of Ethiopians in their houses has also been discussed—a practice that was common wherever exemplary repression was under way. Numerous Italian telegrams reported the burning of homesteads during these ‘reprisals’, but the official reports of the dead (usually referred to as ‘rebels’ and ‘suspects’) were generally limited to those shot or hanged; Graziani’s reports make no specific reference to the numerous deaths by burning. However, the reader will recall the written instruction by Captain Corvo to his subordinates, indicating that it was an accepted practice: ‘You are to punish without pity all persons found in possession of arms or ammunition. I instruct you to burn not only their houses, but also the persons themselves.’

So, what possessed these 20th-century Italian commanders, who were overwhelmingly Catholic, to institute these barbaric practices, all of which smacked of crusader zealotry? Were they consciously emulating their crusading forebears? Were they driven by a primeval instinct, or were they just following orders?

We may never know the answer, since none of those responsible, from Graziani downwards, were ever held accountable for their actions in Ethiopia. However, it appears that the enthusiasm for crusading had never completely died out, and that all that was needed in Rome for a revival of the crusader spirit was the expectation of a Promised Land, reinforced by the pope’s talk of Ethiopian heretics and schismatics, and the bishops’ constant refrain that the invasion was a holy war and that the soldiers were doing the work of the Almighty.¹

Where Was the Holy Father?

This brings us to the question of what Pius XI was thinking, and doing, about the invasion. While these horrors were taking place, what was the reaction of the primate of Italy, whose clergy were using their churches and cathedrals to promote the invasion with such zeal?

We have seen that in the early 1930s, before the invasion, there was a positive and constructive relationship between the Catholic Church and Ethiopia; indeed, we have noted the direct assistance and encouragement given by the Ethiopian government to the Catholic Church’s ongoing missions in Ethiopia. As far as Ethiopia was concerned, the Italian episcopate had nothing to complain about. We have also noted the pontiff’s initial disapproval of Mussolini’s plans for an aggressive war against Ethiopia. And we know that some of the most influential individuals such as Pacelli, Ledóchowski and Tardini either attenuated papal statements, or made it difficult for the pontiff to criticise Mussolini’s actions as much as he would have liked, thereby contributing to the inconstancy of his responses. Yet despite his (albeit muddled) expression of concern in August 1935, no evidence has come to light to indicate that Pius XI subsequently made any serious effort to prevent Italy’s attack on Ethiopia, although he had the opportunity to do so on several occasions.

Furthermore, and even more surprisingly, the pope chose not to condemn the vociferous campaign waged during 1935 and 1936 by a substantial proportion of the most senior and influential members of the episcopate of the Italian Catholic Church, even including those directly subordinate to him as bishop of Rome, to publicly garner human and material support for the invasion. He also stood by in silence when the same archbishops and bishops used their pulpits to dehumanise and denigrate the Ethiopians, brand Ethiopian Muslims as infidels, and promote the invasion as a holy war. Indeed, far from distancing the Holy See from the invasion, by early 1936 we find the secretary of state making it clear that as far as the Holy See was concerned, opponents of the invasion were, by definition, enemies of the Catholic Church, while the pope was putting his weight behind Mussolini in his fight against the League of Nations’ anti-war sanctions.

So what are we to make of the pope’s claim to be politically neutral? Pius XI claimed that he maintained neutrality so as to be in a position to mediate between nations in conflict. Yet when Emperor Haile Selassie put that claim to the test, the pontiff refused the request to mediate, stating that he ‘would not treat with schismatics’.

It must be said that the claim of papal neutrality comes across as hollow, particularly in 1936. We have already noted several cases in which the Holy See threw its supposed neutrality to the winds when it chose to do so. The secretary of state was quick to discipline clergy of national Catholic Churches when they spoke against Fascism and the invasion of Ethiopia, insisting that clergy should not make political statements. However, he never disciplined clergy who made highly political public statements in favour of Fascism and the invasion. Another case concerns Monsignor Joseph Ciarrocchi, pastor of the Catholic church of Santa Maria in the archdiocese of Detroit, who spoke against the invasion, and published anti-Fascist articles. The response was a strongly worded letter from Pacelli ordering him in no uncertain terms to desist from writing on political matters, and threatening to withdraw his papal honours.² And this at a time when numerous Italian clerics and the editors of Italian Catholic Church newspapers and journals were publishing inflammatory political articles and making bellicose declarations in their churches and cathedrals in favour of Fascism and in favour of the war in Ethiopia, yet they were never disciplined.

Another well-documented case already mentioned is the alacrity with which Pius XI himself reined in Archbishop Innitzer of the Austrian Catholic Church, summoning him to Rome and giving him a dressing-down in April 1938 for delivering without Holy See approval a speech welcoming Hitler’s invasion of Austria.³ Yet Cardinal Archbishop Schuster of Milan had not been reprimanded after delivering a similar speech welcoming Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.

Whatever the private thoughts and intentions of Achille Ratti at the time, and whatever his difficulties, the inevitable conclusion is that his stance towards the clergy of the national Catholic Churches was in reality far from neutral, nor was it neutral towards the governments of Italy and Ethiopia before and during the invasion of Ethiopia. Consequently, the opportunity for the Holy See to make a difference was lost. As Gaetano Salvemini wrote, ‘Had Pius XI instructed the Italian bishops to abstain from warlike propaganda, they must needs have done so.’⁴

An Eye on the East

The pope’s meek acceptance of the Italian episcopate’s sacralisation of the invasion and occupation becomes all the more surprising when we consider what had happened to the Russian Orthodox Church. A ferocious persecution of the Church by the Bolsheviks commencing in 1917 killed millions and led to Christian martyrdom on an unprecedented scale. By 1920, two-thirds of that nation’s monasteries had been liquidated and some transformed into labour camps.⁵ It was thus understandable that Achille Ratti, who had been raised to the papal throne in 1922 and who had a horror of Communism from his personal experiences in Poland, would do anything he could to avoid the Communists taking power in Italy. One might even forgive his infamous and much-quoted words that the Duce had been ‘sent by Providence’.

But if Ratti was shaken and outraged by the barbaric destruction of the world’s largest Orthodox Church, surely as Pope Pius XI he would not turn a blind eye to Catholic support for the destruction of the world’s second-largest Orthodox Church. Philip Jenkins tells us that across Europe, Catholic clergy were aghast at how the large and powerful Russian Orthodox Church could be destroyed so rapidly by a ‘ruthless regime with no compunction about inflicting violence and terror’.⁶ If indeed the Italian clerics were aghast, one cannot help wondering why they campaigned so vociferously and energetically for Italy’s military to do precisely the same thing in Ethiopia.

The Atrocities of 1937

As we have seen, 1937 was the peak year for Italian crimes against humanity in Ethiopia—crimes that foreshadowed what the Italians and Germans, either separately or jointly as the Axis, would go on to do in the other countries they would invade, such as Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland and beyond.

Whereas the invasions carried out after Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in September 1939 were extensively documented, those conducted before then are less well documented and not widely known. Thus it can be difficult for non-Ethiopian readers to realise, or even imagine, the impact on Ethiopian Christendom of atrocities such as the massacre of Debre Libanos. The sufferings of the Orthodox Church of Serbia under the Fascist regime of Ante Pavelicć provide a point of comparison, but that episode is also surprisingly little known.

In fact, there are few well-known historical precedents to cite as a basis for comparison with the massacre of Debre Libanos. For British readers one could go back in time to the infamous Viking attack on the celebrated Christian monastery and church at Lindisfarne, Northumbria, in the year 793. In all material respects the attacks were similar. As in the case of Debre Libanos, the monastery of Lindisfarne was the most important sanctuary of Christian Britain, it was a remote monastery focused on theological study, it housed an important scriptorium producing parchment manuscripts, the attack was planned in advance, the invaders were heavily armed, the victims were defenceless, they were surprised and had no opportunity to fight back or flee, and the scene was one of desecration and carnage. It must be said that the attack at Debre Libanos was on a larger scale than that of Lindisfarne, and, unlike the attack on Lindisfarne, it left no clergy alive. Furthermore, unlike the Italians, the Vikings did not loot all the artefacts they encountered; they actually left several valuable items in place. In these respects, the incidents differed. Nonetheless, they bear comparison. They were both landmark events in the history and evolution of the national Church concerned, and in both cases the news, hardly believable, triggered shock and horror throughout the land.

Apart from the campaign against the Ethiopian Church, which is the subject of this book, the atrocities of 1937 also included the depopulation, with toxic gases, fire and sword, of large swathes of land across the Ethiopian highlands; the February massacres in Addis Ababa and several of Ethiopia’s secondary towns; Mussolini’s order for the execution of all the adult male residents of the village of Gogetti (see Map 6); the execution in cold blood of thousands of Ethiopian prisoners; the countrywide public hanging of community leaders; the liquidation of the educated elite; and widespread deportations to concentration camps and prisons, which by late 1937 were filled to overflowing. The question is: did these horrific events create alarm and debate within the Vatican, particularly in the office of the secretariat of state? And if so, what was the reaction?

With hundreds of Catholic clergy in occupied Ethiopia at the time, one would expect there to have been hundreds, if not thousands, of documents such as telegrams, reports, letters and memoranda flowing into the office of the secretary of state concerning the atrocities. Pius XI was well known to be outraged by the faintest suggestion of immorality on the part of Italians. So would the fastidious pontiff, who dispatched his agents to scour the villages and towns of Italy for offensive behaviour, plays or films, and who felt that immodestly dressed women—even on the beach—heralded severe moral decline, not have expressed outrage and shock at the moral decline of his Church’s ‘holy warriors’? Would he not have been prompted into action by the gassing of civilians, the severed heads, the massacres, the tortures, the dismemberments, the deaths by burning, the destruction of so many Christian churches and monasteries, and the murder of their clergy? These abominations, which were carried out as part of the campaign declared by his clergy to be God’s work, were not required to prevent Italy from falling to the Communists; so why the silence?

It has been suggested that the pope was unaware of the atrocities in Ethiopia, owing to Archbishop Castellani’s failure to keep him informed. However, the pontiff’s strong personal interest in Ethiopians makes this most unlikely. It will be recalled that news of the massacre of Addis Ababa was broadcast in considerable detail by the European radio and press media within a few days of the event, and within weeks had appeared in detail on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. In addition, in March 1937 church services for the dead were held in England, and it is also on record that Monsignor Jarosseau personally submitted a report to Pope Pius XI on the ongoing atrocities. Furthermore, the monastery of Debre Libanos was not only of international repute, it was well known to the Vatican as Mons Libani, an institution with which the papacy had interacted in past centuries. Moreover, Pius XI had personally arranged for the reconstruction and expansion of the monastery church of St Stephen of the Abyssinians.⁷ The massacre of Debre Libanos took place in May 1937, while Archbishop Castellani and hundreds of Catholic missionaries were on the ground in Ethiopia, and was reported in writing to Rome by both Graziani and Maletti, who was instructed by the viceroy to ‘give publicity to these proceedings’. Finally, Graziani’s report explicitly stated that ‘no trace remained’ of the monastery; by early June the slaughter had been made public in Sylvia Pankhurst’s New Times and Ethiopia News; and in July, Emperor Haile Selassie personally broadcast an appeal to the Christian Churches of the world—including a specific appeal to Pope Pius XI—condemning the pogrom against the Ethiopian Church, in which he detailed several of the major atrocities.⁸

Given all this publicity and multiple channels of communication, it is inconceivable that either the pope or his secretary of state was unaware of the extent and intensity of the carnage in Ethiopia, even if Castellani was not reporting on the situation, Yet, so far as can be ascertained, the Holy See expressed not a word of concern, denunciation or even solace.

Outraged by the massacre of Addis Ababa, the American envoy in the city, Cornelius Engert, who could scarcely believe what he was witnessing, alerted Washington, stating, ‘Not since the Armenian massacres have I seen such unbridled brutality and cowardice.’⁹ It is a sad irony that whereas Pope Benedict XV personally intervened with Sultan Mohammed V in an attempt to bring an end to the massacres of the Armenian Orthodox,¹⁰ his successor had nothing to say when the Ethiopian Orthodox were being massacred by his own countrymen and co-religionists.

A Disappointed Sovereign

Emperor Haile Selassie never forgot Pius XI’s turn-around in his attitude towards the invasion. Interviewed in December 1973 by the then Ethiopian envoy in Rome, Ambassador Zewdé Reta, he recalled his state visit to the pontiff at the Vatican in 1924, and how solicitous Pius XI had been at that time:

We remember how the pope received us and our delegation with respect and love. At the time we discussed the relationship between the Orthodox and Catholic Christians, and agreed to communicate through Bishop André [Jarosseau], the head of the Catholic mission in Harar and our French language tutor. [Later,] when Mussolini was preparing for war, using the Welwel conflict as a cover, we were making it clear that Ethiopia prefers a peaceful solution to the conflict. The pope was replying to our letters.¹¹

Haile Selassie said that he was aware of the pope’s speech of August 1935, in which the pontiff had ‘declared that a war for territorial expansion was illegal’. In fact, he was so impressed and pleased that he had written to Pius XI, thanking him. However, his pleasure turned to dismay when ‘the Vatican fell silent’.¹² Although by the time of his visit to Rome in 1973 Haile Selassie was anxious to reconcile with the Italian government of the day, the memory of Pius XI’s change of heart never left him. He was shocked that the Holy Father had not said a single word about the massacre of Addis Ababa, the killing of Bishop Pétros and Bishop Mikaél, and the massacre of Debre Libanos. ‘We were disappointed with the pope for remaining silent, knowing about these atrocities, which were incompatible with Christianity, humanity and civilization.’¹³

It was later suggested to Haile Selassie that the pope’s silence was due to his fear of ‘retaliation by Mussolini’. Whether he thought it appropriate for the representative of Christ on earth to be cowed by the Duce the emperor did not say, but he was certainly disappointed to have been let down by the pope, who had proved to be no more reliable than the League of Nations.

What Did Pius XI Really Think?

It is, of course, possible that Pius XI was appalled by the atrocities but was prevented from expressing his outrage in public. Many scholars expected that the Vatican Secret Archives would provide the answers to the mystery, for even if a policy of political neutrality or his fear of Mussolini falling from power had precluded him from speaking out, the archives must surely demonstrate that Papa Achille Ratti, a man generally considered pious, reflective and righteous, was personally distraught at the barbarity of the occupation. In September 2006 the sections of the Secret Archives for the period of Pius XI’s reign were finally opened to scholars. But when Lucia Ceci examined those archives to find out how the Holy See had reacted to the massacres of the Ethiopian clergy, and specifically the massacre of Debre Libanos, she failed to find any such documents.¹⁴

We do not know, of course, whether such documents ever existed, or whether they have been removed. But whatever the explanation, how, in the absence of any primary written sources, do we explain the silence of the Holy See regarding the atrocities?

Certainly, the failure of the Holy See to react publicly to the atrocities in Ethiopia cannot be explained by the much-overworked ‘neutrality’ argument, nor by Pius XI’s apparent fear of causing the Fascists to fall from power, since by 1937 Mussolini was losing interest in Ethiopia. In any case, scholars such as Daniel Binchy and Emma Fattorini have shown that Pius XI did not slavishly follow Mussolini’s policies; there were plenty of issues which the outspoken and often overbearing pontiff was quick to raise with the Italian government whenever he felt that the Duce was stepping on Church prerogatives, or that the clergy of the national Catholic Churches were stepping out of line and not reflecting the stance of the Holy See.

The final nail in the coffin of the ‘neutrality’ argument must surely be Pius XI’s reaction to the Spanish Civil War, which was concurrent with the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. Far from being silent, the Vatican sided with Franco, and the pontiff spoke out firmly and courageously in expressing his outrage over ‘the horrible fratricide, the sacrilege, the horrible torment and destruction’ perpetrated against the Spanish clergy, regretting that ‘All that is most human, most divine; sacred persons, things, and institutions; invaluable and irreplaceable treasures of faith and Christian piety and of civilization and art … indeed even the sacred and solemn silence of the tomb; all this has been attacked, disfigured and destroyed.’¹⁵

In his well-researched analysis, Daniel Binchy shows that neutrality was cast aside in the Vatican’s unequivocal support for General Franco because of the ‘brutal war on religion’ that was being waged in Spain: ‘In face of this threat to organised religion the Pope was bound to side with the insurgents …’¹⁶ In short, all the sentiments that ‘neutrality’ had allegedly prohibited in the case of the war on organised religion in Ethiopia poured forth from the Holy See when similar atrocities were carried out against organised religion in Spain. The inevitable conclusion is that the pontiff’s decision not to speak out or intervene in the case of Ethiopia had nothing to do with political neutrality; it was presumably because the ‘sacrilege, the horrible torment and destruction’ was being inflicted by Italian Catholics, supported by the senior Italian Catholic clergy.

Was the Pope a Racist?

It would also be tempting to assume that Pius XI shared the view common in 1930s Europe that standards applicable to Europeans were not appropriate for non-Europeans, who were generally considered genetically inferior, and whose sufferings were thus not to be equated with those of Europeans. Certainly, many—probably most—Africans believed that the invasion of Ethiopia was driven by a white-supremacy doctrine on the part of both the Catholic Church and the Italian government; indeed, the reputation and credibility of many Catholic missions on the continent suffered for several years afterwards as a result.¹⁷ However, it is notable that by 1938 both the pope and Pacelli, to differing degrees, were expressing public concern when the anti-Semitism increasingly associated with both Nazism and Fascism began reaching alarming levels. At that time the pontiff reacted, publishing a powerful statement declaring, ‘Let it suffice to say that racialism, as it has been dealt with by the Holy Father, does not constitute a political question, but a danger essentially spiritual, moral, and religious, to the whole human and Christian family, and thus a suitable subject for his paternal solicitude.’¹⁸ On the other hand, such solicitude had been absent the year before, when Italy’s racial laws introduced a draconian apartheid system in Ethiopia.

So was the pope what we, with our modern sensibilities, would call a racist? Apparently not, for he had been a champion of the Ethiopian community in the Vatican, and was also well known to be strongly in favour of the promotion of non-European Catholic clergy. His encyclical Rerum ecclesiae of 1926, which was a plea for the development of indigenous clergy, condemned missionaries who practised racial discrimination, stating, ‘Anyone who looks upon these natives as members of an inferior race or men of low mentality makes a grievous mistake.’¹⁹

Other Possibilities

There are other possible explanations for the papal silence, of which one has been suggested by several scholars. Did Pius XI’s Italian nationality take precedence over his moral conscience? One acknowledges of course that the Holy See, being the supreme organ of the universal Catholic Church, is technically a separate institution from the national Italian Catholic Church, and this fact is frequently highlighted by scholars wishing to absolve the Holy See of responsibility for the misdeeds of the Italian Church. Yet this distinction can seem to non-Catholics like splitting hairs. After all, Pius XI’s apostolic nuncios were Italian, he selected Italians for the overwhelming majority of positions in the Vatican, and he certainly sided with Italy on most, if not all, issues, including condemnation of League of Nations sanctions in respect of the invasion of Ethiopia. Even the well-informed analyst Daniel Binchy, who was conducting his research in 1938–9—at the time of the events concerned—concluded that ‘while theoretically the distinction may, and indeed must, be drawn, it cannot be maintained in practice. History as well as geography has intertwined the fortunes of the Holy See and the Italian Church so closely as to make them almost indistinguishable.’²⁰ We therefore cannot dismiss the possibility that the pope’s nationality swayed his judgement.

Secondly, in joining the Italian government and general public in celebrating so vociferously the ‘conquest’ of Ethiopia, Pius XI went along with Mussolini’s claim that the war had come to an end in May 1936, thereby becoming complicit—wittingly or unwittingly—in propagating that falsehood. Clearly, raising the issue of war crimes carried out after May 1936 and throughout 1937 would have exposed the falseness of the tale that the Italian public had been led to believe. This would have annoyed Mussolini, a risk the pope may have been unwilling to take.

Finally—and bearing in mind the speed with which he intervened in Spain where the clerical victims were Catholics—we cannot rule out the possibility that, although he had initial misgivings about the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the reason Pius XI came around to accepting—and even supporting—it in 1936 was that he did, in fact, consider it a holy war against ‘heretics’ and ‘schismatics’—vocabulary that he himself had used publicly, and that had certainly contributed to the Great Mobilisation. He may have been supportive of the war once it was under way, but, being concerned with appearances, he did not want to be the one to say so. If so, one would then conclude that the pope was not really silent, for he spoke through his agencies: his secretary of state, his cardinals, his archbishops and the Italian episcopate, the majority of whom were promoting the war. And he anticipated that one day, when the slaughter was over, his missionaries would be able to proselytise or evangelise any Ethiopians left alive, thereby bringing them under the Church of Rome, the only source of salvation.

Perhaps the most likely explanation for the silence would be some elements of each of these three.

The Opportunity to Speak

With the dramatic change of Italian government policy towards the Ethiopian Church in late 1937, the prospects for significant expansion of the Catholic Church in Ethiopia along the lines originally hoped for by the Holy See evaporated almost overnight. The Ethiopian Church was now untouchable in its new role as a potential instrument of Italian Fascist government propaganda and control. Italy’s Catholic clergy were now, so to speak, out of the picture, and their joint venture with the military had gained them almost nothing.

Thus, as that annus horribilis drew to a close, the pope had little, if anything, to lose by speaking out against the murderous campaign that had brought the Ethiopian Church to its knees. The new policy provided an opportunity for Pius XI to assess the effect of the green light he had either intentionally or inadvertently given to his foot soldiers in the holy war in Ethiopia, to reflect on where Mussolini’s totalitarianism was leading, and to consider the consequences of having ‘supped with the Devil’. This was the moment for the voice of the Vatican to ring out, loud and clear, in condemnation of the evil that had been done in the name of the Church of Rome.

It was not against the Infidel, but against Christians that you drew your swords … It was not heavenly riches upon which your minds were set, but earthly ones. Nothing has been sacred to you. You have violated married women, widows, even nuns. You have despoiled the very sanctuaries of God’s church, stolen the sacred objects of altars, pillaged innumerable images and relics of saints.²¹

Outraged, the pontiff denounced the Catholic army with these forthright words. But not, however, in 1937, nor even in 1938. This furious denunciation was issued in 1204 by Pope Innocent III, appalled by the ungodly behaviour of the Catholic army of the Fourth Crusade, which had sacked the Orthodox Christian centre of Constantinople and desecrated its churches.

If the pope in 1204 was well informed, and morally outraged, about the behaviour of his flock in a distant land, how much better informed and more outraged a 20th-century pontiff would surely be in similar circumstances. However, by the end of 1937 Pius XI was in many ways drawing closer to the Fascist government. Far from concerning himself with the behaviour of the Italians in Ethiopia and the suffering of their victims, there were other matters that needed attention, and for which he needed Mussolini’s assistance. The pontiff was focused on using the Duce’s relationship with Hitler to persuade the Führer to abandon his plans to put hundreds of German Catholic clergy on trial on charges of sexual perversion, and not to proceed with charges against the Jesuits for illegal exportation of funds.²² Thus, for the Church of Ethiopia, unlike the 13th-century Church of Byzantium, the hour for the voice of the pope to ring out never struck.

Did the Pope Fulfil His Mandate?

It is clear that Pius XI should not be thought of as an anti-Fascist pope, which is how he has sometimes been characterised. On the contrary, for several years following the Concordat he continued to be complimentary towards and supportive of Fascism. Later, during the second half of the 1930s, he experienced increasing difficulty in trying to adhere to Christian principles while accommodating Fascism, frequently wavering from one side to the other. The only time he could be said to have been anti-Fascist was towards the end of his life. During his last few months he finally began to realise that demagogues such as Mussolini and Hitler posed a serious threat to world peace, but by then it was too late; the fires had been lit.

Today we find historians citing papal statements to demonstrate that Pius XI supported the invasion of Ethiopia, or that he opposed it, depending on which side of the argument they wish to promote. This paradox arises largely because, as we have seen, his stance changed over time. He was initially opposed to the war because he felt it was unjust and particularly because it would be damaging for the Catholic missions already operating in Ethiopia. By late 1935, even though he had concerns about the injustice of the ongoing invasion, the war was so popular with Mussolini’s government and the general Italian public that he had decided to refrain from criticising the Catholic clergy for their vociferous support for it. By the first week of 1936, when it was looking likely that the Italian military would prevail, Secretary of State Pacelli was signalling tacit support for the war, and advising Mussolini to do something about the pro-sanctions lobby in the United States. And by mid-1936 Pius XI was congratulating the Duce and the Italian nation on their ‘victory’, and making plans for expanding the Catholic Church in Ethiopia in the wake of what he believed to have been a conquest.

Later, as Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli would face accusations similar to those faced by Pius XI in his relationship with Mussolini: having been too accommodating towards Hitler and remaining silent during the build-up to and implementation of the Holocaust. In this regard, Jacques Kornberg, who has analysed Pacelli’s papacy in depth, makes a persuasive case for calculated acquiescence in evil, arguing that while Pius XII was not an accomplice to evil, he allowed evil to occur because of the need to ensure the ‘barque of Peter’ would come safely to harbour, so that the salvation of the faithful could be assured. It would be anomalous to judge Pius XII by the liberal and humanitarian values of today. He was not running a 21st-century human rights organisation; his overriding concern was the survival and expansion of the Catholic Church. The price of his success in fulfilling his mandate and achieving that goal, Kornberg argues, was moral failure.²³

It is difficult to avoid concluding that in acquiescing in evil, Pius XII was simply continuing the policy of his predecessor, who regarded the invasion of Ethiopia as an unfortunate episode through which the ‘barque of Peter’ had to be carefully and safely manoeuvred, even at the cost of a loss of moral authority. In other words, when the Italian episcopate cast the invasion as a holy war, Pius XI’s response of silence was, in his view, a necessary evil to ensure the Church of Rome would survive. The pontiff had, in effect—to use the words that he himself had spoken earlier—made a concordat with the Devil.

This would not be the first time that Pius XI ‘allowed evil to happen’ so long as the outcome was beneficial to the Church. In 1929, during the Great Depression, the Vatican was in financial straits—a situation relieved by the Lateran Treaty, under which the Italian government paid the Vatican some $90 million in compensation for the loss of assets such as the Papal States.²⁴ In order to ensure that the funds were invested wisely, Pius XI appointed a layperson, Bernardino Nogara (brother of Archbishop Giuseppe Nogara), as the Vatican’s financial manager, reporting directly to himself.

Nogara accepted the position on condition that his investments and transactions would be free of doctrinal considerations. Pius XI agreed, and was delighted when, owing to Nogara’s shrewd investments and currency speculations, the money started rolling in. Nogara’s newly created agency, which would eventually become known as the Vatican Bank, soon owned shares in numerous successful companies. According to John Pollard, there was ‘hardly a sector of the Italian economy in which the Vatican did not own a share-holding of some sort or another’.²⁵ The pontiff railed against ‘the trustees and managing directors of investment funds which they administer according to their arbitrary will and pleasure’, and declared that such people, ‘addicted to excessive gain … were and are in great part the cause of these evils … The desire for money is the root of all evil.’²⁶ Meanwhile, the very same pope was only too happy for the Vatican to be prospering from the very activities that he was denouncing.

One does not have to look far to see another startling paradox: the Vatican now owned shares in Italy’s largest manufacturer of contraceptives, and was thus promoting and profiting from a practice strictly incompatible with Church doctrine as promulgated by Pius XI himself.

These were not just cases of choosing the lesser of two evils; the Vatican was now actually profiting from what it regarded as evil, rather than just allowing evil to happen.

It may be argued that the invasion of Ethiopia was another case of allowing evil to happen while also benefiting from that evil—the benefit being not only from the potential for expansion of the Catholic Church. As Binchy observed in 1941, ‘Papal finances are not a promising subject for study, at least for those who seek to base their statements on fact.’²⁷ Nonetheless, despite the difficulty of establishing the details, it is well attested that Pius XI, to whom Nogara reported regularly, permitted the Vatican banker to acquire substantial holdings in Italy’s major arms and munitions factories. According to one published source, Nogara acquired ‘a munitions plant that supplied arms for the Italian army’s invasion of Ethiopia’.²⁸ This is consistent with the findings of Gerald Posner, who discovered that the Vatican had stakes in Breda, Reggiane and Compagnia Nazionale Aeronautica (CNA).²⁹ Furthermore, concerned that the war should not drag down the Italian economy by going on too long, Nogara made it clear to Pius XI that the Vatican’s ‘huge investments’ in Italian stocks and Mussolini’s state-issued bonds meant that ‘the Church’s interests were best served by a brief and successful [military] campaign’. Posner also states that the Vatican granted a loan to the Fascist government to help finance the invasion.³⁰ So far as the present author is aware, this claim has not been substantiated. Nonetheless, there appears to be little doubt about the Vatican’s financial interests in Italian arms manufacturers under Pius XI.

When the Vatican acquired substantial interest in a company, Nogara often placed a Vatican representative on the board. Sometimes this was Francesco Pacelli, the brother of Pius’s secretary of state. In the case of CNA, the representative was the pope’s nephew, Franco Ratti.³¹ CNA was a major supplier of military hardware for the invasion of Ethiopia, in that the company manufactured Caproni bombers, which they sold to the Regia Aeronautica, and which accounted for the majority of the bombers used in the invasion.³² These aircraft each carried a payload of up to 1,000 kg of bombs, frequently deploying the infamous C-500T and C-100P bombs armed with the chemical weapons yperite and phosgene.

Franco Ratti also represented the Vatican on the board of Reggiane, or, to give it its full name, Officine Meccaniche Reggiane.³³ This company produced, among other things, Piaggio aircraft engines fitted to aircraft such as the Romeo Ro.37, of which 49 were deployed in Ethiopia, as well as Ca.101 Caproni bombers.

As for Breda, apart from manufacturing ships and trains, this company was a major armaments manufacturer. It produced the machine guns used on the Caproni and Savoia-Marchetti bombers deployed in Ethiopia, as well as the ubiquitous Model 30 machine guns, the Model 35 mortars and the field guns used by the Italian artillery.

Today such arrangements would trigger a public debate on the rights or wrongs of a good cause relying on ‘tainted money’; it is sufficient here to note that the evidence reviewed indicates that Pius XI was indeed open to ‘allowing evil to happen’ if it was ultimately to the benefit of the Catholic Church.

Unfortunately, despite Pius XI’s apparent belief that the end justifies the means, the outcome of his ‘concordat with the Devil’ was far from being the ‘prelude to peace’ that he optimistically proclaimed. On the contrary, the attack on Ethiopia would turn out to be the prelude to the Second World War—a conflagration that would cause unprecedented suffering and would ultimately almost destroy Italy. As such, the pontiff’s decision to go along with the invasion could be regarded as one of the greatest errors in the history of the papacy.

As for the victims of the invasion, it is true that in turning a blind eye and allowing the episcopate to freely sacralise Mussolini’s military adventure, the pope temporarily appeased the demagogue, and the Roman Church survived and prospered. However, the Ethiopians and their Church paid a terrible price. At the end of the day, it was not the Catholic Church’s ‘holy warriors’ who carried the cross of Christ; it was the Ethiopians who bore that cross and suffered and died for their faith. The invasion of Ethiopia was their Calvary.