The Pope's Last Crusade by Peter Eisner

mind: “National Socialism is more menacing to Catholicism than Communism. For whereas Communism is atheistic, National Socialism is Satanic.”
    Ledóchowski had lobbied the pope more than once to link Jews with the spread of Communism. “Perhaps your Holiness would like to make known to the world this terrible danger, one that becomes every day more threatening,” he had said to the pope prior to the 1937 publication of the pope’s encyclical Divinis Redemptoris , “The Promise of a Redeemer,” which attacked Communism. The encyclical was the pope’s strongest statement opposing Marxism and was issued a few days after the more controversial anti-Nazi tract, With Deep Anxiety, which set the stage for future criticism of Nazism as well. The two encyclicals had a certain symmetry in dealing with the world’s two totalitarian systems; issuing them so close together perhaps assuaged Vatican dissenters such as Ledóchowski who were more rabidly anti-Communist than concerned about the Nazis. But the pope had no intention of using the anti-Communist encyclical as Ledóchowski intended—as a groundless diatribe against Judaism.
    Divinis Redemptoris did criticize Communism on grounds that it “strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.” But Ledóchowski insisted on changes once more. Your Holiness, he told the pope, such a strong message on Communism should contain a mention of what he saw as the international conspiracy of Jews, Masons, and Bolsheviks. “Though the atheist propaganda from Moscow becomes ever more intense, nonetheless the world press, in the hands of the Jews, hardly makes a reference, just as it ignores the crimes committed in Russia.”
    â€œFor not only were all the intellectual fathers of Communism Jewish,” Ledóchowski said in his letter to the pope, “but the Communist movement in Russia was staged by Jews, and even now, if one digs deeply one finds that the primary authors of Communist propaganda, though perhaps not always openly, are Jews.”
    These fraudulent charges had been circulated widely by anti-Semites inside and outside the Catholic Church. The pope challenged these written corrections and in several places penciled in the word “Verify!” Prove it, he was saying. Ledóchowski had no factual responses, and the pope rejected these attempts to change the text.
    Similarly, the pope turned down Pacelli’s requests that the Vatican be more supportive of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain. Pacelli saw Spain as a clear confrontation between good—the Nazi and Fascist-backed Nationalists—and bad—the Soviet-supported Spanish government. Pius did not see the dispute in such stark terms—he never accepted or trusted Franco and questioned Franco’s ties to the Nazis.
    The pope even considered a dialogue proposed by the leader of the French Communist Party about creating a united front against the Nazis and Fascists. The pope told a French bishop that it might be a good idea “to take up that invitation, not of course so that we might be drawn toward the Communists, but rather so that we can draw the Communist proffered hand toward us.” Not surprisingly, Cardinal Pacelli was against such a dialogue and worked behind the scenes to block it. Conservatives within the Vatican saw Pius’s interest in this dialogue as evidence that the pope was losing his grip on reality.
    DURING THE June 26 meeting, Pius told Ledóchowski about his meeting with LaFarge and the new encyclical, and Ledóchowski immediately set out to devise a strategy for dealing with LaFarge. He said he would help LaFarge, and even appeared to be doing so, but he was certainly against issuing the document, and his strategy would be to manage the process. Ledóchowski had once told his friend Cardinal Edward