1938 diary now shows pope’s view on fascism to Hitler

A 1938 diary written near the end of Pope Pius XI’s papacy confirms his opposition to fascism was hardening as the outbreak of World War II grew closer, a historian said Tuesday, Sept. 19, after examining documents in the Vatican’s just-opened secret archives.

The diary quoted Pius as saying, “I won’t be afraid. I prefer to beg for alms” than to give into pressures from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, said French historian Philippe Chenaux.

The diary was written by Monsignor Domenico Tardini, a top aide who served as Pius XI’s foreign minister, and was based on Tardini’s private conversations with the pontiff in September 1938. That was just before the Munich conference, which became a symbol of Western Europe’s futile attempt to appease Hitler.

The Vatican opened the archive Monday to scholars, allowing them access to millions of documents from Pius XI’s pontificate, which lasted from 1922 to February 1939.

Chenaux said Tardini quoted Pius XI as uttering the alms quote after being informed that Mussolini’s regime had prohibited Italian newspapers from reporting on articles in the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

The diary also indicated that Pius XI was determined to oppose the 1938 anti-Jewish laws enacted by Mussolini’s regime, Chenaux said in a telephone interview.

Entries “showed the great firmness of Pius XI. He wasn’t afraid” to oppose both fascism and Nazism, said Chenaux, who is a professor of church history at the Pontifical Lateranense University in Rome and a biographer of wartime Pope Pius XII.

Many scholars and researchers had predicted the archives would yield fresh evidence that Pius XI took a harsher stance against the German and Italian regimes at the end of his papacy.