WILL THE POPE REMAIN IN ROME?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 243, 18 February 1944, Page 6

WILL THE POPE REMAIN

IN ROME?

The Position of The Vatican In Current Events

OME is not merely the centre of Axis organisation in mid-Italy: it is the home of the Pope. Will retreating Germans allow him to remain? Or will they try to rob Rome’s conquerors of a good half of their advantage by carrying him off "in protective custody"? Or is he freer than we imagine, physically and psychologically, in his own private, independent city-within-a-city? In this article, written specially for "The Listener," A.M.R. gives a personal impression of the Vatican and of its place in current events.

ARLY one morning I was cycling towards a strange city. "Strange city, indeed," was my comment. "Though by the map I must be right alongside Rome, not a house nor a factorystack have I yet seen." And then among the green fields there rose a high white wall-"some school, or monastery, maybe." But no, for as I skirted it, flashing downhill amid sudden houses, two trucks and an engine puffed inside through an arched gateway. "A factory, then." But I Was wrong again. For the wall changed as quickly into a forest of stone trunks end, running through this magnificent colonnade, I shot out into a great paved @quare, at whose far end there rose a

dome there could be no mistaking-St. Peter’s itself. I leaped off to observe, straddling a white line that ran across the flags. My back wheel remained in Mussolini’s Italy. But my front tyre was now in "foreign territory," where even Il Duce’s writ did not run and his word returned to him void. In my three-minutes’ run beside that wall I had half circumnavigated Italy’s most contested modern frontier. I stood half in, half out of the Vatican City. So physically small and sunk among its surroundings is the temporal kingdom of the world’s most powerful potentate. And although, when you enter (on invitation) and examine it more closely, your feeling becomes one of amazement at its concentrated riches of architecture and art, you still feel towards it much as you do towards other tiny States-Monaco, Andorra, Ruritania. Nevertheless Stato

della Citta del Vaticano, the Vatican City, is in reality very far from being a mere "picturesque survival." Still, picturesqueness certainly is one’s first impression. At the "Bronze Door" entrance pace Swiss halberdiers, purely medieval in blue doublet and hose slashed with bright orange. Inside, a warren of stone passages proliferates without apparent end or intention, liberally peppered with Alice-in-Wonderland doors that do, some of them, lead into walled gardens or enormous rich salons and halls. Layer above layer lie acres of paintings and sculpture, treasures of antiquity and the Renaissance, overwhelming in sheer quantity. And the government of this vest-pocket Realm, should you inquire about it, is intricately divided out among hereditary Latin noblemen of complicated titles and intriguing attire. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Modern innovations merely accentuate this Ruritanianism, like the toy reforms of an Oriental princeling. For example, this Empire of 109 acres runs a onestation railway. It possesses a store, one only store, but departmentalised and "ultra" with gleaming chromium and glass. For 900-odd "subjects" it has cor. plete sets of coinage and postage stamps, systems of motor registration and passports, a post office, a gaol, a fire brigade, a daily newspaper, a radio station... Citta Vaticano with its walled "frontier" has even foreign possessions-several buildings elsewhere in Rome possessing "extra territoriality"-and one practically overseas: the summer villa of Castel Gandolfo 18 miles distant in the Alban hills. "A Tool, Not a Toy" However, the tourist who concentrates on these things is seeing only the surface. The Vatican is in reality no more "a picturesque medieval hangover" (as I overheard one American call it) than the Papacy itself. Citta Vaticano exists to further the Catholic Church’s strictly practical concerns, both temporal and spiritual. It is a tool, not a toy. A going concern, not a vestigial remnant. The Library indeed (of manuscripts, not books) is there because the Church is patron of antique Scholarship. The Renaissance treasures continue to amass because She is patron of accepted Arts. And the Observatory proclaims the patron of Science. But HVJ (Vatican Radio) provides a means of addressing Catholics over the entire world and of quickly instructing nuncios and envoys in foreign capitals by means of short-wave code. Observatore Romano writes for world audience, not Citta Vaticano’s few hundred readers. Post office and coinage help to provide the cash-mainly from philatelists and souvenir hunters-to carry on these informative enterprises. Even the apparently ridiculous railway is as practical as the pasta and potatoes it shunts in twice or thrice daily. The City’s acttial function of "General Headquarters" or "Head Office" of the world-wide Roman Catholic Church indeed appears quite strikingly in its "business equipment" statistics — 20 foreign telegraph lines, 800 telephones, 200 motor-cars.

But why go to all the trouble and expense of running an independent state simply to house Church offices and run a religious newspaper and radio? Because you must do it in the present world if your radio is to speak freely and your paper appear ‘at all except by leave of some blue-pencilling nationalist censor. Of course priests remain men with human emotional attachments and frailties of judgement-which is why the Pope’s children fight with equal sincerity on both sides in this war-and for this reason, and because the Vatican is financially dependent on revenues from Italian property, the Papacy is more than sufficiently suspected as it is of pro-Italian and pro-Fascist bias. But if Pius XII were a subject of the King of Italy, his person liable to arrest and his corréspondence liable to search and censorship, how impossible would his exercise of spiritual authority and moral suasion become in a world split by war. How It Began Citta Vaticano in its present form dates from the Lateran Treaty between the present Pope’s predecessor and Mussolini in 1929, but its Temporal Power began with the occupation of Imperial Rome by the barbarians well over a thousand years ago. For in the centuries of anarchy that ensued, one protection alone remained to the local populace-the moral aura of the local clergy, that is of the Presbytery of Rome (College of Cardinals) and of their universally-revered Head (the Holy Father). In such circumstances, for the

district’s welfare as much as for their own freedom of action, the Popes had to organise temporal rule. Later, this led to their becoming involved in the power politics of the peninsula’s princes, sometimes to the scandalous embarrassment of their spiritual functions. The millennium-long Roman clash between temporalities and spiritualities has been, in fact, a persistent personal problem writ large. We need a body to house our immaterial self and translate its invisible: intentions into externally effective action. But all too easily, body acquires more than instrumental importance and hinders the aims it exists to promote. However, even the possession of political independence has not always in the past preserved freedom of action and expression to His Holiness. As late as 1797 Pope Pius VI was kidnapped north by the Revolutionary French and died in Florence: with the result that his successor was elected in Venice, where the largest number of Cardinals happened to be. That successor in turn suffered long detention in Paris, though not in his case actual violence, by the Hitler of his day. With plenty of precedent for attempted political use of his person, it would be indeed surprising if the present occupant of Peter’s chair has not already (as is rumoured) taken steps to delegate his authority elsewhere should the Vatican be invaded or the pressure of belligerents prove otherwise overwhelming.