Preface
PreFaCe From 1937 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt intensified his efforts to overcome the resistance of the most hard-headed isolationists in the Congress. He proceeded with the caution of one who was wholly aware of the reactions of American public opinion to a decision as unpopular as entry into a new war alongside the unstable European countries, but also with the firmness and charisma that had always distinguished him. And so it was that he was able to escape from the quicksands of appeasement and put the huge military, economic, technological, and diplomatic potential of America at the service of democracy and anti-Nazism. It was of course a slow and gradual, though unremitting, process, moved by the conviction that passive acceptance of the war, and its aftermath, into which the Old Continent had plummeted once again, would have notable repercussions on U.S. security and that, in order to prevent the victory of the totalitarian powers, they would again have to take on the responsibility of the civilizing mission they had too hurriedly abandoned after Versailles. From the progressive revision of neutralist legislation to the adoption of a plan of rearmament and military and economic support first to Great Britain, then to the Soviet Union, the American buildup to the war called for decisions that were at times courageous and revolutionary. Among these, the decision to reestablish diplomatic contact with the Holy See must certainly be included. It was made official on December 23, 1939, in Roosevelt’s Christmas message to Pius XII, who had become pope only a few months earlier. As Gaetano Salvemini commented, “it was impossible not to admire President Roosevelt’s wisdom in nominating Taylor, which enabled him to kill several birds with one stone”; in fact, he “had chosen the right time and manner to carry out his plan, pleasing both the Pope and Mussolini , and causing only slight upset to American public opinion.”1 Though xiii 1. Gaetano Salvemini, L’Italia vista dall’America (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1969), 262. xiv PREFACE Roosevelt was praised by the Catholic Church authorities and, early on at least, unopposed by the Italian government, the sending of Myron Charles Taylor to the Vatican as his personal representative—with the rank though not the name of ambassador—and his activity assisted by the secretary to the American embassy Harold H. Tittmann, caused no slight protest on the part of certain representatives of several Protestant sects, private American citizens, and even the Fascist authorities. Any relationship with the pope was considered taboo which, especially since the closing down of the American mission in the Papal States in 1867, had never failed to rekindle demonstrations against Catholicism and the pope, almost always involving all levels of American society, causing an unavoidable reduction of diplomatic contact between the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the following century. The conservative involution that characterized the second half of Pius IX’s pontificate, combined with his refusal to accept Italian unity, provided the U.S. Senate with a pretext to interrupt the dialogue with the Vatican, considered by many in the United States to be the anachronistic symbol of obscurantism and the ancien régime. The “Vatican Question,” for the most part ignored by successive Republican and Democratic administrations , came to the fore again in all its complexity during the First World War. This complexity was due, first to the imperfect relations between the Roman curia and the American Catholic Church, who had found the Vatican’s accusations of heterodoxy hard to swallow; but above all to the attitude of Woodrow Wilson, whose prejudice against Catholicism, an organic part of the ideology of the WASP (white, AngloSaxon , Protestant) tradition, expressed itself in a systematic refusal to comply with Benedict XV’s peace initiatives and efforts at collaboration. Ignoring the possible similarities between the pope’s “Note” to the heads of peoples at war and Wilson’s own Fourteen Points was a clear affirmation of the basic incompatibility between Wilson’s plan to rebuild the international system and that of the pope, whose objectives were in fact just as unrealistic. The sudden wave of nationalism that characterized American society in the decade following the Great War and which saw in the fresh outbreak of anti-Catholic nativism one of the most violent and politically widespread manifestations, contributed to the rejection of any prospect of approaching the Holy See. Immersed in the problem of conversion and therefore in the so-called postwar normalcy, all...
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