Cabinet papers: Vatican talks during World War II

During my search of Cabinet files, I came across an intriguing memorandum from the foreign secretary on October 13 1942 about his meeting with the US emissary to the Holy See, Myron Taylor.

The memo says Mr Taylor’s journey to Rome was fulfilled, namely, to "discourage the Vatican from any untimely peace initiative" at that time. The document includes Mr Taylor’s memo to Pope Pius XII, in which he argues the US is fighting in a just war and that "complete victory" for the Allies is the only way to achieve peace. He says:

In the conviction that anything less than complete victory would endanger the principles we fight for and our very existence as a nation, the United States of America wall prosecute this war until the Axis collapses.

There is reason to believe that our Axis enemies will attempt, through devious channels, to urge the Holy See to endorse in the near future proposals of peace without victory…We therefore feel it a duty to support, the Holy See in resisting any undue pressure from this source. It is for this reason that we feel impelled to make known our views on the subject of peace, and to point out that the growing power of the United States is now being applied to re-establish those principles of international decency and justice which have been so well expounded by the Holy See.

He describes the Holy See has having "magnificent moral leading" and said promotion of world peace is one of the great functions of the Holy See. He attacks the Nazis for their accusations that there are 60 million atheists in the US, added that "the persecutors of religion are trying to use the church for their own sinister purposes".

Mr Taylor says the US fights with a clear conscience. He also complements the statements made in the editorials of American Catholic papers and by the hierarchy in the US in the wake of Pearl Harbour. In a response to a letter by the bishops that expressed their pledge to defend freedom against aggression, President Franklin D Roosevelt said: "We shall win this war and in victory we shall seek not vengeance but the establishment of an international order in which the spirit of Christ shall rule the hearts of men and of nations."

Also in the report is an interesting document on the state of the Church in Russia. The Communist regime had done all in its power make itself "into something like a competing religious life in its own right, with similar requirements of spiritual devotion and even of public profession in ceremony and symbol", it says. When Germany began to occupy large portions of Soviet territory, they found a genuine hunger for religious experience in large parts of the Russian population.

The Nazis have been exploiting this situation for their own purposes with characteristic cynicism and, I am afraid, with some success.

Apparently, in Pskov, Germans found no priests left in the city at all but they promptly imported two priests from the Russian Orthodox Church. The great Cathedral was reopened in time for the Russian Christmas in January. On Christmas the Cathedral was packed and thousands more stood in the square outside in 30 degrees of frost during the service. Untrained laymen, in some cases even old women, conducted services informally in railway stations and Christians flocked to them.

In the memo, there is also a "strictly personal memorandum" giving a summary of the conversation between Mgr Tardini, the Cardinal Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Mr Taylor about the dangerous situation of the Church in Russia.

This section reports that no Russian priests had been freed from prison or from the sentence of deportation to which they had previously been condemned. In the Archdiocese of Mohilew alone, approximately one hundred Catholic priests were detained in prison or in concentration camps. The note says:

For more than a year now there has been no news of His Excellency M. Edward Profittlich, Titular Archbishop of Aclrianopli and Apostolic Administrator of Estonia. Archbishop Profittlich, a citizen of Estonia, was arrested at Tallinn, the 28th June, 1941, and deported, to the Urals, probably to Kasan.

Ending this intriguing memorandum is a message from Count Dalla Torre, director of the Vatican’s newspaper, Osservatore Romano.