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the Polish army repulsed the invading Soviet army. The experience contributed significantly to then Bishop Ratti’s view of the world—as had lessons of Austrian rule in his home region of Lombardy. The church was also under attack after the fall of Czar Nicholas II in the Russian Revolution. Lenin’s Bolsheviks destroyed churches and imprisoned priests throughout Russia. Nevertheless, as pope in the 1920s, Ratti sought a gesture that might make life easier for Catholics still in Russia. He sent food aid to the new Marxist-Leninist state, but the gesture did not result in improved relations with Moscow. The birth of the Soviet Union brought into vogue with Catholic churchmen the phrase “Godless Communism.” The church confronted the question of whether Hitler was a worthy ally against Communism, whether “the enemy of my enemy” was a friend, or one more enemy?
    This was a central issue at the Vatican when Pope Benedict XV died of pneumonia in 1922, and when Achille Ratti, who was then sixty-four years old, became the compromise choice to replace him. He was elected pope by the College of Cardinals on the fourteenth ballot after one other prelate had turned down the job. Ratti’s opponents said he was not worldly enough to govern and that he had lived his entire life in a world of books. Though he had been a librarian for a long while, the criticism was unwarranted. In terms of daring and adventurousness, there has been no other priest—or any other pope before or since—who traversed mountain passes that now bear his name and none other who had the stamina to climb unattainable peaks. Somewhere at the heart of his increasingly passionate drive against Hitler and Mussolini was the drive to break the mold and to do what others would not or could not do. These were not the aspirations of a bookish, retiring man.
    AS HE RECOVERED after 1936 from his ailments, the pope would carry on with a normal schedule—he had much left to be accomplished. Central was his intention to continue, even accelerate, the pace of his attacks on Hitler and Mussolini, to reject anti-Semitism, and to seek new ways to warn the world about the growing threat of war in Europe. Hitler and Mussolini were mightily concerned by the pope’s recent actions and declarations. Such was a measure of the moral power of the papacy. Pius XI knew well that his speeches and the resulting worldwide headlines enraged Hitler. He criticized the Nazis and their anti-Semitic tirades with increasing vigor in the hope this would spur international action before it was too late.
    Along with his speech about Hitler’s presence in Rome on May 4, the pope authorized a similar statement by his American aide and interpreter, Monsignor Joseph Hurley. This new statement again emphasized the images of two crosses, the Christian cross and the crooked cross of Nazism. The pope had banned coverage of Hitler’s trip, but there would be strong language, both on Vatican Radio and in the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano .

    John LaFarge’s European trip, May–October 1938.
    â€œThere are two crosses now side by side in Rome . . . the cross of Christianity and the crooked cross of neo-paganism,” it said, without crediting Hurley as the author. Hurley’s anonymous words were translated and read on Vatican Radio in Italian, English, German, and French and published in Osservatore Romano . The “crooked cross” became the image of Vatican-Nazi relations. The statement sent Hitler into a fury, and Mussolini ordered the seizure and destruction of any copies of the Vatican newspaper circulating outside the Vatican walls.
    Cardinals at the Vatican reacted with fear, worried about reprisals against Catholics in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Britain and the United States were also surprised by the strength of Pius’s words. Once he been considered a conservative pope who embraced authoritarians and