Free The Pope's Last Crusade by Peter Eisner

elevator door opened; perhaps the most prominent member of the College of Cardinals emerged—Cardinal Pacelli. The cardinal glared, barely acknowledged the priest’s presence, and walked off. Shortly afterward, Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, a close ally of the pope and one of the pontiff’s best friends, crossed the patio. The two cardinals were a study in contrasts. Pacelli was a gangly, pale, even ghostly presence; Tisserant, a Frenchman, was a burly man who sported a long bushy black beard flecked with gray. He did not seem to notice LaFarge.
    After a while, an attendant ushered LaFarge into an anteroom, where he watched as various clergy and laypeople entered and left the pope’s study, which had a sign over the entry door, PIUS XI PONTIFEX MAXIMUS . Finally it was LaFarge’s turn to enter; the pope must have used some silent buzzer to signal the secretaries that he was ready. This was to be a private meeting with the pope. LaFarge stood up nervously. “I was shown into the pope’s study by myself entirely,” LaFarge wrote. “No one [was] there with me, and [the] door shut.”
    LaFarge stood for a moment before Pope Pius XI, the 258th successor to St. Peter, and then bent to the carpet to kiss the pope’s shoe. Pius motioned him to rise and take a seat before his desk. LaFarge looked around the room. A walking stick was leaning against a table near the pope’s desk, the pope’s white skullcap rested on the table. LaFarge had the impression that the pope had recently been strolling outdoors. He could see the sumptuous gardens and tree-lined paths beyond the balcony ahead of him and a distant view of the Mediterranean beyond.
    The pope made small talk to put him at ease and spoke informally. The first hurdle was to choose the language in which they would speak. Pius understood English, but spoke only haltingly; LaFarge’s Italian was not conversant. The pope was amused by LaFarge’s confusion. They alternated briefly between German and French and then settled on French. LaFarge was struck by the pope’s vigor, “a natural vigor which few who reach that age enjoy.”
    Finally, the pope told LaFarge he literally could not sleep when he thought about the rise of Nazism. “He grieved over the present divided state of the world, over the growth of racism, condemned by reason, science and faith,” LaFarge remembered.
    Pius told the younger man he had read Interracial Justice and considered it a triumph. LaFarge saw a copy of the book prominent on the pope’s credenza. Americans, the pope said, had a greater understanding of these issues in part because they had access to LaFarge’s book. But he had come to the conclusion that LaFarge’s book also helped explain the deteriorating situation in Europe, that “racialism and nationalism were fundamentally the same . . . the most burning issue at the present time.”
    LaFarge was surprised the pope had even heard of his book, which was written in English, distributed mostly in the United States, and published very recently. Interracial Justice was an exhortation for the Catholic Church in the United States to accept and dedicate itself to the letter of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, that African Americans could not and should not be treated differently or deprecated or denied basic human and civil rights.
    LaFarge went further in the book, taking quite an absolute progressive stance, writing that “modern anthropological and ethnological science overwhelmingly rejects the theory that even purely physical traits are permanently or fixedly inherited by any large determinable group of human beings. It is an analogy falsely transferred from an animal race: an analogy not unlikely when human beings are treated as animals.”
    The pope asked about LaFarge’s views on race in America and discussed the relationship with the case of the Jews in Germany.