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Vatican Evasions

In 1986, when I had just started at the bookshop where I still work, I was given a book by a tall, amiable man in late middle age. He was the book’s author and he had just reprinted it himself. He imagined I might be interested.

Branko Bokun’s Spy in the Vatican begins, ‘In April 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany and her allies. With the surrender, a new State of Croatia was formed. The Ustashi, a band of Catholic fanatics, backed by the clergy, decided to eliminate all non- Catholics in Croatia. Orthodox Jews, Serbs and Gypsies – men, women and children – were slaughtered in their thousands.’

Four months previously, aged 21, Bokun had been accepted into the Yugoslav Foreign Office. When his country was ‘obliterated’, he joined the Serbian Red Cross and was sent to Rome. Registering at the University of Rome ostensibly to study ‘Corporate Economy’ and the ‘Doctrine of Fascism’, his real mission was to present a file of Ustashi atrocities to the Vatican. As well as eye-witness accounts and photographs, the file included a statement from a Catholic priest: ‘Brethren, up to now we have worked for the Holy Roman Catholic Church with the cross and the missal. Now the moment has come to work with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. The more Serbs and Jews you succeed in eliminating, the more you will be raised in esteem in the heart of the Catholic Church.’ Since Ustashi policy depended on the Vatican’s power, surely Pope Pius XII had only to say that he did not condone it and the atrocities would stop?

One might assume that once our man had got the evidence into the right chap’s hands, the enlightened pontifical head would signal his disapproval. But shocking as the preamble is, what follows is even more so. A week after delivering his file to Monsignor Montini, an influential figure in the Vatican, Bokun was told by the Monsignor’s secretary that he ‘has had a word with the Croatian Ambassador wh

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In 1986, when I had just started at the bookshop where I still work, I was given a book by a tall, amiable man in late middle age. He was the book’s author and he had just reprinted it himself. He imagined I might be interested.

Branko Bokun’s Spy in the Vatican begins, ‘In April 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany and her allies. With the surrender, a new State of Croatia was formed. The Ustashi, a band of Catholic fanatics, backed by the clergy, decided to eliminate all non- Catholics in Croatia. Orthodox Jews, Serbs and Gypsies – men, women and children – were slaughtered in their thousands.’ Four months previously, aged 21, Bokun had been accepted into the Yugoslav Foreign Office. When his country was ‘obliterated’, he joined the Serbian Red Cross and was sent to Rome. Registering at the University of Rome ostensibly to study ‘Corporate Economy’ and the ‘Doctrine of Fascism’, his real mission was to present a file of Ustashi atrocities to the Vatican. As well as eye-witness accounts and photographs, the file included a statement from a Catholic priest: ‘Brethren, up to now we have worked for the Holy Roman Catholic Church with the cross and the missal. Now the moment has come to work with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. The more Serbs and Jews you succeed in eliminating, the more you will be raised in esteem in the heart of the Catholic Church.’ Since Ustashi policy depended on the Vatican’s power, surely Pope Pius XII had only to say that he did not condone it and the atrocities would stop? One might assume that once our man had got the evidence into the right chap’s hands, the enlightened pontifical head would signal his disapproval. But shocking as the preamble is, what follows is even more so. A week after delivering his file to Monsignor Montini, an influential figure in the Vatican, Bokun was told by the Monsignor’s secretary that he ‘has had a word with the Croatian Ambassador who explained that the atrocities described in your file are the work of the Communists, but maliciously attributed to the Catholics . . . We can do nothing further.’ Outside, amidst Bernini’s columns, a sympathetic Polish priest divulged that the Pope’s only response to German persecution of Catholics in Poland had been the observation that ‘Hours of painful distress are hours of grace.’ Moreover, it turned out that Bokun’s file had been copied by the Vatican, despite their supposedly neutral status, and sent to Italian counter-espionage. They in turn had been tipped off by an anonymous letter that he was an ‘agent provocateur for international Communism’. A priest in St Peter’s told him that the Croatian Ambassador to the Vatican had managed to persuade everyone, including the Pope, that the massacres were for the ‘supreme glory of the Church of Rome in the Balkans’. As a member of the Red Cross, Bokun was in an extraordinary position. His pass was respected by everyone, including Germans, so he was able to observe events with unusual detachment, and to keep some surprising company. Ivo, his closest friend, was a cynical, witty Yugoslav who worked as a censor for Italian Intelligence. ‘His job was to read all suspect ingoing and outgoing mail in Russian, Spanish, French and English, as well as Serbo-Croat. As a result there was little he did not know about the majority of the foreigners in Rome.’ Other friends included Sasha, a former lieutenant in the Red Army who had fled to Rome to study singing; Bora, a Romanian deserter who wanted to stage Crime and Punishment; and Rudi, a Slovenian interpreter for the Gestapo of whom ‘no one was ever quite sure how seriously he took his job’. Everyone knew who was spying for whom, and it was understood that everyone had their own agenda, although they were all hostage to circumstances. Because the book is presented in diary form against this background of cynicism and helplessness, we see how everyone reacts to unfolding events and gossip in ways that are often very funny as well as alarming. It was Ivo who explained that the people who really knew what was happening in the Vatican were not the diplomats but the cleaners, telephonists, electricians and gardeners who worked there and who were known as the Sotto Vaticano. They usually met in the Pizzaria of Bonafede in the Piazza del Castello every evening, and it was there that Bokun and his friends went when they wanted to find out what was really going on. It was also there that the Pope was most revered, and his single-minded fear of communism most openly acknowledged. At the news of the Russian victory at Stalingrad, Bokun noted the ‘sudden kindness of the Romans’, but the Vatican servants who met in Bonafede soon clarified the Vatican perspective: the Pope would never do anything to prevent massacres of Orthodox Serbs, Polish Catholics or anyone else, because communism was held to be the primary evil against which Germany should be seen as a bulwark. By backing Tito in Yugoslavia, the Allies were merely facilitating its spread, while their demand for unconditional surrender was viewed as wickedly misguided, ‘forced on Roosevelt and Churchill by American and English Jews pursuing a special vendetta’. The gruesome civil war in Yugoslavia soon made Bokun’s mission redundant. ‘There were no Orthodox Serbs left in Croatia, as more than 700,000 had been eliminated and the remainder had either escaped or been converted . . . Reading my file was like reading an out-of-date newspaper.’ Even so, he held the Vatican culpable in its failure to engage and increasingly came to regard it as both ridiculous and pernicious, a hotbed of spies, power-hungry priests and bored, secretive diplomats desperate for something to report. A friend who worked in the Vatican library told him that ‘whenever there was talk of a new German weapon he would receive requests from every single diplomat for the works of Leonardo da Vinci, each one bribing him not to breathe a word to the others’. And when the Primate of Croatia visited the Vatican, Ivo informed Bokun that the subject under discussion was abortion. ‘When millions are being slaughtered the Vatican has nothing better to do than to honour Croatia for pronouncing abortion illegal. What is even more ironic is that his bloody Excellency is preventing abortion, by murdering the parents.’ As the war in Italy advances, Bokun observes the shifts in Italian allegiances. Mussolini falls and Italy surrenders. Rome is occupied by the Germans and then eventually by the Allies. There are some astonishing vignettes, such as his accidental meeting with the exiled Mussolini on a beach on the island of Ponza. But Bokun still had his own serious work to attend to, which now included looking after escaped prisoners-of-war. One day he was with a group consisting of a Canadian, two British officers and an Indian sergeant. One of the British officers instructed Bokun to take them to the Vatican. ‘We will stay there till the end of the war,’ he said, presuming that the Vatican’s neutrality and Christian principles would dispose them to shelter those who were self-evidently on the right side. Bokun marvelled at their confidence but nevertheless agreed. As the horse-drawn carriage drew up outside St Peter’s, he said he would wait. ‘After about ten minutes they reappeared . . . stooping and silent.’ Bokun was right in thinking his book would interest me. It stayed in my mind during the Nineties as a historical context to the renewed civil wars, a corrective to the facile Western view that the Serbs were the Bad Guys. Rereading it now, I am struck too by the clarity with which he observed that the Allies had their own agenda just as much as the Axis powers. But most striking of all is the way in which his confusion over Vatican policy gradually turns into disgust, a reminder that even religious institutions may harbour political ambitions.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 18 © John de Falbe 2008


About the contributor

John de Falbe has been selling books at John Sandoe’s in Chelsea for over 20 years.

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