HISTORY:
The Vatican
Pimpernel, By Brian Fleming, Collins Press, 212pp,
€17.99
THE CLOAK-and-dagger exploits of
Mgr Hugh O'Flaherty in wartime Rome, when he helped hide thousands
of Allied escaped prisoners-of-war, have often been told in print,
writes
Joe Carroll.
In 1983, Gregory Peck played him in a TV film called The Scarlet and the Black, and the Kerry priest also figured in an Eamonn Andrews-fronted This is Your Life programme on television in 1973 shortly before he died.
The author of this latest book, Brian Fleming, a Fine Gael TD for Dublin West in the early 1980s, bemoans what he sees as the lack of official recognition in Ireland for the humanitarian exploits of this courageous priest. The book, written with help from his nephew and former judge of the Supreme Court, also Hugh O'Flaherty, is an attempt to prompt belated recognition. The author speculates that the failure may be due to "the official disapproval" in neutral Ireland of those who were "involved with the British forces".
Even before the war ended in May 1945, Britain had awarded the Killarney priest a CBE for "services to our forces in Italy". The US government gave him the US Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm, citing his "unfailing devotion to the cause of freedom", often "at the risk of his own life". Later the Italian government awarded him a silver medal for military valour and a pension, which he never drew. The President of Italy recalled: "Singled out and relentlessly sought by the enemy, he still managed to achieve many and dangerous missions of war, calmly facing the peril to his life, in order to practise at all times his dedication to humanity and the cause of liberty."
There was no way a country officially neutral could have handed out similar accolades to an Irish citizen. Indeed the Irish minister accredited to Italy during the war, Michael MacWhite, complained about O'Flaherty's un-neutral behaviour to the Department of External Affairs in Dublin. "It will not surprise me if finds himself in a concentration camp one of these days. A period there might develop in him a sense of proportion and responsibility," MacWhite wrote testily to the secretary, Joseph Walshe, in November 1942. MacWhite, who had a remarkable background himself as a former soldier in the Foreign Legion, also expressed annoyance that the other Irish ambassador in Rome, Dr TJ Kiernan, accredited to the Holy See, had given a travel visa to allow O'Flaherty return to Ireland for a much-needed break.
Perhaps MacWhite needed a break himself. He could hardly have had a lower opinion of the Italians who "ate the bread and enjoyed the games" laid on by the Roman emperors, "but have not succeeded in doing anything particularly noteworthy since the Battle of Actium" in 31 BC, he informed Dublin in April 1944.
While this book is largely a retelling of the O'Flaherty humanitarian deeds, the author breaks new ground in his use of Irish diplomatic correspondence about the turbulent priest. As Irish ambassador to the Holy See, Dr Kiernan was inevitably concerned about the activities of a fellow citizen who was using his position as a senior Curia official to help Allied escapees who had made their way to Rome. But, while Kiernan had to preserve the neutrality stance, his wife, Delia Murphy, the famous balladeer (Denis Johnston, then a BBC correspondent, described her admiringly as "Rabelaisian"), was ready to take risks to help O'Flaherty, which could have cost her husband his job.
With the war coming to an end, MacWhite became even more critical of O'Flaherty and what he saw (almost certainly unfairly) as his publicity-seeking. In a diplomatic telegram to Dublin in January 1945, MacWhite wrote: "In three of last Sunday's papers one could read how an Irish Monsignor deceived the SS by pretending to be a coalman. It has all the appearance of having been contributed by the person concerned, who has a mania for publicity. How far it is true I cannot say, but the implications are that he was the agent of the British Minister to the Holy See, if not one of his spies. It will hardly get him sympathy in the Holy Office."
Inside the Vatican, however, O'Flaherty had a powerful protector in Mgr Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI) who was a discreetly pro-Allied under-secretary. Other officials were critical of how O'Flaherty's network of safe houses and refuges in monasteries and convents, organised with British diplomatic connivance from inside the Vatican, threatened to provoke German retaliation against the tiny state during their period of occupation of Rome in 1943-1944.
It is a story of personal bravery well worth retelling now that most of the earlier books about O'Flaherty are probably out of print.
...
Joe Carroll is a former Washington correspondent for The Irish Times and author of Ireland in the War Years 1939-1945