Vatican newspaper recalls bombing of Monte Cassino

February 16, 2024

» Continue to this story on L'Osservatore Romano (Italian)

CWN Editor's Note: The Vatican newspaper has published a lengthy article on the events surrounding the bombing of Monte Cassino, the mother abbey of the Benedictine order. The article, written by Professor Matteo Luigi Napolitano of the University of Molise, appeared on February 15, the 80th anniversary of the bombing.

Encyclopaedia Britannica states that the Allies “erroneously believ[ed] that the Germans had occupied and fortified it. Actually, the Germans were able to remove both the monks and the treasures of the abbey; and, after the bombardment ceased, they in fact occupied and fortified the ruins.”

Napolitano recounts that the American government had assured the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Amleto Cicognani, in November 1943 that Monte Cassino would not be bombed, in response to a request made to the American and British governments by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione.

In the meantime, writes Napolitano, “a press campaign was underway in American newspapers on the need to bomb the abbey ... It was a comedy of nonsense, fueled, moreover, by Dom Alfred Koch, German Benedictine archabbot of St. Vincent, the oldest American abbey, in Pennsylvania.”

Allied generals clashed over whether to bomb the abbey. In the end, Gen. Mark Clark, who opposed the bombing, was commanded by his superior, Gen. Harold Alexander, to give the order to bomb the abbey. Four months later, Clark’s troops liberated Rome from Nazi occupation, and Clark met with Pope Pius XII.

Napolitano’s article did not address a recently discovered document, written by an official of the Secretariat of State in the summer of 1944, maintaining that the abbey might have been saved if his superiors had taken more energetic diplomatic actions a month before the bombing.

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