Fr. Christopher Berlo, C.P. A Passionist 'James Bond'
Edited by Morgan P. Hanlon, C.P.
Student archivists are cautioned by their instructors to avoid gathering material that focusses too heavily on the plans, programs, buildings or real estate of the organization whose history they are documenting. One then ends up with a dry-as-dust story of programs, etc. but not the living story of the men or women who did the work, labored and suffered for the organization and whose lives are the real story. Religious communities have been especially guilty of this tendency.
Sometimes, out of genuine humility, a true hero or heroine, obscures their own role in a fascinating tale. In the following article we are previleged to share the story of such a hero—Fr. Christopher Berlo, C.P. We have this story only because "Chris," as he was known, was urged by members of his own family to commit his experiences to writing in 1948 for a family publication, THE BERLO FAMILY REGISTER & HISTORY. We hope you will find it as interesting as we did.
Fr. Morgan Hanlon, C.P., Editor
BERLO, Christopher John, C.P. 1902 - 1979
Ch. Chris J Berlo, 0-517909
Staff, Percy Jones Gen. Hosp.
Battle Creek, Michigan
15 April 1948
I was born 45 years ago in Boston. My father was a pioneer of the automotive industry with the first garage in that city and his antecedents were French, having streamlined the name from Berleau to Berlo in 1729. My mother was descended from Alsatian stock, almost entirely self-educated and endowed with more than a normal share of that open honesty, militant common sense and willingness to work commonly associated with the old-school conservative New Englander.
Since my parents gave me complete freedom in the choice of my life's ambition, I left home at an early age and became a student at St. Joseph's Prep School, then located in Baltimore, thus beginning a nomadic existence of living out of a suitcase which has lasted, with few interruptions, for 32 years and taken me to 21 countries of this earth. My studies were continued in various cities of the eastern United States and Europe and I was ordained in 1927 in an old pilgrimage church in the Styrian Alps, which is now located behind the iron curtain. Then began a series of European assignments which took me all over the continent and necessitated the study of several foreign languages.
In addition to the normal clerical duties of a missionary and religious superior, I was also entrusted with the restoration and modernizing of Monasteries and Churches, the designing and construction of new units, and also the compilation of an extensive and artistic work in Latin dealing with Gregorian Chant. The last thousand copies of this work were destroyed at the printers in Belgium when the German Wehrmacht overran that country in 1940.
The most interesting and politically dangerous assignment consisted in the designing and construction of a new monastic unit in the Palatinate district of Bavaria immediately after Hitler's rise to power in 1934. The financing of this project involved the purchase of a large packet of frozen credit Marks from the Reichsbank in Berlin and the release of the same through the Devisenstelle in Nuremberg for the purpose of employing the jobless in a certain town—a complicated procedure by means of which the Nazi government unwittingly paid the lion's share of the cost of building a new Monastery at the same time that it was confiscating and secularizing old ones. For this piece of "business administration" I was promised 15 years in jail, and while I actually stood trial on five occasions in Amberg and Nuremberg and had to flee the country several times, it was proved in court that every step of the proceedings had been accomplished in accordance with existing laws and I have yet to see the inside of a Nazi lockup. In 1938 it was no longer possible for me as an American to hold the position of Rector of the monastery; in fact, it was no longer possible to work anywhere within reach of the Nazi strong arm, so I again returned to the United States where I spent the next year working in Pittsburgh and the adjacent coal mining areas.
In the summer of 1939 I flew from New York to Marseilles on one of the pioneer flights of Pan American Airways and then on to Rome in an Italian bomber where I arrived in late August and had another private audience with the present Pontiff, Pope Pius XII, whom I have known since he was Papal Secretary of State. On the following day Hitler's troops marched into Poland and World War II was under way. A month later I was given an assignment in Austria and Germany which I undertook with misgivings, despite my good contacts and fluent use of German dialects. In the company of Italian aviators the border crossing at Tarvis presented no problems and for a while I managed to fulfill my duties without opposition, for as it turned out later, the Gestapo did not then know I had returned. During this time the practical plans were laid for the preservation of our monastic property during the war, or its recovery after the war.
Finally, in the summer of 1940, after Dunkirk, my contact in the German Sicherheitsdienst or Secret Service warned me of impending disaster. I studied every means of exit: through Italy or Switzerland, or by air to Lisbon or Danube riverboat to the Black Sea, or even via the Siberian railroad to Vladivostock: all were closed to me.
So I made one gigantic effort to leave the country in a legal manner; I coolly walked into Gestapo headquarters in Vienna and requested an exit permit on my American Passport, presenting a letter from the American Consulate. I was ushered into the private office of the chief, who turned out to be the former chargè d'affaires of the German Consulate in Vienna. We recognized each other at once and I knew I had made a colossal mistake. He laughed in my face, took the letter from the Consulate by the corner as though it were something unclean and dropped it into his wastepaper basket, confiscated my passport and told me I was under investigation, must not leave the city, and might return in three weeks for a decision. The meaning of this was all too clear to me: my passport would be given to a German spy and I would be arrested before midnight.
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