Shedding new light on the wartime Pontiff

News this week that the Vatican is opening the archives for World War II (1939-45) to historians will bring fresh focus on the Pope Pius XII. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli – who had been Papal Nuncio in Bavaria and then Secretary of State to Pius XI – was elected Successor of St Peter in 1939 on the eve of war.

His election was not a surprise since cardinal-electors wanted a quick election and a known quantity as darkness enveloped Europe. Under Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli had been a key drafter of the encyclical Mit brennender sorge (With Burning Sorrow) which was smuggled in to Nazi Germany in 1937 and read at all Masses on Palm Sunday. It contained a firm condemnation of the racist underpinnings of the Nazi ideology. Adolf Hitler was furious and the document precipitated an intensification of the Nazi persecution of the Church, including many priests and religious being imprisoned or sent to concentration camps.

Pius XII was familiar with Germany: Pope Benedict XV sent him as nuncio to Bavaria in 1917. Three years later, he was dispatched as the first papal ambassador to the new Weimar Republic. He soon set about negotiating a concordat aimed at preserving rights such as Catholic education. During his time, he developed a fondness for German culture and music – a stick with which critics would late beat him to imply a softness of German colonial ambitions.

Foreign
 policy

In 1930, Archbishop Pacelli was recalled to Rome and became Vatican Secretary of State, effectively responsible for the entire foreign policy of the Holy See. Evidently, he quickly saw the threat of the rise of national socialism. Diplomatic papers reveal that he warned the US consul in Berlin in 1937 that Hitler was “an untrustworthy scoundrel and [a] fundamentally wicked person”. He is also quoted as saying he believed the Nazis were incapable of moderation and was fully supportive of the anti-Nazi stand of the German hierarchy.

When he was elected Pope in 1939, the Nazis were clearly disappointed. Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert has noted that “so outspoken were Pacelli’s criticisms that Hitler’s regime lobbied against him, trying to prevent his becoming the successor to Pius XI. When he did become Pope, as Pius XII, in March 1939, Nazi Germany was the only government not to send a representative to his coronation.”

The curious thing about the allegations against Pius XII – chief of which are that he was a Nazi sympathiser and did little or nothing to help the Jews – didn’t surface until the 1960s. And ever since the publication in 1999 of John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, Papa Pacelli has been framed in the public imagination as either a coward or a villain.

Yet, during his papacy and indeed afterwards, Pius was hailed as a heroic defender of human rights. In a Christmas editorial in 1941 the New York Times – an organ not known for reverence to the Catholic Church – noted that “the voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas”.

A year later, the newspaper leader writer returned to the Pontiff’s “lonely pulpit”.

“Just because the Pope speaks to and in some sense for all the peoples at war, the clear stand he takes on the fundamental issues of the conflict has greater weight and authority. When a leader bound impartially to nations on both sides condemns as heresy the new form of national state which subordinates everything to itself: when he declares that whoever wants peace must protect against ‘arbitrary attacks’ the ‘juridical safety of individuals:’ when he assails violent occupation of territory, the exile and persecution of human beings for no reason other than race or political opinion: when he says that people must fight for a just and decent peace, a ‘total peace’ — the ‘impartial judgment’ is like a verdict in a high court of justice.”

The historic record also shows that Pius intervened in several countries to try to stop the Nazi deportation of the Jews. In the eternal city itself, when the Nazis ordered the deportation of the Roman Jews almost 5,000 of the city’s 5,715 Jews found shelter in Church institutions with hundreds hidden inside the walls of the Vatican and many more at the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.

A mark of the esteem in which the Pope was held in the immediate post-war period for his stance is found in the fact that the Chief Rabbi of Rome converted to Catholicism in 1945. Israel Zolli – who upon becoming Catholic took the Pope’s baptismal name Eugenio – recalled how during the war he and his family had been hidden in various Catholic institutions in the city of Rome to evade Nazi capture and certain deportation to one of the death camps.

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At the time of his death in 1958, Pius XII was widely hailed as a courageous voice who had not only denounced the Nazis, but has also shown true metal by shielding many Jews in Church-run property both at the Vatican and across Nazi-occupied Europe.

His reputation on the Shoah was first tarnished in a 1963 play by the left-wing German activist Rolf Hochhuth which portrayed Pius as having failed to act or speak out against the Holocaust. While critics have pointed out that the work is clearly unhistorical and lacking credible substantiation, it captured part of the public imagination about the often austere Pontiff.

It was Mr Cornwell’s 1999 book Hitler’s Pope that did much to vilify Pius in the English-speaking world.

The book’s serialisation in the Sunday Times did much to copper-fasten the allegations in the public imagination. Coupled with a general ignorance about the Pontiff and the period, Mr Cornwell’s account went unchallenged for some years.

Suggestion

In his 2005 book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, the Jewish historian David Dalin also countered Mr Cornwell even going so far as to suggest that Yad Vashem – the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem – should honour Pope Pius XII as a ‘Righteous Gentile,’ concluding that “[t]he anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians like Garry Wills and John Cornwell…of ex-priests like James Carroll, and or other lapsed or angry liberal Catholics exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today”.

In his book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Philip Jenkins said that Hitler’s Pope could not be understood except as a series of “very low blows against the modern Catholic Church, and specifically the papacy of John Paul II”.

Whatever about the personal prejudices of the critics of Pius XII, the newly-opened archives will prove to be a treasure trove for those who want to shed new light on the period.

“The Church is not afraid of history,” the Pope said on his decision to open the archives. But, it’s likely to be many years before there is much concrete information to gleen given the extensive nature of the holdings. Bishop Sergio Pagano, prefect of the Vatican’s Apostolic Archives, said the World War II documents alone ran into millions of pages, divided into 121 sections according to topic.

Questions

The scholars who will look at the papers include some from the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and award-winning German historian Hubert Wolf, a specialist on the Pius XII pontificate.

The central unanswered – perhaps unanswerable – question is whether Pope Pius XII did enough in words to speak out against the Holocaust. It’s ultimately a moral question and one that has no easy answer. For starters, how much is enough? What did others like the allies know and choose to remain silent? What would more trenchant public denunciations from the Pontiff have achieved?

We know, for example, that both papal interventions and criticism from hierarchies of the Nazis often led to more persecution and more people losing their lives. Did Pius believe that the better way was to work on the ground to save lives rather than having the moral high ground in speeches?

These are prudential judgements and ones that will continue to be debated alongside the demonstrable actions the Pope took to protect and shield Jews and others from the Nazis.

As well as the papers themselves, many will also hope that the research will clear the way for the stalled process of canonisation for Pius XII. That will be a decision for Pope Francis and, perhaps, his successors.

But for now, the release of the archives will allow for a more rounded picture of one of the most prominent Popes of the modern period.