He was a cosseted Renaissance prince, and he looked like an el Greco painting, as whip thin and dangerous as a pistol, as ascetic as a razor. He was a Victorian Italian, born in 1876, and entirely a product of his place and time. But he was also “a big man,” in the sense in which a 1920s American industrialist might have used the phrase—one of those people, instantly recognizable to another, who understands exactly how things and organizations work: a getter of things done.
He was hard and competent, perhaps the most sheerly competent man ever to hold his position, though he also showed a tender, almost sentimental streak from time to time, and he trained himself to a habitual charity by force of will. He was more longsighted than most such quick and decisive men, but shortsighted sometimes as well, as they all eventually prove. He lived in a castle and flew in an airplane. He spent three hours a day in prayer. He could never learn to ride a horse. Six months before Hitler’s total war of modern tanks and dive-bombers smashed its way across Europe, he assumed control of a vast medieval institution whose international operations were best suited to solve the question of what to do about Charlemagne.
Most of all, he was an insider. Inside the Church, inside the diplomatic corps, inside politics, inside the world. He knew how a president’s office works and what a banker does, how a scholar functions and what an army colonel thinks. He came from a powerful and important family, who groomed him for great things from the beginning. At every point, his teachers and elders recognized his discretion, his self-possession, his superiority, and his strength. And they always responded by taking him further, and further, and further in.
Early in his career, he was the highest example of a type you sometimes notice at an embassy party or a state reception. The kind of young politician you can almost sense— like an ultraviolet color just beyond seeing, a bat-squeak just beyond hearing—is destined for power. The kind of young diplomat who has quickly become the ambassador’s right- hand man and is standing near the entrance talking quietly with the other ambassadors’ right-hand men. The kind of loyalty and personal freedom, and for six years, he was trapped inside 100 acres in the middle of Rome, walking every day the same path through his garden—spied on by half a dozen major intelligence services, his mail opened, his employees bribed, his telephone lines tapped, his papers copied, his radio signals jammed. He hated extemporaneous speaking. He kept his own counsel.
He was a saint and a failure, a success and a sinner, a man designed by nature to be the finest wielder of the delicate tools of civilized diplomacy the Vatican had ever known— and confronted during his papacy with only blind, monstrous barbarity, like a fencing master forced to duel a panzer tank. He was the most important man in the world and utterly beside the point. From the time he became pope in 1939 until his death in 1958, every thread of world history passed through his hands. But for the most part those threads proved steel cables, and he could never make them bend.
His name was Eugenio Pacelli—reigning as Pope Pius XII—and he was either one of the greatest disasters to sit on the throne of St. Peter, or one of the greatest men to live in the 20th century.
Slandering a Saint
Perhaps the most curious thing about the man, however, is exactly this bifurcation, for there seems no third option, no middle ground for us to choose. Whenever the topic of his pontificate is raised, Pius XII is either unreservedly lauded as the only significant resister of Hitler to survive on the European continent, or unrelentingly denounced as a cowardly failure who passively or even actively participated in the Nazi’s destruction of six million Jews.
So, in the mid-1960s, Broadway gave us Rolf Hochhuth’s widely discussed play The Deputy, which presented the guilty silence of the Catholic Church during the war as an obvious matter of history, and Hollywood gave us The Sound of Music, which presented the Catholic Church as the sole source of shelter for refugees from the Nazis. For the recent British writer John Cornwell, Pius XII is “the most dangerous churchman in modern history,” without whom “Hitler might never have come to power or been able to press forward with the Holocaust.” But for the Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide, in his 1967 volume Three Popes and the Jews, “The pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000, Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.”
These absolute extremes are why Pius XII’s papacy is a topic we seem to have forced on us over and over. This spring alone saw the appearance of four books on the question: Cornwell’s extremely bitter Hitler’s Pope, Pierre Blet’s careful Pius XII and the Second World War, Garry Wills’s unhesitating Papal Sin, and Margherita Marchione’s hagiographical Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace.
And now, for this fall, the latest set of books on the subject has arrived, like the annual falling of leaves: Ronald J. Rychlak’s systematic response to Pius’s critics in Hitler, the War and the Pope, Susan Zuccotti’s somewhat belated attempt to join the recent bandwagon of papal detractors with Under His Very Windows, Michael Phayer’s curious effort to extend the attack to include everything Catholic before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, and Ralph Mclnerny’s splenetic defense in The Defamation of Pius XII.
On the whole, the current defenders of Pius seem to have the stronger case. Indeed, the best of these new books is Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope, and in his epilogue, Rychlak provides a devastating, point-by-point refutation of Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope.
But “on the whole” is not an option in the argument over Pius. And—to get down to the nub of the matter—it shouldn’t be an option. The phrase implies a moderated view of the role played by the Church during World War II. And where is there room for moderation?
On the other hand, if Pius XII was a holy and able religious leader who succeeded in saving lives and did the best that could be done when, armed with nothing but a traditional moral authority, he was faced with a set of monsters dedicated to the destruction of traditional morality, then attacks from the likes of Hochhuth and Cornwell are obscene, twisted slanders of a saint.
Behind the Scenes
Between the camps holding these divergent views, the facts are hotly disputed—but the number of facts actually in dispute proves, on examination, to be surprisingly small. Ordained a priest at age 22 in 1899, Eugenio Pacelli was one of those talented men that hierarchies exist to find, train, and promote. Pius X made him a monsignor in 1904, Benedict XV consecrated him a bishop in 1917, and Pius XI raised him to cardinal in 1929.
Ever since 1848, the Catholic Church had found herself faced, across Europe, with a swirl of Communists, Socialists, Catholic center parties, and traditional Protestant animus. And the Vatican’s solution—even as the Papal States ceased to exist as an independent nation—was to sidestep domestic politics and negotiate as a foreign power with each European state. It was, in its way, a brilliant idea for preventing the seizures of schools and monasteries the Church had suffered in France—and for winning, in a single stroke, protections that would have required years to obtain politically as domestic legislation. But the governments after World War I were not the kind that had existed before. And instead of changing its technique, the Vatican after 1917 accelerated its negotiation of concordats with any government that made the least claim to legitimacy—as though dictators, Fascists, Communists, military cabals, and impossibly fragile coalitions could be bound with international law.
Pacelli’s relations with Germany began in 1917 when Benedict XV sent him as nuncio to Bavaria. In 1920, he was named apostolic nuncio for all Germany, and he signed concordats with Bavaria in 1924 and Prussia in 1929. That was the same year the Lateran Accords were completed with Italy, recognizing the Vatican as a sovereign state. In 1930, Pacelli returned to Rome to become Pius XI’s secretary of state, where he concluded the general concordat with Germany—led then by Hitler—in 1933.
For all that, Pacelli seems to have understood that the new governments were not all compatible with Christianity. Before Hitler’s accession, Pacelli gave 44 major addresses in Germany, 40 of which condemned some aspect of Nazism. He was deeply involved in the drafting of Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety), Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical condemning German racialism and nationalism. In 1935, at Lourdes, Pacelli denounced ideologies “possessed by the superstition of race and blood.” At Notre Dame in Paris in 1937, he called Germany “that noble and powerful nation whom bad shepherds would lead astray into an ideology of race.”
In March 1939, Pacelli was elected pope, and six months later, the war he dreaded began with the invasion of Poland. For the next six years, he would speak constantly of peace, always peace, anything but war—denouncing, for instance, the Allies’ demand for total surrender. He was, at root, a diplomat and believed that clever negotiations, subtle pressures, and behind-the-scenes manipulations could ameliorate almost any horror in a time of peace. Many of his best gifts were useless during war.
On March 3, 1940, for example, Pius celebrated his first papal anniversary by attending a Chopin concert and was overheard to say, “Poor Poland is being crucified between two thieves.” This was a week before Ribbentrop’s official visit to the Vatican, during which Pius read a list of Germany’s racial crimes and concordat violations in Poland. It was all very strong and powerful—for a world before the Nazis, for a world at peace. A month later, the blitzkrieg swept across France. Italy joined the war.
The Vatican’s radio and newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, poured out denunciations of atrocities, and Pius’s Christmas message of 1941 deplored “the dishonor to human dignity, liberty, and life.” By 1942, the Nazis’ systematic plans for the Jews were clear. When the prime minister of Slovakia complained, “I don’t understand why you want to stop me from ridding Slovakia of…this pack of criminals and gangsters,” the nuncio replied, “Your Excellency is no doubt aware of the atrocious fate awaiting these deported Jews…. All the world knows of it.” In Holland, in July 1942, the Catholic bishops issued an official protest against deportations—and the Germans retaliated by seizing and deporting the Jewish converts who had previously been exempt (among them, Edith Stein). The pope’s 1942 Christmas message pleaded for “the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, only because of their nationality or descent, are condemned to death.”
The Nazis, at least, understood clearly what Pius meant. In October 1942, Goebbels’s office issued ten million copies of a pamphlet denouncing Pius as a “pro-Jewish pope.” His 1943 theological encyclical, Mystici Corporis, was banned in Belgium for containing such lines as, “We must recognize as Brothers in Christ…those not yet one with us in the Body of Christ.” In an April 30 letter, Pius wrote, “We give to the pastors who are working on the local level the duty of determining if and to what degree the danger of reprisals…seem to advise caution.” The prudential decision may have been mistaken, but it was a strongly indicated one, and it matched his personal style. “I have repeatedly considered excommunicating Nazism,” he told an Italian military chaplain, “in order to castigate before the civilized world the bestiality of Judaeocide. But after many tears and prayers, I have concluded that a protest would not only fail to help the persecuted, it might well worsen the lot of the Jews.” Vatican Radio and L’Osservatore Romano, under Pius’s direction, had repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism and the Nazis’ atrocities. But, given the reprisals in Germany—where listening to Vatican Radio was a capital crime—Pius decided that additional public protests would only provoke more deaths.
His personal bravery was never in question. In September 1943, the Germans seized Rome and assigned an officer to “advise” the pope—whose sole response was, “Tell your chiefs that the pope is not afraid of concentration camps.” “Papal caution and circumspection,” Lapide later wrote, “saved close to 90 percent of Roman Jewry; would papal clamor have saved more—or, conversely, would it have endangered those Jews then in precarious hiding?”
A Question of Judgment
It is not so much these facts that are in dispute between the two camps of Pius interpreters. It is rather mostly “a question of judgment,” as the Jewish scholar (and Polish refugee from the Nazis) Joseph Lichten entitled his 1963 essay defending Pius XII. How are we to take statements made on Vatican Radio and in L’Osservatore Romano? To whom are we to ascribe the ultimate credit for the good done by some nuncios and bishops in Greece and France? To whom are we to ascribe the ultimate blame for the evil done by some clergy in Slovakia and Croatia? The argument about the Church during World War II turns primarily on what facts are to be taken as central and what facts are to be set aside as incidental.
So, for instance, in a private conversation on July 14, 1933, Hitler boasted that the German concordat Pacelli signed on behalf of the Vatican “will be especially significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry.” But then, recorded in the “table talks,” we find Hitler’s tirade on July 4, 1942: “Once the war is over we will put a swift end to the Concordat…. Not only the history of the past, but also present times afford numberless examples of the very hard-boiled diplomats to be found in the service of the Catholic Church, and of how extremely cautious one must be in dealing with him.” And which of these are we to take as Hitler’s actual view?
In 1939, in the formal letter announcing his election as pope, Pius wrote to Hitler: “At the outset of Our pontificate, We wish to assure you that We have an intimate affection for the German people consigned to your care…. [A] s papal nuncio, We labored to organize the relations between the Church and the State in a reciprocal agreement and effective collaboration,…a goal at which We aim particularly now with all the ardent desire that the responsibility of Our office charges Us.” But Sr. Pascalina Lehnert, his longtime secretary, recalls:
On one occasion I asked the Nuncio if he did not think that [Hitler] could…perhaps help the German people. The Nuncio shook his head and said: “I would be very, very much mistaken in thinking that all this could end well. This man is completely obsessed: all that is not of use to him, he destroys; all that he says and writes carries the mark of his egocentricity; this man is capable of trampling on corpses and eliminating all that obstructs him.”
And which of these are we to take as the pope’s actual view?
The problem for writers in one of the Pius XII camps is always to explain why writers in the other Pius XII camp cannot see what seems so apparent from the chosen facts. At times, the explanations are almost comic. In a relentless section of The Defamation of Pius XII, Mclnerny, with some accuracy, dismisses—as the psychodrama of lapsed Catholic faith—the papal attacks by the likes of the ex-seminarians Wills and Cornwell and the ex-priest James Carroll (whose 1997 article in the New Yorker began the latest round of attacks on the memory of Pius). Zuccotti, more tendentiously, devotes her conclusion in Under His Very Windows to disparage—as ill-informed, mistaken, or even devious— the praise Pius received from such Jews as Lapide, Golda Meir, and Albert Einstein.
Reordering the Timeline
But if there is a solution to the puzzle of Pius XII, it must lie most of all in the rejection of anachronism. We make a historian’s mistake when we insist that the everyday people and busy leaders of the time should have seen things as sharply as scholars who have devoted their lives to studying the period now can. We stumble when we apply the same moral condemnations to those who instigated the atrocities of World War II and those who did not foresee or prevent them. Judgment is the historians’ task, but we err most of all when we substitute not only our judgment but our reactions for that of the observers of the time—when we say, for instance, that because a document is not phrased in a way to evoke a strong reaction from us, the people who reacted strongly to it then must be mistaken.
For someone like Cornwell, anachronism is almost the only available tool for his anti-Catholic project. In Hitler’s Pope, he denounced Pius XII for his failure to speak as forcefully about the Jews as John Paul II has done. But that same spring in which Hitler’s Pope appeared, he wrote an article in the Times of London mocking the “sclerotic pontificate” of John Paul II. For Cornwell, it amounts to a double-bind in which the Church is dismissed as corrupt because prior popes were not like John Paul II, and John Paul II is dismissed because he leads a Church thereby found corrupt.
But even Mclnerny seems not to escape the trap entirely. In The Defamation of Pius XII, he devotes four sections to Zionism and the confusing, contradictory statements of Jewish leaders: “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to [a new Jewish state in Palestine],” the Zionist David Ben Gurion once declared, “then I would opt for the second alternative.” Mclnerny’s purpose is a kind of reductio: If you want to play the anachronistic game of interpreting statements from the 1930s and 1940s by the standards of today, then there are plenty besides Pius XII open to ridicule and blame.
This is, however, a dangerous strategy. And it is, in any case, an unnecessary one. If we dismiss the errors of anachronism and consider how Pius XII’s pontificate was perceived at the time, the defense of the Catholic Church’s behavior before and during World War II becomes clear. That behavior was not perfect, by any means. It was not always wise even by the standards of the moment, and it was often unwise in retrospect. But it was clear and coherent, and everyone knew it—the Nazis knew the Church opposed them, the Nazi sympathizers within the Church knew they had lost the fight to influence the papacy, the Allies knew the Vatican was not under Axis control, and the observers of the time knew Pius XII alone stood against the tide.
So, for example, we must take seriously such things as the October 27, 1939, story in the New York Times, which observed, “a powerful attack on totalitarianism…was made by Pope Pius XII in his first encyclical…. It is Germany that stands condemned above any country or movement in this encyclical—the Germany of Hitler and National Socialism.” The March 14, 1940, issue reported Ribbentrop’s visit to the Vatican with the subhead “Jews’ Rights Defended.” “Vichy Seizes Jews; Pope Pius Ignored,” ran the Times headline on August 27, 1942. “Pope Said to Help in Ransoming Jews,” added the headline of October 17, 1943.
A New History
What would make all this clear is a kind of writing about history that we haven’t quite had yet (though Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope comes close and is, for now, the magisterial volume on the subject). We need a history that selects not only the actions undertaken during Pius XII’s pontificate but also the recorded reaction to them—which refuses to decide how things ought to have been perceived but limits itself to reporting how they were perceived.
What we will arrive at from such a systematic history is, I believe, an ability to recognize both the sanctity of Pius XII and the failure of all he longed for. An ability to recognize that he did more than anyone else to prevent war, and nonetheless war came. An ability to recognize that the Catholic Church saved more than 700,000 Jews from the Nazis, but nonetheless six million others died. An ability to recognize that no one could have done better than this good, brilliant, powerful man, and nonetheless, it was not enough.