The Pope at War, page 51
“Of extreme delicacy and sensitivity, wishing not to hurt anyone, hesitating for a long time to take a decision,” as the French ambassador described him, the pope could become unbending once he had made up his mind. But, concluded Maritain, “One should not expect from him the liveliness of reflexes and intuitions, the spontaneity and strength of character which marked his predecessor.”[21]
Despite his frail health, Pius XII’s papacy would last another decade. He would keep pushing himself as hard as he could to the end.
At his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo on October 3, 1958, the pope received a group of American pilgrims headed by his longtime friend Cardinal Spellman. He addressed them in English. The following day Britain’s envoy to the Vatican heard rumors that the pope had taken ill. He asked Monsignor Angelo Dell’Acqua, who had replaced Montini as substitute in the Secretariat of State, whether it was anything serious. The pope, replied the monsignor, simply had a sore throat. Two days later the Vatican put out a bulletin with the news that the pope had suffered a stroke.
Pius XII died on the morning of October 9, aged eighty-two, his papacy having lasted nineteen years. “There can be no doubt,” the British envoy reported to London, “that he really killed himself with over-work.”[22]
At the time of his death, the Vatican secretary of state post was still unfilled, and Domenico Tardini remained in his position as pro-secretary of state for extraordinary ecclesiastical affairs. His longtime colleague Giovanni Montini was no longer with him. Four years earlier, following Cardinal Schuster’s death, the pope had appointed Montini to be the new archbishop of Milan.
Life at the Vatican was about to change, as the mild-mannered Angelo Roncalli was elected by the cardinals to succeed Pope Pacelli. In 1953 Pius XII had summoned Roncalli, then nuncio to France, back to Italy, raising him to the cardinalate and appointing him patriarch of Venice. Taking the name John XXIII, Roncalli would soon convene a Second Vatican Council and, through it, seek to bring the Roman Catholic Church into greater harmony with modern times. Although he would die while the council was still in session, his successor, Giovanni Montini, Pope Paul VI, would see it through to its end. Not the least among the changes it would usher in, the council would put an end to the church’s age-old demonization of Jews.
The controversy over the wartime pope has largely focused on his silence during the Holocaust, his failure ever to clearly denounce the Nazis for their ongoing campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews, or even to allow the word “Jew” to escape from his lips as they were being systematically murdered. The Jesuit scholar Pierre Blet, one of the best-informed and most sophisticated defenders of Pius XII, offered an explanation for that silence in 1997 that many others have embraced. The pope, he argued, “had given thought to the possibility of public statements” but in the end decided not to speak out. His decision was based on two considerations. The first was his belief that “protests gain nothing, and they can harm those whom one hopes to assist.” The second was of quite a different nature: “Pius XII had to consider that a public statement on his part would have furnished ammunition to Nazi propaganda, which would in turn have presented the pope as an enemy of Germany…. It could unsettle the faithful—not all of whom were unaffected by the successes of the regime—in their confidence in the church and its leader.” Father Blet was putting the matter delicately, but in plainer language this latter motivation boiled down to the pope’s recognition that nearly half the citizens of the enlarged German Reich were Catholic, and millions of them were avid supporters of Hitler. To denounce Hitler and the Nazis as the German army was marching through Europe and rounding up Jews for extermination would be to risk losing their allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church.[1]
What are we to make of Father Blet’s first proposition, the one most commonly heard today from those promoting a heroic image of the pope? Pius XII’s silence, we are told, was motivated by his belief that if he were to denounce the Nazis’ exterminationist campaign, he would be encouraging Hitler to take more severe actions against Europe’s Jews. It is a proposition that assumes a Hitler and a Final Solution that are unrecognizable. It also fails to recognize that a large number of the men murdering the Jews, whether shooting them next to ditches they made their victims dig, or herding them into gas chambers, thought of themselves as good Catholics. Indeed, they might well have justified their action by recalling what they had learned from their parish priests about Jews and the danger Jews posed to good Christians, building on a centuries-long tradition of vilification of Jews by the church’s lower clergy.
The focus on the pope’s wartime actions in Italy, a country where his influence was huge, offers particularly valuable insight into these fraught questions. Can anyone argue that if Pius XII never spoke out against Italy’s racial laws, and never declared it unacceptable for good Catholics to cooperate in the Jews’ persecution, it was because he was afraid of making matters worse for the country’s Jews? If he refused to denounce Mussolini for taking Italy to war at Hitler’s side, could it have been because he worried that Italians would then abandon the Roman Catholic Church?
A question that is missing in so many of the polemics over Pius XII’s attitudes toward the war and the decisions he made during it is a simple one: when? As I have shown in these pages, the war appeared differently to the pope over time. We can distinguish two broad phases. In the first, the pope had good reason to believe the Axis would win the war. The German army seized Warsaw within weeks of its invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the next year took Paris in a matter of weeks while at the same time driving the British army in humiliating retreat from the continent. The contrast with the trench warfare that Germany had fought against France and Britain only a quarter-century earlier seemed astonishing at the time. Early in 1941 the German army quickly occupied the Balkans, then in June began a rapid march deep into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile England was reeling from months of devastating bombardment, while the Axis armies were routing British troops in North Africa and German submarines threatened to make North American aid to Britain impossible. In the east, Japan was going from conquest to conquest.
Pius XII’s eagerness to remain on good terms with the Italian Fascist regime and to avoid offending Hitler in these years has to be understood in this light. He felt he needed to plan for a future in which Germany would dominate continental Europe. His first and foremost duty, as he saw it, was to protect the institutional church. Having no confidence in Hitler, indeed angered by the Nazis’ systematic campaign to weaken the church, he saw in Mussolini his best bet for exercising a moderating influence on the man on whom, it seemed, Europe’s fate and that of the church would depend. In an Axis-dominated Europe, too, the church’s collaboration with the Fascist regime would guarantee its continued position of influence in Italy, a position that might otherwise be threatened by the spread of Nazi ideology to the Italian peninsula.
Only in late 1942, more than three years after the war began, as Axis reverses in Russia and the weight of America’s entry into the war were finally being felt, did the ultimate defeat of the Axis begin to appear likelier than not. This ushered in the second phase of the war. But surprisingly little changed in the pope’s approach, aside from occasional phrases that began to creep into his speeches referring to the sufferings of minorities and small nations. Part of the reason for this is that his main fear in the war’s first phase—of the implications of an all-powerful Nazi regime for the fate of the church in Europe—was replaced by a new fear, the fate of the church following a victory by the Soviet Union.
The German army’s occupation of Rome in September 1943 provided an additional incentive for the pope not to offend Hitler. Eager to protect Vatican City and other church institutions in the world capital of Catholicism, Pius XII was determined to maintain cordial relations with the Nazi authorities. Only in this context can we understand the pope’s decision not to protest as a thousand of Rome’s Jews were rounded up in October 1943 and shipped off to Auschwitz. The proposition that he did not protest because he feared what would happen to Italy’s Jews if he did must be difficult for all but the most credulous to believe.
In justifying the pope’s silence as the Nazis went about their systematic slaughter of Europe’s Jews, defenders of the wartime pontiff sometimes point to the danger that any papal criticism would have entailed for the Vatican or, indeed, for the very safety of the pope himself. While here we are getting closer to the pope’s motivation, this too has to be set in its proper context. As the evidence presented in these pages should make clear, both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were invested in portraying themselves as defenders of Christianity. The enemies of the Axis, Italy’s Fascist press kept repeating, were the same enemies that had long been fighting the Roman Catholic Church: Jews, Communists, and Protestants. As for the Germans, they never bombed Rome, much less the Vatican. It was the Allies who did.
But let us for a moment indulge in a bit of conjectural history. What if? What if the pope had loudly denounced Hitler and Mussolini, excommunicated them, and warned that any Catholic who participated in the extermination of Europe’s Jews would be condemned to an eternity of hell’s fires? It is indeed not hard to imagine that in such a case the Germans occupying Rome would have taken action to muzzle him. But if they were thus forced to do so, it would have come at a considerable cost to their war effort, undermining one of their major propaganda claims.
This brings up another part of the story, for among the reasons for the pope’s silence is one that is rarely mentioned. He realized that many of the loyal Nazi citizens in the Reich had been raised in the church and indeed continued to see themselves as Catholics. A 1939 census found that only one percent of Germans identified as “unbelievers,” while the rest, other than the one percent who were Jewish, saw themselves as Christians. The leaders of the Third Reich regularly reminded them that the state was funding both Protestant and Catholic churches, as it would continue to do until the very end.[2] If Pius XII’s silence was motivated by fears of the actions that the Axis powers might take against the church if he spoke out, it was motivated as well by his fears that denouncing the Nazis would alienate millions of Catholics and risk producing a schism in the church.
It is in this context that the ambiguity of the pope’s speeches during the war can best be understood. A mixture of opaque theological language and moralistic bromides, his sermons were remarkable for their length and his ability, amid the torrents of oratory, to scatter nuggets that both sides would be able to point to as supporting their cause.[3] While government elites in London, Rome, and Berlin complained behind closed doors about the papal phrases they deemed pleasing to their enemies, both Axis and Allied governments worked tirelessly to promote the public impression that the pope was on their side.
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In examining the construction of the heroic image of Pius XII during the war, the historian Oliver Logan observed that the frail, bespectacled, ascetic figure of the “Man in White” offered the perfect foil to the hardy, black-shirted, barrel-chested, pugnacious Duce. As Mussolini’s own fortunes declined, the man cast as Rome’s savior would become the focus of an intense personality cult. The emotional attachment that many would have to this image after the war was made all the stronger by its unstated corollary, the pope as the spiritual force behind a church that firmly opposed Fascism and all it stood for.[4]
As the history told in these pages makes clear, the controversy over the pope’s “silence” began almost as soon as the first shot of the war was fired. Criticisms of the pope for his support of Italian Fascism and for his eagerness to reach an understanding with Hitler began even before that. In February 1940 the American secretary of the treasury received a report from Kurt Riezler, member of a prominent German Catholic family, who had been a major figure in the Weimar Republic before being forced out when Hitler came to power in 1933. “The Catholic Church,” observed Riezler, “made a very good bargain with Italian Fascism—strengthening its position in Italy a good deal. The Pope likes dealing with governments, not with people and elections and public opinion—a deal with a more moderate Nazi Government for the sake of peace—with some concessions to the Catholic Church for good service in mediating peace—would be in his line.”[5]
The first criticisms of Pius XII for his silence during the war came when German troops crossed into Poland and began brutalizing the Poles, including, notably, many Roman Catholic priests. “The Pope does not seem to realize the immense authority that he continues to enjoy in the world,” wrote the French ambassador to the Vatican in October 1940. “He does not seem to appreciate how important a word, an affirmation, a condemnation coming from him has. He has his weapons, and he either does not know it, or he does not want to use them.” The ambassador went on to attribute the pope’s timorousness to a lack of self-confidence due partly to his nervous character and partly to the “Fascist dictatorial atmosphere” in which the Vatican was enveloped. Although the men of the Vatican insisted that the pope was doing all he could behind the scenes, added the ambassador, “His initiatives are timid, their results insignificant.”[6]
The postwar controversy over the pope’s failure to denounce the Nazis began almost immediately following Germany’s defeat. In mid-October 1945, a widely read French Swiss newspaper published an article, “Crime and Punishment,” that denounced the papal nuncio in Berlin, Monsignor Orsenigo, and the Vatican: “Was the Apostolic Nuncio ignorant of the massacres of the members of the German, Austrian, and Polish clergy? Was the Vatican able to ignore the methods of those with whom it had signed a concordat?” Invoking the familiar biblical verse, the article concluded, “Woe unto those who have eyes but do not see and ears but do not hear.” Alarmed, the nuncio in Switzerland wrote to Monsignor Tardini arguing that a Vatican response was “imperative” and requesting evidence to defend Orsenigo. The following May word that the Poles thought the Vatican had done nothing to come to the aid of Polish priests interned in German concentration camps led to a similar request for documents to defend the Vatican, including the correspondence of the nuncio in Berlin. Monsignor Tardini scribbled a note on the text of the request, dated May 30, 1946, expressing his doubt that sending such documentation would help their cause: “I am very uncertain: 1) Monsignor Orsenigo’s reports have a tone that is a bit too…optimistic: he appears too credulous and rather…timid in regard to the Germans. 2) Our dispatches have a bureaucratic tone—and could not be otherwise. All this together is not likely to satisfy—today—the Poles.”[7]
The evidence newly available from the Vatican archives offers further support for the astute assessment of Pius XII’s wartime role by the prominent European historian István Deák:
Fearful of Hitler’s wrath, the Pope barely raised his voice against Nazi racism and anticlericalism, and spoke even less against Nazi anti-Semitism. He did not take a stand in defense of the suffering Polish Catholic nation, or of the Christian victims of the Nazi euthanasia program, or of the Jews of his own bishopric in Rome….
Pius XII made it his supreme purpose to assure the survival of the Catholic Church in a time of turmoil. In this, he was successful, although it is still not clear just how, when, and by whom that survival was threatened. Providing help to the victims of Nazi persecution, the pope undertook much less than could have been expected of a person of his exalted position.[8]
As Deák points out, Pius XII saw his primary responsibility to be the protection of the institutional church, its property, its prerogatives, and its ability to fulfill its mission as he saw it. But as multiple sources from the war years make clear, he was painfully aware of the criticism that he was failing to perform another role that many sought in the leader of the church, courageous moral leadership. His defensiveness on this score runs through innumerable reports of those who met with him at the time.
As the pope saw it, there were bad Fascists and good Fascists, the bad men of the Nazi regime and the good men. For every Farinacci there was a Ciano, for every Ribbentrop there was a Weizsäcker. What differentiated the good from the bad was their attitude toward the church. Those who respected the church’s prerogatives, showed deference to the Catholic clergy, and offered the resources of the state to strengthen the church were good. Those who threatened the church’s influence, undercut its institutional activities, and threatened its property and its reputation were bad.
Pius XII would never stand up to Mussolini or to Hitler. Both men clearly intimidated him, a fact that the two dictators recognized and used to their benefit. Defenders of Pius XII’s silence who argue that the pope was not in a position to exert influence over Germany’s political path have a point that has to be taken seriously, but such a defense has little to recommend it in the case of Italy. The pope was, after all, Italian, as were virtually all the men of the Curia. The Vatican was in Rome, within a couple of miles of Mussolini’s Palazzo Venezia and the king’s Quirinal Palace, and the pope himself was a Roman. The country was overwhelmingly Catholic and permeated by a massive capillary church organization that reached into the remotest villages. There is no doubt that the pope and the Catholic clergy had vast influence there.
The speed with which the whole apparatus of Fascism crumbled when the king deposed Mussolini on July 25, 1943, with barely a peep of popular protest, shows how tenuous the Duce’s hold was on the Italian people in the end. What would have happened if the pope had denounced Italy’s impending entry into the war in 1940, had denounced the constant use the Fascists were making of church authority in justifying their demonization of Jews? How many of the men who murdered Jews or helped round them up to be sent to their deaths saw themselves as good Roman Catholics?
