Random House first edition - 2022
This is the third massive tome on the Papacy by David I. Kertzer that I have read. His The Pope and Mussolini (2014), about Pius XI, which won the Pulitzer Prize, my Blog discussed on 27 July 2022. I had written another Blog on 21 September 2021 on The Pope Who Would Be King (2018), on Pius IX. In 2020, Pius XII's archives were finally opened and the author has been mining this new material ever since, revealing how the pope came to set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church's power. In 2005, Kertzer was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the combination of intense (and immense) archival work as well as an erudite approach and easy style suggests it was merited.
The book is based largely on documents found in archives scattered across five countries as well as the Vatican City - in each case (German, Italian, British, American, French, Vatican) the author pays a heartfelt tribute to other archivists and historians. No one person could possibly assemble such a formidable and wide-ranging body of material. The Notes for each chapter run to 92 pages, whilst the References (or Bibliography) show just how much others' work have helped to build up a pretty damning case on Pius XII. As I slowly read the 484 pages (and it took several nights of intense concentration), time and time again any defence on behalf of the pope shook and, usually, crumbled. The man of rare courage, of great virtue, heroically standing up to the Nazis and their Italian Fascist allies, which Pius's defenders portray, simply will not stand up to scrutiny. There were always sceptics, throughout the actual war and up to modern times. The key date, though, was March 2020, when the present Pope Francis, decided to order the archives for Pius XII's papacy to be available to researchers. Kertzer's book is the first full account to take advantage of them. Here one reads of how Pius balanced his public stance of neutrality while presiding over an Italian church hierarchy that offered enthusiastic support for the Axis war.
The author's father was a thirty-three years old Jewish chaplain with the Allied troops at Anzio beachhead in early 1944. He presided over funerals of Jewish soldiers. A few days after Rome was liberated, together with the chief rabbi of Rome, he conducted the first service held at Rome's Tempio Maggiore since German troops had occupied the city the previous September and began rounding up the city's Jews for deportation to Auschwitz. So, a personal vendetta? No, but an account with clearly personal feeling behind it. The fully documented story, backed up by specific and authenticated end notes, stands on its own feet.
Pius XII
Pius was first and foremost an Italian and, more specifically, a Roman. Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, was born in Rome into an upper-class family of intense piety, a member of the 'Black Nobility', or aristocracy, who had sided with Pius IX in the latter's opposition to the newly-formed Italian state. Secondly, he was leader and myopic defender of the smallest independent State - Vatican City; thirdly, he ruthlessly supported a Roman Catholic Italy, particularly in a hatred of Communism. Only once these priorities were addressed, did he look beyond to support Catholics in other countries. Tribal best sums him up. Protestants, other religions and, at the bottom, Jews and Communists, simply were not God's chosen ones, Was I surprised as I read Kertzer's damning account? - no. I had always suspected a cover-up. Was I shocked? - of course. Equally shocking, was the push for canonization of Pius XII after his death in 1958. He was made a servant of God by John Paul II (another fierce anti-Communist) in 1990 and Benedict XVI declared him Venerable in 2009. Let Kertzer, in his pages, build up an alternative appraisal.
If Pius XII is to be judged for his action in protecting the institutional interests of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of war, there is a good case to be made that his papacy was a success. Vatican City was never violated, and amid the ashes of Italy's Fascist regime the church came out of the war with all the privileges it had won under Fascism intact. However, as a moral leader, Pius XII must be judged a failure.
(p.34) From the first days of his papacy, Pius XII decided it was best to tread a careful path. He was committed to maintaining the church's mutually beneficial collaboration with Italy's Fascist government and was eager to reach an understanding with Nazi Germany.
(p.88) The Polish ambassador to the Holy See had repeatedly urged the pope to speak out, but to no avail. Britain's envoy to the Vatican complained that the pope "has carried caution and impartiality to a point approaching pusillanimity and condonation."
(p.139) It is impossible to understand the pope's actions without recognizing he had good reason to think the church's future would likely lie in a Europe under the thumb of Hitler and his Italian partner.
(p.157) From the moment Italy entered the war, Osborne [Britain's envoy] observed, "the moral prestige of the Papacy began to decline...Axis methods of blackmail were used to good effect."
(p.178) "reality," wrote the French ambassador d'Ormesson, "Pius XI and Pius XII were very different men. In the place of a robust mountaineer from Milan came a more passive Roman bourgeois."
(p.201) While Pius XII carefully avoided any condemnation of Hitler or the Nazis, there was one evil he had no trouble in denouncing...Comparing the battle to be fought today with the "glorious" Crusades of old, the pope told member of the Girls' Catholic Action organization it was crucial for them to help government authorities "combat the dangers of immorality in the areas of women's fashion, sport, hygiene, social relations, and entertainment."
(p.231) On the text of Osborne's report [12 July 1942], a London Foreign Office official added a handwritten note: "timidity becomes ever more blatantly despicable."
(p.238) After dismissing the pope's generic words denouncing the crimes of war as of little use, Osborne warned, "A policy of silence in regard to such offences against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and authority of the Vatican."
(p.258) "Having been reliably assured that the Pope was going to speak out this Christmas, I am now equally reliably assured that he is not. The Vatican will be the only State which has not condemned the persecution of the Jews. (Osborne's Diary)
(p.322) Now that Mussolini had fallen, the church faced the urgent task of denying it shared any responsibility for having promoted popular support for his regime. (p.333) "...the Holy Father speaks to tell us that...Christianity is threatened. Is that His true feeling about a German defeat, or is it that His horizon is bounded by the Alps and the Sicilian straits. The robbed and starving in Greece, in France, in Belgium, Holland, Austria, in concentration camps - religious, priests, seminarians, the enslaved workers - does their liberation mean nothing to the Vatican? Sad, sad." (Father Vincent McCormick, 7 August 1943)
(p.367) Lutz Klinkhammer, the foremost historian of Germany's military occupation of Italy, summed up the pope's reaction to the roundup of Rome's Jews: "It is more than clear that all their efforts were aimed above all at saving the baptized or the 'half-Jews' born from mixed marriages."
(p.382) "for a protest by the pope for the arrest of the Jews, it is not even being considered." (Ernst von Wizsacker, German ambassador to the Vatican to Berlin, mid-December 1943.)
(p.398) "Cardinal Secretary of State send for me today to say that the Pope hoped that no Allied coloured troops would be amongst the small number that might be garrisoned at Rome after the occupation." (British envoy to London)
(p.415) "The pope is working six days a week for Germany, on the seventh he prays for the Allies." (Weizsacker 29 March 1944)
(p.426) "People credit Pope for saving Rome, though he had nothing to do with it." (Osborne)
(p.460) Pius XII's speech for 2 June 1945 highlighted the suffering of Catholics and the Catholic Church during the war and represented Catholics in Germany as the Nazis' victims. He made not even the briefest mention, indeed no mention at all, of the Nazis' extermination of Europe's Jews. If any Jews had been in those concentration camps alongside the valorous Catholic priests and lay Catholics, one would not know it from the pope's speech. Nor did he make any mention of Italy's part in the Axis cause, much less suggest any Italian responsibility for the disasters that had befallen Europe.
I wonder if Pius XII has done his time in Purgatory yet?
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