There have been easier times to be Pope. I don’t mean now, with the relatively gentle divisions between conservative and reformer, but during the Second World War, when the irrational became the norm and genocidal madness dominated Europe. Eugenio Pacelli had been elected to the papacy in March 1939, and as Pius XII remained pontiff until 1958. The times demanded a man of strength and resolve, whereas Pacelli was a diplomat and a compromiser.
Those attributes, rather than any extremes of personality or policy, characterize and dent his reign. Because he led the Roman Catholic Church during the Holocaust and eventual Nazi occupation of his country, such anodyne skills were simply inadequate.
It’s been genuinely difficult to gain a firm and fair understanding of where he stood when faced with tangible evil. Immediately after the war, Pius was regarded as a friend of the allies and a rescuer of the Jewish people. That portrait changed dramatically in 1963, with Rolf Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy, in which the writer claimed that Rome not only ignored the suffering of the Jews but tacitly and sometimes explicitly supported the Nazis.
In 1999 came British author John Cornwell’s, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, the title somewhat indicating the book’s arguments. Six years later there was a counterblast in, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis. The author was David G. Dalin, who is not only Jewish but a rabbi. Thus it’s continued, with shots being fired from all sides in the Pius Wars.
In 2020 Pope Francis ordered that previously secret documents concerning Pius and the Shoah should be released to academics, and has now made them available to the general public. What began to be discovered two years ago is that Pope Pius was neither as grim as his critics claim, nor as noble as his defenders maintain. As a Cardinal, he had drafted an encyclical condemning Nazi racism and had it read from every pulpit, and as Pope he employed Vatican assets to ransom some Jewish families held by the Germans. There were also Roman Jews hidden in the papal palace of Castel Gondolfo. He did save individual Italian Jews, did work on behalf of Jewish people who had converted to Catholicism or were married to Catholics, and he wasn’t a friend to National Socialism.
Problem is, nor was he a significant enemy. His considerable intelligence sources —some of them strongly anti-Nazi — had informed him of the extent and barbarity of the extermination of the Jews. But at no time did Pius explicitly condemn the Holocaust. He had, after all, been the Vatican’s ambassador to Germany and knew the beliefs of the Nazis.
As to the often-made argument and defense that any public condemnation would have been impossible, or led to further suffering, the question has to be asked: further suffering for whom? One-and-a-half million children were murdered in the death camps! Also, it was during the Pius XII pontificate that the Church issued the Decree against Communism, declaring that any Catholic who became a Communist was an apostate and to be excommunicated. This was after the war but at the height of Stalinism. Had Pius learned a lesson, or was Communism viewed with far more distaste than Nazism?
Had Pius learned a lesson, or was Communism viewed with far more distaste than Nazism?
My father’s family wasn’t Italian but eastern European. They died in large numbers in the Holocaust, and in western Ukraine many of the Nazi fellow travelers were Catholic. As were Holocaust facilitators all over Europe. As was Slovak leader and obsessive anti-Semite Jozef Tiso. He was a Catholic priest. Imagine what would have happened if they’d been held fully accountable by the papacy, even threatened with excommunication? The countless Catholics who were resisting Nazism, and risking their lives to save their Jewish neighbours would, I’m sure, have appreciated the support.
The King of Morocco requested yellow stars for himself and his family when told that Moroccan Jews would have to wear them. Dutch priest Titus Brandsma publicly opposed Nazism, rescued Dutch Jews and allied airmen, and was eventually murdered by the Nazis for his resistance. He was canonized by Pope Francis earlier this year. There are many such heroes.
Hindsight, courage, and resolve during times of safety are of course easy and cheap. But more could and should have been done, and the obscenities of the Holocaust perhaps, just perhaps, been limited or even halted. Millions still cry out for justice, as does the Jewish Jesus. Those cries will never stop.
