David Kertzer Book Panel: The Pope and Mussolini ▬ February 26, 2014

Professors Kevin Madigan, Suzanne Steward-Steinberg  and Kevin Spicer join Professor David Kertzer in a discussion about "The Pope and Mussolini", at the Watson Institute. 

Professor Kertzer opened his presentation with a reference to the February edition of "First Things" and quoted from an article on Pius XI by Filup Mazurczak.  Mazurczak's article is a somewhat "rose-tinted glasses" view of the papacy of Pius XI.  The truth, as Kertzer reminded us, is somewhat more complicated.

At the heart of the book is an extensive examination of the role of the church in keeping Mussolini in power.  It is the stuff of cloak and dagger crime fiction, except it is assuredly historical fact.  Kertzer's 16,000 words of references, notes and archival file numbers dispells any notion of flights of anti-Catholic or anti-papal fantasy.  Kertzer writes history.

One of the many characters who emerge in this story is the Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi, the pope's private messenger to Mussolini.  This man was obsessed with ideas of Jewish plots and, without the pope's knowledge, "kept hectoring Mussolini that he was under threat by the Jews and he better take action against them".  Pius kept Tacchi Venturi because of his access to Il Duce not because of his antisemitic paranoia that was certainly not shared by the pope.  Tacchi Venturi proved himself so useful that Pius XII kept him in his position of unofficial mediator with Mussolini.

By mid-1930s Pius XI had doubts about Mussolini, but he was surrounded by curial officials who were determined to preserve the relationship between the Church and fascist state.  The most disturbing reality that emerges is the Italian government's reliance on the Secretariat of State and, in particular, the Secretary, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli to shape and steer Catholic opinion around the world in a pro-Italian fashion especially after the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

Then there is the sad deal between Mussolini and the pope just before the passing of the first antisemitic laws in Italy.  In return for the silence of the Church over Italy's new anti-Jewish laws of July 1938, the regime would ensure a steady stream of benefits, gifts and privileges.

From the outset Kertzer underscored the importance of "triangulation" of archives in order to corroborate the thousands of documents from the ASV, Italian state archives and other sources.  No fact could be allowed to stand alone; it must be put into its context against other sources.  I interpret this to be David Kertzer's all too familiar experience with the tactics of those who seek, through thinly veiled smear campaigns, to impugn the academic and personal integrity of historians who set about to do their job, and do it well. It is a point that Kevin Madigan also makes.

The presentation of all speakers makes it clear that the historical narrative is far more nuanced and complex than the "official" narrative maintained by the Vatican and elements of restorationist and neo-conservative Catholic groups.  Kertzer's book makes for uncomfortable reading, and so it should.  However, if there is to be an honest and open discussion of the role of the church, the papacy and individuals within the Vatican, the acceptance of a less than perfect history must be the starting point.

At the end what David Kertzer's research has revealed is sadly simple.  Pius XI was a tragic figure, a man with a medieval world view, limited in his ability to respond and deal with the threat and seductive charm of fascism, who came to see too late in his life that he had indeed supped with the devil. 

Kevin Madigan reviews David Kertzer's "The Pope and Mussolini".

If you haven't bought your copy of The Pope and Mussolini you are missing out on a sterling piece of historical research that establishes a new benchmark in the study of the papacy in the twentieth century and its dealings with fascism in Italy.  

David Kertzer tells a gripping story that would be worthy of Ian Fleming and the Bond novels, except that unlike Mr Bond, this story is true, disturbing and very uncomfortable.  It is another reminder that histories on the relations between the Catholic Church and the regimes of the right in the first half of last century are still evolving.  Kertzer's examination of documents from the Vatican archives along with corroboration in Italian state archives presents the most complete picture to date on the devilishly difficult path Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli and their fellow workers in the Vatican found themselves treading from 1922 onwards.

Il Duce and Il Papa

Kevin Madigan's article, originally published on Israel-Commentary, gives a thought provoking review of Kertzer's book.  I am grateful for Professor Madigan's permission to publish his article here.

How the Vatican Aided Mussolini

National memories like personal ones, tend to be self-flattering, soothing, and often glorious. So it comes as a shock when historical research shows those memories to be false. It is even more shocking when research unearths new historical narratives that are awkward, shameful, or even intolerable. Since the end of the Second World War, both the Catholic Church and Italy have treasured heroic memories of their supposedly contentious relations with Benito Mussolini, his Fascist regime, and the anti-Semitic racial laws of 1938. The traditional, self-consoling narrative goes something like this:

Brava gente, the good people of Italy opposed Mussolini’s Fascist regime and the racial laws it produced. The Catholic Church in Italy resisted Italian Fascism. Its cantankerous pope, Pius XI, fought Mussolini and his dictatorship, as did other high-ranking Vatican churchmen. When Italy’s racial laws were published in 1938, church leaders protested them vigorously. They were appalled that Jews would be disenfranchised, marginalized professionally and educationally, ostracized socially, defined by race, and declared ethnically and culturally inferior to their European neighbors. Only semi-heathen and politically illiberal Germany could possibly have championed this sort of pre-Christian tribalism and discrimination.

David Kertzer, the distinguished historian of modern Italy at Brown University and author of the brilliant The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,(Vintage, 1998), tells a much different story in his latest, meticulously researched, and captivating book. The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (Random House, 529 pages) is based in large part on tens of thousands of documents made available only in 2006 in the Vatican Archives, covering the pontificate of Pius XI (1922–1939), as well as a treasure trove of newly available sources for the same period in the Jesuit archives, along with the rich Fascist archives for these years. Among Kertzer’s conclusions are that the Vatican bureaucracy, far from resisting Mussolini, enabled and sustained the Mussolini dictatorship. Several important Jesuits, including the order’s Superior General, helped support the Fascist regime and tried to muzzle papal criticism of Hitler. These Jesuits also did much to sustain the notion that there was a worldwide conspiracy of Judeo-Bolsheviks intent on subverting healthy Christian society and establishing a Communist empire in the West. Not only did the church fail to resist the 1938 racial laws; church-approved writings provided much of the rationale for discriminating against Italy’s tiny Jewish population. Among those who suppressed criticism of the Italian racial laws and sought to ease tensions between the pope, Mussolini, and Hitler was the Vatican secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, who would succeed Pius XI in 1939.

Most of all, Pius XI and the dictator, who both came to power in 1922, depended on each other for support and for achieving mutual goals. They shared many political ideas; both loathed democracy and Communism. Pius gave sacred legitimacy and removed political obstacles to Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Mussolini restored many ecclesiastical prerogatives that had been lost over the previous decades. Only near the end of Pius XI’s pontificate, when the aging pope grew enraged with Mussolini and his friend and ally Hitler, did the unholy union begin to unravel. But the unraveling was knit up after Pacelli became Pius XII.

As he rose to power, the anti-clerical and irreligious Mussolini (his first publication: “God Does Not Exist”) felt that he needed the support of Italy’s Catholics. Among the obstacles to his rise to power had been the Italian Popular Party, founded by the Sicilian priest Luigi Sturzo in 1919 with the support of Benedict XV. Intended to draw Catholics away from the Socialists with a program of progressive Catholicism, it was by 1922 among the country’s largest parties. The Fascists saw the Popular Party as one of several countrywide organizations that blocked their path to power, and to clear the way, they beat priests, raided party meetings, and sacked party buildings. Unlike Benedict, Pius XI had never embraced the Popular Party, partly because of its professed independence from the Vatican. In addition, both the new pope and Mussolini had profound misgivings about democracy—and both hated Communism and feared a Bolshevik takeover of the West. In the eyes of Pius XI, Mussolini and the Fascists would provide an indispensable bulwark against Communism and other detestable aspects of modernity.

Eventually, the new pope concluded that it would be best to throw his support to the Fascist Party. In 1922, he had his secretary of state send a letter to bishops forbidding priests from joining any party, and in 1926 the Popular Party was disbanded altogether.

Pius XI had done a critically important favor for Mussolini, and upon Il Duce’s assumption of power in 1922, the new leader was eager to communicate his gratitude to the new pope. He ordered his men to kneel in prayer for a moment. As Kertzer observes, Mussolini was well aware that the support he had received from the church was “priceless.” Pius XI made sure that never again would the Vatican-vetted Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica denounce Fascism. Indeed it would legitimate it. Just before the first election held under Mussolini, in 1924, the journal reminded readers of all the benefits provided by the Fascists and of how tirelessly Mussolini had already worked to improve church-government relations.

For his part, Mussolini pleased the Vatican by restoring crucifixes to the country’s classrooms, adding church holidays to the civil calendar, and showering the church with funds to rebuild places of worship damaged in the Great War. In 1921, in one of his earliest speeches as leader, Mussolini pledged that Fascism would help restore a Christian society in Italy. He would build a Catholic state appropriate to a Catholic nation.

The two most powerful men in Italy had fallen into what Kertzer calls a “fatal embrace.” The pope had cast his lot with the former “priest-eater” for the benefits he would provide the Catholic Church in Italy. The Fascist revolution, Kertzer concludes, had become “a clerico-Fascist revolution.”

Then, crisis. In 1924, the leader of the United Socialist Party, Giacomo Matteotti, was murdered by Fascist thugs (following a broad hint from Mussolini that they should do so), after he had criticized Fascists from the Chamber of Deputies and suggested that the recent election, marred by violence, be annulled. Mussolini’s government was in trouble, and the pope “decided to do all he could to save” Mussolini and his regime. The Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, published an editorial reminding its Catholic readers to obey the civil authorities, as Romans 13 instructed them to do. Catholic party members were given a special warning not to help bring down the Fascist regime. The pope sent an emissary to Mussolini to convey his support. In early September, the pope instructed university students that Italian Catholics could never cooperate with Socialists, a parliamentary alliance that would be required if Mussolini were to be deposed.

In the end, Fascism did not fall, “not least,” Kertzer concludes, “due to the pope’s constant efforts to undermine any possible alliance to put an end to Fascist rule.”

Flash forward to 1935, when Mussolini shocked the world by invading Ethiopia. In response, the League of Nations imposed economic sanctions on Italy, and American newspapers began to focus attention on similarities between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. President Roosevelt denounced Italian Fascism for the first time. Mussolini turned to the Vatican for help. Secretary of State Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, was at the ready. He helped organize international resistance to the boycott. He also met with several European ambassadors and threatened that there would be no peace until the sanctions were lifted, which the League did on July 7. Cardinal Pacelli had done the first of many favors for Mussolini. Throughout Mussolini’s time in power, Pacelli was Il Duce’s most powerful and reliable ally in the Vatican. 

By that time, a confidential intermediary between Pope Pius XI and Mussolini, Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, S.J. (1861–1956), had long been attempting to persuade Il Duce of something that many of his fellow Jesuits and Catholic intellectuals believed: that the greatest enemy of the state (and the church) was “the worldwide Jewish-Masonic plutocracy.” This had not been a part of Mussolini’s ideology. In an interview held with the widely read German Jewish journalist Emil Ludwig, he declared that he saw no racial or Jewish problem in Italy. That would change.

In a book replete with intriguing and unsavory characters, Tacchi Venturi is surely the most conniving—and among the most influential. A “powerbroker extraordinaire,” as Kertzer calls him, he hurried from one ministerial office to the other.¹ The Jesuit was discreet, but his bond with Mussolini did not go unobserved. Romans dubbed him “Mussolini’s confessor.” He had taken upon himself the task of alerting Mussolini to the threat posed by Western Jews as well as those in Central and Eastern Europe. This was not church doctrine. While Pius XI had—at least at one time—believed that the “hordes” of Jews in Eastern Europe posed a threat to the health of Christian society, he never thought Italy’s tiny Jewish community (one-tenth of 1 percent of the Italian population) was in any way an enemy of the state or the church. But Tacchi Venturi made no such distinction between Eastern and Western Jews. He believed the Jews sought revolution, embraced Bolshevism, and wished to destroy current society and dominate the world by themselves, “as their Talmud prescribes.” Mussolini was, the Jesuit tried to persuade him, the victim of a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy. The League of Nations, under the domination of “the Jews and Masons,” was aiming to end Fascism and the Mussolini regime. Their goal? To install a Judeo-Bolshevik “empire in Italy.”

Under pressure from the British and French, and feeling himself friendless, Mussolini was quickly seduced by this view, and he eventually saw to the passage of Italy’s 1938 racial laws. He justified them in part with the observation that the new anti-Jewish laws would be no harsher than those that the popes themselves had for centuries imposed on the Jews in the Papal States. He surely even viewed them as more liberal, for as the text of the agreement worked out secretly between Tacchi Venturi and Mussolini put it—an agreement made in the pope’s name just before the announcement of the racial laws—some of the more odious anti-Semitic restrictions would not be put back in place:

As for the Jews, the distinctive caps—of whatever color—will not be brought back, nor the ghettoes, much less will their belongings be confiscated. The Jews, in a word, can be sure that they will not be subject to treatment worse than that which was accorded them for centuries and centuries by the popes who hosted them in the Eternal City and in the lands of their temporal domain.

For Tacchi Venturi and the Jesuits who had composed anti-Semitic articles for decades in the Vatican-vetted Civiltà Cattolica, the racial laws represented the realization of all their religio-political fantasies. The Jews would at last be subject to restrictions aimed at protecting Christian society from their noxious influence. For its part, the Holy See agreed not to criticize the anti-Semitic laws. Given the history of the papacy’s merciless treatment of the Jews in Rome, it was hardly in a position to do so, even if it wished to.

Tacchi Venturi was not the only Jesuit on whom Mussolini knew he could rely or who was overjoyed at the passage of the racial laws. Elected in 1915 to his post as general superior of the order, Wodzimierz Ledóchowski (1866–1942) was the Polish priest who would hold that powerful position for over a quarter century. Ledóchowski did nothing to challenge and much to bolster the belief of both leaders in the existence of a worldwide conspiracy of Jews aimed at undermining healthy Christian societies and bolshevizing the West. He was quite open in his enthusiasm for Mussolini’s Fascist regime, so much so that he effectively neutralized much ecclesiastical and all Jesuit criticism of the regime. In 1936, for example, an article critical of Fascism was published in the Jesuit journal America. Through his ambassador, Mussolini made it known he was displeased. Ledóchowski, as superior general of the Jesuit order, immediately fired the journal’s anti-Fascist editor and replaced him with a new one, who was enthusiastic for the Fascist cause. Ledóchowski observed to the Italian ambassador to the Holy See that attacks on Musssolini for waging war in Ethiopa were “simply a pretext from which international Judaism is profiting in order to advance its attack on Western civilization.”

The view at the top of the Vatican, however, was changing. In 1936, Pope Pius XI, at the urging of the German bishops, prepared an encyclical urging the Nazi government to respect the terms of its 1933 Concordat with the church. Secretary of State Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, was reluctant to antagonize Hitler and advised the pontiff against issuing his criticism in the form of an encyclical. Instead, Pacelli suggested, the pope should simply send Hitler a letter to be shared only with the German bishops. Pius XI rebuffed Pacelli, and in March 1937, bishops and priests throughout Germany read from their pulpits the papal encyclical “With Burning Anxiety,” a critique of Nazi anti-Catholicism. At the same time, the Holy Office had been working on a separate document, recording a list of fundamental principles of Nazism that the church deemed to be in grave error. Among these principles were passages clearly taken from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Throughout the drafting project, Ledóchowski did all he could to prevent the pope from denouncing Hitler. He urged the pope to “avoid going into questions that are very difficult and subtle.” In a handwritten letter in 1936, Ledóchowski urged the pope to issue a worldwide warning about the “terrible danger that grows more menacing each day.” The danger came from Moscow’s atheistic Communist propaganda—all the product of Jews, he said—while “the great world press, it too under Jewish control, barely speaks of it.” He advised: “An encyclical on this argument [would] lead not only the Catholics but others as well to a more energetic and better organized resistance.”

Sharing Ledóchowski’s belief that Communism posed the graver danger, Pius XI agreed to have a special encyclical prepared and, over the following months, frequently sent him drafts for his comments and suggestions. Unhappy that they said nothing about the Jews, Ledóchowski kept pushing the pope to add language linking Jews to the Communist danger. 

“It seems necessary to us in such an encyclical,” Ledóchowski advised, in reaction to one such draft:

at least to make an allusion to the Jewish influence, being certain that not only were the intellectual authors of Communism all Jews, but also that the communist movement in Russia was staged by Jews. And now, too, although not always openly in every region, if you look more deeply into it, it is the Jews who are the primary champions and promoters of Communist propaganda.

Over the course of his pontificate, Pius XI grew more suspicious of Hitler’s racism, which he took to be incompatible with the Catholic doctrine of creation. He was appalled when Mussolini invited Hitler to visit Italy. Indeed, Pius XI was so upset with the prospect of Hitler’s disgracing his beloved nation that he choked up in the company of aides and left the city for the papal retreat at Castel Gandolfo. After Hitler left, Pius complained that the colossal tribute to Hitler was just the latest sign of Italy’s servility to Germany.

Pius had good reason to rue. In the diocese of Orte, for example, the Franciscans covered their friary with Nazi flags and decorated their bell tower with swastikas. As a train carrying the two Fascist leaders passed, they chanted: “Viva Mussolini! Viva Hitler!” It is not impossible that Hitler’s visit was related to the timing of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign, announced shortly thereafter. “Mussolini,” Kertzer concludes, “was eager to impress the Nazi leadership and undoubtedly thought that nothing would please it more than taking aim at Italy’s Jews.”

Soon Pius XI would commission the admirable American Jesuit, Father John Lafarge, who had written a book against American racial injustice, to draft a secret encyclical on racism and anti-Semitism. Ledóchowski was outraged. “The pope is mad,” Ledóchowski thundered. The Jesuit superior general required that Lafarge be accompanied by two colleagues of his choosing as he drafted the encyclical. When the three Jesuits delivered the text to their superior Ledóchowski, they assumed the Jesuit general would send it directly on to the pope. But for seven months, Ledóchowski kept the draft encyclical far from the Throne of Peter. Pius XI died in 1939 before the so-called secret encyclical against racism could be published.

When Pacelli was elected Pius XI’s successor, Kertzer reports, “Mussolini and the other Fascist leaders felt as if they had woken up to find an irritating sore that had long plagued them was miraculously gone.” Within 48 hours of his election, Pius XII summoned the German ambassador, Diego von Bergen, and said he was eager to assure the Nazi government that he sought a new era of understanding. After telling Bergen how close he felt to the German people as a result of his many years in Munich and Berlin, the new Pope came to his main point. He understood, he said, that different countries adopted different forms of government. Amazingly, he concluded that “it was not the pope’s role to judge what system other countries chose.” While much attention has been paid to Pius XII’s relations with the genocidal Nazi regime, until now very little has been written on the same man’s earlier role in quelling criticism of the Nazi and Fascist regimes and in preserving the Vatican’s good relations with Mussolini. Indeed, there is a serious movement within the Catholic Church to make Pius XII a saint. Will the new material Kertzer has uncovered and expertly analyzed make it into his canonization dossier? Not very likely. More likely, Pacelli’s apologists, ever alert to protect Pius XII no matter what the evidence suggests, will (if recent history is any guide) accuse Kertzer of all manner of scholarly dereliction.

On the other hand, intellectually honest historians who have the requisite philological and historical expertise will credit Kertzer with a remarkable achievement in bringing to light, through researches wide in scope and profound in depth, a previously hidden history. And Roman Catholics eager to purge their church of all vestiges of anti-Semitism will welcome his exposé of this unhappy and largely unfaced history. Perhaps Francis I—pope, Jesuit, and philo-Semite—will finally enable historians to uncover this history in all its fullness.

Footnotes

1 One of the strangest chapters in Tacchi Venturi’s curious life was a mysterious attempt to murder him by a young man who got into his apartment and stabbed the Jesuit priest with a paper knife. Tacchi Venturi did everything he could to convince the police that he had been the target of an international assassination attempt. Based on oddities in the story and the physical evidence, the police disbelieved him.  In fact, the reasons for attacking him were personal and not political.  As it turned out, the attempt on his life had been made by a young man with whom, at least according to a police informant, the Jesuit priest may have had illicit relations.  As the Fascist police were not anxious to look into the personal life of the Jesuit who was so close to both Mussolini and Pius XI, or look into his possible relations with boys or young men, they were content to bring the investigation to a close.  The attacker was never found.

About the Author

Kevin J. Madigan is Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School and the author, with Jon D. Levenson, of Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (Yale University Press, 2008).

Robert Ventresca points to the complexities surrounding Pius

I have referred to Professor Robert Ventresca of University of Western Ontario in a previous post.  His work on Pius XII is balanced, critical and highly nuanced.  This interview came from Charles Lewis of the Canadian National Post.  Ventresca makes several highly significant points about context, points that have been argued on this blog since its inception.  I commend the interview.

Taking another look at Pope Pius XII's 

actions during the Holocaust

Charles Lewis, July 6, 2012

Pope Pius XII reigned between 1939 to 1958, a period of catastrophic events. But history seems mainly concerned about his behaviour around the Holocaust. Pius has been accused of being a German sympathizer or at best failing to do his moral duty to help save the Jews of Europe by keeping silent. For others he was a saint who used his skill as a diplomat to save thousands of Jews from Nazi terror. But this week in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, the world’s most foremost Holocaust museum, softened its criticism of the wartime pope, allowing that despite faults he did help save Jewish lives. The changes in an exhibit on the pope seem subtle, but given the divisions between Roman Catholics and Jews over Pius’ actions, even small changes are considered important. For example, Yad Vashem now acknowledges the 1942 Christmas radio message in which Pius speaks of “the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only because of their nationality or ethnic origin, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline because of their ethnicity.” The National Post’s Charles Lewis spoke to Robert Ventresca, a professor of history at King’s University College at University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., who is completing a biography of Pius XII called Soldier of Christ.

NP: What does the Yad Vashem decision signify?

RV: This rewording constitutes a minor diplomatic victory for the Vatican and the defenders of Pius XII insofar as it seems to correct what was considered to be the decidedly one-sided and inaccurate original description. I think that it’s unfortunate that this decision has sparked the predictable range of polarized opinion — such as saying the exhibit now vindicates Pius. I do think the new wording is remarkably balanced and nuanced not just about Pius but of the Church in general. It conveys clearly there is a range of opinion on this subject.

NP: When Pius died in 1958, he was widely praised by Jewish leaders, including Golda Meir, later Israeli prime minister. Then came Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Deputy, which vilifies Pius and started the decline in his reputation. Did anyone question his role before?

RV: There was a clear and consistent criticism of his policies, and especially of his diplomatic style and choices, beginning as early as 1939 and continuing through the war years and beyond. It’s important to stress that some of the strongest and most consistent criticism came from within the Catholic world. The lines of the debate have remained fairly constant over the years but intensified after The Deputy. There was the feeling that Pius as the Vicar of Christ was expected to raise his voice in protest. Even after the war, there were Catholics who wanted him to say something explicitly about what had happened to the Jews. The matter always comes back to the nagging doubts about what felt to many like excessive papal caution in the face of unspeakable atrocities.

NP: Was the Jewish leaders’ praise misguided?

RV: It was not so much misguided, as only partly informed, especially considering that when he died in 1958 the historical understanding about the Holocaust was in its early stages. It’s a matter of record that in the months after the war Jewish delegations went to Rome to thank the pope for what the Church had done on their behalf. But as we learned more about the Holocaust, it allowed us to approach the story of rescue with a greater degree of differentiation among the various layers of the Church. In effect, the pope’s indirect role in these efforts has receded into the background, while the courageous efforts of the Catholic rescuers on the ground have moved to the forefront.

NP: For most people Pius is either a saint or the worst sinner. What’s wrong with that analysis?

RV: The problem arises from the tendency to think of Pius XII the way he was presented in The Deputy — as “less a person than an institution.” Thinking of Pius XII that way works only if your intention is to render the man a myth, which can never correspond to the more complex reality of a man who struggled, often unsuccessfully, to reconcile his very human attributes and foibles with the demands of leading a global community whose self-ascribed nature and mission were not of this world. When we approach Pius XII as a person, we find a man of considerable talent, intelligence and imagination, who nonetheless often could not free himself from the norms and conventions of his upbringing and clerical training to grasp fully how the times in which he was living required an extraordinary courage and originality.

NP: So how do you see him after all your research?

RV: There are things about him that are so admirable, but other things at the end of the day that leave me ambivalent. There was an intelligence, an unmistakable spirituality, a keen mind at work. At the same time, he could be very narrow-minded and unyielding. [In terms of the Holocaust during and after] he could be excessively diplomatic rather than evangelical in his criticism. After the war he didn’t appear to want to come to terms with what happened and did not want broach the important question of the role of historical Christian anti-Semitism in leading to the Holocaust.

NP: Was he an anti-Semite?

RV: Much of what we say about Pius and the Jews has to be inferred. There is nothing I recall seeing in the way of a letter or an encyclical or speech that tells us much about what he thought about Jews and Judaism. He was a man of his times. He would have had an appreciation of the Jewish roots of Christianity and a great love of the biblical heritage of Judaism. But there would have been a certain measure of ambivalence, especially of Jews in the social and economic life of European societies. I don’t think he had any special appreciation of sense of duty toward contemporary Jews or Judaism. But he was not indifferent to Jewish suffering. He would have seen the suffering Jews as akin to the suffering of many others who were suffering as a result of destructive modern ideologies, including communism.

NP: What did he think of Nazis?

RV: I think he saw Nazism as a kind of heresy. He saw the nationalism and the racial theories incompatible with Christian teaching.

NP: Why couldn’t he have said just once directly the actions against the Jews were wrong and no Catholic should be a party to them?

RV: That’s the nagging question. There was always this vague allusion to people who were targeted for no reason other than their ethnicity. After the war, for instance, he spoke directly about the persecuted clergy of Poland and the sad fate of German youth, but there is no explicit mention of what happened to the Jews. There it is. When we come back to the question of his relations to Jews, there remains many nagging questions. One of the problems I have with the certain defenders is that they don’t want to deal with the uncomfortable questions.

NP: But did he save Jews?

RV: There are some exaggerated claims made by certain defenders that Pius XII helped to rescued tens if not hundreds of thousands of European Jews, albeit indirectly through the work of papal institutions or other Catholic organizations and religious orders. These claims are not tenable in my view, nor especially instructive, since they would credit the pope with efforts that took place often without his specific knowledge, approval or encouragement This is not to say that his general policy, as well as the work of certain Vatican-related institutions in Rome itself with the Pope’s approval, did not help to save lives. Clearly, Pius XII knew of and approved of initiatives by his representatives or other Catholic individuals and institutions in Italy and parts of Europe to rescue Jews and other civilians. Near the war’s end, the Vatican itself boasted of having helped to save at least 6,000 Jews in Rome alone during the Nazi occupation. Some scholars put that number at closer to 4,000.

Then there is the case of high-level papal intervention with leaders in Hungary and Slovakia during the war to prevent the deportation en masse of tens of thousands of Jews. In the end, the Pope’s intervention was only partly successful, but undoubtedly his direct intervention helped to save lives, though it is difficult to say with great precision just how many.

From Stand-Off to Confrontation: Pope Pius XII and Mussolini, 1938-1943

I posted one of Schnitker's earlier articles in August. This article is a very good summary of the situation that confronted the Church in Italy during the 1930s. The title might be a bit misleading, unless it this is the beginning of a series since it is more related to Pius XI than his successor. Schnitker's grasp of the "big picture" is clear and coherent. I look forward to reading more of his series.



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The relationship between the Catholic Church in Italy and the country’s Fascist regime began seriously to unravel in the year 1938. Until then, two important considerations had mitigated the short-comings of Mussolini in the eyes of the Church: the signing of the Lateran Treaty and the Concordat. The first had ended years of strife between the Church and the country that had been the host of the Throne of St. Peter since the first century; the second had created Italy in the Church’s image, at least to some extent.

As noticed previously, since the Concordat, Catholicism had become Italy’s state religion, the Church supported financially by the state. All schools, and not just Catholic ones, taught Christianity from the Church’s perspective, and marriage had become reserved for the Church. Little wonder many in Italy’s Church believed Mussolini to have been ‘a man of Divine Providence’, for the contrast with Liberal Italy between the 1860s and 1929 could not have been greater.

The Church had paid a price, however, and the size of the payment grew as the years of Fascist rule accumulated. The first, and arguably greatest, price was the abolition of the Catholic political party. This had been a major factor in Italian politics and its sacrifice had been deemed to have been of lesser importance than the Lateran Treaty and Concordat. Of course, one needs to be aware that not all Catholics had welcomed the bargain: Italy’s Church contained Catholics with varying views on the world, with many emphasizing the cause of economic justice set out in the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, a cause which underpinned the Catholic Party in the Italian Parliament.

Others were first and foremost social conservatives, whose main concern was with the authority of the Church and with the prestige of Italy as a nation state. Some of these have been termed ‘clerico-fascists’. To Pope Pius XI, this cleavage presented a serious challenge: he wished for a unified Church and resented the incursion of political arguments within the ranks of the Church. In the Pontiff’s view, these squabbles detracted from what truly mattered, the Church’s task of spreading the Gospel. This task had been impeded by the rise of Liberal, Nationalist Italy, and the removal of that obstacle took precedence in Pope Pius XII’s eyes.

This did not mean that he embraced Fascism in the way that some of the clerico-fascists in the Church did, far from it. The Holy Father publicly described the Fascist oath as being incompatible with Catholic teaching, and this should have been a warning for the bishops and priests in the country whose patriotism overrode their sense of Catholicism. Pope Pius XII had finely-tuned antennae that picked up the merest whiff of ideologies that attacked the essence of the Gospel. In this series we have already seen that the Pontiff clashed with Mussolini over Catholic Action, the social organization that had remained in being after the abolition of the Catholic Party.

It was a clash that would repeat itself in 1938, as the dictator tried to move closer to the ideological world across the Alps in Germany. The two Fascist regimes had already found each other in Spain, where they supported General Franco’s nationalists. In 1938, two events removed the obstacles to greater co-operation and, finally, an alliance between Berlin and Rome. The first was the removal of Austria from the political map of Europe. To date, Italy had guaranteed the survival of the Alpine republic, where the regime mirrored the preoccupations of Rome. Yet Hitler was determined to incorporate what he saw as fellow Germans into his Reich.

To Mussolini, this was incomprehensible. After all, he had, correctly, described racism and the ideals of race as “a stupid mistake”. This was six years earlier, in 1932. The arrival of German troops on the Italian border made him nervous, for across that border lay southern Tyrol, a wholly German region which Italy had acquired as part of the Versailles Treaty in 1919. A previous German attempt to install a puppet Nazi regime in Vienna had failed precisely because Mussolini had opposed it. Now, however, the tables were turned. The Duce was convinced that Germany’s army could not be stopped by his troops, indeed, was no longer convinced this was desirable.

In the aftermath of the annexation in April 1938, the Catholic Church in Austria and in Italy, as well as the Papacy, all received a serious shock. Vienna’s Cardinal Innitzer and one or two of the Austrian bishops had urged the people to vote in favor of annexation. They believed that it would remove the threat of Marxism, and they believed Hitler would maintain the privileges of the Church as secured in the 1933 Concordat. They were sorely mistaken on the last count. Hitler closed all Catholic schools and silenced Catholic opposition. The final act was an open attack on Cardinal Innitzer’s residence, after the latter had fronted a demonstration against the Nazis.


One month later, Hitler was being fêted by Mussolini and the Fascists as he visited Italy. The shockwaves that emanated throughout the Italian Church could hardly have been more severe. True, there were still some clergy for whom nationalism played a more important role than their Faith, but their numbers were dwindling fast. The oppression of the Church in Germany had already caused Pope Pius XI to ask the man who was to succeed him, Eugenio Pacelli, to write the Encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, in 1937. What had happened in Austria had served only to underline the threat that Nazism posed to the Church and her teachings. It was dawning on many just what the price-tag was for the promise of Fascism to ward off the Church’s enemies: Socialists, Marxists, Liberals and Freemasons. That price-tag was a new enemy, more ruthless than any except for the Russian Bolshevists.


Hitler’s visit to Italy in April 1938 brought that new menace very close to the heart of the Church. Indeed, the German dictator was received by the Italian king in the Quirinal, the former palace of the Popes in Rome. It was followed by a renewed Fascist crackdown on Catholic Action in Italy. Mussolini’s advisors were convinced by now that Catholic Action served as an incubator for a generation of militant Catholics, unreached by Fascist teaching. They were right, for this is exactly what the Pope had in mind when he had prevented Catholic Action from following the Catholic Party into oblivion. A secret service source reported that Catholic Action was a political party in waiting, prepared for when Fascism and monarchy were to topple. He was right. From it grew the Christian Democratic Party, which ruled Italy from 1945 to its demise in the late 1980s.

What caused most in the Church to abandon any remaining regard for the Fascists was Mussolini’s introduction of Anti-Semitic legislation in the autumn of 1938. Italy’s 70,000 Jews were amongst the best integrated in Europe, and had contributed to Italian life in all forms, from cuisine to politics. Amongst the founders of the Fascist party there had been many Jews, and one recalls Mussolini’s remarks on the stupidity of racism. In its early days, Fascism had been markedly free of Anti-Semitism, and the party had exempted the Jews from the rules of the Concordat, to the dismay of the more Anti-Semitic wing of Italy’s Church. All that came to an end with the stroke of the pen of a man desperate to ingratiate himself with Germany’s racist dictator.

Pope Pius XI’s reaction was typical of the man: he offered teaching posts to Jewish professors dismissed from Italian universities, and provided jobs for many other Jews. It convinced Pius that he had been wrong in seeing Mussolini as the man of Divine Providence; instead, he realized that the Italian strongman had been drawn into the vortex of Germany’s neo-pagan rulers. Of course, Mussolini’s own original dislike of the Church and the clergy resurfaced around this time, too. However, there were still those in the Church, true clerico-fascists these, who could bless the Italian army as it entered France in 1940, and some who remained staunchly supportive of the regime until its fall in 1943. Few went as far as the Archbishop of Palermo, who prayed for Divine intervention against possible British and American invaders, but many let their Italian hearts rule their Catholic heads, nonetheless.

Harry Schnitker: Pope Pius XII and Germany

This is an interesting article from the Catholic News Agency on the relationship of Pacelli with Germany.  While it does not reveal anything new, it does present a balanced portrayal of Pacelli that is in accord with what is known from the historical record.  Schnitker's thesis is simple: Pacelli had a great love for Germans and German culture, but no love for German Nazis and Nazism.  There is a difference.  This article is part of a series called Inside the Church during World War II, which while being on the conservative side, are thought provoking and stimulating.  Harry Schnitker has taught at the University of Edinburgh and the Maryvale Institute in Birmingham.  I have made a couple of comments in red.

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 Pope Pius XII and Germany

By Harry Schnitker, Ph.D.


It is frequently said that Eugenio Pacelli had a profound love for Germany. This is rarely an innocent statement: it usually means to imply that he was biased towards the Germans. That Pope Pius XII liked the country is beyond doubt; he had spent many years there, spoke the language very well, and had many close German friends. Whether that also caused him to favor Germany during the war is another matter, though. Let us consider the stance of one of the most influential of his German friends, the Jesuit priest and professor of Church history, Robert Leiber. Between 1924 and 1929, Leiber worked closely with Pacelli when he was the Nuncio, first in Munich and then in Berlin.


In 1930, he moved to Rome and became professor at the Gregorian University. From this post, he maintained his links with Pacelli, now Secretary of State of the Vatican. He was his main researcher and would read all his letters, speeches, radio talks and encyclicals. This fact is important, as we recall the critical attitude of Pius towards Nazism in his first Encyclical, Summi Pontificatus. After the war, Leiber would repeatedly defend those Germans and members of the Church who supported Zionism, in the face of opposition from the Holy Office.


Leiber was also an influential lynch-pin in the final, frantic pre-war attempt to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis and thus end the slide towards war. He was approached by Joseph Müller, a lawyer who had helped Pope Pius XII to define the legal protection left to the German bishops after the Nazi take-over after the concordat. Müller was the spokesperson of an influential group of German military men, who wished to remove Hitler. They wanted the Pope to approach the British to persuade them to declare peace once Hitler was gone, which message was conveyed to London by the British ambassador to the Vatican, Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne.


The first approach was made in September 1939, immediately after the outbreak of war in Poland, and the British reply, that peace would, indeed, follow a coup d’état, was related to the German opposition in February, again through the mediation of Pope Pius XII. As we all know, nothing came of the plans, but it is significant that the Holy Father wished the “voice of the German opposition to be heard”. Leiber and Pius would later repeat their contacts with the German resistance when they supported the 1944 plot against the dictator. Yes, Pope Pius XII loved Germany, but the episode shows that he had little time for the Nazis. In all of this, one of his often maligned German friends, Robert Leiber, was the conduit between Pope and German opposition to Hitler.

The 1939-40 overtures to the Pope are well known, but I have not come across anything in ADSS to support the idea that Pius colluded with the July 1944 conspirators.  Dr Schnitker needs to provide the evidence.  It is not inconsistent with what we know about Pius, but documents need to be cited.

The one shadow hanging over Leiber is his supposed involvement in the so-called ratlines, the escape route for Nazis fleeing Germany when the war was lost. There were, indeed, several priests, including some leading bishops in Austria and France, who were responsible for facilitating the fleeing of criminals from justice. Yet Leiber’s link with the organization is, at best, tenuous. It is true that he corresponded with Bishop Hudal, a leading ‘light’ of the movement, but the nature of this correspondence is unknown. If Leiber did support the exodus of Nazis to South America, it mirrors the role played by Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, in saving Jewish friends from the Holocaust: an act of kindness that went against the grain of their personal convictions.  I have to interrupt here.  Goering was a part of the machinery of the Holocaust.  Claiming he saved "Jewish friends" is simply without historical foundation.  It is known that Goering's brother, Albert, was involved in rescuing Jews.

Pope Pius XII’s own love for Germany had deep roots. As early as 1915, he had been part of a Vatican delegation in Vienna, trying to negotiate a peace treaty to end the First World War. Two years later, in 1917, he became the Nuncio in Munich, the Bavarian capital. Since the German Empire had no diplomatic relations with the Vatican, this post in the largest Catholic state in the Empire was the de facto link between Berlin and Rome. This position became official in 1920, when the Weimar Republic opened official relations with the Church.


Another of Pius’ friends who sheds much light upon his views on Germany is Ludwig Kaas. Few people ever deserved the title of ‘turbulent priest’ as did Kaas. Ordained to the priesthood in the Rhineland city of Trier, he was undoubtedly a brilliant scholar, who held a PhD in theology and one in philosophy. From this theoretical basis, he applied his extensive knowledge of Canon law and Church history to the problems facing the Church in modern Germany. This turned him into one of Catholicism’s most prominent political figures, to the acute discomfort of many in the German hierarchy.


As with so many Germans, the defeat of 1918, and particularly the chaos that enveloped Germany subsequently, appalled Kaas, who now became a politician. He joined the overwhelmingly Catholic Centrum Party and was elected to the first Parliament of the Weimar Republic. Kaas showed his great love for Germany by opposing partition, but at the same time was an advocate for reconciliation with France and the other Allies. In 1920, he became an advisor to Pacelli, when the latter became the Nuncio to Germany. Kaas was to provide the information on Prussia, the largest constituent part of Germany, which Pacelli lacked.


In 1929, Kaas achieved the greatest political goal of his life, when he was instrumental in helping Pacelli to negotiate a concordat between Prussia and the Holy See. It seemed as if the Kulturkampf – the battle between the German Empire and the Church under Bismarck - and its nefarious aftershocks had finally been buried. Yet this triumph was followed closely by his greatest mistake. The Centre Party had always been an uneasy coalition between Catholics enthused by the Church’s social teaching, monarchists, and those espousing an authoritarian regime. Franz von Papen was one of the latter, and fell out with Kaas. In an attempt to unseat von Papen, Kaas reached out to the Nazis and Hitler: it was a fatal mistake.


We all know the results: in spite of losing seats in the Parliament in the elections of 1933, Hitler came to power as the result of a political deal in which Kaas played an important role. The major question is: did Pacelli endorse him? There is some evidence that Pacelli, by now the Secretary of State in the Vatican, was furious with his old friend, who had allowed the Centrum Party to be dissolved. It had robbed the Vatican of its negotiation power during the Concordat discussions, in which Kaas, ironically, played a major role. The so-called Reichskonkordat was eventually signed and gave the Church some protection, but only in theory. Nazi hostility to the Catholic Church was deep-seated and the Concordat proved ineffective. Just after his election in 1939, Pope Pius XII met the German episcopate and told them:


“They [the Nazis] always responded, "sorry, but we cannot act because the concordat is not legally binding yet". But after its ratification, things did not get any better, they got worse. The experiences of the past years are not encouraging”.

As a result, Kaas became a persona non grata amongst Germany’s embattled bishops, and Pope Pius XII seems to have agreed. He maintained his friendship with Kaas, but put him in charge of the excavations of St. Peter’s tomb under the Vatican Hill, his political role finished. Kaas, unlike Leiber, did not share Pope Pius XII’s inherent distrust of the Nazis, and this ensured that his influence came to an end. The Pope would never let friendships come between his vision of the Church and society as enumerated in Summi Pontificatus. The same is also true for his love of Germany: that the Holy Father liked the country is beyond doubt, but he would never allow this to cloud his judgment of the regime that had come to power in 1933.

Kass knew that Pius XI and Pacelli had no time for priests in politics.  He also knew that both men had promised to ban all clerical involvement in politics as part of the price for the Reich Concordat.  None of this was new; it has been part of Pius XI's modus vivendi since he was elected pope in 1922.  The demise of the Zentrum was a tragedy that lay both in the muddle of the internal life of the party and the abandonment of the party by the bishops of Germany and the Vatican.  I think Schnitker's analysis is rather too romantic.

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Harry Schnitker, Ph.D. was born in Holland to a secularized family with Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran roots. He moved to Scotland at the age of 18, and attended the University of Wales, College Cardiff (then the Jesuit University of Antwerp, Belgium), and the University of Edinburgh, where he gained a masters. Schnitker completed his Ph.D. in medieval history at the same university. During college and through the study of the Middle Ages, he regained contact with his own Catholic roots.


Since graduating, Schnitker has taught at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, before moving to the Maryvale Ecclesiastical Institute, where he is the senior supervisor of Ecclesiastical History. The institute specializes in long-distance learning, and this allows Schnitker, his wife, son and daughter to live in the countryside of Perthshire, Scotland.

Dr Harry Schnitker

Two Popes, One Holocaust - Kevin Madigan

Kevin J. Madigan is the Winn Professor of ­Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School and the co-author, with Jon D. Levenson, of Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews, published by Yale University Press.Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.





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Madigan's article is a well-balanced commentary on the current state of research into the reactions of Pius XI and Pius XII to the menace of Nazi Germany.  He takes into account the excellent work of Hubert Wolf and Neal Pease.  It is well worth the read.  He is at pains to argue his case based on the evidence and the evidence alone.  Madigan was one of the attendees at the recent conference on Pius XI hosted by Brown University, Rhode Island.

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During the first four years of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI put the beatification proceedings of the controversial World War II–era pope, Pius XII, in abeyance. It was, Benedict announced, a time for “reflection”—not yet the time to grant sainthood. At the end of last year, however, the pope apparently decided that the time for “reflection” should draw to a close. In a Mass commemorating the 50th anniversary of the wartime pontiff’s death, Benedict moved Pius XII closer to canonization by declaring him “blessed” and “venerable.” Born Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII presided over the church from 1939 until his death in 1958. In the mysterious, intramural language of the Vatican, venerabilis is a posthumous recognition that designates one who, in his lifetime, achieved acts of heroic virtue. Yet even if one puts aside the contentious debate over what he did or did not do for Jews being deported during the war, Pius XII’s reign was, in fact, conspicuous for its lack of heroism. Seen in that light, Benedict’s declaration of Pius XII as venerable made one wonder how different, in his relationship with the Jewish community, Benedict XVI would be from his beloved predecessor John Paul II.







As it happens, there are interesting questions involving Pius XII and his immediate predecessor, Pius XI. Born Achille Ratti, the elder Pius served as pope from 1929 to 1939. New research by Father Hubert Wolf, a distinguished church historian at the University of Münster, in the Vatican Secret Archives and those of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has cast new light on the two popes who found themselves having to cope with the rise of fascism in Western Europe and Marxism-Leninism to the East. These materials, released only in 2006 and described in Wolf’s Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, are, as he observes, “informative particularly as they relate to the person of Eugenio Pacelli” both in his diplomatic and early papal offices. They also allow us to wonder whether the right Pope Pius is being considered for canonization.






In terms of his attitudes to Jews and Judaism, Pius XI was, at the start of his service to the Vatican, certainly no saint. In traditional Christian hagiography, saints are often depicted as exceptionally holy from birth—even sometimes in utero. Pius XI does not fit this canonical model. His is a story of moral evolution, from an initial, unreflective acceptance of common but deplorable and dangerous anti-Semitic stereotypes to profound reflection on, and rejection of, his early opinions, and, finally, to decisive, vigorous denunciation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. That is, he began, with respect to his attitudes toward Jews, as a moral mediocrity; but he ended his life, with respect to those self-same views, as a heroic if not prophetic and saintly critic—and one whose heroism is to this day largely unknown by Jews and Catholics alike.






Pius XI served as papal nuncio to Poland from 1919 to 1921, once the Polish state had been re-created after having disappeared from the map of Europe since the late 18th century. Ratti initially tolerated some of the crude anti-Semitic stereotypes of the day. As nuncio, he shrank from direct condemnation of violence against Polish Jews by a Catholic population that largely took its cues from the church. Like many ­others in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, he saw a direct link between the Bolsheviks and the Jews. Later, as pope, he concluded concordats with fascist regimes that had openly anti-Jewish aims: in 1929 with Italy and in 1933 with Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Critics have argued that these concordats legitimized racist, expansionist, despotic governments and, finally, in the case of Germany, a genocidal power. His motivation for these decisions can be found in that, like many associated with the Vatican, Pius XI was convinced that liberalism had led to socialism, which, in the ecclesiastical mind of the day, led ineluctably to “Judaeo-Bolshevism.”






Even after he became pope, Pius XI still clung to many of his anti-Jewish biases while distinguishing Jews in general from Italian Jews, with many of whom he was quite friendly. In 1933, for example, he invited a delegation of distinguished Jewish religious and intellectual leaders to the Vatican to express his disgust with the persecution by Hitler of Germany’s Jews. Pius XI’s anti-Communism did not entirely blind him to the dangers of racism, which he perceived to be contrary to the Catholic faith—that is, a dogmatic heresy—and thus a danger, by definition, to the claims of the Catholic magisterium. It has been plausibly argued that Pius’s position on racism initially may have dissuaded Mussolini from pursuing a racial policy analogous to that engineered by the Nazis (though such laws would eventually be promulgated in Italy during the last years of his papal reign).






Like Ratti, the future Pius XII also made his name in the church as a nuncio—in his case, perhaps fatefully, in Munich from 1917 to 1925 and then in Berlin from 1925 to 1929. Pacelli, in his time in Munich, consistently linked Jews and Communism and, as ­Father Wolf observes, even credited notions of a “Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy.” These, of course, played a poisonous and then deadly role in the propaganda of the German Reich. Exuberance for his Mercedes-Benz is not all Pacelli took back with him from Germany to Rome when he became Pius XI’s cardinal secretary of state in 1930. Among other things, he feared a revived Kulturkampf, the “culture war” in late-19th-century Germany engendered by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s fears about the extent of Catholic political and social influence, which led to severe discrimination against the church and its adherents. This historical lesson led Pacelli to conclude that the church must avoid political involvement at all costs and that it should, if need be, as Father Wolf puts it, “withdraw completely from society into the sacristy.” He was also deeply affected by the prescient but failed appeal for peace in the middle of World War I by the sitting pope, Benedict XV, who urged all parties in May 1917 to “avoid the suicide of civilized Europe.” Benedict’s failure to alter the trajectory of the war persuaded the future Pope Pius XII that direct papal intervention in or speeches on international conflict or tragedy would achieve little or nothing in the way of social and humanitarian consequence.






While Pacelli was still nuncio in Germany, a furious debate unfolded within the Vatican over the Catholic Good Friday liturgy, which contained a particularly ugly anti-Semitic prayer. In 1926, an organization called “Friends of Israel” (Amici Israel) was established. The Amici was a philo-Semitic sodality that included, by 1928, around 20 cardinals, 300 bishops and archbishops, and 3,000 priests among its members. Its main objective was to achieve good relations with Jewish communities and organizations. A second aim was to supply a counter-voice to the openly anti-Semitic stance of the secretary of Pius XI’s Holy Office, Merry del Val (1865-1930), a Spanish cardinal whose beatification process is also ongoing.






Liturgically speaking, the Friends’ aim was ultimately to purge the Catholic rite of elements that were flagrantly anti-Semitic. They had also agreed to avoid all anti-Semitic expressions and practices not only in the liturgy but also in their everyday lives. In context, this meant refusal to refer to Jews as deicides or to Jerusalem as the city of God-killers. They also explicitly rejected the vicious falsehood generated by, above all, Christian clerics: the blood-libel myth—that Jews yearly abducted and killed Christian children for religious purposes. (Though born in the Middle Ages, the blood libel was still widely credited in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.) In addition, the Friends avoided the term “conversion,” as it was offensive to Jews. All this ­occurred in the context of a European Catholic liturgical life in which sermons were regularly embroidered with anti-Semitic vituperation.






In 1928 the Amici issued a pamphlet entitled Pax Super Israel (Peace Upon Israel). The pamphlet provoked a fierce debate within the Roman curia that revealed a wide spectrum of attitudes toward the Jews, ranging from what Father Wolf calls “hard-core” anti-Semitism to thoroughgoing philo-Semitism. At the time, and all the way until the liturgical reforms enacted by the Second Vatican Council, the eighth prayer of the Good Friday liturgy included a plea for the “perfidious Jews.” Members of the Friends of Israel understood that talk of “perfidious Jews” could easily be appropriated by racial ideologues, whose views were gaining ascendancy in Europe. That Catholics furnished Jew-baiters with such language was understood to be particularly dangerous, as it supplied them with an anti-Semitism based in liturgy and sanctioned by the authority of the church.






For his part, del Val tried to place Pax Super Israel on the Index of Forbidden Books. He also rejected the Friends’ recommendation that the “perfidious Jews” language be purged from the liturgy, arguing that in Matthew 27:25 the Jews had explicitly accepted responsibility for Christ’s crucifixion and dismissed the Friends’ petition as “nonsensical.” For del Val, this Jewish people were simply stiff-necked as well as cursed.






As Father Wolf acutely observes of del Val’s response, “echoes of a völkisch interpretation are obvious” and would become “even sharper as the opinion proceeded.” Indeed, he argues that some of the arguments advanced by del Val’s colleagues in the Holy Office about “the Jewish peril” could well have been lifted from the writings of racial anti-Semites of the time. As the Nazis would later state, del Val suggested that just as Jews had secretly infiltrated all modern societies, they were now attempting to do the same with the Catholic Church by insinuating themselves into the Friends of Israel. To his credit, Pope Pius XI was so shocked by del Val’s assertion that he summoned him for a dressing-down.






Pius XI’s response to this controversy revealed a still-evolving conscience and less than appropriate alacrity in responding to the potentially lethal consequences of anti-Semitism. He rejected the Friends’ petition, dissolved their organization, and publicly condemned anti-Semitism. He did so in the face of opposition from some of the cardinals of the Holy Office, who objected to the pope’s emphasizing that the Catholic Church had always rejected all forms of anti-Semitism. Their reason is telling. Those cardinals argued against Pius’s declaration that “the church condemns anti-Semitism,” because they wanted to leave room for an anti-Semitism that was “permissible” or even “necessary.” Still, for the first time ever, the magisterium, in the person of Pope Pius XI, had authoritatively repudiated modern anti-Semitism. Granted, the pope rejected the suggested reform of the Good Friday prayer. Yet racial anti-Semitism he presciently rejected with disgust.






Despite the wide-ranging nature of this internal debate, Father Wolf demonstrates that on major issues, Vatican decisions taken during this period were made by just two men: Pacelli and the man who made him secretary of state, Pius XI. Pacelli was the central figure in the deliberations between the Vatican and Germany, discussions that resulted in the 1933 Concordat between the church and the Nazi regime. Pacelli and Pius XI both hoped to preserve the capacity of Catholic churches, schools, and other institutions to function unmolested by Hitler’s henchmen, a desire that eventually proved to be futile. As the Germans began to pass laws designed to isolate Jews economically, socially, and culturally, the Vatican remained silent. This was so even though the Vatican nuncio in Germany issued frequent and faithful reports on the deteriorating situation of the Jews. At the same time, it should be noted that the two men at the top were not always so silent; they were quite vocal when Catholic priests and institutions were harassed. This two-man-show arrangement, too, was to have fateful consequences. When Pacelli became pope, he acted, by and large (especially on the issue of denouncing Hitler and the Final Solution), without seeking the advice of underlings.






As Father Wolf concedes, the Concordat was a pact with the devil. The unsavory covenant was motivated by a desire to protect Catholic, and only Catholic, peoples, practices, and institutions. It was this same mindset that, fatefully, Pacelli took with him to the office of the papacy during the war and the Shoah, at which time he regarded imperiled Jews as, at best, lying outside his universe of moral concern or obligation. He was also convinced that Nazi atrocities ought to be challenged locally by German bishops. This proved a miscalculation. During the war, the nationalism of the German bishops effortlessly overcame their ethical obligations to object to mass murder—except in the case of the “euthanasia” program, which targeted handicapped German Gentiles.






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In the spring of 1933, immediately after Hitler’s successful grab for power, Pius XI asked Pacelli to look into the possibilities of Catholic intervention against anti-Semitic excesses. Pacelli complied and actually stated his reasons for doing so, in words that would come back to haunt him, as follows: “it is in the tradition of the Holy See to fulfill its universal mission of peace and love for all human beings, regardless of their social status or the religion to which they belong.” With these words, Father Wolf observes, Pacelli had acknowledged the principle, which he proceeded in the hour of greatest Jewish agony to ignore, of the responsibility of the Catholic Church as the primary ­European “advocate for and protector of human rights.”






This was a period when persecution of German Jews intensified from boycott to legalized social, economic, educational, and cultural segregation, to Aryanization of businesses, and finally to the horrors of Kristallnacht. At this time, discussions were held in the curia about the possibility of denouncing Nazi atrocities. In the end, these came to naught, with Pacelli declaring, with characteristic “diplomacy,” that it would be “very delicate” to condemn Nazi atrocities.






Yet these very enormities (especially Kristallnacht) began to persuade Pius XI that accommodation with so evil a regime was unacceptable for the Vicar of Christ or for the religious communities over which he presided—and that the general public and ordinary Catholics might interpret supine quietude on the part of the Holy See with respect to Nazi racial doctrine as acceptance or even approval of this ideology. It was only after Kristallnacht drew no general ecclesiastical response in 1937 that Pius XI began to have pangs of conscience about the Holy See’s silence in the face of this escalation of anti-Semitic violence. From that point on he ceased to behave with the moral mediocrity of a typical curial diplomat and started to act more like a Christian saint.






Father Wolf presents us with compelling evidence that in the last two years of his pontificate, Pius XI decided to intervene more decisively against National Socialism’s racial ideology and the persecution of the Jews. Even before Kristallnacht, he issued the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety). Written in the vernacular rather than in Latin, it was delivered on Palm Sunday to large German congregations, and it condemned more than just the many brazen breaches of the Concordat that upset the Vatican. It also criticized Nazi racial ideology and Hitler himself. The Nazis were infuriated and responded in their typical racialist fashion: they absurdly charged that the pope had been critical of Nazi activities because he was half-Jewish.






In 1938, Pius XI attempted to do more than speak; he tried in concrete ways to assist persecuted Jews in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Late that year, he attempted to have diplomatic representatives of the Vatican in the Americas and Australia ask those governments about the possibility of accepting Jewish immigrants. He also had the infamous writings of the Nazi chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Pacelli did not prevent this even though four years earlier he had termed it politically inopportune.






Angered by the course of events in Hitler’s Germany, the suddenly fearless Pius XI charged an American Jesuit, Father John LaFarge, who had criticized American racism publicly, to write an encyclical to condemn all forms of racism, especially anti-Semitism. Intriguingly, he did so without consulting Pacelli. In fact, when summoned to the pope’s private summer residence, the Jesuit priest met with the pope alone. In the meeting, the Jesuit was instructed by Pius XI to “say simply what you would say if you yourself were pope.” Pius XI, who had read LaFarge’s book on America’s treatment of blacks, told the Jesuit that he believed God had sent LaFarge to Rome, providentially, at a moment when Europe needed desperately to hear a message on race.






With two colleagues working outside of Paris, LaFarge quickly produced the document, which he entitled Humani Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race). This came to be known as the “lost” or, more precisely, “hidden” encyclical. On the very day LaFarge submitted it, in December 1938, Pius XI tearily explained to a group of Belgian pilgrims that anti-Semitism was not reconcilable with the Catholic faith. Indeed, he declared it “a repulsive movement with which we Christians can have nothing in common.” Speaking of Jews and Catholics, he concluded, famously, “Spiritually, we are all Semites.”






Soon, Pius XI began to consider placing Hitler’s own Mein Kampf on the Index and to use the occasion to condemn the racial errors of the time. He ordered the Holy Office to proceed with a critical examination. Ultimately, a document was produced, distilling 37 propositions, mostly from Mein Kampf, many of which had to do with the dangerous doctrine of the superiority of the Aryan race and the heretical notion that humanity was divided by race. Jesuits again led the charge, arguing for an open confrontation with Hitler. There was also a conciliatory faction. Pacelli led that group.






Despite the lack of support from his secretary of state, Pius XI planned to use the 10th anniversary of the formal independence of the Vatican city-state to denounce fascism. The now critically ill pope dedicated the final hours of his life to writing this text. But Pius XI died on February 10, 1939, the day before he was scheduled to give the speech. On February 15, Pacelli ordered all printed copies of the speech and plates in the Vatican printing office destroyed; too delicate, again.






Later that year, Pacelli was elected Pope Pius XII. The choice of name is not insignificant. Pacelli clearly intended not only to honor Ratti but also to signal continuity with his predecessor. Yet German fears of renewed diplomatic conflict with the Vatican quickly turned out to be unfounded. Monsignor Domenico Tardini, who served Pacelli as one of the top two men in the secretariat of state, observed, in masterful understatement, that he lacked the “pugnacious spirit” of Pius XI. The Jesuit priest Robert Leiber, one of Pius XII’s closest advisers, came to the conclusion that while “Pius XI was in general not easy to dissuade from taking public positions on burning questions,” Pius XII “was not easy to move toward that end.” When one considers the burning issue of the time, one cannot but ask an agonizing question: would the fate of many of the 6 million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis and their collaborators have been different had Pius XI lived or Pius XII been more like him?






Given the “diplomatic” instincts attested to by friendly contemporaries, it cannot be surprising, as historian Frank Coppa has observed, that Pius XII’s “first priority” upon donning the papal tiara in 1939 was “to conciliate Nazi Germany.” In fact, following his accession to the papacy, relations between the Vatican and Germany became less fraught. One of Pius XII’s first letters was to Hitler, announcing his accession. He addressed it to the “Fuehrer,” a salutation that it is hard to imagine his predecessor using. In the spring of that same year, French diplomats expressed anxiety that in the face of the impending invasion of Poland, the new pope was somehow content to remain silent. To them, his impassivity seemed like indifference. But instead of speaking, he asked Catholics on all sides to begin a “crusade of prayer” for peace, a tactic not likely to deter Hitler from the war he craved. The difference between his attitudes and actions toward Germany when compared with those of Pius XI was pronounced. Later, when war had broken out and persecution had evolved into extermination, no less a figure than the devout Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain told Aryeh Kubovy of the World Jewish Congress that he guessed Pius XI would have issued a statement of the church’s position toward the Jews but was quite sure Pius XII would not. His guess was tragically right.






Pacelli himself supplied evidence of even more profound reluctance to alienate Germany. When Pius XI expressed his intention to terminate relations between the Vatican and the Third Reich, Pacelli boasted that he had persuaded him not to do so. As the war began and wore on, and as news of the mass murder of the Jews regularly reached the Vatican—often supplied by Vatican diplomats and Axis military chaplains who had witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the SS’s “mobile killing units,” or Einsatzgruppen, in Eastern Europe—it would have been possible to excommunicate the National Socialist dictator or those of his associates who were nominally Catholic. Father Wolf has concluded, however, that there is “no trace” in the Vatican archives of any effort to initiate excommunication proceedings against Adolf Hitler. Pronouncing a reich chancellor and head of state anathema was simply out of the question. Hitler remained a member of the Catholic Church until the day he died. “Like the Pope,” Father Wolf ruefully concludes, “even the devil could be Catholic.”






Though Pius XI was, by egregious contrast to his successor, ultimately bold and unshrinking in the face of the Vatican’s fascist and totalitarian conversation partners, including Mussolini and Hitler, there is no sign that the Roman curia has any intention of promoting him to sainthood. Perhaps the reason is that it would weaken Pacelli’s historically wobbly case. Yet when one compares the record of the two popes, the question of who is more deserving of recognition and celebration, if not canonization, may not be all that hard to answer. Unlike Pius XII, Pius XI “understood that the dehumanization of Jews was anti-Christian, destructive and dangerous long before he recognized that it might culminate in genocide,” as Coppa argues. Even when it did culminate in genocide, as Father Wolf notes, “in exchange for a promise of spiritual freedom,” the church under Pius XII was willing “to renounce worldly engagement in politics and public affairs, and literally withdraw” to its liturgical dressing chambers. Pius XII let the demand to serve as supreme shepherd of his flock completely trump “his duty to advocate for all human beings formed in God’s likeness.”






The church has devoted a great deal of effort in recent decades to defending Pius XII against accusations of indifference about or even complicity in the Holocaust. As such, proclaiming his innocence and downplaying the unhappy facts about his reluctance to take on the Nazis has become something of an article of faith for many Catholics. Indeed, the movement to grant him sainthood is seen by many of the faithful as an appropriate response to charges they have come to see as a blanket accusation against their entire church. But rather than focusing on attempts to burnish the tarnished reputation of Pacelli, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate his largely forgotten predecessor, a man who ultimately lived up to the moral responsibilities of his office in ways that his successor namesake did not.