Volume
21, Number 4 (December 2015)
Review
of John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 560 Pp., ISBN: 9780199208562.
The
papacy during the first fifty years of the twentieth century is no easy subject
for a historian to cover, and not merely because one of the popes is the
ever-controversial Pius XII. Between 1914 and the early 1950s, the supreme
leader of the global Roman Catholic Church was forced to contend with two world
wars, genocide, and economic depression. Ideologies bent on achieving total
control over the societies they governed, including Nazism in Germany, fascism
in Italy, and communism in the Soviet Union and China, contributed to vast
political and social upheaval. As John Pollard reminds us on the opening page
of his book on the papacy of this era, the popes “faced challenges far greater
than anything that had arisen since the Reformation of the sixteenth century or
the French Revolution” two centuries later (1). This fact, coupled with the
strict closure of most of the Vatican’s archival materials on the papacy of
Pius XII, means that the scholarship covering the Vatican in this period is
riven with division and debate, particularly during the Second World War.
Pollard wades ably through this historiographical quagmire and uses sources
adroitly for his own analysis. What he produces is a more balanced account of
the three men who sat on the papal throne than much of what has come before.
Pollard
has an imposing pedigree, which one might demand of a scholar willing to tackle
such a contentious subject: he is no amateur in examining modern popes in times
of conflict. He has devoted much of his professional career to the Vatican and
Catholicism in Fascist Italy, and his biography of Benedict XV is one of the
most significant of any language. His introduction includes several crucial
definitions and a brief sketch of the papacy up to Benedict’s election in
September 1914. His conclusion speaks cogently of the legacy of the period as a
whole, which he refers to simply as the age of totalitarianism, and addresses
its greatest legacy: bringing the divisions between Church conservatives and
liberals to the fore, leading to the most radical changes in Church history at
the Second Vatican Council (478).
The
book proceeds in chronological fashion, beginning with the accession of
Benedict XV and ending with the death of Pius XII. Each pope is fully realized
as his own person, though Pollard cannot help but acknowledge the heavy threads
of continuity running through Vatican politics in this era. Though Benedict is
given the shortest space (only two chapters), Pollard minces no words about his
significance: Benedict committed the Church to a peace-making, humanitarian
role in a time of total war, and one hundred years later this remains the
foundation of contemporary papal diplomacy. Whatever else might be said of
Benedict – that his papal “moral neutrality” during the war was at once tenuous
and dubious; his tendency towards paranoia; his unhelpful obstinacy; his
lassitude in developing doctrine and liturgy – this is no small contribution to
the modern papacy.
His
successor was Pius XI, whose temperament was “authoritarian” (128) and who,
refusing to bow to Roman custom, brought his own housekeeper with him into the
papal apartment. Until nine years ago, Pius XI’s reign tended to be
overshadowed by the man who worked as his secretary of state from 1930, and who
himself became pope in 1939; however, the opening of the archives relating to
his papacy in 2006 has allowed scholarship on “Papa Ratti” to grow. The
interwar pope did not have to cope with the challenge of bloodshed in Europe,
but between the advent of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, the worldwide
economic depression, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, continual upheaval
and persecution of the Church in Mexico and China, among other places, Pius XI
also instituted Radio Vatican, beatified nearly five hundred people, and
canonized another thirty-four (189).
Pius
XI continued what Benedict had commenced with a reliance on “concordatory
politics,” signing a series of important treaties in the interwar period with
numerous countries that were aimed at protecting the religious rights of their
Catholic citizens, notably including Italy and Germany. His papacy also heavily
emphasized teaching, which is borne out by the number of public pronouncements
and encyclicals he issued on subjects from Christian marriage (Casti
connubii, 1930) to Soviet communism (Divini redemptoris, 1937) to
the plight of the Catholic Church in Germany (Mit brennender Sorge, also
1937). His most significant challenges lay in dealing with the two totalitarian
ideologies that entrenched themselves in the Soviet Union and Germany, and
Pollard understandably delivers some of his sharpest criticism – of both Pius
XI as well as the scholarship about him – here. He points to the obvious missed
opportunity of the Vatican to have representation at the 1938 Evian Conference,
when countries from across the globe met to discuss the plight of Europe’s Jews
fleeing Nazism, but does not speculate about why. He acknowledges the
collaborative nature of many of Pius’s encyclicals, especially the later ones,
though fails to emphasize just how much of the German-language encyclical, Mit
brennender Sorge, was the work of Pacelli and a handful of German bishops.
(See Emma Fattorini’s excellent discussion of this encyclical in Hitler,
Mussolini and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech that was Never Made
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Ultimately, Pollard insists, despite occasional
vacillation, Pius left the papacy stronger than it had been when he began as
pope, though on a basic level he remains a mysterious, somewhat elusive figure
with regard to certain key issues, particularly the “modernist crisis”
(289-290).
Like
all scholars dealing with Pius XII, Pollard has to admit that the lack of
access to key documents about his pontificate is problematic: until these
archives are opened (and when this will happen has been the big question for
many years now), scholars will have a difficult time contributing anything
genuinely new to the debates. Pollard, though, does the historiography a clear
service by summarizing the material that is available for study and by plumbing
the controversies about Pius XII to provide fresh insights, especially with
regards to his continuity with Pius XI. He underscores the stability within the
Vatican hierarchy during the second Pius’s reign, largely due to the
connections between the two Piuses – Pius XII had worked under his predecessor
as secretary of state from 1930 to 1939. In fact, one argument about the papacy
that Pollard makes unassailably is the importance and clout of the man in the
position of secretary of state up to the outbreak of World War II. (The power
of this position disintegrated somewhat when Pacelli became pope in 1939,
though Pollard does not clarify specifically if this was due to the way that
Pacelli ruled as pope or the personalities he chose to serve under him in that
dicastery – or a combination of both.)
Pollard
does not sidestep the controversy surrounding Pius XII. He states explicitly
that Pius never mentioned specifically the plight of the Jews in Nazi-dominated
Europe, despite the Allies urging him to do so. This was not due to lack of
awareness; he estimates that the Vatican knew reasonably well about the mass
murder of Jews in Eastern Europe by early 1942 at the latest (332). Rather,
Pius believed he was doing as much as he could within the limits imposed on him
by external circumstances. Above all – and here is where continuity shows
strongly – he was committed to the policies of his predecessors, especially
Benedict XV: in time of war, the Vatican had to remain neutral so as to avoid
alienating segments of the Catholic population spread across the zone of
conflict. To condemn the atrocities perpetrated by one side or another risked
this alienation – and condemning Germany’s atrocities in particular risked
isolating the sizable Catholic minority in Germany, a country dear to Pacelli’s
heart (he had served as nuncio there from 1920 until he became secretary of
state).
Pollard
demonstrates historical sympathy in detailing the conundrum Pius XII found
himself in vis-Ã -vis wartime atrocities, including the genocide of Europe’s
Jews. Such a show of sympathy is not tantamount to an absolution, though his
refusal to be more strident in his criticism will not please those ever ready
to condemn the Vatican for its muteness in the face of the Holocaust. Pollard’s
heaviest criticism for Pius XII – his “ugliest silence” (346-347), as he calls
it – falls on the pope’s lack of reaction to the murderous campaigns of the
fascist Ustasha regime in Croatia. Although the Vatican had not formally
recognized an independent Croatian state when it was instituted in 1941, it
declined to protest the forced conversions and ethnic cleansing that the Croats
unleashed, apart from any German initiative in the area, even though Church
officials had a full awareness of what was unfolding.
Moreover,
of the three popes that Pollard assesses, Pius XII is not presented as the most
unsympathetic towards Jews; Pius XI is. “It is impossible,” he cautions, “to
understand the papacy’s relationship with the Jews of Europe in this period
except within the broader context of Christian antisemitism” (472), and here he
excuses none of the popes. But he singles out Pius XI as the most ambivalent
towards Jews. He was continuously conflicted, showing sympathy for their plight
in some circumstances but missing several opportunities to endorse a clear
renunciation of antisemitism, whether found in Church liturgy or in Nazi
ideology. It would take another two decades, and two more popes, before the
Church finally took responsibility for its role in perpetuating antisemitism in
the issuance of Nostra Aetate. Pollard categorizes this move as the
papacy’s “final [divestment] of the last trace of antisemitism” (474), though
one might disagree about how final it really was.
Pollard’s contribution to the subject of the popes during the
age of totalitarianism has not definitively resolved any outstanding
controversies and debates, but he has provided a judicious, nuanced, and
well-informed examination of Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII. Expertly using
a truly impressive array of materials in multiple languages, including the most
recent scholarship, he grounds these popes in the contexts of both great
political crisis and upheaval in Europe as well as the Church’s institutional
development and growth as a political and diplomatic player. Without drawing
attention away from the experience of the victims of Nazism, he quietly reminds
the reader in his conclusion of the impact of communism across the world, from
Asia to Europe to North America (Mexico), on Catholics and the Church: “This
period of the persecution and martyrdom of Catholics must be ranked alongside
those under the Roman emperors, during the Reformation and wars of religion of
the sixteenth century, and in the years following the French Revolution of
1789” (460). All three popes under scrutiny made mistakes, some grievous, but
their terror of widespread communist victory, which was consistently at the
forefront of their thinking and behavior, perhaps makes their actions more
human, and more understandable. It is to Pollard’s credit, as historian and
writer, that he has made this perspective available to his readers.
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