Still all quiet on the Pius front 2013-2016

For all sorts of reasons I have not been able to post for the last couple of months.  My school is preparing for its Sesquicentenary next year and I am involved on various committees and projects that seem to take up more and more time.  Many have the moments been when I have thought I should sit down and write something, but more often than not, it has been a case of "tomorrow", the end of today has left me yearning only for the sofa!  

Now, back to it!

I have commented before that under Pope Francis there has been a serious "slow down" on talk and action on the possible canonisation of Pius XII.  It has not changed in the three years since I last wrote on this topic.  It is almost as though the academic world has adopted a "wait and see" approach, an approach I can well understand.  

Over the last ten or so years, after the high-water mark of the revisionist and apologists attempt to re-configure historical debate on Pius along non-historical lines, mainstream academia has, it would appear, reached the point where there is nothing more to be said at present.  Research continues, but, as in my case, I suspect it is moving into other related areas.  My own study has taken more and more into ADSS, and the "usual" work of historians, namely the little discoveries and nuances that help add a highlight on this point or a shadow on that point.  There have several major works published by serious historians - Coppa, Fattorini, Kertzer, Kornberg, Madigan, Ventresca, Wolf, to name some - that have, in their own field, added to our collective knowledge.

The "elephant in the room" has been and remains, the closed archives of Pope Pius XII contained in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano.  We have waited for years, and, I suspect, we will continue to wait.  2003, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2013 ... Whatever the reasons for the delays, most of us believe that there will be no major change in the general direction research has headed over the last half century.  This direction was confirmed when the archives for Pope Pius XI were opened between 2003 and 2006.

I will continue to post my reading of ADSS if only because I remain convinced that the published documents still contain many nuggets that shed light on the reasoning behind the many different layers of the Vatican diplomatic efforts firstly, to prevent a war, and secondly to contain it once it started.

Over and over again, the documents reveal patterns of diplomacy, negotiation and responsibility, that did not change over the course of the war years.  If I have reached only one conclusion from the ADSS, it is that Pope Pius XII while not knowing everything, was arguably the best informed person in Europe.  However, that knowledge grew incrementally, and in a non-consistent manner - he became aware of events from across Europe as they arrived in Rome, and often not in chronological order and often seemingly unrelated.  It was the responsibility of the Secretariat of State to attempt to create meaning and patterns out of the material that arrived, and that could often be devilishly difficult to do.  Only in one area did the Pope have as clear and consistent a picture of German intention as was possible.  That area was the evolution of German policy towards the Jews.

From a research point of view I have to thank so many people who have posted and maintained entire libraries of online resources.  My study of ADSS would simply not be possible without access to the mostly gratis resources that have been made available.  For that I am most grateful and offer my deepest thanks.

Ventresca's book continues to receive high praise.

Australia's CathNews recently published a compendium of review of Robert Ventresca's Soldier of Christ.  

Soldier of Christ: the life of Pope Pius XII by Robert Ventresca (Harvard University Press)

Pope Pius XII (1939-58) has become the most controversial pope of the twentieth century. His biography is the battleground for the so-called ‘Pius War’, waged largely over his decision to remain silent in the face of the Holocaust as reliable reports of Nazi atrocities against Jews reached the Vatican.

Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), which cast the Pope as cold and calculating in deciding not to protest publicly against the plight of the Jews, unleashed a conflict of interpretations in 1963.

John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope: the secret history of Pius XII stoked the fires of controversy again in 1999.

Robert Ventresca complains that the ‘war of words has done more harm than good to our understanding’ of Pius XII. Many previous studies ‘offered a distorted or highly selective picture’.

Ventresca’s biography is largely sympathetic, as the title suggests. It alludes to the pope’s first encyclical Summi Pontificatus, issued almost two months after the beginning of the Second World War. Pius hoped that Catholics as ‘Soldiers of Christ’ would feel inspired ‘to a more determined resistance by the sight of the ever-increasing host of Christ’s enemies’.

Ventresca ends at the same point as Cornwell by considering the cause for the pope’s canonisation. Unlike Cornwell, he is favourably inclined. Benedict XVI’s decree of 2009 that acknowledged the ‘heroic virtues’ of his predecessor simply means, as Ventresca explains, that Pius XII ‘lived as a virtuous man striving in extraordinary ways to be like God’.

Appreciation for the Pope accumulates in Ventresca’s survey of the post-war pontificate. Pius XII was a ‘modern pope’. Is this epithet a challenge to Peter Hebblethwaite, whose biography of Paul VI acclaimed him ‘the first modern pope’?

Pius XII favoured a global Church that looked beyond Europe. He counts as ‘the real spiritual father’ of Vatican II.

In light of the encyclical Humani Generis (1950), a critique of ‘some false opinions threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine’, Ventresca rejects the caricature of Pius XII as ‘the architect of an arch-conservative, reactionary, and monolithic church culture’.

Far from ‘retreating into a reactionary obscurantism’, the Pope aimed at a reconciliation of Catholic faith and modern science. Nevertheless, ‘he allowed a reactionary, inquisitorial culture to fester – to the personal and professional detriment of some of the Church’s most intelligent, creative, and faithful servants’. 

Most readers will gravitate to the story that takes the biography of Eugenio Pacelli/Pius XII to the end of the Second World War and its aftermath.

Ventresca’s focus on the diplomatic side of his subject’s life is much stronger than his recognition of the pastoral and spiritual dimensions of the post-war pontificate. As Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli genuinely believed in the utility of the concordat expeditiously concluded with Hitler’s regime in 1933. But Ventresca concedes that his protest in 1936 against Nazi violations of the Church’s rights assured in the Reichskonkordat ‘shows the futility of a diplomatic protest without teeth’.

During the war, Pius XII pursued a policy of neutrality, or impartiality, as he called it. Such a policy necessitated a ‘supreme rhetorical restraint, which Ventresca equates with ‘prudence’.

By responding to aggression with balanced and complex diplomatic language the pope sought to avoid provoking greater harm. His impartiality often exasperated Germany’s enemies, including Polish churchmen who wanted a clear papal condemnation of the invasion of their country. ‘But,’ Ventresca insists, ‘the Pope was not silent during the war.’

Such a claim competes with Ventresca’s critical comments…

Full review in The Tablet: 

Review on Catholic World Report: 

Review on Times Higher Education Report:  

Review on The Lay Catholic.com: 

Review on NCR On Line: 

Buy this book: 

All very quiet on the Pius front

Today is the feast of St Eugenio, name day of Pius XII.

Work commitments have made it difficult to keep posting  on the subjects related to Pope Pius XII.  However, given the significance of the day I thought it worth while making a few comments on what appears to have been a lull or even a "cease fire" in what has been about a decade and half of energetic polemic and a growing academic discussion over Eugenio Pacelli. 

Cyberspace has been very quite for about three months.  My google alerts have been getting  fewer and fewer and the content of what has been coming through has been fairly innocuous. I suggest a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, Frank Coppa and Robert Ventresca's biographies of Pius XII have been published and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive.  The scope and scale of historical work done by both authors is impressive for its depth and detail along with balanced interpretation and analysis.  It is hard to argue against scholarship of this calibre.

Secondly, I believe that the arguments of those who have been very vocal in the recent past decrying and demonising those historians who did their job, and did it well, have been comprehensively answered and deconstructed.  To remain a proponent of the over-used and generalised statements "Pius did everything possible to save the Jews of Europe" and "Pope Pius XII saved 860,000 Jews" is to place oneself well and truly outside any form of mainstream discussion.  In effect, these positions have been shown to be effectively bankrupt and without historical basis.

Thirdly, the interest in the subject appears to have "gone off the boil".  The wait for the archives of Pacelli's papacy continues.  However, the energy to explore what is currently available has waned.  And this is a significant "reality check" for those who want clear answers now.  Research into the available material is only in the early stages.  It will take years to explore the archives of the pontificate of Pope Pius XI and his Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli.  Out of this will come new insights and nuances that will help shed light on Pacelli's papacy; but it demands great patience and discipline, something most of the apologists lack.

Fourthly, there is what I describe as the "Francis effect".  The new pope does not appear to have the interest that his two immediate predecessors had in the debates over Pius XII.  I do not believe this indicates disinterest, but rather it is not high on his priority list at present.  This many change, but current indicators seem to suggest that this will not likely be the case.  What may happen is a direction to the archivists to speed up the process, but this is moving into wishful thinking.

Thank you to those who have written to me with questions.  I hope to get answers for you shortly.

Robert Ventresca's "Soldier of Christ"

I finished reading Robert Ventresca's "Soldier of Christ" a few weeks ago and was asked recently to write a review of the book for an academic journal.  I was very happy to do so.  If you have not read the book - do so.  I believe it will be the standard general biography of Pope Pius XII for some time.  Even when the ASV files for Pacelli's papacy are made available Ventresca's book will still be the most helpful English-language guide.  Coupled with Frank Coppa's slimmer, but equally well-written "The Life and Pontificate of Pope Pius XII: Between History and Controversy", historians, students and the general reader, have at their disposal an excellent resource.  

But!  Reader beware.  Ventresca treats his audience as adults and expects them to use their minds to make their own judgements.  

Kertzer reviews Ventresca's new book on Pius XII

Since it's publication several months ago, Soldier of Christ by Robert Ventresca continues to make very positive headlines throughout the world.  Ventresca may have finally succeeded where many others have come to grief, in writing the a comprehensive and balanced biography of Pius XII using the available material.  In any case Ventresca's book, along with Frank Coppa's slighter volume, look like being the best biographies of Pius for some time to come.  It remains to be seen if another book written after the archives are opened will cause significant change.

Keeping in mind that the archival material for Pius XII's pontificate are still under embargo, until at least later this year according to earlier comments from the ASV, Ventresca's work may have some areas that will need expansion with the help from primary material that could emerge.  However, the review of Ventresca's book that appears in the current online edition of the Jesuit magazine America suggests that this book is balanced, non-polemical, scholarly and built on sound historiography.  The reviewer is David Kertzer of Brown University, Rhode Island, a recognised expert in Vatican-Italian-Jewish history.  

Kertzer's review is positive and offers Ventresca a major plaudit when he says that the author allows the reader to judge for themselves on some of the major issues that have coloured, and which still do, Pacelli's life and papacy.  

I have a copy that I have just started reading and I look forward to the rest of the book.

Pius XII - two new biographies

Readers may be interested in two new biographies of Pius XII.  

The Pope's Jews: the Vatican's secret plan to save the Jews from the Nazis by Thomas Gordon (Thomas Dunne Books) has been available since the beginning of this month.  The review in Publisher's Weekly seems rather tame and non-committal which cannot be said of the review on Kirkus Review.  

Soldier of Christ the Life of Pope Pius XII by Robert Ventresca (Harvard UP)  will be published in January 2013.  The information provided on HUP's website indicates that Ventresca's work places a far greater emphasis on the post-war years arguing that the Cold War and the confrontation with communism gives the definition of Pacelli's papacy.

Of the two books, Ventresca's seems to me to be the more balanced and reliable.

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.

Robert Ventresca on access to the war archives

The Vatican and the Holocaust: waiting for the critical documents.

Robert Ventresca's latest article taken from the National Post (Canada) on current research into Pius XII is both scholarly and timely.

For 40 years now the Vatican consistently has demonstrated initiative in the field of Catholic-Jewish relations. Every Pope since John XXIII has shown foresight in promoting mutual understanding and dialogue between Catholics and Jews. With the publication of the second volume of his book on the life of Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict XVI continues in this tradition by affirming, among other things, that Jewish-Christian relations over the centuries has been marred by “misunderstandings” which have “weighed down our history.”


Chief among these deeply consequential misunderstandings has been the stubborn myth that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. In a stimulating review of the Pope’s new book, Geza Vermes, a distinguished professor of Jewish studies at Oxford, rightly applauds Benedict’s “courage for a Christian leader of his disposition” in conceding that parts of the gospel account of Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ should not to be taken as “historical fact.”

In a similar vein, Benedict XVI could make history if he were to take another courageous move to accelerate the opening of the Vatican’s wartime archives. In doing so, the Pope would help to pave the way for a full and proper historical assessment of the Vatican’s response to the Holocaust.


For all of the strides made since the 1960s in Jewish-Catholic relations, open questions over the Vatican’s role during the Second World War, especially its response to Nazi persecution of Jews, remain an obvious source of misunderstanding — exacerbated unnecessarily by the sluggish pace to fulfill the promise to make access to the wartime archives a priority.


The extent to which the archives issue remains a real sore spot was evident at a recent international gathering in Paris, convened to celebrate 40 years of constructive Jewish-Catholic dialogue, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reiterated its call for the Vatican to work with qualified scholars and institutions to facilitate immediate access to all the unpublished files of the Vatican’s wartime archives.


Particularly troubling for the ADL, and for a dedicated contingent of eager historians around the world, is the absence of a consistent, concrete timetable for open access. At one time, there were widespread expectations that the records would be catalogued and open to researchers by 2011-2012. In 2010, though, Bishop Sergio Pagano, the Prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives, tempered these hopes by pointing out that the “technical preparation” of some 16 million documents from Pius XII’s 19-year long pontificate will not be completed until 2015 at the earliest. Even then, the reigning Pope will have to make a final decision on when to make these records available to researchers.


Patience may well be a virtue but, as the ADL’s Rabbi Eric Greenberg suggested in Paris recently, for Holocaust survivors and their families, the time to act is now.


There is a simple but compelling logic to Rabbi Greenberg’s point that what is at stake here is “truth and historical accuracy.” Greenberg reasons that opening the archives now would have profound symbolic meaning for aging survivors and their families, whatever the documentation were to show.


Vatican officials have long maintained that open access to the documentation from Pius XII’s pontificate, including the war years, is not yet feasible on a technicality. The concerns are eminently reasonable. For instance, it is clear that the task of cataloguing such a vast, complex collection has strained the material limits of existing resources. Those of us who have worked in the Vatican archives know well the breadth, depth and complexity of the collections. We know too how support systems are being strained by the increased demand for access to this unique repository of precious documentation.

Where there is the proverbial will, of course, there is a way.

Successive Popes have proved as much through a series of authoritative moves. The cake of custom broke decisively in 1964 when Paul VI authorized a team of respected Jesuit scholars to edit and publish select portions of the wartime archives, drawn largely from the records of the Vatican’s political and diplomatic offices. The result, of course, is the set of 11 massive volumes of documentation that remains to this day the single most important published source of information about the Vatican’s wartime policies.


The Vatican has no hard and fast rule about access to its archives, and, as always, papal discretion reigns supreme. The general rule has been to leave the archives closed for at least 100 years after a given period or event. Here, too, though the Popes have taken the lead in setting precedent. Consider, in particular, Benedict’s remarkable decision in 2006 to open the archives for the entire pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939). This gave researchers unprecedented access to the Vatican’s most sensitive documents from the troubled decades in between the two world wars. Among the real gems of this collection are the personal notes of Pius XI’s Secretary of State in the 1930s, Eugenio Pacelli – the future Pius XII.

In opening modern papal archives to the scrutiny of historical research, the Popes have demonstrated a serious commitment to deliver on the Church’s promise to confront its past with honesty and scientific rigour. John Paul II once said that the Church “is not afraid of the truth that emerges from history,” adding that it entrusts the study of the past to “patient, honest, scholarly reconstruction.”


Historians are uniquely placed to take up the work of honest reconstruction of the past. As John Paul II put it, “this is the reason why the first step [historical judgment] consists in asking the historians to offer help toward a reconstruction, as precise as possible, of the events, of the customs, of the mentality of the time, in light of the historical context of the epoch.”

Historians stand at the ready to help towards just such a precise reconstruction of the past. But we need the meaningful collaboration of the Vatican archives to permit us to do our work to the best of our ability, in keeping with the conventions of our craft. Hence the powerful logic of these renewed calls for immediate access to the Vatican’s wartime archives.

Selective access to the documents begets a selective reading of history. The image that emerges of Pius XII and the Vatican during the war inevitably is partial, provisional and vulnerable to manipulation by apologist and critic alike. Worst of all, selective access to the archives continues to feed the suspicion of critics who already are prone to see a cover-up behind those imposing Vatican walls.

For the sake of truth and accuracy, and to pay homage to decades of fruitful Catholic-Jewish dialogue, it should be possible to conceive of the means by which serious scholars and institutions can be invited to the table to consider even a targeted study of the wartime archives. This would help to begin to answer some of the most contentious, most relevant questions. It would also be an act of good faith, commensurate with the Church’s stated commitment to furthering Jewish-Catholic understanding and interaction.

It could temper fears of a premature move to have Pius XII made a saint, and would bring the methods of historical scholarship to bear as the Vatican studies this controversial cause. There may very well be ample justification to consider Pius XII a worthy candidate for sainthood. But it would be hazardous for the Holy See to delude itself into thinking that it has at its disposal a definitive historical assessment of this long, pioneering but complex pontificate.

It may be that even with the opening of the rest of the archives we will find ourselves no further along than we are at present. Yet, even if the enigma remains around the controversial wartime Pope, at least the stigma of secrecy stemming from the current state of archival access would be alleviated; maybe even removed entirely.


R. A. Ventresca is a historian at King’s University College at The University of Western Ontario and is currently writing a book on Pope Pius XII.






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