Death by a thousand cuts

A new study of a tainted pontiff

Miles Pattenden

The Pope at War: The secret history of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler

by David I. Kertzer Oxford University Press

$55.95 hb, 658 pp

Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1876–1958), bears the dubious distinction of being the twentieth century’s most discredited Catholic – and also the millennium’s most controversial pontiff. The case against Pius, prosecuted most famously by John Cornwell (‘Hitler’s Pope’), is that he aided and abetted, or at least did nothing to prevent, the Nazi regime’s unprecedented crimes against European Jews. A stiff, diffident Roman patrician, he was simply too steeped in cultural anti-Semitism to see the importance of speaking out against Nazi racial ideology or the genocide it encouraged.

As pope (1939–58), Pius prioritised the institutional Church’s covered up child sexual abuse ‘for the greater good’ is obvious. Pius’s actions, or rather inaction, leave a stain on the Church comparable to those deriving from more recent scandals. What claims to moral leadership can his successors have when they fail even now to condemn his dishonourable example? Many were disgusted when Benedict XVI declared him venerable in 2009, a status which put him on the path to sainthood.

David I. Kertzer has long established himself as one of the foremost experts on the modern papacy, not least concerning its role in fomenting anti-Semitic sentiment. The Pope at War is his contribution to the debate around Pius personally – its rationale coming from Pope Francis’s recent decision to open the files in the Vatican Archives from Pius’s reign. Yet what access for researchers to these official documents and correspondences really adds to the already polemical positions of Pius’s critics and defenders is not entirely clear. I mention defenders here, because, although the case against Pius can seem compelling, he is not without his apologists: pious Catholics who stress the complex and evolving relationship between Church and State in fascist Italy and the extraordinary circumstances in which he found the fate of so many to be in his hands. As his most recent successor so pithily put it, in another context, ‘Who are we to judge?’ survival above all other considerations – even when that meant accommodating unspeakable evil and breaching every tenet of the teachings he claimed to have inherited from Christ. The parallel with a later generation of Catholic leaders who have

The full case for Pius goes like this. A virtual prisoner of Mussolini’s Italian fascist regime, he was never in a strong position to speak out against it and had to consider the potential consequences of doing so. He sought accommodation with Mussolini and Hitler, not from sympathy for their policies but because his capacity for seeking meaningful alternatives was severely limited. Quixotic condemnation could have made him feel virtuous but might easily have backfired if it led to the curtailment of the Church’s prerogatives and the persecution of Catholics as well as Jews. The war’s early phase favoured the Axis powers, generating enthusiasm for martial activity among Italians. Pius therefore had to be careful, planning for the eventuality that Hitler would indeed emerge victorious. Many in Italy and Germany were only nominally Catholic at best, so Pius even had to wonder what they would really do if he forced them to choose between him, their Duce, and the Führer. Moreover, he could scarcely have known what Hitler was sanctioning in Central and Eastern Europe, for it was unprecedented and many even among the Allies failed to give enough credence to the full horror of accounts which reached them.

Kertzer positions himself midway on the spectrum of Pius’s historical judges. He grants a measure of validity to some of these arguments which exculpate Pius for – or, at least, explain – his silence. Moreover, it is clear that Kertzer does not view Pius as a kindred spirit to either Hitler or Mussolini: their differences of outlook were profound, if only because they were substantially classbased. For Pius, the élite paternalist, the rabble-rousing ways of fascism, National Socialism, and their variants were at least as distasteful as Jews. On the other hand, Kertzer paints an extremely critical image of his subject who was prone to timidity, myopia, and vacillation. His Pius is a man who was never happier than with his pet canary hopping up and down on his shoulder – in other words, not merely otherworldly or a ‘useful idiot’ but weak-willed, mousy, and a touch pathetic.

Kertzer’s basic thesis is that both Mussolini and the Nazi leadership had Pius’s measure and were ruthless in taking advantage of this. Consummate diplomat he may have been as Secretary of State to Pius XI during the 1930s, but he simply lacked those convictions about the world – a moral compass, if you will – which had guided his predecessor (and, indeed, animated his own Secretary of State, the fascinating Luigi Cardinal Maglione). Thus, while Pius XI used his last breaths to try to rally the Church against the fascist regime, once he had seen which way the wind was blowing, Pius XII was repeatedly enticed, or cowed, into false and self-serving optimism. He accepted reassurances (implausible now) from Hitler, Mussolini, and their minions that the Church would be respected. Death came by a thousand cuts, with small breaches turning into bigger ones while the helpless, hapless pontiff looked on aghast.

Kertzer’s book may not shift the dial on Pius much, but it is still one of the best accounts of his wartime pontificate. Kertzer had already acquired a reputation as an elegant stylist with a commanding gift for explanation. That reputation will be further burnished by this tome. Yet, since the debate about Pius is essentially insoluble – or, at least, is most unlikely to be resolved by discovery of ‘smoking gun’ documentation – this book does really raise the question: what further value is there to be added? Almost every fragment of information surrounding Pius is already subject to complex and multiple interpretation. Some readings of the evidence may be perverse and disgraceful – I would certainly not wish to appear to condone the sorts of abuses of history perpetrated by David Irving and chronicled by Richard Evans in Telling Lies about Hitler – but reasonable views will always vary within a certain frame. How much one finds Pius culpable depends as much on the subjective values one ascribes to this factor or that as to any inherent set of facts which, in the cliché, ‘speak for themselves’.

The problem may lie with us – in our determination to put figures like Pius on trial and find them guilty or not guilty. This can occlude more valuable questions about such persons’ historical significance. One obvious counterfactual we ought to consider is what would have happened had Pius died in 1944? Could the cardinals, under Nazi domination, have elected a new pope and what legitimacy would such a man have had when the war was over? Should not both Catholics and the Allies be grateful to Pius for making sure he stayed alive to prevent such a profound constitutional crisis?

In the end, though, it is hard to have much sympathy for Pius. If he was really an unfortunate innocent trying to make the best of a bad lot, then even he must have accepted long-lasting ignominy as the weighty cross he would likely bear for his compromises and his omissions. Perhaps he really is up there in heaven suffering still for humanity’s sins. Since we cannot know, there is little point in speculating. On earth, it seems his reputation is unlikely to be rehabilitated any time soon. g

Miles Pattenden is a Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at ACU.