Review of Marshall J. Breger and Herbert R. Reginbogin, eds., The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Review of Marshall J. Breger and Herbert R. Reginbogin, eds., The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2022). ISBN: 978-1-7936-4216-5

By Gerald J. Steinacher, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Permanent neutrality is a key concept for understanding the policies and teachings of the Holy See over the last 100-plus years. It is crucial for comprehending Vatican decision-making. For anyone interested in the history of the Catholic Church and the papacy, a key question in historical analysis is the motivation behind their actions, specifically the underlying theological or ideological factors. This is especially relevant in the context of the controversial discussions surrounding not only World War II but also the Cold War. The volume The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality, edited by Marshall J. Breger and Herbert R. Reginbogin, offers rich insights and material for further thought on this important topic, revealing a wide range of expertise and diverse perspectives from scholars of church history.

Breger rightly notes that following World War II, neutrality had a negative connotation and was often seen as a form of collaboration with the Nazis. Countries like Switzerland, and to some extent Sweden, did not emerge from the war with their reputations fully intact. Consequently, for many years, Vatican neutrality has received little attention in academic literature. This volume, which spans from 1870 to 2020, helps to close that gap by examining various aspects of the Vatican’s neutrality over these 150 years. However, the main focus is on the Vatican’s neutrality as defined in the Lateran Pacts of 1929, which also established the city-state. Breger states the goal of the project thus: “This book will consider the interplay between two normatively disparate subjects – the concept of neutrality in international law and the concept of the Vatican as a neutral actor in international relations” (Breger xii). This review will provide a general overview of the volume, highlighting a selection of the thirteen essays rather than examining each one in detail. I will focus primarily on essays that fall more closely in my own research purview, which deals with Fascism, WWII and the immediate postwar years.

The volume’s chapters are mostly arranged chronologically. Part 1 examines the period from the end of the Papal States to the Vatican (1870–1929), with contributions by John F. Pollard, Kurt Martens, and Maria d’Arienzo. Pollard explains that, for centuries prior, the Church ruled over extended territories in central Italy, which the pope was determined to protect and expand. The “Vicar of Christ” in those centuries was usually neither neutral nor impartial nor peaceful. Military alliances were forged, and armies were recruited, including the now-famous Swiss troops. Popes and their families on the papal throne, such as the notorious Borgias in the 16th century, pursued wars and conquests, like other principalities in the Italian peninsula.

As in other parts of Europe and Latin America, nationalism in the nineteenth century surged through Italy. Backed by the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, Italian nationalists sought to establish an Italian ethnic nation-state, which became a reality in 1861, with Turin as its first capital. Protected by French troops, the Papal States resisted until 1870, when Italian forces seized Rome by force. With Rome now the capital of Italy, the Holy See was left without any territory, prompting the pope to famously declare himself the “Prisoner in the Vatican.” Nevertheless, several powers continued to recognize the Holy See as sovereign and maintained diplomatic relations. For decades after 1870, the tensions between the Catholic Church and the constitutional liberal Italian monarchy remained unresolved and relations were often strained.

 Claims of permanent neutrality toward all nations and the Holy See as a “peaceful sovereign” were emphasized by Vatican diplomats as early as the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815. During World War I, Pope Benedict XV (1914–1922) became known as “the great neutral.” Practical considerations played a role, as Catholics fought on both sides of the front. Pollard shows that the pope also stayed neutral when it came to accusations of war crimes committed by Russia as well as Germany. “To have pronounced one way or another on alleged war crimes could inevitably have compromised the Vatican’s claims to neutrality and impartiality, so in public, Benedict limited himself to generic condemnations of all atrocities” (10). Pollard’s point is well taken, as this arguably set a precedent for the Holy See’s position during World War II. After WWI, the Vatican also tried to stay neutral, and when new nation-states and borders emerged, the diocesan geography needed redrawing, as Kurt Martens shows.

In 1929, the Holy See negotiated an agreement with the Italian government, then under Benito Mussolini, consisting of two parts: the Lateran Treaty and a concordat, collectively referred to as the Lateran Pacts. The Church was compensated for the loss of territory, regained its status as an independent, sovereign state (Vatican City), and declared its permanent neutrality. Maria d’Arienzo reminds us that there is a key distinction when it comes to the Vatican as a city-state: The Vatican is not a nation-state but rather a state administration that was designed to provide a basis for the universal mission of the papacy (Maria d’Arienzo 45). Article 24 of the Lateran Pacts creating the Vatican city-state in 1929 states, “The Holy See declares that it desires to take, and shall take, no part in any temporal rivalries between other states, nor in any international congresses called to settle such matters, save and except in the event of such parties making a mutual appeal to the pacific mission of the Holy See, the latter reserving in any event the right of exercising its moral and spiritual power” (quoted in Brown-Fleming 106). This text and its interpretation lie at the heart of the volume and its discussions that focus on Vatican neutrality: how it has been understood and whether it has changed over time, if at all. As Pollard points out, this is where the history of Vatican neutrality truly begins.

Part II, focusing on the “long Second World War: 1931-1945,” with contributions by Lucia Ceci, Pascal Lottaz, and Suzanne Brown-Fleming, could also be titled “Neutrality [Put] to the Test.” This is the title Ceci chose for her chapter on the Vatican and the Fascist wars of the 1930s. She points out that the 1929 Lateran Pacts was “an agreement signed with an authoritarian government with totalitarian ambitions” (Ceci 63). Both the Italian state as well as the Vatican believed that a modus vivendi would be possible. The pope officially granted the state temporal power over Rome, but the state ceded sovereignty in matters of marriage and teaching. Mussolini celebrated this reconciliation between Italy and the Holy See as a great achievement. The Church, too, was hopeful, as Ceci states, that the Fascist state was “catholicizable” and would cement a “Catholic nation” (Ceci 65).

Mussolini’s war of aggression in Ethiopia (1935–36/41)[1] and his military intervention in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as the Italian Racial Laws (1938), put the Vatican’s declared neutrality to an early test. The papacy faced immense pressure to endorse Mussolini’s Ethiopian war; however, Ceci states that Pius XI was absolutely opposed to this Fascist war of conquest (68). Meanwhile, Italian Catholic bishops and clergy went above and beyond to show their support for Mussolini’s campaign. When it came to Italian laws against Jews, the pope limited his interventions to get exceptions for baptized Jews.

Behind the scenes, Pope Pius XI authorized the drafting of an encyclical letter condemning racism and modern antisemitism. Suzanne Brown-Fleming highlights the encyclical Humani Generis Unitas [“Unity of the Human Race”], which was prepared at Pius XI’s request in 1938 but was never released to the public. The encyclical emphasized that Catholics should not remain silent in the face of Jewish persecution. However, when Pius XII ascended to the papacy in 1939, he chose to shelve this encyclical (Brown-Fleming 105). Only a few months later, World War II broke out. Not unlike Pope Benedict XV during WWI, Pius XII also attempted to maintain neutrality and guide the Church through the storm that engulfed the world. During and after the war, particularly regarding the atrocities of the Holocaust, Pius XII was accused of silence and a lack of moral guidance. In the face of the Holocaust, why did the Holy See not use its “right to exercise its moral and spiritual power,” as enshrined in the Lateran Pacts? The heated debate over the pope’s responses to the Holocaust has been at the center of discussions for decades. The challenges faced by the universal Catholic Church during World War II included mass atrocities occurring not only in Europe but also in Asia, as discussed by Pascal Lottaz about “Vatican diplomacy and Church realities in the Philippines during World War II”. Pius XII tried to be neutral, but at the same time worked on a modus vivendi with the Japanese.

Brown-Fleming focuses on the immediate postwar years and examines the Vatican’s clemency appeals for Nazi war criminals on trial, drawing from several case studies in the Vatican archives. One well-known case is that of Oswald Pohl, who oversaw Nazi slave labor operations and was sentenced to death at one of the Nuremberg trials. The Holy See and German bishops went to great lengths to save the life of this mass murderer, who had converted to Catholicism while in prison. The Church’s stance on neutrality and “forgiveness” after World War II—exemplified by the interventions of the pope’s envoy in Germany, US Bishop Aloisius Muench, and the postwar Allied military government in Germany—reflected a tendency to forgive perpetrators and quickly forget the victims. This attitude was also intertwined with strong anti-communist sentiments. The broader question raised in this volume concerns Vatican neutrality, and this has particular significance in the context of papal aid for Nazi war criminals. As I have shown in Nazis on the Run and elsewhere, much of the Vatican’s efforts on behalf of Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators did not have leniency as the primary goal. Instead, these efforts were often intended to secure impunity through generous amnesties or even assistance in escape.[2] Such actions not only hindered Allied efforts toward postwar justice but also compromised Vatican neutrality.

Pius XII could be very undiplomatically direct when it came to confronting communism, ideologically and otherwise. For example, Piotr H. Kosicki details the Holy See’s role in the crucial Italian parliamentary election of 1948, where a victory for the left-wing alliance of communists and socialists was a realistic possibility. The “Civic Committees,” organized by Church-run Catholic Action, clearly aligned with the Christian Democrats (DC) and significantly influenced the election outcome. These committees played a pivotal role for the Christian Democrats by orchestrating a propaganda campaign against the communists and socialists. Concluding his chapter, Kosicki shows that the “lonely Cold War of Pius XII”^[3] shifted to the “Vatican Ostpolitik” after the pope’s death in 1958. This Ostpolitik involved the normalization of relations with the highest levels of communist parties and states, with Yugoslavia being a prominent example.

Árpád von Klimó and Margit Balogh present the case of a widely forgotten story in public memory: the saga of Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary. He spent fifteen years trapped in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, a fascinating chapter of Cold War history. In the last part of this volume, on the post-Cold War period of 1990–2020, Massimo Faggioli explains how, after the Cold War, the Vatican adopted a policy of “positive neutrality,” engaging on new social and political levels. Luke Cahill looks at the Vatican’s outreach to Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad in order to aid war victims. Maryann Cusimano Love analyzes the Church’s theological stance against nuclear weapons. In relation to just war theory, Saha Matsumoto discusses how, with the end of the Cold War, the Church felt free to oppose all nuclear weapons, no longer constrained by the “Communist menace.” Herbert Reginbogin concludes the volume in Chapter 13 by addressing the Vatican’s responses to scandals in the Church, such as money laundering, sexual abuse, and its efforts to repair historical wrongs.

To conclude, despite some minor shortcomings—including repetitive quotes and repetitions when explaining the Lateran Pacts as well as the chronology of chapters in some cases (e.g., Maria d’Arienzo’s outstanding chapter feels somewhat out of place in Part I, as much of it discusses post-1945 issues)—this volume is an excellent contribution. It presents different views and interpretations on the theme of “the Vatican and permanent neutrality” over the course of the last 150 years. The balanced contributions make the volume thought-provoking and invite further exploration of this fascinating topic. In a world where neutrality seems to be under strain—evident in Sweden and Finland recently abandoning their tradition of neutrality to join NATO—Austria’s ongoing discussions about its own tradition of “permanent neutrality” reflect the challenges faced by the once-neutral bloc of nations during the Cold War. The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality is a must-read for everyone interested in the rationales of the Holy See’s international engagement.

Notes:

[1] Ethiopian historians prefer to date the period from 1935 to 1941 because the fighting continued until the liberation of Addis Ababa by British and Ethiopian forces in May 1941, following six years of Italian occupation.

[2] See also Gerald J. Steinacher, “Forgive and Forget? The Vatican and the Escape of Nazi War Criminals from Justice” in S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation, 9 (2022) 1, 4-28.

[3] Peter C. Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943–1950. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.