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Book Note: “Religion” in Lisa Pine, ed., Life and Times in Nazi Germany

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Book Note: “Religion” in Lisa Pine, ed., Life and Times in Nazi Germany (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Pp. xv + 307. ISBN: 9781474217927 (Paperback).

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Lisa Pine’s Life and Times in Nazi Germany brings together an interesting set of contributions on “the history of everyday life” in the Third Reich. With three sections—“Food and Health,” “Lifestyle,” and “Religion”—she aims to assess “the extent to which a regime with totalitarian aims and ambitions succeeded in permeating different areas of social and cultural life in Germany” (15/357; all references are to the pdf electronic edition). Pine provides a thorough historiographical overview of the social history of Nazi Germany, then turns things over to her contributors. The section on “Religion” is the chief concern of this note, and is comprised of three chapters on Protestantism, Catholicism, and Christmas.

In his chapter “Protestantism in Nazi Germany: A View from the Margins,” Christopher Probst draws on church sources (newsletters, conference papers, ecclesiastical correspondence, and published works) to consider how Protestants responded to the Nazi regime and living in Nazi Germany produced profound religious divisions among Protestants. Probst begins with the issue of antisemitism, noting that “many, perhaps most, German Protestant ministers and theologians had decidedly deprecating views of Jews and Judaism,” and that most were “deeply nationalistic” (244/357). He goes on to ask three main questions: “What tack did Protestant pastors and theologians take towards the Nazi regime? How did the pressures and strictures of living in the Nazi state help to fracture the Protestant church into competing factions with distinct views on myriad issues? How did Protestant clergy and theologians confront the so-called ‘Jewish Question’?” (244/357)

Probst argues that most Protestants supported the Nazi state, whether eagerly or with mixed emotions, and that well before 1933, Protestantism was permeated with antisemitism and anti-Judaism. He develops these ideas through an overview of German Protestantism in the Third Reich and then a comparison of the views of two opposing Protestants towards Jews: Theodor Pauls, a historian and professor of religious studies who celebrated Luther’s antipathy towards Jews (adding a layer of Nazi racial antisemitism to the views of the reformer) and who worked to de-Judaize Christianity; and Heidelberg pastor Hermann Maas, a member of the Confessing Church and an ardent defender of “non-Aryan Christians” and Jews against anti-Judaism and Nazi persecution. Along the way, he draws on the work of Alon Confino (A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide) to establish the ubiquity of antisemitic sentiment among Germans, including Protestants, as the context within which clergy and theologians lived and worked. Overall, Probst focuses on explicating the range of Protestant opinions on Jews and Judaism, but says little about Protestant responses to Nazism or the pressures which split Protestantism into the competing factions of the Confessing Church and German Christian Movement, generating the church-political struggles that dominated Protestant life in the Third Reich.

Kevin P. Spicer’s chapter, “Catholic Life under Hitler,” traces the difficult choices faced by German Catholics over four phases of their relationship with National Socialism: “(1) 1930-1933, when German bishops publicly opposed National Socialism; (2) 1933-1934, when the German bishops jointly reversed their stance towards National Socialism, while holding on to the delusion that they could work with the state; (3) 1934-1939, when the state directly attacked the Church’s value system and worked to remove it from the life of the Volksgemeinschaft (‘national community’); (4) 1939-1945, when the state, while threatening to blot out the Church as a matter of policy, engaged in an annihilative war that simultaneously carried out the murder of thousands of physically handicapped and mentally ill people, as well as the deportation and murder of millions of European Jews” (273/357).

With memories of the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf in mind, Catholics worried about the danger of marginalizing themselves from the political mainstream through a rejection of Nazism. And besides, both Hitler’s promise that the churches would be foundational to his rule and the emerging economic recovery made the Nazi regime popular. The Centre Party’s support for the March 1933 Enabling Act and the July 1933 Concordat between the German state and the Vatican only seemed to confirm the belief that Hitler and his government might well form an effective partnership with the Catholic Church. After all, both Catholics and Nazis rejected the cultural modernity of the Weimar era, promoted traditional gender roles and forms of family life, opposed Bolshevism, and expressed antipathy towards Jews. Though Catholic religious antisemitism differed from Nazi racial antisemitism, in practice these were mutually reinforcing, as clergy rarely differentiated clearly between the two.

Spicer demonstrates how easily clerical attempts to protect the Church from state attacks could lead to accusations of political subversion against Catholic clergy. Indeed, “one-third of Germany’s diocesan priests came into conflict with the Gestapo or other police agencies” (272/357). Few of these would have understood themselves as opponents of the regime. They were merely attempting to fulfill their liturgical, educational, and associational roles. On the side of the laity, over half attended services faithfully and almost all who married within the faith did so in Catholic churches (274/357). By the middle 1930s, however, tensions were rising as Nazis and Catholics sparred over access to Germany’s youth. Hermann Goering forbad all non-spiritual youth activity (including the popular hiking and camping trips taken by church youth groups), in violation of the Concordat. Over time, simultaneous membership in Catholic and Nazi youth groups was forbidden and eventually Catholic youth groups themselves were disbanded, while the Hitler Youth was made mandatory (281/357). Many priests and Catholic religious instructors faced Gestapo investigation or incarceration for their continuing engagement in youth work. Similar battles were fought over the continuing existence of Catholic schools in the Third Reich.

Spicer explains how Pope Pius XI and Vatican officials wrote well over 350 pages of correspondence to the German government over various church-state conflicts, following those private complaints with the papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (‘With Burning Concern’) in 1937. The German state responded with an increase in the judicial persecution of Catholic clergy by means of the so-called “morality trials,” to which the bishops responded with pastoral letters critical of state attacks on the Church. While the number of Catholics exiting the Church increased somewhat in the later 1930s, all in all, the Church was able to maintain the loyalty of most Catholics and maintain its church taxation system.

Finally, during the war, Spicer argues that Catholics were “disturbingly silent” in response to the Kristallnacht Pogrom, with the exception of Monsignor Bernhard Lichtenberg. More notable was Münster Bishop Clemens von Galen’s public protest against the Nazi euthanasia campaign, which “became the central topic of conversation among the Catholics of Münster and far beyond” (287-288/357). In the end, though, Spicer maintains that Catholic resistance was normally limited to blocking state interference with traditional church practices. Similarly, Catholic lay people—perhaps especially in the countryside—were able to accommodate the everyday practice of their faith to their patriotism and loyalty towards the Hitler regime.

Finally, Joe Perry’s chapter, “Christmas as Nazi Holiday: Colonising the Christmas Mood,” demonstrates how “Nazi functionaries cast Christmas as a celebration of the German Volk that had deep roots in the solstice worship of pre-Christian Germanic tribes.” Decorations, family celebrations, carol singing, Christmas markets, and Christmas trees “were stripped of their Christian content and were reworked to insert Nazi ideology into popular festivity” (31/357). Perry draws on the history of emotions to assess the extent to which Hitler and his movement successfully co-opted the traditional Christian holiday and the “‘Christmas mood’, which turned on moving feelings of Gemütlichkeit (comfort, cosiness), Innerlichkeit (inner warmth, soulfulness), family love and deeply felt spirituality” (301/357). As Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels put it in 1935, Christmas was “the most German of all holidays. It is a Christian celebration,” but “also in the truest sense of the words a National Socialist holiday. Because, when we consider the great ideals of community that bind together the entire German Volk, the commandment ‘love thy neighbour’ has gained a new and surprising significance for us all” (303/357).

Perry traces the nazification of Christmas through three stages: (1) attempts to reshape the holiday along völkisch lines in the 1920s, (2) the campaign to popularize the Volksweihnachten (‘People’s Christmas’) between 1933 and 1939, and (3) the promotion of a Kriegsweihnachten (‘War Christmas’) during the Second World War. Often, December 21—winter solstice—was emphasized over December 25 as the time to celebrate, and public celebrations outshone family holidays.

An important part of this Nazi colonization of Christmas was the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NS-Volkswohlfahrt) charity initiative carried out by the Winter Relief Agency (Winterhilfswerk). Heavy advertising and aggressive collection campaigns focused on promoting charity because, as Goebbels stated, “we must possess a healthy Volk so that we can assert ourselves in the world” (313/357). The Hitler Youth played a large role in the collection of Winter Relief, giving out badges to those who had donated and shaming those who hadn’t. As “the human face of an inhuman regime” (Herbert Vorländer), the Winter Relief generated large sums of money which went to holiday gift packages and Christmas trees to those in need (314/357).

Similarly, other Nazi organizations such as the Hitler Youth, National Socialist Women’s League, and German Labour Front, along with the German Army, also sponsored significant Christmas celebrations. All of these events were designed to celebrate and strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft, or racial community. Perry also mentions the role of the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement in fostering this nazified version of Christmas. German Christians attempted to strip the story of Jesus’ nativity of its “Jewish-Christian accretions.” Indeed, German Christian pastor Wilhelm Bauer’s Celebrations for German Christians (1935) described the rising of a “morning star” on December 25, but left out any mention of Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph, or even Jesus, and renamed Jerusalem “the heavenly abode” (307/357). Nazi party presses produced a wide array of similar publications with instructions for celebrating Christmas, many of them directed to women, boys, and girls. The Ministry of Propaganda also produced many Christmas-themed radio programs and newsreels, while the National Socialist Teachers’ League produced curriculum material emphasizing the “blood and soil” aspects of the holiday, including the winter solstice, Nordic rituals, and female fertility (312/357).

Other Nazi writers worked to reshape even family celebrations of Christmas, by emphasizing primordial Germanic Christmas customs and rewriting Christmas carols along völkisch-racial lines. Here too, German Christians played significant roles. They replaced the lyrics “Rejoice, Rejoice, O Christianity” with “Rejoice, rejoice to be the German Type,” and added the lines, “Christmas! Blood and soil awake! Volk, from God’s light and power; your honour and heroism come” to another Christmas song (318/357).

During the war, Christmas took on new meaning, linked to suffering and sacrifice. “Light oaths” to the sun, mother love, Hitler, the Fatherland, and the German army mixed with “Bringing Home the Fire,” a ceremony where lit candles would be taken from the public, Nazi celebrations into the family home. More ominously, “Heroes’ Remembrance” ceremonies were designed to comfort grieving families at Christmastime (323/357).

Though the nazification of Christmas had its limits—the dechristianization of the holiday was particularly unpopular, and “National Socialist attempts to colonise Christmas and the Christmas mood turned the holiday into a site of cultural-political conflict” (326/357)—Perry effectively demonstrates how it was one means among many through which National Socialists worked to reconstruct social solidarity and national identity along racial lines.

Article Note: Giuliana Chamedes, “The Vatican, Nazi-Fascism, and the Making of Transnational Anti-Communism in the 1930s”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Article Note: Giuliana Chamedes, “The Vatican, Nazi-Fascism, and the Making of Transnational Anti-Communism in the 1930s,” Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 2 (April 2016): 261-290.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Giuliana Chamedes’ article addresses the intersection of Soviet, Vatican, and German policies through an examination of the Vatican’s Secretariat on Atheism and its transnational campaign to fight the spread of international Communism. In the early 1930s, the Vatican launched the Secretariat on Atheism as a branch of its foreign policy apparatus. The Secretariat led the anti-communist campaign by publishing monthly journals, creating traveling exhibitions, and sponsoring radio programs, writing contests, and even film propaganda. Although the Secretariat was deeply engaged in the fight against the spread of communism, Chamedes argues that the Secretariat’s success was due in part to its willingness to work with pre-existing networks of anti-communists, including the Nazis, Fascists, and others in Europe and in the Americas.

The creation of the Secretariat was part of the Vatican’s determination to re-assert Rome as the center of global Catholic life while simultaneously underscoring the Catholic Church’s ongoing prominence in international affairs. It was also part of an effort to protect the Church against threats that seemed to challenge the very existence of the Church. By revealing more information about the under-studied Secretariat on Atheism, Chamedes’ article expands on the history of transnational anti-communism. In addition, Chamedes’ research helps us to understand how Catholic Church leaders got involved with Fascists and Nazis in the Vatican’s quest to gain control over the multitude of anti-communist organizations.

Chamedes notes that Vatican-Soviet relations were carried on diplomatically throughout the 1920s and that a change in the relationship came about in the early 1930s. For Chamedes, the Vatican’s “crusade of prayer” played only a small role in the changing dynamics of Vatican-Soviet relations. Rather, she cites the years 1932-1933 as the moment when mild protests against Soviet policy were replaced with a transnational campaign, aiming to vilify communism “as the greatest existing threat to the survival of Catholicism and the Catholic Church” (266). She connects this sea change to several factors, including the outbreaks of anticlerical violence in Spain and Mexico and the emergence of a new cadre of Vatican insiders such as Eugenio Pacelli, who functioned as the Secretary of State at the Vatican. By 1931, Pacelli was obsessed with the rise of the Spanish Republic and its attempts to separate Church and State. He was convinced that the Spanish Republic was part of a communist plot to destroy Catholic Spain. He took a similar approach when examining events in Mexico. By early 1932, Pacelli revealed in a circular letter sent to Vatican officials in 39 countries that a new campaign was going to be launched from Rome to fight against the existential threat of communism against Catholicism and the Church.

1932 was also the year in which the Vatican developed the anti-communist encyclical, Divinum Mandatum. Pacelli was once again involved in this project as well and the encyclical argued that the international Catholic Church could weaken international communism. The encyclical, however, was never published and the reasons remain somewhat unclear. This did not stop Pacelli. In January 1933, a group of officials at the Vatican agreed to form the Secretariat on Atheism. The organization would be run by the Jesuits, who would keep in continual contact with the Secretary of State, and Rome would serve as the organization’s home base. Its purpose would be to launch an international counter-revolution in an attempt to defeat the aims of the Soviet Union. The new organization began by coordinating itself with anti-communist activists in Europe, the Americas, and in countries in Asia and Africa.

The Secretariat argued that it was uniquely qualified to lead the charge against communists, asserting that “the Vatican was the only ‘dynamic and truly global organization’ that stood ‘above all nations and nationalities’, and was capable of competing with international communism…” (271). Unlike Fascist and Nazi propaganda, the Secretariat did focus on communism as being essentially atheistic and godless, therefore avoiding the anti-Semitic tropes employed by men such as Hitler. Despite the struggle between the Secretariat and Nazi-Fascist forces for leadership in the charge against communism, Chamedes argues that cooperation between the competitors actually increased when one examines the case studies of traveling exhibitions and a writing competition.

With the urging and support of Pope Pius XI, the Secretariat on Atheism was charged with overseeing an international writing competition (although the role of the Secretariat was to be kept secret). The judges for the competition were known for their fascist and proto-fascist sympathies. Over 500 novels were submitted, and a Russian émigré to Vienna, Alja Rachmanova, won first place. Her novel represented the triumph of Christianity over an immoral and extremely violent Bolshevism. While Rachmanova’s novel did not employ Nazi-Fascist motifs, the second-place novel, written by Erik Maria Ritter von Kühnelt-Leddihn, told the story of a Jesuit and two other men who traveled around Europe beating up communists. Further book prizes were awarded in ways which underscored the growing interconnectedness between the Secretariat and radical right-wing political movements. For instance, when writing to the judges of the competition, Pius XI noted that book awards should go to authors who stressed themes that were anti-democratic, authoritarian, and rooted in religious political thinking (275). The Pope also warned that the novels should not stress extreme nationalism as that would threaten the role of the Catholic Church as an international organization capable of leading the fight against communism.

By the spring of 1936, as the Spanish Civil War was close to erupting, the Secretariat released a traveling exhibit meant to re-affirm that the Vatican was the leader in the fight against Communism. The thrust of the exhibit stressed that the Soviet Union and its nefarious influence could only be defeated with the collaboration of state powers with the Vatican. Using many types of modern staging techniques, visitors would encounter the growing threat of international communism. The final room in the exhibit, however, showed the Secretariat’s brochures, posters, and related material, leaving visitors with a feeling of hope that the Catholic Church was capable of defeating communism. The exhibition traveled to many different European cities and was followed up by two other exhibitions in 1938 and in 1939. In the case of these exhibitions, the Vatican did not shy away from working with Nazi and Fascist governments, as their anti-communist agenda was a shared one. This common cause also led to agreements with the Gestapo that allowed previously banned publications to be brought into Nazi Germany, showing the work of the Secretariat in its battle with the Soviet Union.

In March 1937 the Vatican released three encyclicals, one of which addressed the growing Soviet threat. Divini Redemptoris revealed the influence of the Secretariat on Atheism in its emphasis that the power and resources of the Catholic Church would be the only effective means of maintaining world peace. This encyclical was followed by Firmissimam Constantiam, which argued that violent action was needed in response to threats against Catholicism in Mexico. Using the theory of just war, the encyclical allowed and even encouraged the use of force in the fight against communism. The final encyclical of 1937, Mit brennender Sorge, addressed the rise of racist ideology. Though it avoided naming Nazi Germany specifically, it nonetheless clarified some of the Church’s position regarding Nazism.

Until the outbreak of the Second World War, many European nations and the United States of America courted the Vatican to support the fight against the spread of communism. However, once the war began in 1939, the Secretariat on Atheism was shut down. Chamedes suggests that because of Vatican cooperation with Nazi-Fascist forces during the interwar years, the Secretariat was never reopened. Chamedes concludes: “In order to weaken the Soviet Union and the global appeal of communism, the Vatican agreed to a tactical cooperation with Nazi-Fascist forces in a number of on-the-ground campaigns. The Vatican often took the initiative in doing so, even as it increasingly distanced itself in doctrinal terms from the Fascist and Nazi project” (289-290).

Review of John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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.

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi

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-Papacy 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-à-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.

Review Article: The Vatican and the United States during the Interwar Era

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review Article: The Vatican and the United States during the Interwar Era

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Luca Castagna, A Bridge across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See Between the Two World Wars (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), Pp. xvii + 193, ISBN 978-0-8132-2587-0.

C. Gallacher, D. Kertzer and A. Melloni, eds., Pius XI and America (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012), Pp. 450, ISBN 978-3-643-90146-9.

The Vatican is the world’s oldest diplomatic entity. But in the last two centuries it was confronted with challenges and set-backs which threatened its very survival. In the mid-nineteenth century it was robbed of its long-held territories by the upstart new Kingdom of Italy and reduced to a small sliver of land in the heart of Rome. At the same time Pope Pius IX retreated into a theological obscurantism which led the church in hostility to any modern patterns of thought. The nadir of the Vatican’s diplomatic influence was, quite possibly, the era of the First World War, when a combination of intrigues by the new Italian government and the anti-Catholic obstinacy of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant President Woodrow Wilson barred the Vatican from the Paris peace conference and the Versailles settlement which resulted. At the same time, the United States saw a resurgence of anti-Catholic nativism and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, with its vociferous outbursts against Catholics, Jews and blacks. For its part, the Vatican was engrossed with trying to establish a set of legally-binding agreements or concordats with the numerous new states which had arisen in the wake of the war. These were supposed to secure the position of Catholic institutions and personnel, but, as the case of the German Concordat signed in 1933 was to show, the results were mixed. In fact, almost immediately protests were launched with the German Foreign Ministry about breaches of the agreement, but no satisfaction was ever given.

The situation in the United States did not improve until the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. His campaign for social reform in the New Deal was widely welcomed by the under-class which included many poor, immigrants and Catholics. The Catholic social work community was particularly impressed, and indeed this move paid off handsomely politically when Roosevelt swept many states into the Democratic fold in 1936. This convergence of ideas in the New Deal and the Catholic Church’s social doctrine, as expressed by the National Catholic Welfare Conference, opened the way for a new relationship of mutual collaboration. This also resulted in an unprecedented participation of Catholics in the national sociopolitical context.

In the 1930s, the resurgence of nationalist antagonisms, especially sponsored by the totalitarian powers, was alarming to both Roosevelt and the Vatican. This alignment of views on their common need to preserve the world for peace and to prevent further conflicts brought the two diplomatic entities closer together, as was symbolized by the highly successful visit of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli, (later Pope Pius XII) to the United States in 1936. He was even invited to have a meal with the President at his summer retreat in Hyde Park, where doubtless the two men discussed the looming dangers of hostilities in international affairs.

The principal difficulty in this rapprochement arose from the fact that the United States had no diplomatic representation at the Vatican, since such an arrangement had been abandoned in 1857. Roosevelt was well aware that any attempt to persuade Congress to vote the funds necessary for the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Vatican would likely arouse waves of vehement opposition from the extreme Protestant wing, as well as from Isolationists. It would be seen as part and parcel of his attempt to draw America into the vortex of world conflict, and hence would be strenuously opposed.

Roosevelt therefore delayed any decision, which was made even more hazardous by the events in Europe in 1938, with the annexation by the Nazis of Austria, which was initially greeted with acclaim by the leading Austrian Cardinal, for which he was strongly criticized by the Vatican. Isolationists in the United States were joined by some vociferous Catholics, such as the voluble “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, whose diatribes were undoubtedly followed by many of his followers. On the other hand, the possible outbreak of hostilities in Europe added to Roosevelt’s desire to recruit the aid of the Vatican for the active pursuit of peace. The death of Pope Pius XI in February 1939 and the election of Cardinal Pacelli as the new Pope further held up this process. So it was not until December 1939, after the outbreak of war in Europe, and the conquest of the largely Catholic Poland, that Roosevelt finally turned his long-held desire into reality. He subtly hit on the expedient of not establishing a normal embassy but rather of appointing a Personal Representative of the President, who would have the status but not the title of an Ambassador. His choice fell on the wealthy industrialist Myron Taylor, a Protestant Episcopalian, who arrived in Rome in February 1940, and behaved with impeccable style and astuteness, entirely avoiding any ecclesiastical or theological matters. As such, Roosevelt now had a direct line to the Vatican and readily assented to the vigorous attempts to prevent any escalation of the war’s hostilities, particularly with Italy. Mussolini’s decision in June 1940 to ignore the appeals of Roosevelt and Pius XII and to enter the war with his Nazi partner spelled the failure of these joint efforts to reserve peace and humanity.

Castagna’s excellently researched examination of the diplomatic archives of both the Vatican and the United States for this short period of twenty years provides a useful extension of comparative diplomatic history. He adds in various papal documents as well as notes the contributions of scholars of this subject in various languages. It is only unfortunate that the papers of Pope Pius XII are still unavailable, so that the next stage of the relationship between the Holy See and the United States, particularly where their policies diverged from 1940 onwards, remains to be told. (For these next events, see J. S. Conway, “Myron C. Taylor’s Mission to the Vatican 1940-1950,” Church History 44, no. 1 (March 1976): 1-15.) It can only be hoped that Castagna, who teaches at the University of Salerno, will be among those scholars invited to follow up this valuable study with a sequel, which could then demonstrate how, in the aftermath of 1945, this relationship actually became the bridge across the ocean of his title. The present short study must therefore be regarded as a prelude, describing the early stages of the thaw in Vatican-American relations which was only fulfilled when full diplomatic relations were finally established in 1984.

The collected essays in Pius XI and America, contributed by a variety of international scholars for a 2010 conference at Brown University, provide further evidence of the tangential and episodic relationships between the Vatican under Pope Pius XI and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. It is striking that these scholars limit themselves entirely to the secular realm. There are no papers given on the ecclesiastical, let alone on the theological developments of those years. Instead the articles concentrate on the political and diplomatic aspects of the Vatican’s outreach and how these overlapped with certain American interests. These essays confirm Castagna’s view that relations improved only after Roosevelt’s election in 1932, when the new President believed that the Catholic social and political thought was not far removed from his idealism. So too he came to the conclusion that the Vatican shared his endeavor to maintain peace in Europe and to restrain the vainglorious ambitions of the European dictators.

In their various explorations and elaboration of the papers from the Vatican archive, it is hardly surprising that these authors paint a favorable picture of the Vatican diplomats, especially of Cardinal Pacelli. Rob Ventresca, for example, in his survey of Pius XI, Eugenio Pacelli and the Italian Fascism, agrees with Castagna that Pacelli’s moderating influence was designed to head off any open breach with Mussolini’s aggressive tactics over Abyssinia, and to promote a negotiated settlement of the dispute. The price paid was to mute the Church’s public criticism of the morality of Mussolini’s imperial misadventures, which Ventresca suggests set a pattern to be repeated later with the even more serious breaches of the peace by Hitler. In her essay, Emma Fattorini takes a more critical attitude. She repeats the theme of her book Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican, pointing to the profound differences of position and temperament between Pius XI and Pacelli. Fattorini clearly prefers the irrepressible intransigence of the elderly pontiff. Jacques Kornberg is even more critical, suggesting that both Pius XI and Pius XII failed to conduct themselves according to their own moral standards. The Vatican issued no outraged protests about the Nazis’ November 1938 Crystal Night pogrom because this was seen as not being a threat to Catholic interests. In Kornberg’s view, civic rights, or universal human rights, were not a matter for the papacy’s concern. On the other hand, Fr. Robert Trisco, in recounting the furor over the outspoken criticisms of Hitler and the Nazi regime made by Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago in May 1937, praises Pacelli for castigating privately the malicious invectives and disparagement perpetrated against the Holy See by the Nazi leadership. Trisco also describes the widespread support for Cardinal Mundelein given by different sections of American opinion, including President Roosevelt. Indeed Roosevelt took Mundelein’s advice about the difficult issue of how to restore diplomatic relations between the United States and the Vatican, but otherwise does not feature much in these essays. In all, there are few surprises, since many of the contributors have already had their say elsewhere. But, as Charles Gallacher remarks, there are still unanswered questions, such as why Pius XI sent Pacelli to the United States in 1936, or what topics were covered when Roosevelt and Pacelli met privately at Hyde Park.

These essays provide additional details in support of the overview given in Castagna’s book, and as such are a useful and reliable addition to our knowledge of papal diplomacy in the inter-war period.