Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)
Review of David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War. The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (New York: Random House, 2022). ISBN: 978-0812989946.
By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University
With his monograph The Pope at War. The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler David I. Kertzer—who has published extensively on the Italian state and the Vatican’s relations with Jews—has added his critical voice to the longstanding controversy surrounding the papacy of Pius XII (r. 1939–1958). There is no shortage of biographers who have attempted to understand the pope’s (in)actions during World War II and the Holocaust, but according to Kertzer, “a crucial piece of the puzzle has long been missing,” because the Vatican has only recently (in March 2020, to be exact) unsealed the archive of Pius XII’s papacy (p. xxix). Making extensive use of this and numerous other European collections, Kertzer writes that “The Pope at War offers readers the first full account of these events” (p. xxx). What follows is an unsparing and detailed narrative of Pope Pius XII’s moral failure in Europe’s darkest hour.
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The monograph opens—somewhat unusually, and reminiscent of a play—with a “Cast of Characters” that offers brief biographies of key figures in this history. Even at this early stage, Kertzer is blunt in his assessment of many members of the Curia as unprepared for and unequal to the momentous tasks before them. Divided into four parts, the book begins with the final months of the dying Pius XI’s papacy when, for a brief moment, it appeared that the Vatican might issue a condemnation of Fascism and Nazism. The encyclical died along with Pius XI on 10 February 1939; the ascendence of the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, to the papacy followed on 2 March 1939. The seasoned diplomat Pacelli, now Pope Pius XII, immediately shifted to a conciliatory approach toward Germany and Italy when “he instructed the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, to end all criticism of the German government” (p. 27).
The new pope’s first major test of his moral leadership came only two days after his coronation, on 14 March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Immediately, the new pontiff faced considerable pressure to denounce the German invasion but, setting the tone for his wartime papacy, Pius XII remained silent (p. 33). Kertzer makes clear that Pius XII did not remain silent because he was “Hitler’s Pope,” as John Cornwell’s 1999 monograph by the same name claimed. The pontiff had nothing but disdain for Hitler and the Nazis, and in his dealings with them, his first priority was the protection of the institutional Catholic Church in Germany. This is not a new argument. What Kertzer adds is new evidence of secret negotiations between Pius XII and Hitler, in which Prince Philipp von Hessen represented the latter. The prince was both a very close friend of Hitler and the son-in-law of Italy’s King Victor Emmanual. The two men met for the first time on 11 May 1939 to discuss ways for improving the situation of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. Eager to reach an agreement, the pope assured the prince, “‘The German people are united in their love for their Fatherland. Once we have peace, the Catholics will be loyal, more than anyone else’” (p. 62). In this and subsequent meetings, von Hessen dangled the possibility of a rapprochement between the Vatican and Germany before the pope. Nothing came of it, of course, and the situation of the Church in Germany continued to deteriorate. The pope nonetheless clung to his conciliatory approach and refused to criticize either Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, even in the face of the extreme violence of World War II and the brutal persecution and mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust.
Kertzer relentlessly makes the argument of the moral bankruptcy of the pope’s leadership in example after example of his refusal to speak out. As the Germans rampaged through Catholic Poland, perpetrating unspeakable crimes against civilians, including members of the clergy, Pius XII remained silent. This silence cannot be explained by a lack of accurate intelligence. At no time did the Vatican lack detailed information about German atrocities, including the genocide against Jews. Defenders of Pius XII have argued that it is anachronistic and thus impossible to judge him by the standards of our time in which the defense of universal human rights is paramount. This, they argue, was not the case in 1940, when the Church’s salvific mission dictated that the pope had to do everything in his power to protect the faithful’s access to the sacraments. Kertzer rejects this argument. He shows that the controversy over of the pope’s timidity and silence during the war and genocide did not commence in the postwar period. Rather, as early as the fall of 1939, after the Polish ambassador had appealed in vain to Pius XII to speak out against German atrocities in Poland, the British envoy to the Vatican, Richard Osborne, lamented that the pontiff “has carried caution and impartiality to a point approaching pusillanimity and condonation…the Pope’s silence seems hard to explain and defend” (p. 88). The Allied ambassadors and envoys to the Vatican would repeat this statement in their reports in many different reiterations and with increasing exacerbation for the duration of the war. Pius XII also was pressured to speak out against Germany from members of his own curia, including the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant, who complained to the archbishop of Paris in 1940 that “I fear that history will have much to reproach the Holy See for in having adopted a policy of convenience for itself and not much more… It is sad in the extreme, above all when one has lived under Pius XI” (p. 90). Kertzer makes the case that the pope’s silence was not the expected or acceptable conduct of a pontiff at the time but was instead driven by his personality in direct opposition to many who beseeched him to act differently and courageously.
By 1942, the pressure on the pope to speak out became enormous. In his twenty-four-page Christmas message that year, he finally decried the death of “’hundreds of thousands of [innocent] people… solely because of their nation or their race’” (p. 258). Although this speech is often cited as proof of Pius XII’s vocal protest against genocide, Kertzer dismisses this assertion. Rather, he concludes that the speech was in line with his previous convoluted, cautious, and ambiguous statements, all of which accomplished little. The following year, the German occupation of Rome in September 1943 and the subsequent round-up of Roman Jews put the pope’s “policy of not criticizing the Nazis’ ongoing extermination of Europe’s Jews to an excruciating test” (p. 363). Kertzer argues that the Vatican made only feeble attempts to intervene diplomatically to aid Catholics of Jewish heritage, but even those interventions often came too late. Pius XII’s action on behalf of Rome’s Jews have been the focus of much research, including research on the rescue and hiding of Jews in Catholic convents, and here and throughout the monograph, The Pope at War could have benefitted from a deeper engagement with the extant historiography on the topic.
Attempting to explain the pope’s appeasement of Germany and Italy, Kertzer argues that, prior to 1942, when it appeared that the Axis powers were winning the war, he sought ways for the Church to function within this new reality. The seat of the Holy See was, after all, in Rome and at the heart of Fascism. Whereas Kertzer does a good job describing the fraught history between the Vatican and Nazi Germany, this is not the book’s main strength. The Pope at War is as much the story of Mussolini as it is of Pope Pius XII. Kertzer shows his deep expertise and knowledge of the papacy and Fascist Italy and excels in rendering—often in excruciating detail—the intertwined stories of the vainglorious, pompous dictator and the timid, ascetic pontiff who used, disdained, and resented each other in equal measure. In writing this detailed history of the collaboration between the Italian Fascist government and the Vatican, Kertzer seeks to correct a postwar history of Fascist Italy and the papacy which, he argues, all too quickly forgot their close collaboration with each other—and with Germany. In this history, “All the efforts the pope made to avoid antagonizing Hitler and Mussolini are wiped from view. His role as primate of the Italian church, presiding over a clergy that was actively supporting the Axis war, is likewise forgotten” (p. 464). This is an overstatement, as there already exists a robust and critical historiography on the subject, but The Pope at War no doubt enriches the scholarship on Fascist Italy and adds ample fuel to the ongoing controversy surrounding Pius XII’s papacy.
On March 10, 2021, the American Catholic Historical Association held a webinar entitled “The Opening of the Pius XI Archive and Holocaust Research.” Presenters included Suzanne Brown-Fleming, US Holocaust Memorial Museum: Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University; Claire Maligot, Ecole pratique des hautes études, Paris, and Institut d’études politiques, Strasbourg; Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University; and Robert A. Ventresca, King’s University College at Western University.
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).
Kornberg takes on both sides of the Pius War, questioning the various ways in which scholars have sought to either support Pius’s reactions to the Nazi regime or have tried to find fault with Pius’s response (or lack thereof). At the book’s outset, Kornberg asks the fundamental question that has frustrated both sides of the scholarly debate: “why was the pope unable to deal with radical evil?” (3) Kornberg argues that, in his view, the papacy of Pius XII was a moral failure out of “calculated acquiescence;” meaning that the pope willingly allowed Nazi atrocities to happen “because of his own priorities and responsibilities as head of the Roman Catholic Church” (8-9). Kornberg then tracks how Pius’s reputation drastically plummeted in the 1960s, in no small part to the wildly successful play by Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter, (The Deputy) which depicted a cold, calculating Pius who sat silent in the face of Nazi crimes for “reasons of state” (16). With this incendiary play, debates raged: was Pius complicit with the Nazi regime due to his silence or was Hochhuth’s play no more than a deeply flawed portrayal of the Pope? Kornberg takes the reader through the play, the reactions and counter-reactions to it and links this to the role of Vatican II in further sealing the demise of Pius’s reputation. A new era was opening up for the Church under the leadership of the charismatic and charming Pope John XXIII and Kornberg dryly notes that in this new climate, “it was inevitable that Pius XII’s reputation would sink like a stone” (35). At issue here was the question of mission: what was the Catholic Church’s role? Was it to serve as a voice of morality to the world, was it to concern itself primarily with pastoral care, or was it to be a mixture of both of these? Raising these questions allows Kornberg to move on to his next chapter, addressing the options of Eugenio Pacelli and his role in the drafting of the Reichskonkordat.
In the detail given to the spy rings operating out of the Vatican, Riebling’s account goes far beyond earlier accounts like those of the American scholar, Harold Deutsch. It adduces evidence from published documentary collections, state, church and intelligence archives in Britain, Germany, Poland and the United States as well as the extensive interview transcripts found in Harold Deutsch’s papers in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In light of the fragmentary nature of the evidence and the sheer volumes of conspirators, adversaries and agendas, this research is one that only a historian of intelligence could have pulled off so compellingly. Shaping the contours of this book is Riebling’s broad range of experiences as an editor for Random House, security expert and terrorist analysis. This is simply the finest work on the subject in print.
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.
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.
Born into the “black nobility” of Roman society, Pacelli lived a privileged life that even included a rare dispensation that enabled him to avoid the rigors of seminary life for the flexibility of home with his family. Pacelli was also not ordained with his classmates, but during a separate Mass in a private chapel. Despite such an uncommon priestly formation, Ventresca concludes that amid the changes “brought about by the fall of papal Rome in 1870, it is difficult to say whether there was anything typical about Pacelli’s clerical training in the closing decades of the nineteenth century” (p. 36). Yet, Ventresca reveals that Pacelli was exceptional. Even prior to earning a doctorate in canon law in 1904, Pacelli caught the attention of Pietro Gasparri, the secretary of the Sacred Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, who soon became a patron and ensured a smooth transition for the young priest into Vatican bureaucracy. By 1914, the talented Pacelli had replaced Gasparri when the latter rose to become secretary of state. Three years later, Pacelli himself rose in the ranks to become papal nuncio to Bavaria. Prior to his departure for Germany, Pacelli was consecrated archbishop of Sardis by Pope Benedict XV himself.
The workshop was a further attempt to mend frayed relations. Yad Vashem and the Reverend Roberto Spataro (acting “on behalf of the Nuncio”) each chose five scholars for the workshop. The latter: Andrea Tornielli, Matteo Napolitano, Grazia Loparco, Jean-Dominique Durand, and Thomas Brechenmacher; the former: Paul O’Shea, Michael Phayer, Susan Zuccotti, Sergio Minerbi, and Dina Porat. Summing up at the end, the Reverend Spataro commented: “we met in an atmosphere of confidence, trust and mutual respect.”