Pius XII

Pius XII (1876–1958).Born in Rome, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope in March 1939, having previously served as papal nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1930, and as Vatican secretary of state from 1930. His wartime stance remains a matter of controversy, considerably reinforced by Rolf Hochhuth's slanderous but influential play Der Stellvertreter (The Representative, 1963) in which Pius is accused of having refused to do anything to save the Jews (see Final Solution). In more muted criticism, the UK's wartime minister to the Vatican wrote that the Pope's neutrality had been ‘meticulous and seemingly pusillanimous’ but that he and his advisers ‘reckon in centuries and plan for eternity and this inevitably renders their policy inscrutable, confusing, and on occasion reprehensible to practical and time-conditioned minds’ ( O. Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 315–16).

Three elements are discernible in the wartime pontificate: the traditional Catholic ideological objection to all forms of totalitarian secular power, especially atheistic communism with which no accommodation was seen as possible; the prime endeavour to stop the war and its attendant horrors by persuading the belligerents to seek a negotiated peace; and, in the face of atrocities, balancing the good that might come from condemnation of evil against the danger of thereby provoking further horrors—as in fact occurred in May 1943 when the Dutch Catholic bishops, in issuing a pastoral letter condemning the deportation of Jews, provoked the immediate arrest and deportation of Dutch Jews who had been baptized as Catholics, while Protestant Jews were spared.

Pacelli was an experienced diplomat who, as secretary of state, had felt forced to accede to the 1933 concordat offered by the Nazi government. His motive was to secure a legal basis for opposing the subsequent anti-Church measures which he foresaw as clearly as he anticipated Hitler's repeated violations of its terms. He had played a major role in drafting the three encyclicals of his predecessor against fascism, Nazism, and communism. His efforts to arrange a peace conference before the outbreak of war failed; and repeated calls for peace subsequently were ignored by both sides. Not surprisingly, he later deplored the Allied policy of unconditional surrender which, no less than Axis ambitions, made a negotiated settlement an unrealistic aim. His very first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus (October. 1939), though couched in the traditionally generalized language of the Roman Curia, condemned the political and religious policies of the German and Soviet governments in Poland and the Baltic States.

In early 1940 the Pope allowed Vatican officials, including his own personal private secretary, a German Jesuit, to act as intermediaries between anti-Nazi conspirators and the Allies (see X-report), but to no avail. In 1941 he refused to declare the German invasion of the USSR a crusade (seeBARBAROSSA), a stance which did not surprise Hitler but enraged Mussolini. In praising the courageous and influential sermons against the Nazi euthanasia programme delivered in 1941 by Clemens August von Galen, the bishop of Münster, he maintained that national episcopates and the local clergy were best placed to judge when speaking out would be the effective course. Though strongly urged to do so by the Italians, he refused to condemn the Allied area bombing which caused such high civilian casualties. The Allies for their part pressed hard for a public condemnation of the Final Solution and in his 1942 Christmas radio message, and again in June 1943, the Pope deplored it in generalized but unmistakable terms that infuriated the Germans but failed to satisfy the Allies.

In areas where he felt he could achieve something, the Pope was active diplomatically on behalf of refugees and Jews, in particular using what influence he had with Italy to help Jews in Italian-occupied parts of Yugoslavia, and in July 1944 petitioning Admiral Horthy to prevent further deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. He supervised a programme for the relief of war victims through the Pontifical Aid Commission and, when Hitler occupied Rome after Italy's surrender in September 1943, the Vatican City became effectively an asylum for refugees. Nevertheless, in October 1943 he was unable to prevent the deportation of Jews from Rome, though the majority were saved, many being given hiding in Church property and in the Vatican itself. In 1944 as the Allies advanced on Rome during the Italian campaign, the Pope made impassioned pleas for the city with its priceless heritage to be spared Allied bombing, and when Rome was liberated in June 1944 he was hailed by the people as ‘defender of the city’—though in fact the Allies had refused to give any undertakings. Towards the end of the war, Pius denounced the concept of national collective guilt, whilst emphasizing the need for a proper legal basis for the punishment of individuals. He warned against imposing on Germany a permanent state of subjection without hope of a new future. In June 1945 he uttered an apologia for his policy towards Nazism, claiming that his radio messages had in fact been the only effective way both to uphold moral principles before world opinion and to maintain among German Catholics the ideals of truth and justice in a situation of overwhelming evil and violence (Acta Apolostolicae Sedis XXXVII, 159–68). See also religion and diplomacy.

Nicholas Coote

Bibliography

Cornwell, J. , Hitler's Pope: the Secret History of Pius XII (London, 1999) (controversial).
Holmes, J. D. , The Papacy in the Modern World 1914–1978 (Tunbridge Wells, 1981).