19 JULY 2008, Page 33

The Pope was wrong

Andrew Roberts

piuS Xii: the hound of hitLer by Gerard Noel Continuum, £20, pp. 256, ISBN 9781847063557 ✆ £16.00 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 VatiCan SeCret dipLomaCY: JoSeph p. hurLeY and pope piuS Xii by Charles R. Gallagher Yale, £25 , pp. 283, ISBN 9780300121346 ✆ £20.00 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In his Christmas broadcast for 1942, Pope Pius XII spoke of the ‘hundreds of thousands of innocent people who have been killed or condemned to a slow extinction only because of their race’. As part of a wider denunciation of the Holocaust this would have been brave and useful, but in fact it was to be his only public wartime mention of it, and he did not even identify Hitler, the Nazis or the Jews by name. This failure publicly to denounce the greatest single crime in the history of mankind has unsurprisingly led to a major debate on the wartime role of the Pontiff, of which this well-researched, very well written, sane and thoughtful book is the latest and one of the most distinguished contributions.

Few people are better qualified than Gerard Noel to disinter the subtle diplomacy conducted by the prewar and wartime Vatican. A translator of the first volume of the official documents relating to the Holy See in that period and a former editor of the Catholic Herald, Noel had a private audience with Pius XII at the Castel Gandolfo in 1948, partly because he is collaterally descended from three saints, including Sir Thomas More. Yet far from being biased towards the Pontiff, as one might expect from this ultra-papabile curriculum vitae, this book lands some heavy blows against him.

Since Pius’ death in 1958 the debate on his actions — or inaction — has been dominated in the media by the case for the prosecution, principally Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Representative, Constantine CostaGravas’ film Amen, Daniel Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning, David Kerzer’s The Pope Against the Jews, David Cornwell’s outrageously titled Hitler’s Pope, Robert Katz’s Fatal Silence and other important and more nuanced books by Ralph McInery, Susan Zuccotti and José Sanchez. The case for the defence was best put by Professor Owen Chadwick in his succinct study Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War in 1986, but Pierre Blet S.J., Eamon Duffy, Clifford Longley, Cardinal Winning, Michael Burleigh, Paul Johnson, Ronald Rychlak and Denis Mack Smith have all landed blows that have tended to undermine the prosecution’s more extreme positions.

Noel himself rightly acquits the Pope of anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism, arguing that his silence over the Holocaust, was ‘motivated by a sense of duty towards the Catholic Church’, which he feared would suffer grievously if he spoke out. He also genuinely feared that the Jews themselves would suffer, for, as the Pontiff put it, ‘No doubt a protest would have gained me the praise and respect of the civilised world, but it would have submitted the Jews to an even worse fate’. He based this upon the effect that the Dutch Catholic bishops’ outcry had against the fate of the Jews in Holland, after which the Nazis responded by killing 80 per cent of all Dutch Jews and refusing to recognise conversions to Catholicism (although they did to Protestantism).

Pius also weighed the perceived dangers to the sovereignty of the Vatican City in his calculations, as well as his Church’s ability to continue to protect tens of thousands of Italian Jews from Nazi persecution, including an estimated 3,000 at his summer residence alone. This is one of the most studied and debated aspects of the second world war, even though it is doubtful that even the harshest papal encyclical would in reality have done anything much to stymie the plans of men like Himmler and Heydrich. Pius was naive to believe that a protest would have made European Jews’ situa tion worse, however, since by the autumn of 1941 the Final Solution was already under way. After Rome was liberated in June 1944, the Pope could have at least threatened to excommunicate leading Nazis, as he did anyone voting Communist in the Italian elections of 1948.

Noel describes Pius XII as a ‘spiritual megalomaniac’ who ‘agonised over the fate of the Jews (and other Nazi victims) but put their fate second to that of his Church’. Yet the Pope consistently underestimated the spiritual power of the Church in southern Germany, undermined the Catholic antiNazi Zentrum party before the war, and failed to protest even when he knew from scores of sources that the Nazis were murdering thousands of Catholic priests across Eastern Europe, especially in Poland. ‘In retrospect,’ concludes Noel perceptively, ‘we can see that Hitler played the Pope with consummate expertise.’ (Noel also believes that Pius’ postwar visions of Our Lord appearing to him in his bedroom at St Peter’s were hallucinations brought on by the cellular rejuvenation treatment that lengthened his life, but which also induced ‘blood-curdling screams’ in the papal apartments. He might well be right, although if the Almighty had chosen to return to Earth, then a visit to his vicar here might well be the obvious place to start.) Pius XII was ascetic, hardworking, frail, compassionate, logical, pious, subtle and highly intelligent, but over the single greatest issue of his life he was plainly wrong. Of course he should have protested vigorously against the Catholic Ustashe regime in Croatia killing Orthodox Serbs, the massacre of the gypsies and above all the genocide against the Jews. In any other period of history he would have made a fine Pope, but in the one that also contained Adolf Hitler he found himself politically and diplomatically at a loss. Although Noel is right to point out that the Pope’s ‘decision to stay silent over the fate of the Jews caused him acute distress, it was as nothing compared to theirs’. The present plans to canonise him should be quietly but definitely dropped.

One who opposed Pius XII’s policy of silence from within the Vatican was the first American to achieve the rank of nuncio, or papal ambassador, Joseph P. Hurley. As the first biographer of Hurley to have full access to his private archive, the Jesuit priest Charles R. Gallagher recreates the internal debates that went on in St Peter’s over the question of what the Church should say about the Nazis’ maltreatment both of Jews and of Catholic priests. Hurley believed that the Pope should say in public what he thought in private, that Hitler was ‘not only an untrustworthy scoundrel but a fundamentally wicked person’. (According to Gallagher this was ‘the only known time he ever personally expressed disdain for Hitler’.) Hurley was — possibly rightly — thought of as President Roosevelt’s placeman in the Vatican, which is one of the reasons that his views were not adopted, and this book relates the discussion that took place between Roosevelt and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli at FDR’s upstate New York home, Hyde Park, in 1936. According to the President’s recollection in 1943, the future Pope — then Vatican secretary of state — had said that the United States was ripe for a Communist take-over. FDR disagreed, saying that in fact the genuine peril was of America going Fascist. ‘No,’ said Pacelli. ‘Yes,’ said Roosevelt. ‘Mr President, you simply do not understand the terrible importance of the Communist movement,’ said Pacelli. ‘You just don’t understand the American people,’ FDR claimed to have replied.

This book also makes the plausible case that in the Twenties, Pacelli originally ‘saw Hitler’s Nazism as merely a political ruse. Aware that Hitler’s earliest ostensible political alliance was with the German Workers’ Party in 1919, Pacelli remained suspicious of Hitler as a politician of the left.’ He certainly told the US consul in Cologne, as late as 1939, that Hitler was not a true Nazi and that he ‘in spite of appearances would end up in the camp of the left-wing Nazi extremists where he began his career’. With such thinking, it is hardly surprising that Pope Pius XII failed to appreciate the true threat that Hitler posed to Christendom, and to respond to it effectively. These two books — both written by devout, lifelong Catholics — will not aid the Pope’s adherents’ hopes for his canonisation.