Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (59 page)

He was elected, as everyone knew, to be pope in time of total war, a role for which everything about his career – his diplomatic skills, his gift
of languages, his sensitivity and intelligence – all equipped him. But there were complications. He had been Nuncio for many years in Germany, spoke fluent German for preference with his own household, and although he loathed and despised Nazi racial theory, he loved German music and culture. Moreover, like Pius XI he saw Soviet Communism, not Nazism or Fascism, as public enemy number one. He had been in Munich in 1919 during the Communist uprising there, and had been threatened by a group of Communist insurgents armed with pistols. He had faced them down, but the experience marked him for life with a deep fear of socialism in all its forms.

The allies therefore would be suspicious of his pro-German as well as his pro-Italian sympathies. Deeply committed to the papacy’s role as spiritual leader of all nations, he spent his first months as pope in a hopeless effort to prevent the war. As he declared in an impassioned speech in August 1939: ‘nothing is lost by peace: everything may be lost by war.’ Once it began, he would struggle to avoid taking sides, to promote peace at every opportunity, to seek to prevent atrocities and inhumanity, yet to avoid sprinkling holy water on the arms of either side. In a war which came increasingly to be seen as a crusade against tyranny, that balanced stance became daily more difficult, and came to seem less and less tolerable in the leader of Catholic Christendom. Pacelli himself was not entirely consistent. Longing for a negotiated peace, and recognizing that this was impossible while Hitler was alive, in 1940 he personally acted as intermediary between the Allies and a group of army plotters in Germany who were planning to murder Hitler. He anguished over the morality of this, and concealed his actions from even his closest advisers. At the heart of all his actions was an increasingly timid indecisiveness, a diplomatic sophistication in which the weighing of every contingency seemed to paralyze action.

His difficulties came to focus on the question of Nazi genocide against the Jews. The Catholic Church had a bad record on the Jews, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Many Catholics thought of the Jews as the murderers of Christ, and Hitler had learned a good deal about the political appeal of anti-Semitism from early twentieth-century rightwing Catholic parties in Austria and Germany. But official Church teaching ruled out the racial theories which underlay Nazi policy, and as the war progressed the Vatican built up an appalling dossier on Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Pressure mounted on the pope to speak out, not only from the Allies, who wanted a papal denunciation as propaganda
for the war effort, but from his own advisers. He was operating Benedict XV’s policy, but in a different war, and a different world. To many of those around him, the moral circumstances seemed qualitatively different, and Pacelli himself sometimes felt it. It took, he told the Archbishop of Cologne, ‘almost superhuman exertions’ to keep the Holy See ‘above the strife of parties’.
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By temperament, training and deep conviction, however, Pacelli flinched away from denunciation. He had none of his predecessor’s fiery impulsiveness, and the increasingly plain-spoken asides which had punctuated papal speeches in the last years of Pius XI were now a thing of the past. In his peace broadcast of August 1939 he wrote into his typescript a direct reference to Germany: ‘Woe to those who play nation against nation … who oppress the weak and break their given word’.
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But he thought better of it, and crossed it out again, and never spoke the words. He was a diplomat, and like his first mentors Cardinal Gasparri and Benedict XV he believed that prophetic denunciations closed doors, narrowed room for manoeuvre. Vatican funds were diverted into rescue measures for Jews, and he did all he thought possible to protect the Jews of Rome, offering to lend fifteen of the fifty kilos of gold demanded as a ransom for the safety of the Roman Jews by the German head of police there in 1943.

Yet the question was whether what the cautious and diplomatic pope thought possible did in fact exhaust the options open to him, and whether it was adequate for the urgency of the occasion. When the Jews of Rome were rounded up in October 1943 Pacelli’s protest was characteristically muted and oblique. The Cardinal Secretary of State, Luigi Maglione, earnestly lobbied Ernst von Weizsacker, the German ambassador, to intervene on behalf of the Jews. When Weizsacker asked what the pope would do ‘if these things continued’, Maglione told him that ‘the Holy See would not want to be obliged to express its disapproval.’ But he left it up to Weizsacker to decide how much to say to the German high command and after the deportation of the Roman Jews Weizsacker told Berlin of his relief that the pope ‘has not allowed himself to be stampeded into making any demonstrative pronouncement against the removal of the Jews from Rome’.
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Nevertheless, as pressure on the Italian Jewish community mounted, Roman religious houses were opened as places of refuge – 5,000 Jews were sheltered there and in the Vatican itself. Historians have recently questioned the pope’s direct
involvement in these relief measures, but at the time he was widely credited with having saved tens of thousands of Jewish lives, and after the war, the chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic and took the baptismal name Eugenio.

It is clear from Maglione’s intervention that Papa Pacelli cared about and sought to avert the deportation of the Roman Jews. But he did not denounce: a denunciation, the pope believed, would do nothing to help the Jews, and would only extend Nazi persecution to yet more Catholics. It was the Church as well as the Jews in Germany, Poland and the rest of occupied Europe who would pay the price for any papal gesture. There was some weight in this argument: when the Dutch Catholic hierarchy denounced measures against Jews there, the German authorities retaliated by extending the persecution to baptized Jews who had formerly been protected by their Catholicism. Pacelli, moreover, was anxious to ensure a role for the papacy as peacemaker by maintaining papal neutrality. Given his horror of Communism, he was not prepared to denounce Nazi atrocities while remaining silent about Stalinist atrocities. Yet how could the oracle of God remain dumb in the face of sins so terrible, so much at odds with the Gospel of the Incarnate? The American representative to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, told Mgr. Tardini, one of the Pacelli’s two principal Vatican aides, ‘I’m not asking the Pope to speak out against Hitler, just about the atrocities.’ Tardini confided to his diary ‘I could not but agree’.
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At the end of 1942 Pius did give in to the mounting pressure, and in his Christmas address included what he believed to be a clear and unequivocal condemnation of the genocide against the Jews. He called on all men of good will to bring society back under the rule of God. This was a duty, he declared, we owe to the war dead, to their mothers, their widows and orphans, to those exiled by war, and to ‘the hundreds of thousands of innocent people put to death or doomed to slow extinction, sometimes merely because of their race or their descent’.
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Both Mussolini and the German Ambassador, von Ribbentrop, were angered by this speech, and Germany considered that the pope had abandoned any pretence at neutrality. They felt that Pius had unequivocally condemned Nazi action against the Jews. But not everyone agreed. To the Allies, and not only to them, but to some in the Vatican, it seemed a feeble, oblique and coded message, when what was demanded by the horrifying reality was something more fiery and direct. Pius XI, they were certain, would have acted differently. This feeling was largely silent
in Pius XII’s lifetime, and after the war it was the Vatican’s immense humanitarian efforts – Vatican officials had processed no fewer than 11, 250,000 missing persons enquiries – which attracted attention and gratitude. It erupted in public controversy over Rolf Hochhuth’s play
The Representative
in 1963, however, which portrayed an avaricious and anti-Semitic Pacelli as refusing to make any efforts on behalf of the Jews of Rome in 1943, and controversy has raged since.

For many people, the moral credibility of the papacy and the Catholic Church had been radically compromised. Pius XII’s actions were vigorously defended by those nearest to him, including Cardinal Montini, who had been his closest adviser on such matters during the war, and the integrity and humanity of whose own role was accepted by everyone. But clearly the accusations of moral failure cut deep, and in the wake of Hochhuth’s play the Vatican took the unprecedented step of appointing a team of Jesuit historians to publish everything in the archives that bore on Vatican involvement with the War and especially with the Jewish question. The resulting eleven volumes of documents decisively established the falsehood of Hochhuth’s specific allegations, but did not entirely exorcise the sense that the troubling silence and tortuous diplomacy of the Vatican had more to do with Pius XII’s oblique and timid sensibility than with rational prudence, much less prophetic witness.
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Controversy revived in the 1980s with suggestions that the ‘ratline’ from Rome to Latin America, down which Nazi war-criminals like Klaus Barbie and possibly even the Gestapo chiefs Martin Bormann and Heinrich Muller had escaped, was a Vatican network. Pius XII dreaded Communism above all, and some at least of these former fascists were viewed in Rome, it was alleged, as defenders of the faith. The accusations were far-fetched in the case of figures like Bormann and Muller, but were given considerable weight by the Vatican’s failure to condemn the actions of the Catholic fascist wartime Ustashe regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia. Pius XII and his wartime staff were aware of Ustashe atrocities against Croatian Jews and Orthodox Christians, and privately intervened to condemn and attempt to restrain them, but once again diplomacy prevailed, and there was no open denunciation. After the war, a large number of refugee clerics and others accused of war crimes in Croatia were given shelter on Vatican property. There can be no doubt that pro-Nazi Austrian and Croatian clerics in Rome, and right-wing Catholic circles in France, actively concealed and assisted such war criminals.
Some at least of the fugitives travelled on Vatican identity papers. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Vatican at least tacitly connived at some of these escapes.

Even while Europe was plunged in total war, however, theological renewal had begun within the Catholic Church. Despite the stifling intellectual atmosphere inherited from the anti-Modernist era, there had emerged in Germany and France, particularly in the intellectual orders of Dominicans and Jesuits, a movement away from the rigidly hierarchical understanding of the Church which had prevailed since the First Vatican Council. These new movements emphasized the spiritual character of the Church, rather than its institutional structure, and pointed to the liturgy of the Mass and Breviary as a rich source of understanding of the nature of Christianity. There was a renewal of interest in the writings of the Early Christian Fathers, with a consequent downplaying of the ‘timeless’ authority of the more recent theological orthodoxies dominant in seminaries and text-books. The Jesuit Henry de Lubac pointed the Church back to the writings of the Greek Fathers in particular, while the French Dominican Yves Congar urged the importance of the corporate dimension of the Church, and the active role of every Christian within it, not simply as obedient foot soldiers under the military rule of the hierarchy.

These currents of thought began to appear in papal utterances. Between 1943 and 1947 Pius XII published three theological encyclicals, each of them in different ways opening up new and hopeful avenues for Catholic theology. In
Mystici Corporis
the pope proposed an organic and mystical model of the Church as the Body of Christ, supplementing the political model of the ‘perfect’ (meaning ‘complete and self-contained’) society in which the pope was general or chief magistrate, which had dominated Catholic thinking for three centuries. In
Divini Afflante
the pope reversed the suspicion of biblical scholarship which had stifled Catholic theology since 1910, recognizing the presence in the Bible of a variety of literary forms which made any straight-forward ‘fundamentalist’ reading of scripture inadequate. In
Mediator Dei
, published in 1947, the pope placed the renewal of a more participatory liturgy at the heart of the renewal of Catholicism.

These documents had their limitations.
Mystici Corporis
, despite its emphasis on the organic nature of the Church, identified the Church of Christ absolutely with the visible Roman Catholic Church (to the implicit exclusion of all other Christian bodies) and remained disproportionately
preoccupied with the hierarchical dimension and the centrality of the papacy.
Mediator Dei
warned against over-eager ‘liturgizers’, and showed how long Roman memories could be by including an attack on the ‘pseudo-synod’ of Pistoia of 1786, and its liturgical reforms. Nevertheless, their cumulative effect as the world emerged from total war was an almost miraculous liberation for theology within the Church. The intellectual and imaginative freeze which had set in the wake of the campaign against Modernism began to thaw. Pius himself followed up these initiatives in the early 1950s by practical reforms like permission for evening Masses, the relaxing of the need to fast from midnight before receiving communion, and above all by reforming and restoring the heart of the ancient liturgy, the moving and powerful ceremonies of Holy Week, which for centuries had been in abeyance.

But this was a false dawn. Pius at heart was deeply conservative, increasingly fearful of the genie he had let out of the lamp. His early papal utterances had often called for ‘audacia’, daring, in action. In the last ten years of his life that word virtually disappeared from his vocabulary. In August 1950 he published another encyclical,
Humani Generis
, in which he warned against the dangerous tendencies of the new theology, attacking the historical contextualizing of dogma as leading to relativism, and warning also against a ‘false irenicism’ towards other Christian traditions which would lead to compromise over fundamentals of the faith. He called on bishops and the superiors of religious orders to prevent the spread of these new and dangerous opinions. No one was named, but that made the impact of the condemnation all the worse, widening the net of suspicion to anyone whose views were considered unconventional. A new attack on theologians began, and many of the most distinguished of them, like the great French Dominicans Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu, were silenced and forbidden to teach or publish.