There
are commentators on the sports channels whose numbing dialogues would
never be confused with the Algonquin Round Table. These are the
so-called Monday Morning Quarterbacks. Some historians quarterback that
way. Pope Pius XII, hailed in his lifetime as a protector of persecuted
people, has suffered in reputation from lax minds who never exercised
themselves in the great contests of civilization.
There is increasing evidence that attempts to misrepresent the Pope
as feckless and even criminally compliant, began as the work of
Communist propagandists, seminally in East Germany at the direction of
Moscow. This was taken up later by people either uninformed or
polemical. An impressive number of works have been published recently to
correct this, and to them I can only add from my own studies a few
details in the anguish of the most terrible years of the 1940’s.
As a child, Eugenio Maria Giuseppi Pacelli was moved by the early
Roman martyrs, and told his uncle that he wanted to be a martyr, but
“without nails.” As Pope, his crucifixion without nails began when the
diplomat confronted the Evil One who has two faces and hides one.
Pacelli became well aware that the strengths of diplomacy can strain
the apostle, which is why the only one of the Twelve Apostles who was a
diplomat, hanged himself. As a youth sensitive by nature and tutored at
home because, according to his sister, he could not take the bad food
in seminary, he had the gifts and limitations of a rarified formation.
The grandson of an Interior Minister in the Papal States was reared in
an intensely clerical world, and one far removed from the nuclear age he
would live to see.
He was born on the day that Rutherford B. Hayes was
declared president, and three years before Newman was made a
cardinal. That early environment cultivated his lifelong propensity for
baroque effusions, such as his display after the bombing of the
Basilica of San Lorenzo, which greatly annoyed the historian Philip
Hughes, an admirer, for its contrast to papal serenity during other more
distant and rebarbative devastations.
The Fascist propagandist, Farinnaci, saw the Vatican and its Pope as
an enemy in his crosshairs. In 1942, he wrote: “Undoubtedly, we could
not agree with the Vatican Wireless broadcasts of sympathy for Jewish
Poland; the telegram sent to the Protestant Queen Wilhelmina; the
considerable contribution made to the Holy See a few years ago by the
Jews; …the appointment of Jews to posts in the Vatican City, almost in
defiance of our anti-Semitic (and therefore Catholic) policy.” To
corroborate Farinacci’s case, Jewish prisoners in an Italian
concentration camp in Tossica, sent a letter to the Pope who was a
“revered personality who has stood up for the rights of all afflicted
and powerless people.”
Around Christmas of 1942, the Vichy government in their collaboration
with the Nazis under Laval as head of government distinct from Petain
as chief of state, complained about the “Vatican cliques” who “fly up in
the air every time it is a question of the descendants of Christ’s
Murderers.” On September 2, The New York Times headlined:
“Laval Spurns Pope—25,000 Jews in France Arrested for Deportation.”
Laval had already exploded in anger against Monsignor Valerio Valeri,
dean of the diplomatic corps in France, for speaking out against the
government’s anti-Semitism and deportations of Jews.
On September 12, 1942, ten days after German troops entered
Stalingrad, exiled Poles and Belgians sent a plea to the pope to condemn
Nazi war crimes. The Pope did not respond, possibly because in the
previous year when he had condemned the racial legislation of the new
pro-Nazi republic of Slovakia the German SS retaliated with mass
executions of 3,500 Jews in Lodz, Poland.
Also in 1942, Joseph Goebbels published ten million copies of a
pamphlet condemning the Vatican’s attempt to protect Jews by enabling
hundreds to flee Poland for Spain and Portugal, and sequestering many in
the Vatican. For such acts, The Pilot, then an influential
Catholic newspaper in Boston, compared Pius XII to other papal
protectors of Jews: Sixtus IV, Clement VII, Eugenius III, Gregory IX
and Pus XI.
The journals of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, formerly a German spy in
Spain and later a counter-spy for the Allies, explain not only how he
had persuaded Franco not to allow German troops to attack Gibraltar
through Spain. A devout Catholic. he also foiled Hitler’s attempt to
kidnap or assassinate both Pius XII and King Victor Emmanuel after the
1943 arrest of Mussolini at the king’s orders.
From a different perspective, in June of 1942, Bishop Veglia in
Yugoslavia, lamented Vatican silence about Italian atrocities among the
Croat and Slovene populations annexed to Italy: “…the people are, alas,
more and more losing trust in the Catholic Church and loyalty to the
Holy Father, while on the other hand they are being thrown into the arms
of Communism, in which they are beginning to see the only element which
will defend them in the forests against the cruelty of the Italian
elements.”
On Christmas Eve, 1942, Pius XII famously broadcast a message to the
world, nuanced by his mindfulness of the failed strategies of Pope Leo X
with the German princes, and Pope Pius V with Queen Elizabeth I. The New York Times
said of the Pope: “This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice
crying out in the silence of a continent.” Bishops took up the message
and, for instance, Archbishop Gounot in Tunisia, anticipating the Allied
landings in French North Africa, denounced the Vichy persecution of
Jews.
In Belgium at the start of 1943, the Germans would not let Cardinal
van Roey publish the Pope’s Silver Jubilee address, and the Italian
government banned the film “Pastor Angelicus” about the life of the
Pope. In that same January, the London Tablet commented on the
tendency to think that more would have been accomplished by a louder
protest from more bishops: “If there exists a vague atavistic memory
that once Popes and Bishops spoke, and wicked Kings trembled, that
salutary thing happened because the public opinion of the day had a much
fuller and deeper sense of the rights and importance of spiritual
authority. Modern men, who have for so long applauded the narrowing
down and emptying of that authority as the emancipation of mankind from
the thralldom of superstitions, can hardly be surprised if, as a rule,
prelates in the modern era tend in prudence to limit themselves to the
field indubitably conceded to them by public opinion.”
In a letter to Bishop von Preysing on April 30, 1943, Pius XII
described with unusual candor the theory behind his subtlety “We give to
the pastors who are working on the local level the duty of determining
if and to what degree the danger of reprisal and of various forms of
oppression occasioned by episcopal declarations…seem to advise caution.
Here lies one of the reasons, why We impose self-restraint on Ourselves
in our speeches…The Holy See has done whatever was in its power, with
charitable, financial and moral assistance.” The U.S. diplomat Harold
Tittman recorded how anti-Nazi resistance leaders consistently had urged
the Pope to follow this policy.
In May of 1943, the secretary of the Jewish Agency for Palestine
asked the future Pope John XXIII, “to thank the Holy See for the happy
outcome of the steps taken on behalf of the Israelites in Slovakia.” At
the same time, the Pope granted an audience to Dr. Kazimierz Papee, the
informal representative of the Polish government in exile to the Holy
See. As recounted by the historian Dariusz Libionka, and mentioned in
his own journal, Papee had expressed to the Papal Secretary of State,
Luigi Cardinal Maglione, his exasperation with the Pope’s hesitancy to
speak about the Polish situation in other than diplomatic language.
According to Papee’s own memoirs, the Pope abandoned diplomatic reserve
to berate him: “I have listened again and again to your representatives
about our unhappy children in Poland. Must I be given the same story
again?” In his memoir, “Pius XII I Polska,” Papee recalled that the
Pope raised his arms in the air as he reprimanded him. Pope John XXIII
had Papee removed, at the start of his pontificate. In the same week of
this strained conversation, the Nazi-controlled Radio Paris broadcast:
“As soon as the Fuhrer assumed power in 1933, the Vatican let loose its
hostility…National Socialism tried to settle all conflicts with the
Church; the Church rejected the hand offered to her. May she bear the
responsibility for this in the annals of history.”
The German ambassador to the Holy See, Baron Ernst von Kessel, was
by all accounts, even that of Churchill, secretly sympathetic to the
Allies, He was convinced that Hitler intended to occupy the Vatican,
which he thought would be disastrous, especially if the Pope were shot
“fleeing while avoiding arrest.”
That did not happen, and Pius XII became a “martyr without nails.”
No Monday Morning Quarterback with any self-respect can say that Pius
XII did not try his best, and indeed did more than most of the players
on that historical stage of the war years, conspicuously in contrast to
the mendacity of President Roosevelt in his whitewashing of the Katyn
Massacre and the short shrift he gave to the resistance leader Jan
Karski. Churchill, whom Pius first met in London in 1911 during a
Eucharistic Congress, called him “the greatest man of our time.” During
an audience in 1944, Churchill was surprised at the vehemence with
which the Pope urged strict justice for war criminals. An eloquent
defender of capital punishment in Thomistic terms, Pius told a Swiss
reporter: “Not only do we approve of the [Nuremburg] trial, but we
desire that the guilty be punished as quickly as possible, and without
exception.” The diplomat in Pius was frustrated by the position of
Monsignor Jozef Tiso as chief of the Slovakian state. A Nazi puppet,
Tiso always wore clerical dress and never suffered canonical censure.
The Pope received him privately in audience more than once. But
diplomacy worked when Tiso yielded to the Pope’s sixth formal plea to
stop deportation of thousands of Jews. After the war, Tiso was hanged
in his clericals as a war criminal. However, nothing was done to the
Herzegovenian Franciscans in the Ustashe center near Medjugorge, whose
complicity in the killing of hundreds of Serbian women and children was
described by Cardinal Tisserant as an abomination.
Pius XII’s diplomatic character was his triumph with civilized men
and his anguish with barbarians. Had he died a martyr with nails, his
legacy could not have been suborned by demagogues. Diplomats tend to
live longer than prophets, but to fault diplomacy for not having done
what a longer view judges should have been done, can be a self-serving
form of detraction. American Indian wisdom has it that you should not
judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins. It is
harder to walk in the Shoes of the Fisherman, for there is a rare
succession of those elected to do that. The tension between diplomacy
and prophecy was the stuff of tragedy, and that made Pius XII a man of
his time, which was the most tragic in the annals of man.