Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War (review)

Building upon his important study The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930– 1965,¹ Michael Phayer has produced a significant work, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, which illuminates the choices that the Vatican made under Pius XII during the Second World War and the years immediately following. At the outset, Phayer informs his readers that he has no intention of entering into the debate over the worthiness of the case for Pius XII's sainthood. Similarly, he dismisses the work of apologists whose sole goal is to portray Pius XII in the most positive light possible. Instead, Phayer examines Pius XII in his role as a politician and leader of the Vatican state. He bases his findings on a wide variety of primary sources located in the US National Archives, including recently released papers of various US government agencies; the papers of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, housed in the Archives of the Catholic University of America; and the records of both the pontificate of Pius XI (1922–1939) and the German Reichssicherheitshauptamt, microfilmed copies of which are located in the Archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Despite his use of such diverse sources, Phayer believes that recent books such as Gerhard Besier's The Holy See and Hitler's Germany and Peter Godman's Hitler and the Vatican (which utilized Vatican documents from Pius XI's pontificate) reveal that historians have a lot more to learn from the materials the Vatican has yet to release.² Although more about this period will be discovered when the Vatican opens documents pertaining to Pius XII's pontificate (1939–1958), historians should be glad that Phayer has written this book now because the result of his efforts is an insightful work that helps the reader to understand why Pius XII responded so apathetically to the murder of European Jews.

Phayer does not take the path of some current authors whose assessments essentially demonize Pius XII for his inaction in the face of the Holocaust. Rather, Phayer seeks to understand and contextualize the pope's choices during this horrific period. According to Phayer, chief among Pius XII's concerns was communism, which he viewed as inherently evil and absolutely detrimental to the Church's visible salvific mission. At the same time, Phayer stresses that the Church's teaching of supercessionism—the theology advocating the belief that Christianity's covenant with God has replaced Judaism's Mosaic covenant—enabled Pius XII to place the welfare of the Catholic Church far above the plight of European Jews. As Phayer writes, "If Jews did not convert, their destiny lay out of the reach of the Church because they had broken the covenant" (p. 255)—a covenant that the Church had newly received. Although Pius "deplored the murder of the Jews," Phayer concludes, "for Pope Pius, Hitler was not killing God's chosen people, for the Jews had long since given up their birthright" (p. 256).

Phayer sheds light on the supercessionist argument only late in his work. Prior to discussing its ramifications, he presents ample evidence to bolster his conclusions. For example, he recounts that despite regular appeals from Polish bishops, Pius XII remained silent while the murder of approximately three million Polish Catholics took place at the hands of their Nazi occupiers. Instead of condemning the treatment of Poles, Pius XII encouraged the Poles to conduct themselves like the biblical figure Job and to bear their sufferings nobly. According to Phayer, Pius advocated such a response in order to keep Germany strong in the face of Soviet communism, for it would serve as a "bulwark against the spread of Russian communism in the west" (p. 40).

Such a strategy did not mean that Pius did not challenge acts of genocide at all. Phayer makes this clear when he alters his previous interpretation of Pius's 1942 Christmas message, viewing it now as a protest against genocide. Phayer cites the Dutch bishops' subsequent protest against...