Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII by Robert A. Ventresca (review)

This is clearly the most extensive biography of Pope Pius XII yet written. Based on original sources in the Vatican, Rome, Germany, Britain, and the United States, and written in clear narrative style, it will not totally please either side in the “Pius Wars.” It does, however, give us greater understanding of the man at the center of the most turbulent pontificate since the French Revolution.

Canadian historian Robert A. Ventresca argues that the dispute over Pius has led us to see the pope as less a man than an institution. His aim is to correct this tendency. This is not an easy thing to do, for inevitably the author has to answer the troublesome questions that have been asked for years about Pius, both as man and institution. The most important of these are his problematic relations with Germany, his silence on the Holocaust, and his alleged connivance in the ratlines that abetted the escape of Nazis and fascists after 1945.

Thus, the book falls into three periods. The first takes up Eugenio Pacelli as a Roman with a strong sense of family loyalty in a Rome that was undergoing cultural modernization. It carries through to his years in the seminary, the papal diplomatic corps, as nuncio to Bavaria and Germany, and finally to his years as papal secretary of state where he faced his most challenging problem in dealing with Nazi Germany. According to Ventresca, the German bishops, who feared Bolshevism and were concerned with political stability, guided Pacelli’s relations with Germany in a period that dated before the Nazi rise to power and ended after their defeat. These bishops counseled restraint in dealing with Adolf Hitler, and Pacelli adopted their approach. It became the chief means of Vatican diplomacy during the war—a policy of maintaining neutrality along with guarded criticism so as to preserve diplomatic relations with the warring powers. As secretary of state and as pope, he carefully worded all public statements, for “he simply saw no practicable alternative” (p. 157). Instead of speaking out forcefully on wartime problems, he favored allowing bishops on the scene to decide whether to speak out or not.

When the war began shortly after he became pope in 1939, his first concern was to lessen the agony of the Poles under both German and Soviet domination. Ventresca states that the long-suffering Poles wanted a papal declaration—“a simple but powerful exposition of the Christian message”—but instead, because of Pius’s fears of German reaction, they received “the cerebral casuistry of an academic and the diplomatic propriety of a statesman” (p. 176).

On the central question of the Holocaust, Ventresca uses the published documents skillfully. He portrays Pius with “a limited ability to perceive the precise nature of the Nazi war against the Jews” (p. 176) because of his background and training. Pius viewed the attack on the Jews as a political issue and therefore as not the primary concern of the Church. Notes Ventresca,

His insistence on maintaining the public face of impartiality undermined the political credibility of the papacy, and worse yet, left the institution vulnerable to the charge that he had failed the test of moral leadership at one of humanity’s darkest hours.

(p. 178)

Ventresca does not give any special insight into the roundup of the Roman Jews in October 1943, and he does not mention at all the pope’s failure to condemn the affirmed Catholic Croat Ustasha’s systematic murders of Serbian Orthodox and Jews during the war—probably the single occasion where the pope had the greatest opportunity to lessen suffering.

The last third of the book covers the years after the war—a period not sufficiently plumbed by historians—which gives clearer insight into Pius. He had to craft a message to show that he had clearly condemned Nazi antisemitism, even though he had...