Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace (review)

Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace. By Margherita Marchione. (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 2000. Pp. ix, 345. $22.95 paperback.)

Sister Margherita Marcione has, in the media when the career of Pius XII was an issue, shown thorough scholarship and admirable clarity in expression. It is a delight, therefore, to welcome a full-length study, especially confronting expertly the campaign of falsification directed against the great Pope. The myth of the "silent pope" was put in circulation by a playwright, no historian, Rolf Hochhuth, in Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy) put on by a brilliant impressario, Erwin Piscator, in Berlin in 1964. Shortly after its appearance, at the trial of the surviving Auschwitz personnel, the first and greatest historian of the Holocaust, Jeno Levai, Jewish, utterly repudiated Hochhuth, as he did to me when some years later I discussed the matter with him. Jewish historians praise Pius XII for his rescue of Jewish lives; one historian puts the figure at 860,000. No one else did anything; the Allied Powers refused to bomb the railway line to Auschwitz, though their planes were flying over it.

It is a complicated story and Sister Margherita provides the reader with the means of clearly unravelling it. She is eminently trustworthy, for all through her chapters the facts are nailed down by irrefutable documentary evidence.

The author proceeds in an admirable order. She first deals in a general, comprehensive way, with the pontificate of Pius XII, showing how different opinions and interpretations, hostile to the Pope, do not stand up in face of the unassailable evidence. She then takes different subordinate elements or aspects of the story. Sister Margherita assures publication to the important texts which crushingly reply to Hochhuth: that the Polish leader, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Sapieha, told the Pope that public protest made things worse. The Pope put it thus, speaking to the College of Cardinals: "Every word we address to the competent authority on this subject, and all our public utterances, have to be carefully weighed and measured by us in the interest of the victims themselves." He saw the grim reality in Holland. His great Jewish apologist, Pinchas Lapide, told me that he heard a German general say in court that retaliation was official policy in answer to protest. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is the eminent witness. She was taken to Auschwitz in retalitaion, with others, for the Dutch bishops' protest. At war's end 29 per cent of Dutch Jews had perished; in nearby Belgium, on the papal policy, 23 per cent of Belgian Jews escaped.

I commend especially Sister Margherita's account of what Jews, eminent in their community, and representative Jewish bodies proclaimed at the time in thanks to Pius XII. As she has pointed out elsewhere, it is Jews who did not live through the Holocaust, latterday members of the community, who have criticized the Pope. One did so for his silence about an event when he was not Pope!

I draw the reader's attention to a most enlightening feature of the book I am reviewing. The author reproduces the texts verbatim of three proved authorities on our subject: an interview with Father Peter Gumpel, S.J., relator of the cause of beatification of Pius XII. This man's family were victims of the Nazis. But, as he says, his sole intention is to honor truth. The second authority is Father Robert Graham, S.J., one of the editors of the Vatican wartime documents, with "Church, Shoah and Anti-Semitism." I enjoyed the friendship of this wonderful man, possibly the only scholar who would place the results of his research at the immediate disposal of another. He helped me in preparing my book on the Pope. I just cannot overpraise him. The third document is from another member of the Vatican editorial team, Father Pierre Blet, S.J. When John Paul II was challenged on the career of...