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.)

The latest round of the controversy over Pius XII, the Nazis, and the Jews is, frankly, beginning to pall. After Cornwell's Hitler's Pope, and then Blet's Pius XII and the Second World War, now we have Sister Marchione's offering, but these books are not getting us anywhere. The real problem is that the debate has the wrong focus: it should be about Catholic, not to say Christian, anti-Semitism and its relationship to the Holocaust, not Pius XII. The Pope is being used as a scapegoat. It is no more helpful to our understanding of the Christian contribution to the Holocaust to say that Papa Pacelli was a demon than it is to present him as a saint. While Cornwell has exaggerated Pacelli's responsibility for the triumph of Nazism (hence the absurd and misleading title) and underestimated his role and that of the Vatican in saving victims of Nazism, his detractors, including Fathers Blet and Gumpel and Sister Marchione are ignoring very serious issues.

Sister Marchione does, however, raise some important issues, one being the sharp distinction she makes between Christian "anti-Judaism" and racial anti-Semitism. But it is implausible to argue that there was no link between the two: the one was the origin of the other, even if, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was overlaid with a coating of Social Darwinism. The French Assumptionist newspaper La Croix and the Jesuit fortnightly La Civiltà Cattolica demonstrate this clearly. In early 1920, when the Vatican was seriously concerned about the Balfour Declaration's commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the Jesuit journal wrote: "The Jews are seeking to accumulate their money by taking it from Christians, regarding it as their legitimate right as chosen people to take possession of the spoils of Egypt." And I could cite even worse examples.

An issue closely linked to the foregoing is the behavior of bishops, clergy, and laity during the Holocaust, which is again obscured by the obsession with Pius XII. While many bishops, clergy, and laity were undoubtedly heroic in their response, by hiding Jews and similarly persecuted groups, others were less than active. The situation varied from place to place, the most humanitarian response coming from such countries as Holland, Hungary, and, above all, Italy, but was mixed to say the least in occupied Poland, Vichy France, and Germany. In Slovakia, as Monsignor Domenico Tardini, Vatican Under Secretary of State, pointed out, it was a downright Christian scandal that a country whose president was a priest (the infamous Monsignor Tiso) was happily deporting Jews to Auschwitz. And the general passivity of bishops and priests confronted by the massacres of Serbs in "Greater Croatia," not to mention the role of Franciscan priests in the concentration camps, stands as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Christianity.

Sadly, I cannot recommend Sister Marchione's book for enlightenment on these vexed issues. It would be much better, if you read Italian, to get a hold of a copy of Giovanni Miccoli's book, I Dilemmi e Silenzi di Pio XII: Vaticano, Seconda Guerra mondiale e Shoah (Rizzoli). And if you do not, wait until it is published in English because it is a carefully considered, scholarly book of great clarity and understanding.

John F. Pollard
Anglia Polytechnic University, England

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