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Reviewed by:
  • A Cross Too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli. Politics and the Jews of Europe 1917-1943
  • John T. Pawlikowski
A Cross Too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli. Politics and the Jews of Europe 1917-1943, Paul O'Shea (Kenthurst, NSW: Rosenberg Publishing, 2008), 392 pp., pbk., $35.00.

In the ongoing discussion of the record of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust, Paul O'Shea sounds a new voice. A historian and educator, he is a founding [End Page 138] member of the Australian Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and serves as Senior Religious Education Coordinator at St. Patrick's College in Strathfield, Australia (near Sydney).

O'Shea's volume does not bring forth new scholarly material on Pius XII; the author's most important contribution to scholarship on the subject is the way he frames his discussion of the available documentation. Far too many works on Pius XII focus almost exclusively on his time as pope and examine his record through the lens of the Church's sordid history of antisemitism. O'Shea, on the contrary, works in a wider context. He describes Pacelli's formative experiences as a student and, most important, interprets Pius' actions as pontiff within the setting of Catholicism's twentieth-century struggle to come to grips with political forces in Europe. Few other scholars take this broader view—a perspective that I deem essential for a fully developed interpretation of Pius' papacy. Regrettably, many scholars working on the question of Pius XII's legacy have little or no background in the broader history of Catholicism or in world politics in the first half of the last century. Yet, the Catholic Church's ideological struggle with liberalism and socialism, as well as critical events such as the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, played important roles in shaping the Vatican's response to the rise of Nazism. O'Shea's book, if taken seriously by other historians, will significantly alter the framework for further discussion of Pius XII. This is, therefore, unquestionably its most important contribution to the continuing scholarly debate.

In the opening chapter, O'Shea outlines the central issues related to the examination of Pius XII's actions. He likewise offers a succinct outline of his overall understanding of Pacelli's papacy. For O'Shea, Pacelli was a leader whose training was strongly influenced by theological anti-Judaism and the concrete anti-semitism it often generated in European society. His understanding of the Church and its leadership was marked by commitment to a policy of reserve—one which, in his mind, would best guarantee the safety and security of the Catholic Church in a changing European context. O'Shea would insist that Pacelli was far from indifferent to the increasing plight of the Jews, and did what he could to speak out against the Nazi persecution of the Jews. However, the Pope's response was conditioned by his overall policy of political caution and his understanding of his papal duty to protect the Church as an institution. O'Shea portrays Pacelli as possessing a sharp moral sensitivity regarding the situation of the Jews, but lacking the passion to make it a papal priority. The problem, as O'Shea views it, was that Pius XII's perspective was simply too narrow for the moral challenge he faced. Pius was reactive rather than proactive on this issue.

O'Shea begins his evaluation of Pius XII with background information about Pacelli's education, particularly the formation of his identity as a priest. The author contends that Pacelli was trained in a theological tradition in which Judaism was seen as obsolete after the coming of Christ. In O'Shea's view, this training was [End Page 139] quite influential in determining Pacelli's later course as a Church leader after the Nazis rose to power.

O'Shea is certainly on target in his description of the prevailing theological mindset in Catholicism during Pacelli's formative years. I suspect he may also be correct in his claim that this theological mindset continued to impact Pacelli's thinking about the Jewish question as papal secretary of state and subsequently as pope. But the historian would regard this claim as...

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