Pio XII: Eugenio Pacelli. Un uomo sul trono di Pietro (review)

"Who was Eugenio Pacelli…?" Thus Andrea Tornielli launches his biography of Pope Pius XII. A "vaticanologist" and contributor to the Italian newspaper Il Giornale, Tornielli attempts to rescue Pacelli from many of what he considers unfair judgments; that the pope was a "centralizer"; that he was "isolated and aloof"; that he was "cold, unfeeling, detached, cowardly, obsessed with the Communist danger"; and that he was either weak in the face of the Nazi dictatorship or that he was devious in his dealings with it. Using both published works and newly released documents and depositions taken from his beatification process, particularly interesting letters between Eugenio and his brother, Francesco, Tornielli develops a sympathetic case. Pacelli emerges as a real and reasonable person who must deal as best he can with the world around him. To add to his political concerns, for example, in 1926 Pacelli confided to Francesco his fears of stomach cancer. That is the strength of Tornielli's book. This is, after all, a biography that has claims to a readership much broader than the scholarly community. Unfortunately, Francesco died in 1935, or on page 253, and Tornielli loses a good source. He supports much of the rest of the work on his strength as a polemicist. In this the author takes sides in the ongoing debate over Pius's conduct in World War II and casts his lot with the "defenders." This attempt to redress the balance, however, has its limits, and his lively and provocative arguments push Pio XII past the boundaries of conventional scholarly treatment. At one point he even reveals a frustration in the contrasting and stereotyped images of "Pacelli 'cattivo'" and "Ratti 'buono'" (p. 175); emphasizing that Pius XI acknowledged to the French ambassador his agreement with Hitler's anti-Bolshevik stance. Tornielli, furthermore, vehemently denies the accusations of a "certa pubblicista" that Pacelli "sold" the German Center Party to the Nazis as part of the deal over the 1933 Concordat.

Tornielli has already published extensively on Pacelli and the Holocaust and, in this biography, stresses that tensions surfaced early between the pontiff and the National Socialists. Caught in Weimar's ideological cauldron, for instance, Pacelli's suspicions distinguish an early, 1923 letter to Cardinal Gasparri that lamented Nazi attacks on the Catholic clergy. Tornielli recounts how, after the Lateran Pacts, Pacelli returned to Rome as secretary of state and found new battles with Italian fascism and, later, Hitler's regime. The author devotes a chapter to the "seventy useless protests" delivered by the Holy See to Berlin between 1933 and 1937. Many of these complaints, however, dealt with holding Nazi rallies on Sundays or with details on religious education. More profound is Pius's anguish over Nazi brutality and murder during World War II. Here Tornielli's attention to the personal tells a more convincing story. After 1945 the cold war enabled Pius to focus on the Communist threat. Tornielli, however, is careful not to overplay Pius's anti-Communism, which he locates "probably . . . at the root of the 'black legend' of his inexistent philonazism" (p. 481). Such passages, again, call into question the author's scholarly detachment and lead the student to investigate other sources on Pius's life. Philippe Chenaux's recent and less polemical Pie XII, in particular, will be translated from French into Italian but, to this reviewer's knowledge, awaits an English treatment. A comparison between Tornielli's and Chenaux's books may favor the latter.