Reflections on the modern attacks against Pius XII.
“I have said that Pius XII gives the impression of being a man patiently awaiting his martyrdom. He has already narrowly escaped it. At his coronation the German ambassador was heard to say: ‘Very moving, very beautiful, but it will be the last,’ and the moment came during the war, under the German occupation, when the end was expected. It was said that Hitler had uttered the threat of razing the Vatican to its foundations, and it is certainly true that the administrator one day received orders from ‘the one up there’ to draw up a plan for instantly summoning the ambassadors of the great powers to St. Peter’s, so that the Pope, if necessary, could make an announcement of the utmost importance. But the threat of death or exile passed: the order was revoked. Now the danger threatens again…”
So wrote Graham Greene in 1951, in an essay on Pius XII. The danger he saw, approaching menacingly, came from behind the Iron Curtain; the danger that had passed was that of Nazi Germany.
Greene was writing at a time when the heroism of Pius XII during the war was universally praised. The efforts of the Vatican diplomatic corps in the various countries occupied by the Germans, where the sinister Eichmann sought his prey, had received the congratulations of all free men, and above all of the inhabitants of the new State of Israel. Groves had been planted in honor of the Pope and of many of his nuncios, especially Cardinal Roncalli who, as nuncio in Istanbul, had been Pius’s right hand in the rescue of the Jews. Pius XII escaped martyrdom in life, but after his death he has been the victim of the martyrdom of vilification, defamation, and incredible falsification.
The campaign to denigrate Pius XII has had a success beyond the dreams of mendacity. Stalin’s efforts to undermine papal authority had no more success than Hitler’s. In fact, during the Pope’s lifetime there were no serious challenges to his efforts during the war and especially before the war, when he was Vatican Secretary of State in the time of Pius XI. For that reason, there are and have been few criticisms of the way in which Pius conducted the various affairs of the Church other than the public and diplomatic activities that interest the secular historian. In his 1950 encyclical, Humani generis, Pius XII had summarily dealt with the revival of modernism in the so-called Nouvelle théologie (“new theology”). He handed over to his successor John XXIII (Roncalli) a Church in which everything was in its place, so that when John convoked the ecumenical council that would be known as Vatican II, he said that he wanted a pastoral council, since there were no doctrinal disputes or difficulties. When Pius XII died in 1958, the chorus of admiration increased. All world leaders — with the exception of the Soviets and those who were under the Russian boot — raised Pius XII to the skies. A few years later, all that changed.
The principal cause of the change was Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. In it, the wartime pope is portrayed as indifferent to the fate of the Jews under Hitler and even as collaborating with the Nazis in the Holocaust. Such a work could only have come out of a Germany that had seen the art of lying propaganda reach unsurpassed heights of perfection with Goebbels and Hitler. The technique was to launch a lie so enormous that any attempt to refute it would be seen at least as a partial admission of guilt. Rolf Hochhuth had grown up under the Nazi regime. He entered the Hitler Youth at the age of ten. Later he would describe his experience as something similar to the Boy Scouts, but of course this was not altogether accurate. Like many Germans, like his family, Rolf believed in the propaganda of the regime and expected a thousand-year Reich. More crushing than the defeat of 1945, more depressing than the mountain of rubble to which Germany had been reduced, was the abhorrence directed toward his country. No doubt, like many other Germans, young Rolf believed in the Final Solution, Hitler’s effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. A defeated nation was also a moral pariah.
The praises of Pius XII after his death increased Rolf’s muted resentment. Rolf was a Protestant, and it irritated him greatly that a Pope should receive such a secular canonization. In this mood, Rolf unexpectedly came across a book, written by a Catholic, that detailed Pius XII’s efforts to save the Jews. In it, the author offered the empty judgment that the Pope “could have done more.” Rolf seized upon it and turned it into the portrait of a Pope in connivance with the Nazis, refusing to pronounce the word that would have stopped everything, in fact more guilty than Germans such as Rolf Hochhuth. The former member of the Hitler Youth had found the safety valve for releasing his own burden of guilt. And that of his country.
That the play was an obvious historical absurdity has been demonstrated again and again over the decades since the appearance of The Deputy. But the lie is so gigantic that the refutations seem rather like trifling indications of a guilty conscience. Moreover, the play made possible the appearance of attacks on Pius XII that came not from behind the Iron Curtain but from Jewish writers. Why would Jews attack a man who had done so much for them during the Hitler years? In response to these surprising echoes of Hochhuth in the work of Jewish historians, Pinchas Lapide, who had served as a Jewish soldier in the British army in the liberation of a camp in Italy, counterattacked by making a systematic estimate of what the Pope and his nuncios had truly done during the terrible years of the Second World War. He concluded that the number of Jews whom Pius XII saved from certain death at the hands of the Nazis could reach one million, but that it could safely be set at around 860,000 Jewish lives. Eight hundred and sixty thousand!
Considering that about two million Jews in all were rescued from Hitler’s clutches, Pius’s achievement is clear. It is also clear that no other person or group even came close to the achievement of Pius XII and his nuncios. But did Lapide’s book settle the question? Alas, it did not. The roar of criticism against Pope Pius continues, and even increases. Why? Jewish authors may be motivated by something similar to what motivated Rolf Hochhuth. There were many heroic efforts on the Jewish side to rescue their coreligionists from the occupied territories during the Second World War, but that effort was compromised by the struggle between Zionist and non-Zionist Jews, with the result that, as Jewish historians admit, Jews elsewhere did less than could have been done for European Jews. Pius XII was a hero in Israel at the end of the war, and remained so at the time of his death. Today there are no longer Jews in the front ranks of his admirers.
Besides the motive already indicated — blaming the Pope for his success because of the inadequacy of the Jewish effort — there is the Vatican’s attitude toward the State of Israel. The Popes have not signed on to the Israeli agenda, particularly on the matter of the fate of Jerusalem, and this causes resentment. Lapide, who was part of the Israeli government, joined the other Jews in criticism. For these and other reasons it has become a commonly accepted opinion among Jews that Pius XII sympathized with the Nazis and did little or nothing to rescue Jews from the clutches of the Gestapo. Hochhuth, the worthy successor of Josef Goebbels, devised a lie about Pius XII that over the years has grown like a snowball since he set it rolling.
The lowest point in this assassination of character is reached by those authors who continue to call themselves Catholics despite their rejection of central dogmas of the faith. Disguised as ashamed Catholics, they join the assault on Pius XII. The infamous efforts of Gary Wills and James Carroll in this new chapter of anti-Catholicism have been greeted by the old enemies of the Church with the same joy once shown by the readers of Maria Monk. These supposed Catholics are very reminiscent of those ignorant Jews who joined the Nazi party. It has become increasingly clear that for these Judases the target is not really Pius XII. Rather, it is the Church and her teachings, which these writers refuse to accept; and they try to oppose her by denigrating the Church as an institution. It is no surprise at all that such critics are obsessed with sex.
The great cross of these “Catholics” is Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae. That the Church would not give her approval to the sexual revolution of the 1960s was a great shock to many Catholics who had misunderstood the intention of Vatican II. For more than a quarter of a century they have tried to present Paul VI’s insistence on the nature of the marital act as a betrayal of Vatican II. But these new conciliarists have no support in the Council. Nor in the long tradition of the Church’s teaching. Nor even in common morality. In these times, when the West is being swept along by a wave of uncontrolled sexuality that has brought the weakening of the family, of the marital bond, and of the natural relationship between parents and children — not to mention the disease and physical misery that have accompanied “guilt-free” sex — the Church is attacked for refusing to become a citizen of Sodom and Gomorrah! It is not only true that the truth sets free; it is also true that falsehood enslaves. Now the vilifying bullies turn against John Paul II, who is the archenemy of those “Catholics” who presume to speak in the name of the Council.
Good and bad historians, with or without prejudices, will make their judgments about the Pope. In doing so they will be guided by the criterion with which they undertake their task, a criterion of the greater or lesser relevance of the role that Pope has played in the Church. This gives rise to variations in the histories that are written, and indicates, as Cardinal Newman suggested, that all histories are partial. The attacks on Pius XII cannot be explained by these honorable variations in historical accounts. There is something diabolical in this campaign to show the Church of Christ as an enemy of humanity, as an obstacle to progress and happiness. Diabolical, but not new. From the account in Genesis, and throughout the whole Bible, Satan is portrayed as a liar. There is no truth in him. Under his banner march those who show good as evil, truth as falsehood, and Pius XII, the best friend the Jewish people ever had, as their enemy.
Author: Ralph McInerny, editor of Catholic Dossier and author of The Defamation of Pius XII (St. Augustine Press).
