The wartime pope and his successors

The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War by Jacques Kornberg (University of Toronto Press)
'The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War' by Jacques Kornberg (University of Toronto Press)

Pope-watching is a challenging business these days. Pope Francis, like John Paul II, asserts his position on pressing issues of political and social importance. Last month in Nairobi, Francis toured urban slums and spoke out against what he called “new forms of colonialism, which would make African countries parts of a machine, cogs on a gigantic wheel.”

While he spoke out against the threat of “faceless private developers” encroaching on slum playgrounds, he criticized countries that “adopt policies typical of the culture of waste, like those aimed at lowering the birthrate.”

Without the full transcript of Francis’ Nairobi speech, it is impossible to guess at how a “culture of waste” would be propelled by a lower birth rate. But certainly, inveighing against birth control in a developing country places him in the company of all the modern popes, including the socially conservative Pope John Paul II, reaching back to Pope Leo XIII, whose papacy began in 1878. In its foreign policy, the papacy has been unremittingly guided by the belief that religious principles trump all other forms of political idealism.

The repercussions of this phenomenon are the focus of The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War.  One understands Francis’ public performance after reading Kornberg’s detailed study of Pope Pius XII’s response to the German destruction of European Jewish communities. Jacques Kornberg develops his comparative approach by examining the equally passive responses of Pius’s predecessors to human catastrophes in Belgium, Armenia and Ethiopia.

Pius XII ascended to the papacy in March of 1939, with Europe well under the shadow of war.  Before this, he played a key role as the Vatican Secretary of State – in this position he was known as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli. It was Pacelli, in 1933, who negotiated the Concordat between the Church and Hitler. This agreement reflected the popularity of Nazism among German Catholics, and it was aimed, above all else, at preventing moves by the German Reich to further dismantle German church authority, educational institutions, and the rights of religious marriage.

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This Concordat between the Vatican and the Nazi Reich – now a historical detail that is largely overshadowed by wartime events – encapsulates the Vatican’s guiding principles with regard to the rise of Nazism in competition with the Christian faith. It would stand, too, as a set of guiding principles by which to respond to atrocities perpetrated by Catholic Nazis, as well as to knowledge of widespread dispossession and mass murder of Jews in occupied Europe.

Kornberg highlights the Vatican’s unwillingness to voice direct opposition to wartime events by singling out the rare European cardinal or bishop who wrote, often privately and in great agitation, to ask the pope to speak out. In Hungary, Apostolic Nuncio (or ambassador)  Angelo Rotta publicly petitioned Hungarian ministers in response to the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. In Poland the church was a direct target of German persecution.  Kornberg tells the tale in numbers. In one archdiocese – that of prewar Posen – there were “681 secular priests, and 147 in religious orders, making 828 prior to the occupation.

By October 1941, of these, 74 had been executed or had died in concentration camps, 41 were in jail or concentration camps, and 120 had been deported to other parts of Poland . . . .  Of 441 churches in the archdiocese, 396 were sealed shut by the authorities or expropriated for other uses, leaving 30 churches for Poles to worship in and 15 for ethnic Germans.”

In response to this devastation the pope did not encourage Poles to actively resist German occupation, and offered little in response to “a barrage of pleas from Polish bishops and the Polish government-in-exile.” The most outspoken among these was Archbishop Sapieha of Krakow, Poland’s senior wartime cleric. Sapieha’s secretaries were sent to a concentration camp, while Sapieha was tailed by the Gestapo.  In the Vatican’s view, in light of these events, appeasement of the German regime remained tantamount, since the “salvation of souls required pastoral care, the churches open, bishops in authority, priests available, and the sacraments at hand.”  Opposition, in the Vatican’s view, would threaten “the church’s role in the care of souls.”

In the course of Kornberg’s wide-ranging argument, which addresses prewar efforts and wartime in numerous European countries, he reiterates this equation as he examines Vatican foreign policy, the background discussions underlying this policy, as well as Pius XII’s leadership.

The Pope’s Dilemma paints a dark picture of the depiction of Jews in Vatican sources before and during the war. Europe’s Jews were consistently characterized as perpetrators of deicide and as a threat. In the late 1930s, a characteristic piece in the Jesuit journal Civilità Cattolica argued that Jews undermined Christian society. Upon the fall of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, in 1943, the Roman Church did not call for the abrogation of the Italian anti-Jewish decrees modelled on the German Nuremberg Laws.  Rather, an exemption was added for Catholics of Jewish descent from the decrees’ far-reaching goal of excluding Jews from civil society.

The reader’s experience of Kornberg’s detailed argument is akin to a weaker fighter at the hands of Muhammad Ali. Each new fact, scenario, anecdote is like a blow against which one has no argument or defence. The overall effect is one of defeat – Kornberg calls it “moral failure” – the absolute absence of anything redeeming in the historical tableaux.

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Pope Pius XII “adhered,” Kornberg tells us, “to the mainline Catholic theology of his time, which required that he avoid condemning Catholics complicit in Axis crimes, so as not to alienate them from the Church.” His priorities, Kornberg adds, “were spiritual.”

What can one say in response to this moral equation? Primo Levi’s formulation was that morality should not be understood as laws handed down from on high, but instead, as rules of behaviour derived from actual experience and action.

When the present Pope looks out over a crowded Nairobi slum and inveighs against the “colonial” character of birth control, one might think a translator has somehow failed the journalist of record.  But upon reading Kornberg’s record of Pius XII’s response to German genocidal acts, one understands Francis’s logic in terms clear and astonishing.


Norman Ravvin is a writer and teacher in Montreal.