The papacy of Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) began on 2 March 1939 and continued to 9 October 1958, covering the period of the Second World War and the Holocaust, during which millions of Jews were murdered by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Before becoming pope, Cardinal Pacelli was a Vatican diplomat in Germany and then Vatican Secretary of State.
His role during the Nazi period has been closely scrutinised and criticised. His supporters state that Pius employed diplomacy to aid the victims of the Nazis during the war and directed his Church to provide discreet aid to Jews and others, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of lives. They also state that the Nazis viewed Pius as an Allied sympathizer who failed to honor his policy of Vatican neutrality. Pius maintained links to the German Resistance and shared intelligence with the Allies of World War II, but also developed alliances with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, even arranging secret negotiations with Hitler's envoys. His most overt public condemnation of genocide was considered inadequate by the Allies, and contemporary and post-war critics have asserted that Pius was either overly cautious or did not take sufficient action and that his response to the Holocaust was characterized primarily by silence . Supporters, by contrast, have held that he ordered his Church to provide sanctuary and aid to Jews and thus saved thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of Jewish lives. They also state that he provided moral and intellectual leadership in opposition to the violent racism of Nazi ideology.
As Secretary of State, Pacelli had been a critic of Nazism and helped draft the 1937 Mit brennender Sorge anti-Nazi encyclical. In Summi Pontificatus (1939), his first papal encyclical, Pius XII expressed dismay at the invasion of Poland (though without ascribing blame); reiterated Catholic teaching in support of universal brotherhood and endorsed resistance against those opposed to the ethical principles of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.
In December 1942, once evidence of the industrial slaughter of the Jews had emerged, Pius's lengthy Christmas address included a brief section voicing concern about the murder of "hundreds of thousands" of "faultless" people because of their "nationality or race". The degree of Pius's efforts to block Nazi deportations of Jews remains a matter of scholarly debate. Upon his death in 1958, Pius was praised emphatically by Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir and other world leaders. United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower called him a "foe of tyranny" and a "friend and benefactor to those who were oppressed".West Joins in Tributes to Pope Pius; The Canberra Times; Oct 10, 1958 However, his insistence on Vatican neutrality and avoidance of directly naming the Nazis as the evildoers of World War II became the foundation for contemporary and later criticisms. Studies of the Vatican Apostolic Archive and international diplomatic correspondence continue.
Background Two Popes reigned during the Nazi period: Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). The Holy See strongly criticized Nazism through the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, with Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) being a particularly outspoken critic. In 1933, the Vatican signed a Concordat, known as the Reichskonkordat, with Germany, hoping to protect the right to practice Catholicism under the Nazi government and government support for Catholic education. The concordat was controversial then and now, and its terms ended up not being kept by Hitler. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica: "From 1933 to 1936 [Pius XI] wrote several protests against the Third Reich, and his attitude toward fascist Italy changed dramatically after Nazi racial policies were introduced into Italy in 1938."
Pius XI offered three encyclicals against the rising tide of European totalitarianism: Non abbiamo bisogno (1931; "We Do Not Need to Acquaint You" – against Italian Fascism); Mit brennender Sorge (1937; "With Deep Anxiety" – against Nazism) and Divini redemptoris (1937; "Divine Redeemer" – against atheist Communism). "Non abbiamo bisogno" directly challenged Italian fascism as a "pagan" movement which "snatches the young from the Church and from Jesus Christ, and which inculcates in its own young people hatred, violence and irreverence". Pius XI also challenged the extremist nationalism of the Action Française movement and antisemitism in the United States.
With Europe on the brink of war, Pius XI died on 10 February 1939 and Pacelli was elected to succeed him as Pope Pius XII. The Nazi Government was the only government not to send a representative to his coronation. Pius lobbied world leaders hard to avoid war and then pursued a policy of cautious diplomacy following the outbreak of the war.
From around 1942, the Nazis had begun to implement their Final Solution – the industrial extermination of Europe's Jews.
1933-1937 In July 1933, Pacelli, then Vatican Secretary of State, signed the Reichskonkordat with the Nazi government. The concordat promised freedom to practice Catholicism, but required German bishops to take the following oath: Before God and on the Holy Gospels I swear and promise, as becomes a bishop, loyalty to the German Reich and to the State (Land) of . . . I swear and promise to honour the legally constituted government and to cause the clergy of my diocese to honour it. With dutiful concern for the welfare and the interests of the German state, in the performance of the ecclesiastical office entrusted to me, I will endeavour to prevent everything injurious which might threaten it. The concordat further stated, "On Sundays and official holy days, a prayer conforming to the liturgy will be offered at the end of the principal Mass in parish, auxiliary and conventual churches of the German Reich, for the welfare of the German Reich and (German) people." The treaty guaranteed government support for Catholic education, adding, "In religious education, special emphasis will be given to inculcating a patriotic, civic and social sense of duty in the spirit of the Christian faith and the moral code, just as happens in all other subjects." Members of the Catholic clergy were now prohibited from joining political parties. "Due to the special situation existing in Germany, and in view of the safeguards created by the clauses of this concordat of legislation preserving the rights and privileges of the Catholic Church in the Reich and its states, the Holy See will enact regulations to exclude the clergy and members of religious orders from membership in political parties and from working on their behalf."
While this treaty with Nazi Germany was being negotiated, Cardinal Karl Joseph Schulte of Cologne warned that "no concordat could be concluded with such a government.". Bishop Konrad von Preysing circulated a memo to a conference of German bishops saying, "We owe it to the Catholic people to open their eyes to the danger for faith and morals which emerge from National Socialist ideology." Ivone Kirkpatrick, the British minister at the Vatican, described a conversation shortly after the treaty was signed in which Pacelli made efforts "to explain apologetically how it was that he had signed a concordat with such people."
Hitler wrote about the Reichskonkordat, "The conclusion of the concordat seems to me to give sufficient guarantee that the Reich members of the Roman Catholic confession will from now on put themselves without reservation at the service of the new National Socialist state. Commenting on the treaty's public relations benefits, he wrote, "The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgment of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion of National Socialism is hostile to religion is a lie." In July 1933, Hitler said, "The concordat gives Germany an opportunity and creates an area of trust that is particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry."
As it turned out, Pacelli filed some 55 complaints about violations of the Reichskonkordat between 1933 and 1939; the historian Martin Gilbert stated that during these years Pacelli repeatedly protested the Nazi "ideology of race". Pacelli also helped Pius XI draft the 1937 Mit brennender Sorge critique of Nazi ideology. Written partly in response to the Nuremberg Laws, the document did not refer to Hitler or the Nazis by name, but condemned racial theories and the mistreatment of people based on race. In 1938, Pacelli publicly restated the words of Pius XI on the incompatibility of Christianity and antisemitism: "It is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is inadmissible; spiritually we are all Semites."
1938
Hungarian Eucharistic Congress Cardinal Pacelli (the later Pope Pius XII) addressed the International Eucharistic Conference that took place in Budapest, Hungary between 25 and 29 May 1938, and, according to Holocaust scholar and historian Michael Phayer, described the Jews as people "whose lips curse [Christ] and whose hearts reject him even today". Phayer asserts that the timing of the statement, during a period when Hungary was in the process of formulating new antisemitic laws, ran counter to a September 1937 statement of Pius XI urging Catholics to honour their spiritual father Abraham. citing
Historians Ronald Rychlak and William Doino Jr. have argued that Pacelli was not referring to Jews because Time Magazine did not mention this in its report of the conference. According to Rychlak and Doino, Pacelli referred to those who were persecuting the Church at that time by doing things like expelling religion and perverting Christianity, and since Jews were not doing this, but Nazi Germany was, the Pope "was clearly equating the Nazis, not Jews, to those who persecuted the Church at earlier times". Gabriel Wilensky, while accepting that Pacelli may indeed have alluded to communists and Nazis earlier in the speech, rejects Rychlak and Doino's interpretation that excludes Jews. He notes that Pacelli's comments were stereotypical of the way the Church once portrayed Jews as Christ-killers and deicides. (See also La Civiltà Cattolica and Nostra aetate.)
The influential Vatican journal La Civiltà Cattolica continued to print attacks against Hungarian Jews during this period, asserting that Hungary could only be saved from Jewish influence, which was "disastrous for the religious, moral, and social life of the Hungarian people", if the government forbade them entry to the country. Holocaust historian Paul O'Shea notes, "There is no evidence that he [Pacelli] objected to the anti-Jewish rants of Civiltà Cattolica, which, as Secretary of State to Pius XI, he at least tacitly approved. The Pope or his Secretary of State gave the final fiat for the journal's editorial content. There is no way that Cardinal Pacelli could not have known of the Judeophobia written in Civiltà."
Hidden encyclical Walter Bussmann argued that Pacelli, as Cardinal Secretary of State, dissuaded Pope Pius XI – who was nearing death at the time – from condemning Kristallnacht in November 1938, when he was informed of it by the papal nuncio in Berlin. Likewise, a draft, prepared by September 1938, for an encyclical Humani generis unitas ("On the Unity of the Human Race"), was, according to the two publishers of the draft text and other sources, not forwarded to the Vatican by the Jesuit General Wlodimir Ledóchowski. On 28 January 1939, eleven days before the death of Pope Pius XI, a disappointed Gundlach informed the author La Farge: "It cannot continue like this. The text has not been forwarded to the Vatican."