Another Form of Heroism

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - October 10, 2008

Yesterday the Church marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Pope Pius XII, the man chosen by God to lead the Church during one of the most terrible times in human history.

Born in Rome in 1876, Eugenio Pacelli grew up in a home that was a school of civic and church leadership. His grandfather was Minister of Finance and Secretary of the Interior for the last 19 years of the papal city states. His father was the dean of the Sacred Roman Rota. His brother was the top civil lawyer for Pope Pius XI and negotiated the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Holy See.

At 12, Eugenio discerned that God was calling him to be a priest, gave up his family's plans for him to become a lawyer, and dedicated himself to priestly studies. At 23, he earned a triple crown of doctorates in theology, civil law and canon law. After two years as parochial vicar of Rome's Chiesa Nuova, where he had been an altar server, he was assigned to the Vatican Secretariat of State, where his talents were immediately put to good use working with Cardinal Pietro Gasparri in the first codification of canon law. By the age of 35 in 1911, he had become secretary of the Vatican's foreign ministry.

In 1917, Pope Benedict XV appointed him papal nuncio to Bavaria as well as representative to Prussia, where he assisted in the negotiations to bring World War I to an end. He remained as a popular nuncio in Germany through the tumultuous times of the Weimar Republic, until he was named a Cardinal and appointed Vatican Secretary of State in 1929. From Rome he continued his difficult diplomatic work with Germany, to prevent what he saw as the rising menace of Nazism under Adolf Hitler and secure the legitimate rights of the Church. After the death of Pius XI in 1939, Cardinal Pacelli was elected the 261st successor of St. Peter on the third ballot.

An incredibly hard worker, during his 19-year pontificate he wrote a staggering 41 encyclicals and composed about a thousand other discourses, allocutions, letters and documents. He renewed the Church's liturgy, spurred Biblical scholarship, proclaimed the dogma Mary's Assumption, revitalized the Church's self-understanding as the Mystical Body of Christ, and related Catholic teaching to almost every aspect of modern life, from education, to medicine, politics, war and peace, marriage, and the life of the saints. The theological richness of his pontificate laid the groundwork for much of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.

What Pius XII is most remembered for, however, is his conduct during the Second World War, particularly with respect to the Jews.

During the war and after it, he was unanimously considered a hero by almost everyone except the Nazis. He repeatedly spoke out in measured, prudent, but unambiguous terms about the evil of the Holocaust. This outraged the Nazis but led the New York Times in 1941 to call him "a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe." He instructed not only Vatican personnel but religious houses throughout Europe to do all they could to hide Jews lest they be deported to concentration camps. Jewish theologian and Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide, in an exhaustively documented 1960s work on the pope's activities during the war, estimated that Pius was "instrumental in saving at least 700,000 but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands." He was praised as a "righteous gentile" and praised by Israeli Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Moshe Sharett, President Chaim Weizmann, and Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog. Rome's Chief Rabbi, Israel Zolli, was so moved by Pius XII's hidden heroism during the war in favor of Italian Jews, that he ended up converting to Catholicism. For his baptismal name, he took Eugenio, in honor of the Pope.

Papa Pacelli's actions were held in near universal esteem until five years after his death, when a communist playwright in Germany, Rudolf Hochhuth, published a play called The Deputy. In it, he portrayed Pius XII as a wimpy fraud who remained silent during the war because he was indifferent to the fate of the Jews. After the fall of the Soviet Union, KGB files came to light that showed that the Soviet agency and various Marxist secret societies concocted the outrageous calumny that Pius XII was a Nazi sympathizer in order to discredit the Church's moral authority and weaken Christianity in the west. The propaganda campaign largely worked. Almost overnight, Pius XII was successively downgraded — especially among those segments in the media and academy generally unsympathetic to the Church — from hero, to coward, to hypocrite, to scoundrel, to Hitler's pope.

The question can and should be asked: Why didn't Pius XII speak out more explicitly against the Nazi atrocities or excommunicate Nazis who happened to be Catholic? Why was he content only to condemn in general terms those who "simply on account of their nationality and origin, have been killed or reduced to utter destruction?"

The fundamental reason is because Jewish leaders and bishops in Nazi-occupied lands had begged him not to, fearing that it would just incite the psychopathic Hitler to retaliation, something that could lead to his killing even more Jews than he already was, and perhaps even raiding the churches, monasteries and convents where Jews until then had successfully been hiding. This was a lesson Jews and Christians alike had already learned in Holland after Church leaders spoke out forcefully against Nazi inhumanity.

Another reason he didn't speak out more forcefully was because he didn't have to: everyone already knew what he was saying between the lines. As the London Times stated in 1942 about the Pope's declarations, "A study of the words which Pope Pius XII has addressed since his accession leaves no room for doubt. He condemns the worship of force and its concrete manifestations in the suppression of national liberties and in the persecution of the Jewish race."

It is tempting in hindsight for some to look back as armchair pontiffs and declare that Pius should have acted differently, but he was concerned fundamentally with saving as many lives as he could from a genocidal madman in a situation in which normal rules no longer applied. Heroism can adopt different forms. Sometimes — and this is hard for the rash to understand — more lives can be saved by diplomatic prudence than verbal kamikaze missions.

One person intimately acquainted with both the evil of Nazism as well as the burdens of the papacy has pointed toward Pius XII's character and courage through it all.

In addressing a group of Jewish scholars from the Pave the Way foundation three weeks ago, Pope Benedict said that his predecessor's 50th anniversary "provides an important opportunity to deepen our knowledge of him, to meditate on his rich teaching and to analyze thoroughly his activities.

"When one draws close to this noble Pope, free from ideological prejudices, in addition to being struck by his lofty spiritual and human character one … can come to appreciate the human wisdom and pastoral intensity that guided him in his long years of ministry, especially in providing organized assistance to the Jewish people… Wherever possible he spared no effort in intervening in their favor either directly or through instructions given to other individuals or to institutions of the Catholic Church… Given the concrete situation of that difficult historical moment, only in this way was it possible to avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews. This courageous and paternal dedication was recognized and appreciated during and after the terrible world conflict by Jewish communities and individuals who showed their gratitude for what the Pope had done for them."

Pope Pius XII simply did the work of over 600 Oskar Schindlers.

The 50th anniversary of his death is a time to set the record straight — and to thank God for him.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.