The Pope at War: Pius XII, Hitler, and the Enigma of Silence

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler was published by Random House in June, 2022. It is 672 pages long, inclusive of black-and-white photographs, an appendix listing archival sources, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index.

Author David I. Kertzer (b. 1948), is Paul R. Dupee, Jr. University Professor Emeritus of Social Science, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Italian Studies, and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Kertzer received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for his 2014 book, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe.

Kertzer is the son of Rabbi Morris Kertzer, to whom he dedicates this book. Rabbi Kertzer was an Army chaplain during World War II; he led services on the Anzio beachhead. The New York Times described him as “a leader in strengthening relations between Jews and Christians.” Rabbi Kertzer’s books include  What Is a Jew? and The Art of Being a Jew.

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler became a bestseller, and it has received numerous accolades. Daniel Silva, an author of thriller novels, called The Pope at War “The most important book ever written about the Catholic Church and its conduct during World War II.” Haaretz called the book “A damning picture of a holy man who chose to remain silent about the mass destruction of European Jewry.” James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, reports that no one ever again need debate the role or character of Pope Pius XII. “With Kertzer’s magnum opus, the book on Pius XII is written, the dispute resolved, the case closed.”

Kertzer and his many colleagues whom he thanks in four-pages of acknowledgments have engaged in massive amounts of research, including in newly released Vatican archives. Kertzer reports on devastating material, including the mass murder of Jews and Pius XII’s baffling responses to those massacres. Kertzer  reports the most disturbing of facts in a dispassionate manner. The combination of Kertzer’s thorough support for his thesis and his perpetual emphasis on reporting objective facts without emotional appeals, self-indulgent rants, or heart-tugging flourishes render his conclusions unimpeachable. Kertzer argues that it is accurate to typify Pius XII’s response to Nazi crimes as silence. The pope faced many moments when another leader would have raised a voice of protest against, for example, the deportation of Jews to extermination camps. But Pius was silent.

For this reader, even this superb book presented drawbacks. What makes for awesome scholarship didn’t, for this reader, make for page-turning reading. Indeed, it would not be right to demand that a book that accomplishes all that this book accomplishes be a riveting read. Kertzer’s book, before I reached page 100, convinced me that Pope Pius XII was the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time. I still had hundreds of pages of forced march reading before reaching the book’s final pages.

Those hundreds of pages followed a predictable pattern, a pattern that was both highly disturbing and monotonous. Kertzer recreates diplomatic communications in wartime Europe. Some higher-up in the Nazi, Italian Fascist, or Vatican hierarchy, or a British, French, Polish, German or American diplomat, or a priest in Poland or a rabbi in the US, sent a letter or telegram, or conveyed an oral report, to someone else in the above chain. The recipient considered the document or oral communication, passed it on to someone else, who passed it on to someone else, and, eventually, Pius XII responded. His response was almost always to refuse to say anything to address Nazi crimes. This pattern repeats on page after page, for hundreds of pages.

Various factors have been suggested as to why Pius XII was silent. Kertzer acknowledges that Pius XII feared Communism, and that the Nazis attempted to sell Nazism to Pius and to others as a bulwark against a worse enemy, the USSR.

Kertzer does not detail why the leader of the Catholic Church would have reason to fear Communism in the mid-twentieth century. In fact Communist and other anticlerical regimes have a long history of mass killings of Catholics. Such massacres go back at least as far as the French Revolution. The Revolution didn’t just decapitate nuns. An estimated 200,000 French people died in the War in the Vendee, fought over the Revolution’s forced dechristianization. Tens of thousands died on both sides of the early-twentieth-century Cristero War in Mexico. The dead included twenty-five canonized martyrs to their Catholic faith. Bolsheviks killed thousands of clergy, mostly Orthodox Christians but including some Catholics. During the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, Republicans killed an estimated seven thousand priests, monks, and nuns, often in brutal ways, including through hideous acts of torture. None of this is addressed in any detail in the book.

Even those of us aware of these facts do not find in them an adequate excuse for Pius XII’s silence. As for the Nazis’ claim that they were a bulwark against Communism and its genocidal hostility to Christianity, the Nazis were themselves torturing and murdering priests and planned the elimination of Christianity. Pius XII received ample reports to be aware of that.

Another argument meant to exculpate Pius XII, one cited in Kertzer’s book, is that Pius XII felt that his role was to make sure that the Catholic Church would continue. Many assumed that the Nazis and their fascist allies in Italy would soon control all of Western Europe. It was Pius XII’s job, in his own view, to maintain a detente with fascists in order to make sure that churches still stood, mass was still said, and children could still attend Catholic school. None of these were reliable options in Republican Spain or the USSR. Pius also wanted to make sure that neither the Axis powers nor the Allies bombed sacred sites in Rome or the Vatican.

Kertzer repeatedly mentions Pius XII’s fear that speaking out would cause retaliation. The fear was that if Pius XII spoke out, Nazis might retaliate by increasing their persecution of vulnerable persons under Nazi occupation. After Pope Pius XI, Pius XII’s immediate predecessor, issued the 1937 anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (“With Burning Concern”), Nazis increased persecution – see here. Another event cited to support the “If we speak out Nazis will increase persecution” argument is the July 11, 1942, protest by Dutch bishops and other Christians. These sent a letter to a Nazi general protesting against Nazi abuse of Jews. Nazi retaliation followed. Previously, Dutch Jews who had converted to Catholicism were exempt from deportation; Nazis now included them.

The question of whether to take action against a powerful oppressor is a real one, under the Nazis or under any other oppressive force. It was a question for, for example, the Czech Jan Kubis and the Slovak Jozef Gabcik, the two men who, in 1942, attacked Nazi occupier Reinhard Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague.” In retaliation for this attack, Nazis wiped the entire Czech village of Lidice from the map.

For this reader, the fear of retaliation is not adequate to explain the silence of Pius XII. Protests and resistance did not cause the Nazis to commit a genocide of Jews or to send Lidice’s children to be gassed in the Chelmno extermination camp. Nazis committed atrocities without reference to resistance. As the civilized world allowed Nazi Germany to get away with its genocidal agenda, Nazi Germany escalated to the next step. Appeasement and silence, not protest, were the Nazis’ allies. People like Neville Chamberlain, not heroes like Gabcik and Kubis, bear responsibility for facilitating Nazi crimes. When facing evil like the Nazis, delaying confrontation merely raises the cost of inevitable confrontation. Alternate historians argue that had the West confronted Hitler militarily in 1938, in response to his demand for Czechoslovak territory, Hitler could have been beaten quicker and at a lower cost. Rather than confronting Hitler in 1938, the West appeased Hitler and handed over the small nation of Czechoslovakia to him. Just eleven months later, Hitler invaded Poland and began World War II in Europe. The cost in blood and treasure to defeat him at that point was massive.

Another possible explanation for Pius’ silence was his nature. Pius XII was an ascetic, that is a man who lived a life of self-discipline, hard work, and little sleep or food. He began working for the Vatican in 1901. He lived almost his entire life in Rome, except for the twelve years he spent in Germany as nuncio. Perhaps his lack of experience in the world beyond the Vatican handicapped him in dealing with intimidating fascist dictators. Some assessed Pius XII as too timid to stand up to fascists. The British ambassador assessed Pius XII’s refusal to condemn the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland as evidence of “pusillanimity.” At the conclave to elect Pius XI’s successor, in one assessment, Italian cardinals faulted the future Pius XII “for his weakness of character, for being too prone to bend to pressure.” French cardinal and curia member Eugene Tisserant assessed Pius XII as “too weak, too easily intimidated.” The Spanish ambassador said that Pius XII was “completely devoid of will and character.”

The one fact that is abundantly clear is that Pius XII liked Germans and Germany a great deal. Sister Pascalina, aka “La Popessa,” a German nun, ran his household. Pius XII took time out of his busy schedule to meet with German visitors to the Vatican, including soldiers, chatting with them in his fluent German, and telling them how much he liked their country. Germans and Poles have fought each other for hundreds of years; the largest battle in Medieval Europe, Grunwald, was between Germans and Poles. German culture is fertile ground for negative stereotypes of Poles, including the belief that Poles are a naturally chaotic inferior breed that benefits from German domination. Perhaps this view influenced Pius XII.

Pius XII trusted an Italian Monsignor, Angelo Dell’Acqua, as an advisor. Dell’Acqua included antisemitic comments in his advice. Dell’Acqua also used racist language to dismiss an account sent to Pius XII from Polish-born Andrey Sheptytsky. Sheptytsky was the Orthodox Archbishop and Metropolitan of Galicia. In 1942, Sheptytsky wrote to Pius XII as part of his efforts to help Jews. Sheptytsky described Germans mass murdering Jews. In response to Sheptytsky’s account, Dell’Acqua wrote to Pius XII, “Orientals are not in fact an exemplar of sincerity.” Racists considered Slavs as Asians and racially inferior to Western Europeans. In other words, Dell’Acqua accused Sheptytsky of lying, and lying because of his “Oriental” race.

Kertzer mentions Sheptytsky’s letter, but does not name him, nor provide biographical details. In fact Andrey Sheptytsky was an impressive man. At risk to his own life, he “publicly protested the murder of Jews and denounced his own congregants for participating in the violence,” according to the Times of Israel. Sheptytsky has been nominated to receive Yad Vashem’s “Righteous” recognition and he has also been nominated to be declared a saint. Jaroslav Pelikan assesses Sheptytsky as “the most influential figure …in the entire history of the Ukrainian Church in the twentieth century.” It’s important to note that such a significant Christian figure in Ukraine resisted the Nazis, rescued Jews, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to recruit help from the Vatican.

Many readers are sure that they are not as baffled by Pius XII’s silence as I am. They are convinced that they understand Pius XII, and indeed the Catholic Church, completely. Pius was an antisemite. The Catholic Church is antisemitic. The Catholic Church provided the historical runway for Nazism. Indeed, Kertzer has written another book, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, that makes that very argument.

The conclusions I draw are different from those that Kertzer and many other readers draw. Why is my reaction different? Let me explain. The other day I was chatting with a lovely health care professional. “Betty” is a Jewish American woman in her sixties. She has an advanced degree, she is published in peer-reviewed journals, and she works at one of the top-rated hospitals in the world in one of the wealthiest suburbs in the US. Betty mentioned to me that she recently performed a pilgrimage to Holocaust-related sites in Germany and Poland. I commiserated. I mentioned my own relatives’ significant victimization at the hands of the Nazis. Betty was visibly confused. “But you’re Catholic.” She was unaware that Nazis had ever mistreated Catholics, and she had no idea that Nazis had ever mistreated Slavs. Betty is not unique. I have had similar encounters dozens of times.

Michael C. Steinlauf, professor of Jewish history and son of Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors, wrote that Poles, “after the Jews and the Gypsies [were] the most relentlessly tormented national group in Hitler’s Europe.” Poland, according to one estimate, lost the second-largest percentage of its population during Nazi occupation; Belarus lost the largest. Before the September 1, 1939 blitzkrieg, Hitler ordered, “I have placed my death-head formations in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need.” Generalplan Ost was a Nazi plan to kill off most Poles and a lesser portion of other Eastern Europeans, save a remnant as slaves, and to take over Polish and other Eastern European territory for Germans. Beginning in 1941, Nazis murdered, usually by starvation, an estimated three million Soviet POWs. Before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Reinhard Heydrich prepared the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, a list of 61,000 Poles to be executed. In an initial implementation of Generalplan Ost, Einsatzgruppen were ordered to “decapitate” Polish society, usually through mass shootings.

Auschwitz was initially founded as a place to destroy Polish society. An estimated 140,000 non-Jewish Poles were sent to Auschwitz; about half died there. Non-Jewish Poles were imprisoned in other camps, as well. For example, in Ravensbruck, Polish women were used in Nazi medical experimentation. Nazis interned 1,700 Polish priests in Dachau; an estimated half died there. The skin of Polish inmates was used to make various items; their fat was used to make soap; Poles and Soviet POWs were the first to be gassed using Zyklon B.

Polish clergy were among the first inmates at Auschwitz. Eventually there were 464 male Catholic clergy in Auschwitz and thirty-five nuns. An estimated one fifth of all Polish priests were murdered by Nazis. In Lodz, there was a concentration camp for Polish children. Millions of Poles were enslaved by Nazis. Nazis plundered and destroyed Polish churches, museums, and libraries, all with the goal of eradicating Polish culture. Hundreds of villages were razed. Polish priest Jozef Gociek was beaten to death in Auschwitz. His photo is here. Polish nun Maria Klemensa Staszewska died of typhus in Auschwitz. Her photo is here. Brother Anicet Koplinski died in Auschwitz; no one is sure of his cause of death. His photo is here. Nazis shot Father Piotr Sosnowski to death; his photo is here. Both Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe and Bernhard Lichtenberg, a German Catholic priest, helped Jews, and both exhibited extraordinary courage before their deaths in Auschwitz and en route to Dachau, respectively. Nazis murdered 152 Jesuits, forty-three of them in concentration camps. Fourteen-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka was one of over one hundred thousand Poles ethnically cleansed from Zamosc, a region in Poland. The girl died in Auschwitz; her photos is here. During these ethnic cleansing operations, when separating children from parents, Nazis used whips for crown control; see here. Other Polish girls similarly ethnically cleansed and sent to a concentration camp can be seen here.

Nazi Germany began its genocidal assault on Poland on September 1, 1939. In accord with the Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact, the USSR attacked Poland from the east on September 17, 1939. As Kertzer reports, “over the first three days” of the invasion, “German forces would carry out seventy-two mass executions.” Victims were Polish “men, women, and children.” Six hundred more massacres would follow just in the next few weeks. This was in addition, of course, to aerial bombings of civilians. Poland’s ambassador asked Pius XII to speak out. The answer was no.

“As German forces moved through western Poland … hundreds of priests . Were arrested .. more than half the priests in western Poland would end up in concentration campus, where many would die, while seminaries, church schools, monasteries, and convents” were closed. “Church charitable institutions were closed, and outdoor shrines” were “dismantled.” The Polish ambassador requested, in person, that Pius XII bless Poland. Pius XII refused.

“At a time of extreme agony” some Poles living in Rome requested “to gather around their common Father.” Pius XII refused. Soviet invaders colluded with Nazis to “carve up” Poland. “Still the pope remained silent.” Cardinal Tisserant protested. “The soldiers of Adolf the Apostate and those of the atheist State [the USSR] are uniting to destroy Catholic Poland. Will the Holy See not protest?” No.

Cardinal August Hlond, Primate of Poland, met with Pius XII. Hlond brought Poles with him to report on conditions in their country. Pius XII, as described by Britain’s envoy, offered “no word of reprobation of either the German or the Russian invasion of Poland.” In 1940, Cardinal Hlond asked merely for permission to address his fellow Poles via Vatican Radio. No. Nazi Germany was not surprised by Pius XII’s behavior. “Pope’s refusal to take sides against Germany,” wrote Germany’s ambassador “would be entirely in harmony with assurances he has repeatedly conveyed to me.”

Pius XII learned in November, 1939, “that all Vatican efforts to send relief supplies to German-occupied Poland were being rebuffed.” A Vatican report described how immediately Nazis had acted to suppress Catholicism in Poland. In Poland, the report stated, there were “no sacraments, no preaching, no religious instruction. Absolute destruction of the once flourishing Catholic press. No seminaries. No convents.” Also in November, 1939, Hitler survived an assassination attempt. Pius XII sent Hitler “congratulations” for his survival.

In November, 1940, Kazimierz Papee, the Polish ambassador to the Holy See, pleaded with Pius XII. He pointed out that the pope’s reception of Joachim von Ribbentrop in March 1940 was interpreted as signaling papal approval of German crimes in Poland. “Poles wondered why Vatican Radio had remained silent about the German occupation of the country, and L’Osservatore Romano made no mention at all of the German assault on Poland.”

A year later, in November, 1941, Father Pirro Scavizzi, an Italian military chaplain, visited Pius XII. Scavizzi offered a gruesome account of Nazi crimes against Jews in Ukraine. He also reported on Catholics in Poland. “Scavizzi delivered an impassioned letter from a Polish priest. Describing the terrifying events unfolding in Poland, the priest said that the Poles could not understand what they termed the Vatican’s ‘crime of silence.’ He begged the pope to make his voice heard.” Pius XII did not.

In January, 1943, Papee returned with instructions from the Polish government in exile to impress upon Pius XII how important it would be for him to speak out. “In Poland,” Papee told Pius XII, “new events have taken place. Their horrific character cannot be compared to anything known in history.”

Pius XII told Papee he was “hurt” by criticism. He had spoken out adequately, he insisted.

Papee replied that “Polish bishops had not found his words adequate … he had nowhere mentioned the Nazis, nor what, specifically they were doing.”

Pius XII protested that a specific denunciation of the Nazis would be used by the Nazis as a pretext to commit crimes against their victims.

Nazis need no such pretext to commit crimes, Papee pointed out. Furthermore, the Poles had no patience for such excuses from the Vatican.

“One senior British foreign officer” urged British and French cardinals to write directly to Pius XII “and point out what an unfortunate effect his silence on the subject of Poland was having on Catholic opinion in our two countries.” The archbishop of Paris did write to the pope. This letter did not change Pius XII’s approach to Poland.

Ambassador Kazimierz Papee would later remember that when he met with Pius XII for the tenth time, in 1944, Pius was angry. “When he saw me as I entered the room and stood at the door awaiting permission to approach, he raised both his arms in a gesture of exasperation. ‘I have listened again and again to your representations about our unhappy children in Poland,’ he said. ‘Must I be given the same story yet again?'”

Perhaps the reader of this review is feeling similar exasperation. Why does this review of a book not focused on Poland emphasize the fate of Poles so much? Here’s why. Poles were and still are majority Catholic. Some insist that Kertzer’s book and others like it prove that Pius XII’s behavior during World War II is easily explained. Pius XII behaved as he did because he was antisemitic. As these examples show, in his public statements, Pius XII took the same approach toward atrocities committed against Catholic Poles, indeed, toward atrocities committed against Catholic priests like himself, as he did towards atrocities committed against Jews.

Nazis murdered approximately two thirds of Europe’s Jews. Nazis murdered approximately ten percent of the non-Jewish Polish population. In other words, Polish Catholics suffered a far lower percentage of deaths than did Jews. But Polish Catholics were murdered in the same way as Jews – through mass shootings carried out by Einsatzgruppen, through beatings, torture, gassing, starvation, subjects of sadistic medical experimentation, and as slaves who were worked to death. This implementation of Generalplan Ost began in 1939, before the 1942 Wansee Conference. In his public statements, Pius XII adopted the same approach, silence, toward suffering by both groups. To this reader, that fact weakens the thesis that Pius XII behaved as he did because he was inspired by antisemitism. Another explanation must be offered for this behavior. Kertzer’s book did not present, to this reader, an adequate explanation. I simply don’t understand Pius XII.

Some voices, hostile to Christianity, cite Nazism as proof that Christianity is a source of evil. These voices conflate Nazism with Christianity. Those taking this position typically choose to downplay Nazism’s crimes against Poles and Poland. Poland is famously a Catholic country. To acknowledge Nazi crimes against Catholic Poles weakens the attempt to conflate Nazism with Christianity. In fact, though, the long term Nazi goal was to eliminate Christianity.

The project of conflating Christianity with Nazism is undermined when one considers the hideous atrocities Nazis committed against Catholic Poles. Eliminating from consideration or at least downplaying Nazi persecution of Christians is exactly what some do. Consider the above quoted James Carroll. Carroll (b. 1943) is a former priest. In 2001, Carroll published Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. The book won many awards. It condemns Catholic antisemitism, and indeed antisemitism is worthy of condemnation. But the book does something else. Carroll’s history of Catholic antisemitism opens at Auschwitz. Carroll announces that this Nazi concentration camp in what was once Nazi-occupied Poland is “central” to his history of Catholic antisemitism. “Throughout the telling of this story,” Carroll will “remain” at Auschwitz. Carroll falsifies history to make his position seem reasonable. He says that Polish Catholics imagine that they suffered under Nazis – not that Poles suffered under Nazis, but that Poles imagine that they suffered under Nazis. Carroll suggests to his reader that only one hundred fifty Polish Catholics died at Auschwitz.

In 2001, in a prize-winning, bestselling book, an author purporting to offer an accurate history of Catholic antisemitism had to erase Nazi genocidal policies against and behavior toward Catholic Poles in order to render his thesis plausible. Twenty years later, readers had to distort history to make The Pope at War say something that it doesn’t, actually, say. And so, blind to the images of Father Piotr Sosnowski or other Polish Catholics murdered by Nazis, Haaretz can characterize the book as “A damning picture of a holy man who chose to remain silent about the mass destruction of European Jewry.” Pius XII didn’t remain silent just about “the mass destruction of European Jewry.” He remained silent about much else.

There’s a detail Kertzer doesn’t mention. Kertzer’s mentioning of this difficult fact would help us to understand Pius XII, but mentioning this fact would weaken the thesis that Pius XII’s “silence” was his alone, and that, as such, his “silence” uniquely implicates the Catholic Church.

In fact Pius XII was not alone. Many were silent during the Holocaust. Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust is a 2004 documentary. My review of it is here. As film historian Neal Gabler argues in his book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Hollywood’s moguls were often, though not always, Eastern European Jews. Even they were relatively quiet in criticism of Nazi Germany. Ben Urwand’s 2013 Harvard University Press book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler argues that Hollywood produced material that advanced the Nazi cause. In 2005 Cambridge University Press published Buried by the Times The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper. That book points out that while America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, did cover the Holocaust, it did so in muted terms that misled readers. In June, 1983, Lucy S. Dawidowicz published, in Commentary magazine, “Indicting American Jews.” That article was followed by a flood of letters debating whether American Jews did enough while the Holocaust was happening. The same theme is visited in Haskel Lookstein’s 1985 Were We Our Brother’s Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust and Rafael Medoff’s 1986 The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel, in his 1978 work “A Plea for the Survivors,” wrote, “While Mordecai Anielewicz and his comrades fought their lonely battle in the blazing ghetto under siege, while Arthur Zygelbaum committed suicide in London to protest the complacency of the free world, a large New York synagogue invited its members to a banquet featuring a well-known comedian.” Wiesel bemoaned silence in the face of the Holocaust. In September, 2022, the Forward summarized the message of a then-new Ken Burns documentary on the Holocaust. The article is titled, “Even American Jews ignored the Holocaust: New Ken Burns PBS series shows divisions in American Jewish community’s response to Hitler.”

American Catholics, according to analyses of Catholic publications in the US published during Hitler’s rise, did not, on the whole, perform better in response to Nazi persecution of Jews or even to Nazi persecution of fellow Catholics; see for example here and here. Their performance improved after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor . Catholics made up an estimated one third of Americans serving in uniform, though their percentage of the US population was only about one fifth. Catholic chaplains during WW II were especially heroic.

Historian Filip Mazurczak alleges, “Allied leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did absolutely nothing to aid European Jews, although they do not have the same stigma.” That is, there is no cottage industry alleging that the West’s failure to respond to the Holocaust quickly and definitively reflects badly on democracy. On the other hand, Pius XII’s silence is used as proof that the entire Catholic Church is beyond redemption.

In his blurb, thriller author Daniel Silva commented that The Pope at War is “The most important book ever written about the Catholic Church and its conduct during World War II.” Note Silva’s language. “The Catholic Church.” “Its conduct.” Is Pius XII the alpha and omega of “the Catholic Church”? Is Pius XII’s “conduct” the “conduct” of the Catholic Church? Apparently not.

Those who condemn Pius XII praise his immediate predecessor, Pius XI, who, in the context of condemning Nazism, announced, “We are Semites.” Pius XI was pointing out that Christians descend from the same spiritual tree as Jews. Mussolini feared Pius XI. Kertzer writes, “Pius XI’s opposition to the anti-Jewish ‘racial’ laws threatened not only to weaken public support for the antisemitic campaign but also to diminish public enthusiasm” for Mussolini himself. Some thought that Mussolini had “found a way to hasten the pope to his tomb.” In other words, Mussolini feared Pius XI so much that some assumed that Mussolini had him killed.

British Minister to the Holy See, Francis D’arcy Osborne, contrasted Pius XI and Pius XII. Pius XI “‘fearlessly pronounced the moral verdict of Christian civilization’ against Nazi worship of the state.” Pius XII, Osborne said, “tailored his words ‘to the exigencies of an anxious neutrality.'” The French ambassador saw Pius XI as “a robust mountaineer from Milan” and Pius XII as “a more passive Roman bourgeois.” That one pope actively resisted Nazism and that his immediate successor engaged in inadequate resistance suggests the problem was more the man than the institution.

Yes, there was too much antisemitism in the Catholic Church; see the American radio priest, Charles Coughlin, for one powerful example. Less famous is Coughlin’s contemporary, Father John LaFarge, SJ. LaFarge, a white man, ministered to blacks for fifteen years. He served as editor and writer for America, the Jesuit magazine, for thirty-seven years, leading America in an anti-racist and philo-semitic direction. Pius XI tapped LaFarge to write Humani generis unitas (“On The Unity of the Human Race”) an encyclical opposing racism and antisemitism. Pius XII suppressed this encyclical. Leadership matters and a wartime Vatican under Pius XI would have been a very different Vatican, informed observers agree.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “one of the first coordinated responses to state-sanctioned persecution of German Jews” was produced by American Catholic clergy. In response to the November 9, 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, the Catholic University of America broadcast, via radio, a protest against the violence against Jews. “The broadcast brought together bishops, priests, and a Catholic layman from different parts of the country to publicly denounce Nazi cruelty and to affirm Catholic support for Jewish communities.”

“Silence” is a word applied to Pope Pius XII. There’s a great deal of “silence” when it comes to World War II. You can get an Amazon copy of The Pope at War for six bucks. I can’t find reasonably priced copies of The Jesuits and the Third Reich anywhere. There are over a thousand Amazon reviews for The Pope at War. For The Jesuits and the Third Reich, I can’t find any Amazon reviews. Luckily, First Things reviewed the first edition of this book in November, 1990. The book’s author, Vincent A. Lapomarda, SJ, attributes the “silence” about institutional Catholic resistance to Nazism at least partially to Stalinism. Catholics behind the Iron Curtain were actively silenced, and also defamed, by Communist authorities. In Edward Krause’s First Things review of The Jesuits and the Third Reich, Krause describes not just individual, but institutional Catholic resistance to Nazism.

“Fathers Pierre Chaillet and Henri de Lubac … edited and wrote for Temoinage Chretien, which in 1942 had a circulation of 50,000. They repeatedly insisted that the persecution of Jews was inseparably an attack on Christianity and in any case intolerable … Cardinals Saliege of Toulouse and Gerlier of Lyons denounced the regime’s anti-Semitic laws in pastoral letters and called upon the people to resist … They helped inspire a joint protest written by Cardinal Suhard of Paris and signed by all the bishops of France … ‘We are profoundly shocked by the mass arrests and the inhumane treatment meted out to Jews. In the name of humanity and of Christian principle, we resolutely condemn this violation of the inalienable rights of man’ … In a pastoral letter, the primate of France instructed French Catholics to refuse to surrender Jews to the authorities and to hide or shelter them when possible. Priests, nuns, and laity were already engaged in a massive rescue effort that saved tens of thousands of Jewish lives.”

Of course there was individual, as well as institutional, Catholic resistance. Silva would not equate “the Catholic Church” and “its conduct” with, say, the “conduct” of the Ulma family. Jozef Ulma, a Polish Catholic peasant, underlined in his Bible lines from the Good Samaritan parable. He and his wife Wiktoria risked their lives to save Jews. Nazis murdered Jozef and Wiktoria, their six children, and one child Wiktoria carried in her womb. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, both Polish and Catholic, both survivors of Auschwitz, co-founded Zegota, the only government-supported organization in Nazi-occupied Europe whose sole purpose was to aid Jews.

I’ll mention one more quibble with Kertzer’s otherwise excellent book. Nazis cited Catholic precedent to Catholics. That is, Nazis reminded Catholics that popes ruling over Papal States had relegated resident Jews to ghettos. Nazis reminded Catholics of this in order to justify Nazi actions. The argument was that Nazis confining Jews to ghettos was not such a bad thing. Kertzer does not offer clarifying commentary on this diabolical Nazi mind game. He should. Of course the Papal States’ ghettoization of Jews deserves condemnation. But the Nazi suggestion that the Papal States’ policy sanitizes Nazi policies is obscene propaganda. Papal bull Sicut Judaeis, issued by Pope Calixtus, forbade violence against Jews, taking property from Jews, disturbing Jewish festivals, forcing conversion on Jews, or violating Jewish cemeteries. Violators could be excommunicated. Though issued c. 1120, its roots go back to Pope Gregory of the sixth century. Subsequent popes reaffirmed Sicut Judaeis. The Papal States’ restriction of Jews to ghettos began in 1555 and ended three hundred years later. Enforcement fluctuated depending on the attitude of the current pope. Nazi ghettos were transit sites to extermination camps. The two are not comparable and one does not “descend” from the other.

Nazism was rooted in Herder’s nationalism, the nineteenth-century fad for Neo-Paganism, typified by the Grimms and Richard Wagner, scientific racism, and social Darwinism. Herder, the Grimms, Wagner, and Darwin were not Nazis and they would be horrified had they lived to see how their ideas were twisted by evil people. Nazis voiced dedication to animals rights and Hitler was a vegetarian. Even good or neutral ideas can be perverted by evil. Nazis didn’t defer to Catholicism to justify their behavior, they cited the above trends. See, for example, Himmler’s speeches delivered in Nazi-occupied Poznan. Himmler praised the wonders of nature. Appreciation for the wonders of nature is a beneficent thing. But to Himmler, nature demanded that he mass murder lesser life forms, i.e. Jews and Slavs. Nazis used the same scientific racist arguments to support the mass murder of handicapped Germans, as well as the mass murder of Jews. Himmler said,

“Everything that we do must be justifiable vis-à-vis the clan, our ancestors. If we do not secure this moral foundation which is the deepest and best because the most natural, we will not be able to overcome Christianity on this plane and create the Germanic Reich which will be a blessing for the earth … We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else. What happens to a Russian and a Czech does not interest me in the least … Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture … Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.”

Hitler didn’t carry a Bible; he kept with him, rather, Richard Wagner’s original scores. These scores were lost in the Hitler Bunker. Hitler said that his “Bible” was Madison Grant’s scientific racist book The Passing of the Great Race. That book called explicitly for the “elimination of those who are weak or unfit.” The taboo around mentioning social Darwinism’s influence on Nazism is great. Historian Richard Weikart is persona non grata to many in academia. I have been burned for citing his works. Titles like From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany are accurate but to many academics utterly unspeakable. One must be “silent” on how Darwinism, Neo Paganism, and atheism were distorted to justify Nazi mass murder.

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.