In March 2020, part of the previously classified archives of the Holy See, relating to the period of World War II, will become available. According to the Vatican, "the church is not afraid of history." If this is really so, it means that historians will have the opportunity to finally determine who Pope Pius XII was - "a man of great holiness" or a loyal ally of Nazi Germany.
Eugenio Pacelli, aka Pius XII, is one of the most controversial figures in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. He is famous for proclaiming the dogma of the taking of the Virgin Mary to heavenly glory. Pius XII actively opposed the spread of communism across Europe. But most often his name is mentioned in discussions about the role of the Holy See in the pre-war and war years, when Pacelli was first Secretary of State of the Vatican, and in 1939 he became pontiff.
Italian maneuver
To understand why in 1930 Pope Pius XI, when appointing the Secretary of State, chose Cardinal Pacelli, it is necessary to know that even before the end of the First World War, he was the apostolic nuncio in the German Empire. There, he saw with his own eyes how revanchist sentiments were growing in a defeated country, which fed the Nazi party, which did not hide anti-Semitism and a desire to change the outcome of the war. American historian and rabbi David Dalin estimated that between 1917 and 1929, Pacelli made 44 public speeches, and in 40 of them he condemned the increasingly popular Nazi ideology. He called their supporters "false prophets with the pride of Lucifer", claiming that they create "a false system between loyalty to the Church and the Fatherland." In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany,and the first thing Hitler proposed to the Holy See to conclude a concordat (a kind of diplomatic agreement between the Holy See and another state). Pacelli studied the experience of his predecessors well and intended to repeat the same brilliant success that the Vatican managed to accomplish in concluding a concordat with Italy immediately after the signing of the Lateran Agreements - according to his text, the Mussolini regime assumed broad obligations to the Holy See, in particular, by agreeing to exist in Italy, the organization "Catholic Action". It was she who soon formed the core of the opposition, which the Duce could not destroy. Pius XI's encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno (“We have no need”), for the first time in the history of the church, was written not in Latin, but in Italian for ease of understanding of its content, also had a certain success. In it, the pontiff condemned all elements of fascist ideology that were at odds with the teachings of the church.
And now the Vatican State Secretariat was going to force Germany to take on the same obligations, intending to use this in the future when condemning the actions of the Nazis that would violate the provisions of the Concordat. True, if in Italy the stake was made on "Catholic action", then in Germany such a maneuver was impossible - the Center Party, to which German Catholics gravitated, was disbanded almost immediately after the establishment of the Nazi regime.
Hitler tried to use the fact of the conclusion of the concordat as confirmation of the recognition of the Nazi government by the Holy See, but Pacelli spoke in the press that the Vatican only wanted to protect the rights of German Catholics.
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With burning anxiety
The year 1937 became important for the Catholic Church. First, then Cardinal Pacelli, through the American ambassador in Berlin, sent America an unambiguous signal about Hitler's "principled anger", which hinted at his aggressive aspirations to reshape the map of Europe to meet the needs of Germany. In general, it was during this period that diplomatic relations between the United States and the Holy See were restored, which allowed the Vatican to invest a lot of assets in the American military economy.
Secondly, on the instructions of Pope Pius XI, Pacelli began compiling an encyclical that sharply condemned the "pagan ideology" of National Socialism. It was called Mit brennender Sorge ("With searing anxiety") and was written in German. Thus, for the second time, the church threw away tradition for the sake of making its sermons accessible - this time for the German people. Mit brennender Sorge also became the world's first official condemnation of Nazism, which led to the closure of all Catholic print media in Germany and a sharp increase in the persecution of the clergy.
Pius XI highly appreciated Pacelli's efforts in the fight against Hitlerite Germany. Shortly before his death, he wrote: “If the Pope dies today, tomorrow another will be appointed in his place, since the Church needs to continue its activities. But if Cardinal Pacelli dies, it will be even more tragedy, since his loss will be irreparable. Every day I pray to the Lord that he will send another such person to one of our seminaries, but today Cardinal Pacelli remains one of a kind."
Diplomacy candidate
Pope Pius XI died on February 10, 1939. The assembled conclave had to determine whether it proceeded solely from spiritual considerations when choosing a successor to the Apostle Peter, or whether it also took diplomacy into account. As a result of one day of discussion, Eugenio Pacelli was elected pontiff. His experience with Germany, whose aggressive policy was one of the main problems for the church, played a decisive role in the choice of the pope. The new head of the church took the name of Pius XII, motivating it this way: "… my whole life was connected with the name of Pope Pius, but especially as a token of gratitude to Pius XI."
As Paul O'Shea, the author of Eugenio Pacelli, Politics and the Jews of Europe, wrote later, Pius XII found himself in a very unenviable position: “The Nazis demonized the Pope as an agent of international Jewry. The Americans and British were unhappy that he did not openly condemn the Nazi aggression. And the Russians accused him of being an agent of fascism and Nazism. Despite all the attempts of the pontiff to influence world leaders, he failed to stop the outbreak of a new war, which he regretted in the pages of his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus - in it he also designated himself as “the irreconcilable enemy of Germany,” which the chapter called him in his diary. Gestapo Heinrich Müller.
Pius XII actively promoted the establishment of contact between Britain and a group of German generals, which in the spring of 1940 was going to stage a coup and stop the development of the world war. He also gave the Benelux countries information about the impending attack on them by Nazi Germany. Finally, in order to save Jews from the Holocaust, the pontiff urged to shelter them in Catholic churches and monasteries, which he endowed in the occupied European countries with extraterritorial status - they became, in fact, the Vatican's embassies, protected by diplomatic law.
Despite this, many critics of Pius XII point to his striking neutrality towards Catholic Croatia, where the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime was established, which unleashed genocide against the Serb population.
Be that as it may, the declassified archives of the Vatican should deliver the final assessment of the actions of Pius XII and his subordinates in different parts of warring Europe in a year.
Magazine: Mysteries of History №4. Author: Stanislav Ostrovsky