The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler

by David I. Kertzer

At the heart of the pope’s strategy was a decision to allow wide latitude to each country’s church hierarchy in supporting its nation’s rulers and policies, including making war. In this way, the church could enjoy good relations with governments anywhere in the world, regardless of their political nature, as long as they in turn supported the church’s institutional interests. But as events would soon show, this approach had its drawbacks, putting the pope in an awkward position as he tried to cast himself as a moral leader and not simply the head of a huge international organization. His approach was particularly uncomfortable in dealing with Italy, for there it was the pope himself who was not only supreme pontiff of all the world’s faithful but head of the nation’s episcopate.

To sell the anti-Jewish campaign to Italians, for whom it smelled suspiciously like an effort by the Duce to ingratiate himself with Hitler, the regime was counting heavily on the striking similarity between the new laws and the measures the popes had for centuries imposed on Jews in the Papal States.[19] Indeed, the Fascists boasted they were being softer on the Jews than the popes had been. After all, they were not herding Jews into ghettoes; nor were they imitating the earlier popes in requiring Jews to wear special marks on their clothes.

Pius XII did nothing to disavow, much less express regret for, the church’s long-standing demonization of Jews.

When the Duce responded by observing that the morale of French troops did indeed seem low, given all the Communist propaganda there, Ribbentrop smiled. A number of those French Communist papers, he boasted, were being printed in Germany.

In his four years as pope, Pius XII had never spoken out against Italy’s anti-Jewish racial laws. He had, though, frequently complained to the Fascist government that the laws were being unfairly applied to families who were, in the church’s eyes, Catholic. Jews who had been baptized should be exempt from the racial laws, the pope believed, as should baptized children of “mixed marriages.” The fall of Fascism now offered the prospect of bringing about the changes to the racial laws the pope had long sought. The newly opened Vatican archives reveal that Badoglio himself was sympathetic to a change in the racial laws. Within a few days of being appointed prime minister, Badoglio had sent word to the pope that he would like to abrogate them, “especially those regarding marriage,” but could not do so immediately due to his fear of what the Germans would think.

An embarrassing example of this repackaging of history is offered by the Vatican’s official 1998 statement on the church and the Holocaust, “We Remember.” Released by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, headed by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, it set out its subject clearly enough: “The fact that the Shoah took place in Europe, that is, in countries of long-standing Christian civilization, raises the question of the relation between the Nazi persecution and the attitudes down the centuries of Christians towards the Jews.” While acknowledging a long history of “anti-Judaism, of which, unfortunately, Christians also have been guilty,” the Vatican statement argues that this demonization of Jews had nothing to do with what made the Holocaust possible. Rather, it attributed the latter to “anti-Semitism, based on theories contrary to the constant teaching of the Church.” The Vatican statement completely ignores the heavy use the Fascists and Nazis made of the popes’ long history of warnings about the evil influence of Jews and the repressive measures they took against Jews. It ignores as well the church’s vigorous defense of the anti-Jewish laws introduced in much of Europe in the decade preceding the Final Solution, a defense found in Vatican-supervised publications as well. “We Remember” based its thesis on a distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism that had no basis in the actual history of the wave of antisemitism that swept much of Europe in t...

The church has showered honors on some of Mussolini’s most influential boosters. Father Agostino Gemelli, after being subject to brief unpleasantness by the postwar Italian commission aimed at rooting out the main figures of the Fascist regime, returned to his post as rector of the Catholic University of Milan. Today Rome’s major Catholic hospital is named in his honor.

The campaign to make a saint of the archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Schuster, long viewed by the Fascists as one of their most important church supporters, began only three years after his death in 1954. In 1996 he was beatified.

regime.” Only in 2020 would the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany finally acknowledge how misleading the pope’s representation of that history was. In marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the war, they issued a statement acknowledging that Germany’s bishops failed to oppose the Nazi war or Hitler’s attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews. Neither Italy’s church nor the Vatican itself has yet acknowledged any similar responsibility.

If Pius XII is to be judged for his action in protecting the institutional interests of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of war, there is a good case to made that his papacy was a success. Vatican City was never violated, and amid the ashes of Italy’s Fascist regime the church came out of the war with all the privileges it had won under Fascism intact. However, as a moral leader, Pius XII must be judged a failure. He had no love for Hitler, but he was intimidated by him, as he was by Italy’s dictator as well. At a time of great uncertainty, Pius XII clung firmly to his determination to do nothing to antagonize either man. In fulfilling this aim, the pope was remarkably successful.