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

by David I. Kertzer

The next day Mussolini was relaxing—that is, insofar as he was capable of relaxing—in his Palazzo Venezia hideaway

Asked by Welles if he still rode a horse every morning, the Duce said he did, proudly adding he had recently taken up tennis and was now, he boasted, regularly beating the pro who played with him. Welles presumably regarded both claims as implausible.[7]

The above is Mussolini in the 1940. Compare: “I am pleased to report, for those that care, that I just won the Senior Club Championship (must be over 50 years old!) at Bedminster (Trump National Golf Club), shooting a round of 67" - Trump, August 2023, claiming to have beaten Phil Mickelson's score two weeks earlier.

If the men who until months earlier had been loyal servants of the Fascist government now found themselves in a compromising position, the same was, at least in theory, true of the many high prelates who had taken such a public role in supporting the Fascist regime and the Axis war. For the pope, allowing action to be taken against any of them would mean admitting the role the church had played in supporting Fascism and the war, both facts of recent history that Vatican officials and leaders of church organizations throughout Italy would now strenuously deny.

The speech highlighted the suffering of Catholics and the Catholic Church during the war and represented the Catholics in Germany as the Nazis’ victims. He made not even the briefest mention, indeed no mention at all, of the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews. If any Jews had been in those concentration camps alongside the valorous Catholic priests and lay Catholics, one would not know it from the pope’s speech. Nor did he make any mention of Italy’s part in the Axis cause, much less suggest any Italian responsibility for the disasters that had befallen Europe.

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 the years leading up to and during the war. A more accurate title for the document, to which Pope John Paul II added his own letter of presentation, would have been “We Choose Not to Remember.”

All the efforts the pope made to avoid antagonizing Hitler and Mussolini are wiped from view. His role as primate of the Italian church, presiding over a clergy that was actively supporting the Axis war, is likewise forgotten. Only examples of those brave priests who stood up to the Fascists can be discussed. Erased from memory are the pope’s regular assurances to the Duce that he need only inform him of anti-Fascist priests, and he would have them silenced.

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.