Sandro Magister has revived a 2005 post by him that is relevant to the revived controversy over the cause for beatification of Pius XII. However, as I commented in the BENEDICT thread, the accusations by prominent French intellectuals like Francois Mauriac and Albert Camus never gained any traction in the public mind, and were quickly subsumed as soon as the propaganda launched by THE DEPUTY gained immediate worldwide resonance.
The Black Legend of Pius XII
started with a French Catholic
He was Emmanuel Mounier, a philosopher, and with him,
a more famous French intellectual, Francois Mauriac.
Soviet propaganda and the play 'The Deputy' continue to be cited,
but history scholar Giovanni Maria Vian,
now editor of L'Osservatore Romano, wrote in 2004
that the Black Legend was started earlier by
French and Polish intellectuals.
ROME, June 21, 2005 – In the latest issue of
La Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit historian Giovanni Sale reconstructs the birth of the “black legend” that Pius XII was pro-Hitler.
Civiltà is the magazine of the Jesuits in Rome, and its articles are read and authorized by the Vatican’s secretariat of state before publication.
According to Fr Sale’s reconstruction, it was the international communist press, led by Moscow, that generated the black legend after the end of the Second World War.
In the same period, the latest issue of
Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, the annual magazine published by the faculty of ecclesiastic history at the Pontifical Gregorian University, also run by Jesuits, had an article appeared by the historian Giovanni Maria Vian presenting a different view of how the Black Legened began.
According to Vian, the accusations against Pius XII’s “silence” were brought about not only by Soviet propaganda, but also French and Polish Catholics, especially two important intellectuals, Emmanuel Mounier and François Mauriac.
Fr Sale draws our attention to the first important speech given by Pius XII after the end of the Second World War: his message to the cardinals on 2 June 1945.
In this speech, Papa Pacelli strongly condemns “the ruinous and relentless applications of the national socialist doctrine which went as far as using the latest scientific methods to torture and suppress often innocent people”.
These words by the Pope follow almost to the letter a suggestion made to him a few days previously by the then-ambassador of France to the Holy See, the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Both in Maritain’s suggestion and in the Pope’s speech, Jews were not explicitly mentioned, but Fr Sale sees in this a clear “allusion to the Final Solution against the Jews ordered by the Nazi hierarchy”.
In his speech, Pius XII then recalls the killing of thousands of Catholic priests in the Nazi concentration camps, with “Polish priests first in line in terms of number and the harshness of their treatment”.
The speech resonated widely around the world. Referring to the comments in the international press, Fr Sale notes that “the Pope’s words were interpreted along the lines of the ideological and political orientations of the various countries at the beginning of the cold war”.
What dictated the line of the Communist press in the whole world was a comment on Radio Moscow on 7 June 1945, in which Fr Sale already sees “the development of several motifs which were too become central in the successive decades of the anti-Pacelli polemic”.
Radio Moscow accused Pius XII of coming forward too late and dishonestly with his opposition to Nazism, because he had been “silent when the German death machines were running, when the chimneys of the cremating ovens were smoking”. In this comment, Radio Moscow did not mention the Jews by name either.
Fr Sale writes that this is how “the black legend began which in some way has continued all the way down to the present day, the legend that presents Pius XII as a friend and ally of the Nazis”.
In the conclusion of his piece, Fr Sale points out that five months after that speech Pius XII “had the opportunity to feel the full horror of the Nazi atrocities, when on 29 November 1945 he received a delegation of Jewish refugees who had come to thank him for the work the Catholic Church did for them during the Second World War”.
And he adds:
“In any case, at that time (1945). the exact perception (psychological, cultural and historic awareness) of what had happened to the Jews in the heart of Europe during the final years of the war did not yet exist […]. The concept of the Holocaust and the uniqueness of the Shoah had not yet been established, not even in Jewish circles”.
[This is an elementary historical fact that most commentators today ignore - as they make the mistaken assummption, now widely accepted as fact, that 'everyone' knew about the Holocaust when it was happening! Even all the isolated reports before 1945, when the Nazi death camps were uncovered to the world, gave little indication of the extent and degree of the Nazi genocide. Nor did the world learn until much later that the Nazis had decided to implement what they called the 'Final Solution' for teh extermination of all Jews at the Wannsee Conference of 1942.]
* * *
In
Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, Vian doesn’t contradict Fr Sale’s reconstruction. However, he does integrated it with criticisms of the pope’s “silence” that in those years had come from French and Polish Catholics. Criticisms of which Pius XII was aware, as is demonstrated in the passage quoted above from the speech from 2 June 1945.
Here is a translation of Vian’s article in Volume 42 of the journal, published in 2004, but without the bibliogrpahical notes. He reconstructs the birth and development of the Black Legend from 1939 to the start of Paul VI's Pontificate. In 2004, Vian was a lecturer of patristic philology at Rome’s La Sapienza University, and a member of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences.
Origins of the Black Legend
about 'the silence of Pius XII'
by Giovanni Maria Vian
The controversy over Pius XII’s silence during the Second World War in the light of the horrendous, genocidal attempt of the Nazis to exterminate Europe’s Jews - one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century – is by now a part of history.
A great deal has been written on the subject, and more still will be written, because of the subject’s indubitable relevance, because of the passionate interest it provokes even beyond the narrow sphere of specialists in the field, and because of its undeniable potential for exploitation, in view of the ongoign cause for his beatification.
It is above all this exploitation that has led to the creation of a full-blown Black Legend that goes far beyond judgement of the Pope’s behaviour during those tragic years of conflict.
The goal of this essay is to recall the origins of the accusations which were made against this Pope, which are often forgotten, and which were first and foremost expressed by Catholics, and then expanded, even as early as during the war years themselves, by Soviet and then Communist propaganda.
The first person to wonder about “the silence of Pius XII” was Emmanuel Mounier. This was only a few weeks after the March 2, 1939, election as Pope of the cardinal secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli.
The questions were raised a propos the aggression towards Albania by Italy in April of that year, and the absence of a condemnation on the part of the new Pope.
In an article written just after this, the French Catholic intellectual pointed out that although it would be “ridiculous for a believer to challenge the papal conscience”, nevertheless “the scandal of this silence” had entered “thousands of hearts”.
He went on to say, “I am not in a position to judge whether this wasn’t the inevitable price of successful diplomacy […]. I only asked for a few words. So that the Word may bring life”.
The problem of words not spoken, pointed out so early on by Mounier, would come to torment the Pope’s conscience during the long and terrible six years of war, which broke out only a few months after the invasion of Poland by the German National Socialist regime and their Soviet Russian allies.
[Historical fact: The Soviets did not invade Poland when the Nazis did, but a few days before the invasion of Poland, they signed the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact in whch they both pledged not to attack each other for the next 10 years. Hitler sought the treaty to avoid getting into a two-front war if the Soviets retaliated for an attack on Poland while the French and British reta;iated on the Western front. The pact only lasted two years, as it turned out, since Hitlere felt bold enough to take on the Soviets as well.]
It was in this context, the Jesuit historian Burkhart Schneider wrote, that “the Pope was criticised for his apparent silence, which seemed to indicate indifference in the face of unspeakable suffering”. These criticisms came above all from “Polish communities in exile”, and thus again from Catholics.
The political and diplomatic line of the Holy See in the preceding decades and more importantly during the frightful war of 1914-1918 had been an attempt, without too much support from Catholics themselves, to keep a sort of neutral impartiality between the conflicting sides.
Along this line was the condemnation from Pope Benedict XV of the “useless slaughter” of World War I and an honest “diplomacy of assistance”, which in Germany was carried on by Pacelli himself, as the Apostolic Nuncio in Munich.
During this new tragic war –
caused by the totalitarianism of the Nazis and Soviets [But Soviet totalitarianism had nothing to do with World War II, which was willfully started by Germany and which it decided to wage against the Soviets themselves despite their 1939 non-aggression pact!] which the Holy See had condemned in 1937 with the encyclicals
Mit Brennender Sorge and
Divini Redemptoris – Pius XII intended to follow that same policy.
But the Pope ended up making some choices that cannot be considered neutral.
In the early years of the war, Pius XII made an unprecedented decision, between autumn 1939 and spring 1940, to support the eventually aborted attempt by some German military groups colluding with the British to overthrow Hitler’s regime.
After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in the middle of 1941, Pius XII not only decided to have the Holy See abstain in what was being pitched as a crusade against communism, but also - in the itnersts of defeating Hitler - set about to temper the opposition that many American Catholics were posing to the alliance between the United States and Stalin’s Russia.
This did not mean that the Pope and his closest advisers had changed their minds about atheistic and totalitarian Communism. They would always be radically against Communism as an ideology, as it made clear in 1943 [HOW????] and culminating in the condemnation of Communism published by the Holy Office in 1949.
The idea of Pius XII being “in the pay of the Americans”, an image spread and supported by the Soviets because of Papa Pacelli's firm anti-communist attitude – is totally without historical basis.
The controversy over Pius XII's overall role in World War II was the fruit of Soviet propaganda in general, and was soon picked up by members of the Russian Orthodox Church.
After 1944, this polemic, compounded with Mounier’s earlier questions, had filtered through to the diplomats accredited to the Holy See, soon stoked by new accusations against Papa Pacelli and the Vatican with regard to the Nazi policy of Jewish extermination.
After the war, relations between the victorious allies soon led to a split between the Soviets and the West, which also resulted in Soviet hegemony over easternand central Europe.
In the context of the Cold war, Pius XII was accused by the Soviets of having supported Nazi Germany and Fascism, of having forgiven them, of having covered up German war crimes, of not having condemned Hitler’s barbarisms, of having been silent agout them, and of having sided with the capitalist West.
The Pope had already responded to these accusations during the war, saying on 13 June 1943: “That the Pope wanted war, that a Pope keeps a war going and provides money for it to carry on, that a Pope does nothing for peace… More horrific and absurd slander than this has perhaps never been heard”.
After the war, on 24 December 1946, Pius XII explicitly alluded to the propaganda against the Holy See: “We know very well that all of our words, all of our intentions, can be misinterpreted and twisted through political propaganda”.
In 1951, the questions that Mounier had raised a dozen years earlier on the subject of the Italian aggression towards Albania was turned into a harsh reproach of Pius XII for not having condemned the monstrous persecution of Jews - in the words of another French Catholic intellectual, François Mauriac, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952.
In the introduction to
Bréviaire de la haine. Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs (Breviary of hate: Teh Third Reich and the Jews), by Léon Poliakov, Mauriac emphasises that the book is first and foremost directed at Germans, and then writes :
This breviary has also been written for us French, whose traditional anti-Semitism has survived the excesses of horror in which Vichy played its own timid and ignoble part.
Above all, to us French Catholics; if we have salvaged any of our honour, without a doubt we owe it to the heroism and charity that many bishops, priests and religious showed towards the hounded Jews.
But we never had the comfort of hearing the successor of Galilee, Simon Peter, use clear and precise words, rather than diplomatic allusions, to condemn the countless crucifixions of the ‘brothers of the Lord’.
During the occupation, one day I asked the venerable cardinal Suhard, who from the shadows of the other side had done so much for the persecuted: ‘Your Eminence, command us to pray for the Jews’.
His only answer was to raise his arms heavenwards. Of course, the occupying powers had ways of pressurising people that could not be resisted, and the silence of the Pope and the upper echelons of the hierarchy were no more than a disgusting duty to avoid even worse disasters.
But this does not excuse the wide-spread crime of all those who bore witness but did not speak out, whatever the reasons for their silence were”.
[Nobel Prize or not, Mauriac is exhibiting what I have decided to call the sanctimony of malice, or the malice of sanctimony - which often leads its practitioners to illogic. How can he say that 'silence... was a disgusting duty to avoid even worse disasters", and then follow up by saying "This does not excuse the crime of those who lore witness but did nto speak out, whatever the reasons for their silence?"
I would like to read all of what Mauriac wrote on this issue, but judging by the citation singled out by Vian, one could imagine Mauriac laboring under the collective guilt and shame Frenchmen like him felt about the cowardly treason of the Vichy collaborationist regime and conveniently turning this guilt against someone like Pius XII.]
The tone of the Jew Poliakov is less severe. On the subject of the anti-Semitic tradition and Pius XII’s attitude, and just before elaborating some arguments on the “anti-Christian essence of anti-Semitism”, he expresses the following, softer opinion:
It does not fall to an Israelite writer to express judgement on the century-old dogmas of another religion, but in view of the immense consequences, it is impossible not to be deeply disturbed. The sense of our perturbation should not be misunderstood.
We are not saying that there was even a trace of anti-Semitism in the pope’s thoughts. If, unlike many French bishops, he did not make his voice heard, it was certainly because his jurisdiction extends to all of Europe, and he had to consider not only the grave threats hanging over the Church, but also the spiritual conditions of his faithful in all countries, who were influenced by the anti-Jewish tradition of Christianity.
This was the situation at what would be the turning point in the campaign against Pius XII for his alleged silence about the Jews in World War II.
It came with the play
Der Stellvertreter [The Deputy] by Rolf Hochhuth, which was performed for the first time in Berlin on February 10, 1963. Due to its extreme anti-Pacelli bias and the strong debates it immediately provoked, it had an enormous influence on the image of Pius XII and the Holy See, both in public opinion and in the historical debate itself.
Following the immediate flare-up, particularly significant was the testimony in defence of the Pope by Giovanni Battista Montini, one of his closest advisors. Montini had been archbishop of Milan since the end of 1954, and made cardinal by John XXIII in 1958.
Montini’s statement came in an article puclished in the English Catholic magazine
The Tablet on May 11, 1963. Among other things, it underlined the similarity between Hochhuth’s play and a “Communist publication” on the Vatican and the second world war.
Then, in a letter that reached
The Tablet on the day he was elected Pope and took the name Paul VI in June 1963, Cardinal Montini defended Pius XII’s wartime actions against Hochhuth's charge that Pius XII was partly to blame for the Nazi crimes against the Jews because he failed to condemn them.
“This attitude of condemnation and protest, for the absence of which the Pope is being reproached, would not only have been futile, it would also have been dangerous. That’s all,” Cardinal Montini wrote.
He concludes:
Subjects like these and historic people we know should not be played with through the creative imagination of playwrights, who are lacking in historic discernment and, God help us, human honesty.
Otherwise, just like in the present case, the tragedy would be something else: that of someone trying to offload the horrible crimes of German Nazism onto a pope who was extremely conscientious in his duties and aware of history, and who in the opinion of more than one friend was certainly impartial, but also very loyal to the German people.
Equally, Pius XII had the merit of having been the Vicar of Christ who tried to fulfil his mission as best he could with courage and integrity. Could the same thing be said of this theatrical injustice, (evenn) in the context of culture and art?
Similar tones and criticism against the propaganda-like views in
The Deputy were articulated about two years later in an article by the historian Giovanni Spadolini.
It was published on February 18, 1965 after the first two performances of Hochhuth’s play in Rome, which was immediately banned, unleashing bitter polemics.
The article by Spadolini, an authoritative intellectual and lay politician, began with a direct attack on the position of the left-wing parties, especially the Communists. “The very party that champions dialogue with Catholics has proclaimed a sort of crusade for freedom of thought on the basis of this libellous anticlerical defamation and nationalist self-defence”.
Spadolini recalled Montini’s defence of Pius XII, first in 1963 when he had just been elected Pope, and then again in January 1964 during his historic journey to the Holy Land, and so again pointed out the elements of political propaganda in the play that had just been shown in Rome.
He said that the then-cardinal of Milan “had stood up, with the loyalty of an advisor and disciple who does not forget, against the absurd and unjust indictments of a political propaganda thinly disguised as moralism”.
And when “Paul VI laid foot on Israeli ground in what was the most significant and revolutionary step of his Palestinian mission, everyone could tell that the Pope wanted to respond to the systematic attacks from the communist world, which had managed to find complicity or indulgence even in Catholic hearts – or at least some Catholics who were known even in Italy”.
In Spadolini’s article, the perceived origins of the accusations against Papa Pacelli were clear: firstly, between 1939 and 1951, the two Frenchmen Mounier and Mauriac; then, the Soviet propaganda of the war years, and finally, the Communist propaganda in the immediate post-war period and during the Cold War.
The controversy over Pius XII simply stepped up after his death, during the very different pontificate of John XXIII, and then exploded definitively after Paul VI became Pope.
It was tied up to contrasting the Pacelli and Roncalli pontificates, which was one of the factors that led Paul VI in 1965 to introduce the causes for beatification for his two predecessors simultaneously:
“In this way, the wish that was expressed for both by so many voices shall be fulfilled; in this way, their spiritual patrimony shall be kept safe for history; in this way, it will be ensured that these authentic and dear characters will not be reinterpreted and will only be remembered through the cult of true sanctity and thus the glory of God, for our veneration and for that of future generations”.
With the passing of time, the question of Pius XII’s silence has become increasingly complicated, because the repeated accusations against Papa Pacelli have crystallized into a “black legend”.
This has certainly not helped the new, positive relations between the Catholic Church and Judaism. In the meantime, the accusations against him that started with some Catholics and was promoted primarily through Soviet propaganda, will not go away easily, because there are still many who will not forgive Pius XII for his anticommunism.
[Vian's 2004 article obviously does not factor in the virulence of anti-Pius sentiment in militant Jewish circles, which at this point, far outweighs the animus of Communists, ex-Communists and Communist sympathizers who resetned Papa Pacelli's unconditional anti-Communism.
Also, strangely, Vian has not lately mentioned Mounier and Mauriac in connection with the Pius XII question, and I would be itnerested to know whether they figure in the book he edited earlier this year, In difesa di Pio XIII: Le ragioni della storia.]