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Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust: a reply to Daniel Goldhagen
Modern Age, Summer, 2003 by Dimitri Cavalli
Goldhagen dismisses Pius XII's 1942 Christmas message, in which he condemned the treatment of "hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or a progressive extinction," as vague and meaningless. However, the Nazis themselves had a different opinion of the speech. "In a manner never known before the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order," the Reich Central Security Office complained on January 22, 1943. "Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice towards the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals." Not surprisingly, like other Vatican critics such as Cornwell, James Carroll, Susan Zuccotti, and Michael Phayer, Goldhagen never mentions this report, which demolishes the perception that Pope Pius XII was "silent" during the Holocaust.
Goldhagen alleges that the Pope supported Nazi Germany's "war of extermination against the Soviet Union, because he considered Bolshevism to be the Church's mortal enemy." Here, Goldhagen has his facts reversed. Pius XII actually assisted the Soviet Union during World War II. In response to diplomatic appeals made by President Franklin Roosevelt in the fall of 1941, the Pope agreed that American Catholics could support the extension of military aid, through the Lend-Lease program, to the Soviet Union after it was invaded by the Nazis. Although the Vatican always condemned Communism (and Nazism), the Pope believed that it was important to help the Russian people, who were the innocent victims of Nazi aggression. In their book, The Undeclared War, 1940-1941 (1953), William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason discuss the Pope's surprising concession to Roosevelt by citing documents in the American archives. This episode is always ignored by Vatican critics because it blows a big hole in their theory that Pius XII turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities; their argument being that Pius didn't want to undermine Germany during its war against the Soviet Union.
In Italy the Fascists pressured Pius XII to bless publicly the German invasion of the Soviet Union and were bitterly disappointed when he refused. On September 5, 1941, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, the secretary of the Vatican's Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, explained the Vatican's refusal to Dr. Bernardo Attolico, Italy's ambassador to the Vatican. "I would be very happy to see Communism put out of action," Tardini said. "It is the worst enemy of the Church. But it is not the only enemy. Nazism has conducted a veritable persecution against the Church and continues to do so." Additionally, during audiences granted to Attolico in 1941, Spain's Foreign Minister Ramon Serrano-Suner in 1942, and the Hungarian Premier Nicholas Kallay in 1943, Pius XII was quoted by each of them as saying that the Nazis were far worse than the Soviets and that a Nazi victory would mean the end of Christianity in Europe. Vatican critics such as Goldhagen, Zuccotti, Carroll, Cornwell, and Phayer surrender their credibility when they peddle the absurd notion that the Pope would actually embrace a group of barbarians, who made no secret of their contempt for Christianity and who were brutally persecuting his own flock in Germany, Poland, and the rest of occupied Europe.
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