Pope Pious XII Sainthood? - World War II, and Albert Camus on the silence of the Roman Catholic Church

Brian Terrell

Catholic Peace Ministry  (515) 255-8114  <terrellcpm@yahoo.com>

  This is only the current round in a debate that began as the smoke from that war began to clear in its aftermath.  In 1948, on the invitation of some Dominican scholars in Paris, the philosopher Albert Camus addressed this question:  Why did not the Church speak more clearly and forcefully against the crimes of the Nazis?  “Why shall I not say this here?” Camus asked.  “For a long time I waited during those terrible years, for a strong voice to be lifted up in Rome. I, an unbeliever?  Exactly.  For I knew that spirit would be lost if it did not raise the cry of condemnation in the presence of force.  It appears that this voice was raised.  But I swear to you that millions of men, myself included, never heard it; and that there was in the hearts of believers and unbelievers a solitude which did not cease to grow as the days went by and the executioners multiplied. It was later explained to me that the condemnation had indeed been uttered, but in the language of encyclicals, which is not clear.  The condemnation had been pronounced but it had not been understood.  Who cannot see that this is where the real condemnation lies?  Who does not see that this example contains within it one of the elements of the answer, perhaps the whole answer to the question you have asked me?  What the world expects of Christians is that Christians speak out and utter their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never a single doubt can arise in the heart of even the simplest man.  That Christians get out of their abstractions and stand face to face with the bloody mess that is our history today.   The gathering we need today is the gathering together of men who are resolved to speak out clearly and to pay with their own person.”

  Defenders of Pope Pius XII often correctly point out that it is by no means certain that a louder, clearer voice from the Church would have averted disaster, nor can we know that an unequivocal Papal condemnation would have spared a single Jewish life.  It must be admitted, too, that in those violent times, condemnations uttered without prudence might even have made matters worse.  But are these defenses relevant, applied as they are to one with the title “vicar of Christ”?

Another European contemporary of Pius XII, the German Jesuit Alfred Delp, saw this preoccupation with the success or failure of moral witness as evidence of moral corruption in itself. “Has the Church,” Father Delp asked in 1943, “forgotten to say ‘Thou shalt not,’ has the Church lost sight of the commandments, or is she silent because she is convinced of the hopelessness of her clear and firm preaching?  Has the ‘imprudence’ of John the Baptist died out or has the Church forgotten man and his fundamental rights?”  Father Delp further suggested that the Church’s silence on what was happening to the Jews and Poles and the horrors of the concentration camps in those days threatened the future credibility of a post war Church. For his imprudence, Father Delp was arrested by the Nazis and onFebruary 2, 1945, he was hung and his ashes scattered to the wind.

As Camus pointed out, condemnations were issued fromRome, but they were couched in the mostly harmless and prudent language of encyclicals.  It is true that the Vatican did in those days condemn racial discrimination and persecution, but in terms so general that they could seem, to any of the few paying attention, to refer to the treatment of ethnic Germans by France, Poland or Czechoslovakia rather than to the treatment of Jews by Germany. If Camus was among the millions unaware during the years of the horror of the Nazi aggression and atrocities that from Rome the pope was issuing encyclicals of condemnation, he could hardly have been ignorant of the pope’s often spoken admiration and effusive praise for the loyalty, bravery and devotion of the soldiers of Hitler’s Third Reich.

  Pius XII was pope for two decades after the war and his career must not be judged on his conduct in human history’s most difficult years. Few popes have spoken so much about peace, it has been noted and his warnings on nuclear weapons and pleas that nations find peaceful resolution are still often quoted.  These warnings, however, continued to come in the obscure and equivocal language of the encyclical and always making provision for “principle of legitimate defense,” prudently demanding that in the nuclear age, “no state, even today, can be refused this right to maintain itself on the defensive.”  In his words some of the truth can be found, but always packaged in a form in which the truth does not rock the boat, in which the truth does not obstruct the prevailing lies.  Always, it was left open that it is the other guys’ arms’ race, the other guys’ racism, the other guys’ imperialism, that was condemned and not ours.  Pope Pius XII, all agree, was a great diplomat.  Papal diplomacy began, it is said, on Holy Thursday in a court yard in Jerusalem when our first pope made three prudent denials and before he heard a cock crow.  

“Who cannot see in this where the real condemnation lies?”  The Church continues today to present what Peter Maurin called “the dynamite inherent in her message,” the teachings on war, peace, economics and human rights, in arcane and obscure language that few understand, in language that cannot challenge.  I wonder sometimes if any but pacifists in the Catholic Church are aware of teachings on nuclear weapons of the last thirty years, for example, or if Catholics in management know Church teaching on the rights of working people.  Who hears and understands Pope John Paul II’s condemnation of the sanctions againstIraq besides those who already oppose them?  The language of encyclicals makes it possible for those who want it and know where to look for it to have the satisfaction of reading a document that speaks the truth, but that speaks it in a way that does not offend or inconvenience the rest of the world.

The Church is capable of speaking clearly and of uttering “condemnation in such a way that never a doubt…can arise in the heart of even the simplest” person when it wants to.  If Pope Pius XII’s condemnation of Nazi crimes was not understood by the mass of perpetrators and victims at the time, there probably was no doubt in the hearts of the simplest of these about what the pope thought about contraception or homosexuality.  Today we have the story of the young US Air Force officer who sits in a subterranean vault waiting for the order to launch missiles carrying thermonuclear warheads that would massacre whole populations, but who conscientiously refuses to obey orders when he is assigned to sit in his hole with a female officer.  This good Catholic knows that such close proximity with a woman not his wife would constitute a near occasion of sin, but has no scruple over the prospect of launching weapons of mass destruction if ordered.

On at least one occasion, long after the war, Pope Pius XII abandoned his characteristic diplomacy to speak plainly and without ambiguity.  Unfortunately, this occasion was not to proclaim the Gospel but to deny it.  “Conscientious objection (to military service) is morally indefensible!” announced Pope Pius XII in his Christmas address of 1956.  “A Catholic citizen may not appeal to his own conscience as ground for refusing to give his service to the state.”  In making this heterodox and idolatrous promotion of the primacy of the state over conscience, rendering onto Caesar the things that are God’s, it must be said that Pius was speaking not as pope, nor even as a Catholic, but as the chaplain of the empire. 

Pius XII, abjuring both the pacifist and “just war” traditions of the Church, undercut the witness of those faithful Catholics around the world who refused to fight in unjust wars.  He abandoned and slandered them, leaving them hung out to dry.  Many of these, including many Americans, went to prison and some, like Father Delp, went to the gallows.

There is a scandal to the career of Pope Pius XII, but it is not confined to his relationship to the warring states during World War II and to his silence during the holocaust.  The scandal extends after that war, and includes his complicity with the post war victors.  The question has been asked if Pius was “Hitler’s pope” but another pertinent and horrible question is, was he Churchill’s and Eisenhower’s pope?  This is all an exercise in academic futility, too, if we do not ask if the scandal extends beyond Pius XII to our present pope and, among other issues, to the question of his silence during then US government’s proxy wars in Central American and to his apparent complicity in the genocidal crimes of Ronald Reagan.

Saints are supposed to challenge Christians to holiness, but I fear that the interest in canonizing Pius has another, less worthy and self serving purpose.  “If St. Pius XII did not name the evil of his day,” one might soon be able to say, “then its OK (holy, wise, prudent) for me to keep my mouth shut and stay put of trouble, too.”

The catechism says that the Church names saints as examples of “heroic virtue” to be imitated.  From the safe distance of half a century, we must take care assigning blame to Pius XII for the prudence that seemed at the time a requirement for survival.  Nor ought we, who have compromised our own selves and who have by and large refused to pay with our own person just to get along, be quick to judge this man for his failure in the face of the evils of Nazism and nuclearism.  I’ll be damned (this word is carefully chosen) though, if ever I accept the compromises

  There is brisk traffic today, in books, magazines, papers and talk shows, in and out of the Catholic Church, around the subject of the conduct of Pope Pius XII during the Second World War.  Was Pope Pius in his silence complicit in Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust, or was he a brilliant strategist, effectively and heroically using a quiet diplomacy that saved many lives and maybe even saved the Church from destruction?  This seems to be the burden of the question.  Interest is fueled in part by a millennial impulse to examine (and perhaps even repent for) the past and in part by hints from the Vatican that Pius soon may be listed among the saints.

1998 – The of Pope Pius XII as heroic virtue.  Catholic Radical – Rock Island IL CW news letter

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