The Weekend Australian

February 15, 2003, Saturday All-round Country Edition

SECTION: FEATURES-TYPE- FEATURE-COLUMN- INQUIRER-BIOG- POPE PIUS XII; Pg. 22

HEADLINE: Pope or Pilate?

SOURCE: MATP

BYLINE: James Murray

The dispute over the wartime papacy of Pius XII -- whether he was a saint or Nazi stooge -- is about to heat up, James Murray writes

THIS weekend the Vatican opens its archives on its relations with Germany from 1922 to 1939, which will perhaps help to explain the enigma of Pope Pius XII, hailed a saint by some and condemned as "Hitler's pope" by others.

Pius XII was the Catholic Church's representative in Bavaria from 1917 to 1929. He then became Vatican secretary of state until his election as pope in March 1939, six months before the outbreak of World War II.

Hero to his supporters, silent compromiser to his detractors, it's estimated he helped 860,000 Jews escape Nazi liquidation. The chief rabbi of Rome became a Catholic at the end of the war as a tribute to the Pope's interventions and Israel awarded him its highest honours. But after the 1963 staging of a controversial play, Rolf Hochuth's The Representative, Pius XII's failure to protest publicly against Nazi persecution of Jews became a recurring criticism, particularly among Jewish and anti-Catholic apparatchiks.

The context in which Pius had to operate is definitive of his actions or lack of them. Born unhealthy, he avoided contact with other seminarians when training for the priesthood and studied from home. Brilliant and a superb linguist, he was marked for the diplomatic service of the Vatican. Dialogue and negotiation would remain his modus operandi, even when the war began.

Elected in double-quick time when Pius XI died in 1939, he was not the outspoken anti-fascist prophet some Catholics wanted. He was perhaps cautious by nature, though his contempt for nazism was complete. The case for the prosecution accuses him of near collaboration with fascism, if only because he co-ordinated concordats -- church treaties -- with Mussolini in 1929 and with Hitler in 1933.

Speaking to the British ambassador to the Vatican, Pius reported that, "I had to choose between an agreement and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich."

Jewish historian Jeno Levai records that the future Pius XII, while still Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, sent 60 notes to Hitler, up to the outbreak of war, to protest against the persecution of the Jews.

Speaking to 250,000 pilgrims at Loreto, Italy, in 1935, he said: "The Nazis are really only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors in new tinsel. It does not make any difference if they flock to the banners of the social revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult."

The Nazis had no illusions about the pope's attitudes. Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy, said of Pius in 1943: "We should not forget that in the long run the pope in Rome is a greater enemy of national socialism than Churchill or Roosevelt."

What is at stake, however, is not the question of the pope's attitude but whether his fairly consistent silence was tolerable from a leader of a worldwide institution with adherents in countries of varying political ideology.

Was his silence a result of cowardice or wisdom? Was it simply a desire to keep the church inviolate from attack, or an opportunistic delay to see which of the belligerents won in the end?

Critics suggest his role in the Lateran Treaties with Mussolini show a willingness to sup with the devil. He was certainly reluctant to go public after the horrors of the concentration camps were revealed in 1942. However, no Allied action was taken either, even though Churchill was aware of such hell holes as Auschwitz.

But was Pius simply responding to the savage persecution of Jews in Holland, which led to 11,000 deaths, caused by the loud protests of the Dutch bishops? In Belgium, where the bishops said nothing, the attacks on Jews were less intense.

The pope's defenders argue he had concluded that public condemnation would spur on the Nazis, not curb them. Catholic priests and Protestant pastors in Dachau concentration camp trembled at what would happen after any Christian protest.

Of course, bolshevism and the godlessness of Marxism weighed heavily on a pope who had faced both verbal and physical communist attack when he was nuncio in Bavaria. His accusers suggest, however, that he preferred fascism as a protection from the spread of communism and was disdainful of democracy.

That he thought of himself as a neutral figure, his pastorate universal and the good of the church his ultimate concern, has also brought criticism. His active involvement or tacit approval of courageous measures to save Jews and others from persecution must be balanced against those objectives.

WHEN the Jews of Rome faced a Nazi demand for gold, Pius offered to make up the difference. Convents and monasteries became sanctuaries for Jews at his direction, and in Castel Gandolfo, the pope's summer retreat, thousands of Jews were hidden or made their escape with his encouragement and often financial backing. Another escape route was the hill town of Assisi, which led to safety in neutral Switzerland. With the pope's connivance, hundreds of Jews, often with children in tow, were concealed in the many religious houses of the town.

Ambassadors to the Vatican, representing both Allied and Axis countries, not only enjoyed the church's neutrality but their access to the pope. He mostly resisted the pressure to take sides in the conflict, but his Christmas message in 1942 was interpreted as a condemnation of the racialist policies of the Third Reich.

Nonetheless, because it was not specific, and no particular countries were named, the pope's detractors target his speech as yet another example of timidity, and a failure to speak out when circumstances demanded it.

So the enigma of a very moral man remains. It is easy enough in historical hindsight to read back into the pontificate of Pius XII what we have learned subsequently. The archives may help us to interpret him both as a personality and as a church diplomat.

He had a long history of succouring the poor and the distressed. After World War I he did extensive, personal work among war victims, showing deep concern for malnourished children.

His life was exemplary and very lonely. His most intimate contacts were with two canaries, one of which often sat on his shoulder.

He was a figure of some contradiction, deliberately remote in many ways, preserving the mystique of the papacy as he had defended the centrality of the church in the city of Rome. At the same time, he was wonderfully approachable and made many changes in church practice which eased the lives of the laity.

Whether he was the saint the church proposes to canonise, the archives may substantiate or deny.

James Murray is The Weekend Australian's religious affairs editor