Oct. 9 marks 50 years since the death of Pope Pius XII, who reigned during World War II and has become a controversial figure since his death.The battle over Pius XII's place in history still rages today, with the prevailing historical consensus being that Pius XII didn't do enough to speak out against Nazism and the holocaust during his pontificate.
Catholic scholars disagree, saying that the general impression about the late pontiff is not based on fact.
At the heart of the dispute lies a host of sensitive topics: the Holocaust, Christian-Jewish relations, secrecy in the Vatican, accusations of historical revisionism and the possibility of sainthood.
One of the touchy points in getting history right is at the Israeli memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem. Their treatment of Pius XII is far from favorable, even though his plaque admits that his reaction to the Holocaust is "controversial."
"He maintained a neutral position except toward the end of the war when he appealed on behalf of the government of Hungary and Slovakia," reads the Yad Vashem comment to Pius XII's portrait. "His silence and the absence of directives obliged the clergy in Europe to decide independently how they should behave toward the persecuted Jews."
It is true that there were points during World War II where Pius XII refused to publicly denounce the Holocaust, and the Vatican usually remains strictly neutral in armed conflict. But what were Pius XII's intentions and reasons? And was he really silent in the face of atrocities against human life?
Finding the answers to these questions would require a dedicated historian willing to sift through thousands of Vatican documents from World War II. Such an historian is Sr. Margherita Marchione, a member of the Religious Teachers of St. Lucy Filippini and professor emerita of Italian language and literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. She told The Bulletin about how she became involved in the case for Pius XII.
"In 1995, I was in Rome and I learned from some of our sisters there that they had saved 114 Jews during WWII," she said. "Jews were hidden in three of our convents in Rome. When I heard that, I said, my goodness, this is the history of our community, even though I'm in the United States, we should have learned something about this. But we did not, because communications during WWII were not available."
When Sr. Margherita learned that the Religious Teachers Filippini convents in Rome had harbored Jews, she delved deeper, writing to preserve the history of her order.
"I wrote an article and thought I would get it published," she said. "Instead, a friend of mine said, 'don't publish that article, make it into a book.' So the article developed into a book, titled Yours Is A Precious Witness: Memoirs Of Jews And Catholics In Wartime Italy, because I went back to Rome and began interviewing people. These people actually lived through this period."
Sr. Margherita has compiled 12 thick volumes of Vatican documents from World War II, and she is convinced that Pius XII did everything in his power to save the Jews from persecution.
"I went to different places, Rome, Ferrara, Assisi, Florence, Venice, and I interviewed Jews in these places, and different orders, first our own sisters of course, and then the Redemptorist fathers, the Salesian fathers, the Sisters of Zion, so I really have an overview of what was available then," she said.
Her findings? Evidence exists of a huge system of P.O.W. location and hiding as well as the smuggling of Jewish refugees, which originated in the Vatican. Although there are no documents to show it, interviewees told Sr. Margherita that the orders for these institutions came from Pius XII himself.
In 1998, Sr. Margherita received a letter from a Msgr. Ferofino, who told her a story about Pius XII and the Jews. Msgr. Ferofino was in Santo Domingo, serving as secretary to the bishop there under the rule of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Msgr. Ferofino received notice from Pius XII asking them to visit Mr. Trujillo and ask him for 400 visas, so the pope could send a shipload of Jews to Santo Domingo. They had visas to the U.S., but U.S. authorities would not accept them. Mr. Trujillo accepted the immigrants, who gradually went to the U.S. via Mexico after arriving in the Dominican Republic.
John Cornwell, a Cambridge University professor, penned the bombshell work that fueled the controversy of Pius XII in the English-speaking world. His work, Hitler's Pope, raised serious questions about Pius XII's foreign policy, especially focusing on his concordat with the Nazi regime in 1933, while he was Vatican Cardinal Secretary of State.
"This treaty gave the Vatican greater authority over German Catholics in exchange for the withdrawal of the Catholic Church from social and political action: this weakened the Catholic potential for resistance," Mr. Cornwell wrote to The Bulletin in an e-mail. "For me, the wartime conduct of [Eugenio] Pacelli, as Pope Pius XII, was actually of secondary importance in my narrative."
Hitler's Pope has been criticized for its accuracy and dedication to objective history, and Mr. Cornwell admits that since its publication, his views have undergone revision.
"While I believe with many commentators that the pope might have done more to help the plight of the Jews, I now feel, 10 years after the publication of my book, that his scope for action was severely limited and I am prepared to state this," he said. "Nevertheless, due to his ineffectual and diplomatic language in respect of the Nazis and the Jews, I still believe that it was incumbent on him to explain his failure to speak out after the war. This he never did."
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(Source: The Bulletin)